The New Digital Enterprise Products Launch — Clemente Reyes Retana
In this piece, supported by graphs and data, Clemente Reyes Retana, a Fintech Product Manager, dives into the most recent trends in technology, market strategies, growth & sales and more.
“Most recent macro trends — cloud computing, social, data analytics, mobile, and Fintech — that have reshaped the technology landscape, are quickly shifting the way fast-moving consumer goods companies are operating. Driven not by the underlying technology, but by an evolution in digital customer buying behavior. B2B channels present exciting new opportunities for accelerating. For shorthand, at AB InBev and Z-Tech we think of this trend as growth plus sales: the bottom-up growth motion eventually layered with top-down sales.
While these go-to-market strategies are not new in software launches, it is becoming the predominant method of going to market in many verticals and ventures across our company, even in categories where conventional wisdom might say it would never work. Think B2B ordering platform Bees, lending plug-in KEO and TiendaPago partnerships and in-house payment stack built — all of these started with a product-led, bottom-up motion, followed later with top-down sales.
Growth and sales changes how we build products and organize the teams behind them. It changes how we evaluate digital marketing and Fintech capabilities, particularly in helping us enable our over 6mm points of contact worldwide (i.e. bars, restaurants, mom-&-pop shops). And it changes how we partner to bring about the next generation of added value services to our digital ecosystem.
Yet, while much has been written about this new standard playbook, it’s no trivial feat to get the tactics right. At Z-Tech, we focus on 3 core aspect when developing our go-to-market strategies:
- The best products win: Modern design, seamless UX, speed, and features that get the job done are the competitive dimensions that matter to the end user. Best products are often far simpler, having been minimum viable product iterations versus endless process checking feature boxes. And when users can vote with their feet, the best product wins. This is an effort to be agile and move away from long, high-stakes implementation cycles which take quarter or years.
- Product discovery driven by word of mouth: When our users really love our product, they tell their peers, friends, anyone who will listen. This beachhead enables a much faster direct sales process than going in cold with no existing end user. When our B2B customers are overwhelmed with new application fatigue, they are not interested in exploring relationships with AB InBev sales personnel without organic momentum from their end. The interaction between the growth motion and the sales motion must reinforce each other, significantly accelerating adoption at scale when sequenced effectively.
- Consumer-style growth tactics: Not only is the recipe for a winning product in bottom-up enterprise adoption the same as in the consumer market, but the actual mechanics of growth are similar. If the end user is the decision maker, consumer-style growth tactics are often the only way to get their attention. Building viral loops into the product, understanding which marketing channels matter, building a brand users trust, cultivating community around the product, and supporting a user journey that makes it easy to adopt and pay become table stakes.”
