If B2B companies want to rise above the competition, they can follow in the footsteps of successful B2C companies and reap the benefits of digital transformation. No-code can help.
Modern digital experiences have fundamentally reshaped the B2C marketplace along with consumers’ expectations for accessibility and service. Consider industry disruptors like Uber, Twitch, and Airbnb. Digital transformation has made it possible for these brands to forge incredibly lucrative revenue streams while eviscerating their less-forward-thinking competition.
B2B companies on the other hand are often slower to embrace digital transformation, but they too will have to face these digital realities or risk falling behind the competition. In this blog post, we will explore how enterprise application development with no-code can help B2B companies start thinking like B2Cs.
B2C Leads The Way…
The rise of Netflix and the fall of Blockbuster is an excellent illustration of how digital experiences can make or break a company. At one point, Netflix and Blockbuster were both major players in the home entertainment rental space, but only one is still standing today. Why? Netflix realized that renting out a finite number of physical videos meant capped revenue, meaning they would have to switch gears if they wanted to boost their bottom line.
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Only 10 years after its founding, Netflix became synonymous with digital streaming. Today, Netflix is one of the world’s largest media companies, with over 193 million paid subscribers worldwide. Netflix redefined the customer experience and created a new standard of entertainment—user-friendly, convenient, reachable from anywhere—that would change modern consumer expectations and shape the way B2C companies operated. Blockbuster, in sharp contrast, resisted digital transformation and eventually sold out to Dish TV in 2011.
This is only one example of how B2C companies have embraced digital to lead the way in their respective industries. As digital transformation becomes a mainstream topic of conversation and a prerequisite for doing business in 2020, B2B companies will have no choice, but to follow suit in order to remain competitive. And despite enormous digitization efforts in industries like retail, tech, and media, the B2B sector still averages less than 40% digitized—which leaves tremendous room for growth.
…As B2B Falls Behind
B2B companies are often slower to adapt to trends like digitization for many reasons. One of the biggest being that complex B2B environments have many moving parts—longer deal cycles, intricate request for proposal processes, vendor negotiations—that make digital transformation challenging. Additionally, B2B financial models are still firmly rooted in offline efforts. For example, company websites tend to be miles behind the intuitive experiences of B2C websites, and sales teams often lack the analytics to understand who the decision-makers are and how to plan effective outreach.
…research from McKinsey indicates that heavy digital investment sets leading B2B companies apart from their counterparts
In a different key, some B2B company leaders don’t see the need for a large restructuring, especially if the financial gains aren’t immediately apparent. According to a study from McKinsey that measured B2B companies’ overall digital maturity on a “Digital Quotient” scale of 0 to 100, the average B2C company scored a 35, while the average B2B score was only 28. Only 10% of surveyed B2B companies said that digitization was a top investment priority. Unfortunately, the divide between companies that are and aren’t digitally savvy is increasing rapidly.
The biggest differentiator between companies that rise to the top and those that sink will be how well they can implement strategic digital efforts. Further research from McKinsey indicates that heavy digital investment sets leading B2B companies apart from their counterparts, with more than twice as many leading companies making the effort to closely align their digital and corporate strategies than not. What’s more, companies that are in the top-quartile of digital maturity experience disproportionate gains, and 80% of companies that have undergone digital transformation efforts reported increased profitability. In order to stake out a competitive advantage, it’s clear that B2B companies should follow B2C’s lead.
Getting B2B Up to Speed with No-Code
Digital transformation can be challenging to execute—70% of complex, large-scale digital transformations fail to reach their stated goals—but B2B companies with the right tools at their disposal can still come out on top. More B2B companies have digitized than B2C companies in the last three years, and innovative technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation (RPA) have quietly digitized 50-80% of backend processes behind the scenes in many industries.
No-code is another excellent solution to add to the arsenal of tools ushering in the digital revolution. Whether B2B companies are undertaking digital projects to set up workflows or manage inventories, no-code platforms offer an extremely efficient way to approach building. No-code breaks down the barriers surrounding software development using visual interfaces and drag-and-drop components, so teams can bring their ideas to life as quickly as possible. For B2B companies looking to get ahead of the curve, Unqork will help them deploy complex, robust, and successful applications in a fraction of the time—for a fraction of the cost.
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