There’s a new generation of B2B buyers out there. In the past, companies relied on personal relationships to build their brand. Whether it was in-person, at industry events, or over the phone, the human element between business and customer played a pivotal role in business growth. But digital changed that dynamic.
B2B customers today do not expect to interact with a salesperson until it’s time to close the deal. More importantly, they expect the same digital experiences and features that they encounter as consumers, and hold brands accountable to frictionless mobile experiences regardless of their industry.
.. B2B mobile leaders are generating higher levels of mobile engagement as measured by search queries, site traffic, lead generation, and actual transactions. They’re also seeing a greater share of revenue that is mobile driven or influenced.
There’s a pretty common argument in tech that though of course there are billions more smartphones than PCs, and will be many more still, smartphones are not really the next computing platform, just a computing platform, because smartphones (and the tablets that derive from them) are only used for consumption where PCs are used for creation. You might look at your smartphone a lot, but once you need to create, you’ll go back to a PC.
.. There are two pretty basic problems with this line of thinking. First, the idea that you cannot create on a smartphone or tablet assumes both that the software on the new device doesn’t change and that the nature of the work won’t change.
.. there are perhaps 100m people who today engage in some form of complex creation using what one might call ‘sophisticated professional software’ on a windows + mouse + keyboard-based personal computer.
.. If less than 10% of PCs are actually doing professional, precise, complex creation, what are the other 90% being used for, if not creation?
.. Well, they do email, and the web. Some of the consumer ones also play games ..
.. They do Facebook and buy groceries.
.. More recently, I’ve seen data suggesting that a large proportion of people who owned digital cameras never loaded the pictures onto a computer (even if they owned one). They looked at the pictures on the camera screen, or got them printed at a kiosk – but didn’t print them until the card was full
.. But then there are all of the things that a normal person (the other 90% or 95%) can’t do on a PC but can do on a smartphone, because the step change in user interface abstraction and simplicity means that they know how to do it on a phone and didn’t know how to do it on a PC.
.. So, 100m or so people are doing things on PCs now that can’t be done on tablets or smartphones. Some portion of those tasks will change and become possible on mobile, and some portion of them will remain restricted to PCs for a long time. But there are another 3bn people who were using PCs (but mostly sharing them) but who weren’t doing any of those things with them, and are now doing on mobile almost all of the stuff that they actually did do on PCs, plus a lot more.
A couple of years ago internet companies moved from having a mobile team and a mobile strategy to what they called ‘mobile first’. Instead of building a product and deciding how and if it would work on mobile, new things are build for mobile by default, and don’t necessarily make their way back to the desktop.
.. What happens if you just forget about the PC altogether? But also, what happens if you forget about featurephones? What happens if you presume all of the sophistication that a modern smartphone has and a PC does not, and if you also presume that, with 650m iPhones in use and 2.5bn smartphones in total, you can build a big company without thinking about the low end anymore?