W07 - How SaaS Can Succeed in Serving B2B

This week I read Jerry’s recommended book, The SaaS Startup Roadmap. Combined with a recent article I saw on a public account titled “Little Time Left for Feishu” (now removed), I’ll share some thoughts on iterations in the B2B space.

• The essence of SaaS is renewal; everything should be built around creating an immediate feedback loop.

  • The author says the first stage of a SaaS startup is product idea and business model selection, with lean startup methodology at its core. Build an MVP, meet customers as early as possible, and iterate continuously. Anything that hinders forming a feedback loop should be treated cautiously. For example, in sales, when choosing between direct sales and channel partners, you should weigh the immediate feedback advantage of direct sales.

  • A merchant platform’s business cannot be benchmarked purely against a SaaS model; we blend a lot of B2C logic, and its essence is certainly not renewal. I think “repeat visits” better reflect our nature. This can partly be understood as retention, but the lifecycle of micro-merchants is short, so retention has a natural ceiling.

• Pursuing extreme efficiency and experience does not serve all B2B needs.

  • B2B customers’ core demands center on three things: making money, raising money, and efficiency. For merchants, making money is paramount. So for SaaS providers, delivering extreme experience and efficiency should not be the primary goal. Only those SaaS products that improve customers’ revenue significantly through efficiency gains are truly “long-term.” A few examples: Teacher Xia shared a service provider who optimized the picking order of dishes in a spicy hotpot outlet to improve staff picking efficiency. I recently saw an automatic product recognition scale at a supermarket checkout that multiplied operator efficiency and could even eliminate the role. These are efficiency tools that clearly translate into increased revenue. Feishu employed 10,000 people to pursue extreme experience and efficiency, but in many domestically “people-driven” companies this approach isn’t easily bought in, for example Xiaomi or Didi.

  • Could Business Cards follow this line of thinking with some operational measures? For example, how much money can Business Cards save customers? Customers who use Business Cards may run their businesses better, so how much more do frequent Business Card users earn on average than non-users?

• Outstanding B2B companies deeply understand underlying commercial logic and deliver advanced management concepts to their customers.

  • Only companies with a clear “philosophy” can hope to build strong B2B products. From this perspective, I think Feishu does very well. Feishu approaches clients like a consulting service, using tools to enhance organizational capabilities and restructure management processes, influencing customers with its advanced ideas. Whether every customer needs such advanced solutions is a question of demand.

• SaaS depends heavily on sales and marketing.

  • A SaaS company is composed of marketing, sales, development, and service. Once a product’s effectiveness is validated, the roles of marketing and sales become increasingly important. I previously had trouble distinguishing marketing from sales; this time I learned some fundamentals and realized it’s a deep area. Both marketing and sales serve the L2C (Leads to Cash) process. Marketing’s job is to move from “potential customers” to “target customers,” and to cultivate “interested customers” from those targets. Sales’ job is to convert “interested customers” into paying customers. After L2C there is another funnel: CSM is responsible for converting paying customers into renewal customers.