Inclusive Growth: The Rise of B4B Companies

The business environment has gone through a significant shift ever since the term business-to-business, commonly known as B2B was coined back in the 1990s, where the concept became very useful in describing companies that sell goods or services that sell directly to other businesses. However, as the relationship between businesses has changed, the expectations go far beyond just one-way selling.

“Language encodes our thinking. To write a new future, we need to use a new language.”? - Nilofer Merchant

Transitioning from B2B to business-for-business (B4B) is found to help more business growth, boost customer retention rates and employee morale.

But how? How does this subtle change of preposition from “to” to “for” totally changes the way a company works?

The difference between B2B and B4B

Let us first understand the differences between these two acronyms: B2B and B4B.

B2B, also known as business-to-business, simply means the exchange of products and services between two business commodities. On the other hand, B4B or business-for-business is an improved version of B2B. It means businesses will collaborate closely in a value chain with a shared goal to satisfy the end-user needs.

The paradigm shift of thoughts from the transactional mindset of B2B towards a collective mindset of B4B involves a higher engagement of questions on growth, pricing, workforce management, and more. Besides, there are big differences between a B2B and a B4B company’s mindset when measuring success.?

Generally, a B2B model prioritizes on the sales they made to generate more revenues; they look for ways to largely boost their products with volume discounts to stand out from their competitors. Therefore, they put more emphasis on their sales folks to sell more products for the company. Buyers are responsible for researching the solutions and products that, they believe, will solve the problem. And what B2B company does is simply sell their products and allow the buyer to find values from them in the manner that they had initially intended.

But in a B4B business model thinking, they measure their success in consideration of other’s company’s success. This is achieved through asking questions like, how can we create products or offer services to our customers to grow together. They are flexible in changing their business model over time to create great experiences for their customers.

Not just that, a B4B company trains their sales executives to become business consultant experts. This is to ensure that they can better understand the problem that the clients are facing to deliver the best solution to them. Since B4B company encourages in-depth consultation, it can help the buyer realize more effective options when approaching the problem. And make sure that their customers recognize a significant impact from the products that they bought.

Now, we see the traditional B2B mindset vs the dynamic B4B mindset. And this leads us to our next point. Stepping into the B4B space.

The case of Grab and General Electric

In recent years, the Southeast Asian market has seen the emergence of businesses that supply high value to other businesses as well as their customers. Let’s take Grab for example.

Grab: Founded back in 2011 by two Harvard Business School students, Grab was originally a simple taxi booking app. However, over the past 10 years, it has grown exponentially in Southeast Asia and now offers a wide range of services – from food delivery to cab rides to hotel booking – making it a true “super app”

The co-founder, Anthony Tan has repeatedly mentioned that the key ingredients to Grab’s success are localization and having the “your problem is my problem” expression, or “Why-pim” as they call it. Southeast Asia is where Grab calls home, hence their local teams are constantly pushing to address local problems and challenges that businesses and individuals face. This has significantly set Grab different from the competition, especially when it comes to scaling locally, navigating regulatory environments, and adapting to local infrastructure challenges. They are constantly looking out for delivering meaningful impact to businesses and customers in the ecosystem that eventually made Grab valued at more than US$40 billion.

From the global perspective, this is a mindset shift large businesses are opting for as well, including General Electric.

General Electric: This is a 124-year-old global industrial company that has made a transition to a B4B company. From just focusing on selling their products and services, they wanted to nurture a culture that is open for collaboration, experimentation, and responsiveness. Besides, they started offering “insights-as-a-service” to ensure that the businesses in the ecosystem can be more knowledgeable in making decisions and help GE themselves in creating better products and services that fit in the ecosystem.

Conclusion

There are various ways businesses can transform into a B4B, from offering more knowledge, to creating tailored solutions. Essentially, what is needed is the ability to empathize with the different businesses in the ecosystem and collaborate for shared growth.

By incorporating a B4B thinking model, businesses can foster a better relationship with other businesses in the ecosystem and address various challenges together, while unlocking sustainable growth.

If you are interested in shifting your business into this model, stay tuned to the next part of this article that focuses on ways a company can transition into a B4B company.