My Learnings: How a B2C product manager can take a B2B product assignment and Ace it!

Indian market is filled with many B2C companies and product managers love to work for them. Zomato, Swiggy, Ola, Myntra, Flipkart and many more startups made the products that users love. In parallel, Udaan, Moglix, Indiamart etc. built products to serve B2B customers. As B2C businesses are blooming, we need companies to help and empower these B2C companies as their customers. Now, product managers in India see product management as a B2C craft and we have a number of good product managers in the market. Excitement for product management is through the roof but interest is mostly limited to B2C space. Not many people know about B2B companies even though these are the backbone of everything we do in our daily lives.

I have a total of 16 years of experience in working with Product Companies. My 14 years of experience is in the B2C space and two years back I joined Airtel Business, the largest B2B company in India. Like most of us, I was unaware of the Airtel Business and its Business model. For me, B2B and Telecom both were unknown territories. My transition from B2C PM to B2B product leader has been a roller coaster ride filled with joy and learning. I keep getting questions from candidates in almost every job interview about how they can transition to B2B product management and whether they will be able to make a mark in the B2C space. Frankly speaking, I don't have a success mantra. I can just share my learnings of the B2B space here. To keep the learnings real, I will use "Airtel Thanks for Business" (ATB) as an example and how this Self-Serve platform became the most preferred Customer-Centric platform for service within Airtel Business.

Methods may change but the goal is the same - Identify & Solve a customer problem

First of all, we should understand that B2C and B2B product management are not different from a goal perspective. You don't need to unlearn everything to learn B2B product management. The fundamental principle of product management remains unchanged - "Think customer - backwards and solve a problem that customer's value"

For instance, a few customers complained that they have to write emails or call Airtel for every query. We did a deep research analysis to find out how we can give power into their hands to solve their own problems. We looked at top actions that our customers perform and whether we can give customers self-serve tools. Out of this deep research and thinking, we came up with the idea of Airtel Thanks for Business (ATB). Airtel Thanks for Business is an integrated platform acting as a one-stop shop for Airtel’s B2B customers to?discover, buy &?manage all their products. Using Airtel’s robust technology systems and world-class digital infrastructure, ATB provides these customers with direct access to Data, Insights, and Tools that they need to self-serve. This makes it easier for them to do business with us and in turn, makes it easier for them to do business with their customers.

Just like B2C product managers, we looked at customer problems and solved them exactly by thinking of customers - backwards.

Understand Segments & Users and Never develop "One size fits all" solution

In the B2C space, the buyer is the prime user e.g. Head of the family. In B2B space, buyers and users may be completely different people and their problems, priorities may be very different. So, every user's experience needs to be personalised and one size fits all strategy doesn't work in B2B. For example, On "Airtel Thanks for Business" each customer’s experience is based on their relationship with Airtel. For example, Finance managers of Large Enterprise Customers require custom reports and verification of monthly bills but standard usage reports and online payment options are sufficient for small businesses. ATB has enabled all stakeholders in the customer’s organisation like CXOs, IT Admins, Finance Managers, Procurement teams etc., with relevant access controls, so that they have easy access to information that’s relevant to them.

Another learning from the B2B market is- Segmentation is equally important as in the case of B2C. Users change as per the segment and their needs must be addressed to launch a successful product. For example, Online Buying has been made simple through Airtel Thanks for Business. Through ATB,?using the online feasibility, price/plan selection and eKYC, Small customers can place their orders with ease. For large Enterprises, the company’s procurement teams can see customised pricing specific to their contract. Once the order is placed, the customer is informed of the next steps and the tentative delivery date. The delivery status is regularly updated on ATB which can then be tracked easily by the customer.

See the Impact, not count of Customers

In B2C, the count of users works as a proxy for impact. for a majority of use cases, looking at customer count is a good indicator of impact. However, in B2B, even one large customer may be contributing large revenue or a large number of complaints. Unlike B2C, you can not ignore large customers because their count is less. In B2B, Impact in terms of revenue and cost are the right metrics to measure impact. This insight keeps us focused on creating a good buying and service experience for large customers instead of focussing on small business segments. We prioritised our roadmap based on revenue and cost impact instead of just count of customers.

Empower Internal Users as Partners Instead of trying to automate everything

As digital product managers in B2C, we try to eliminate every manual step. B2B is a different ball game. Here, we are dealing with big players and case-to-case basis judgement may be required. So, take a conscious choice between a fully automated or assisted model. Take workforce as empowering asset to serve customers rather than cost in all cases. At Airtel, we live and breathe our products. Hence we’ve made Airtel Thanks for Business a part of Airtel’s way of working. We didn't consider to eliminate all servicing channels other than ATB and used ATB to empower internal users. Everyone, involved in servicing various customer touchpoints i.e. entire Airtel sales org including Account Managers, complete service org including Relationship Managers use ATB. Getting a 360-Degree Customer View enables our teams to provide the right interventions at the right stage of the customer lifecycle. This approach has enabled us to run our entire SMB (Small and Medium Business) service GTM (Go to Market) in a digital-first manner.

Co-create with Customers

This is a unique concept to B2B space. You can pick a few customers, create products that they needed by working with them and keep validating the product market fit. Once, the product works for these few customers, it will work for most of the customers. Here the success of the product is almost guaranteed if co-creation is done with customers. Also, customers are always willing to co-create with us as this solves their pain points. So real-time feedback always helps to build the right product. Whenever we created any new features for our customers, we always identified a set of customers who can use our product and provide feedback. As a result, ATB has unlocked immense value for our customers by improving the productivity of IT and Network service teams.

ATB’s system integrations allow for automated service provisioning leading to a reduction of the TAT (Turn around Time) for frequently used actions by 99%. For example, services change requests such as SIM Swap or plan changes, which used to take several hours to complete, now get auto-provisioned in a matter of minutes. All this was possible because of co-creation with customers.

When I look back today, I find myself as a better Product Leader. B2B product experience gave me 360-view of product management and prepared me to solve any problem holistically.