Everyone and Everything Are Your Competitors
You might think being the best among your peers is enough, but that's just the bare minimum.
Before we start…
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Everyone and Everything Are Your Competitors
Congratulations! You have the best product amongst all of your competitors. Mission accomplished!
Well, like other mission accomplished declarations in the past, you’re not actually done.
What many companies fail to recognize is that they are leaving a ton on the table if “good enough” is judged by being slightly better than your closest competition. Sure, you’re doing well and the dollars are coming in, but I guarantee that you’re missing out on more by not setting the bar a bit higher.
In reality, the competition you face is every single product people use. Yeah…sorry…things just got a lot harder for you.
I’m going to focus this post on B2B applications in this post, but the concept applies to B2C as well.
So, your company has a B2B application and you’ve probably spent a ton of time researching your competitors and dissecting every aspect of their product. And if you’ve done that correctly and have a great team, you’ve likely improved on some aspects of that competitor and added some more features.
Let’s say that one of the things people told you they hate about your competitor is how slow their response time for support tickets is. You have to email their support because there’s no form on their site and it takes a few days to get a response.
And this might be a great point of differentiation, so you improve on this by adding a form on the site and promise a 24 hour turnaround on requests. Your goal to be better than your closest competitor is complete and maybe you’ll win a few more customers and keep a few extra. But you’ll also miss out because you’ve fallen away below what people actually expect.
They have higher expectations because people that use your B2B application also use a ton of B2C applications that typically pay way more attention to user experience. And when it comes to support, the expectation now is that support is instant. It’s live chat plus or minus an AI bot that can answer almost every question. Suddenly, your cute little form and one day response time isn’t so great.
And while you might not lose existing customers because of this, you will have potential customers do a little extra shopping. They’ll check out other competitors to see if they have what they expect from a support experience. They might not find what they are looking for, but while they’re shopping, they might find a competitor that has features you don’t and you’ve lost them forever.
So, where else do B2B applications underperform B2C applications? All of these can be seen as opportunities to grab more customers from your competitors without necessarily adding giant, new features or battling on price.
Onboarding process.
Most B2B apps are terrible at this (for a variety of reasons). B2C apps have gotten really smart at including the bare minimum in onboarding (including intuitive tutorials) and introducing more onboarding steps later when customers are hooked. B2B apps like to throw the kitchen sink out there immediately and REQUIRE tons of steps before the customer can do anything.
Account creation.
B2B apps love making this complicated, but nearly every other application people use have simple ways to create accounts using social logins. That’s how people expect account creation to work. But maybe you can’t allow this for security reasons as a B2B app. That’s fine, but are you requiring tons of fields to get started? B2C apps don’t ever do this. Collect the minimum and ask for more later.
Searching and filtering.
I don’t know why B2B apps are bad at this, but that’s generally been my experience especially when compared to B2C apps. People expect search (including filtering) to just work. It can’t require specialized knowledge or have a really complicated user interface (and obviously it has to return the right results).
Mobile experience.
I can’t believe I need to add this in 2023, but here we are. It was “the year of mobile” like 15 years ago. Anyways, the mobile version (never mind a native mobile app) is typically an afterthought for B2B applications (if it’s even available). For B2C apps, they know that most people do most things on their phone and so they accommodate that.
Checkout and payment process.
Ugh…this one is awful for most B2B apps. Getting money from customers might require POs and approval flows. Maybe you have to actually call someone or chat with a support rep. The expectation is how Apple Pay or Stripe’s checkout features work. Simple forms or one click payments. Make it very easy for people to give you money if they really want to.
Speed and loading times.
B2C applications and, more specifically, ecommerce applications know that every second someone spends waiting for something to load means less dollars. B2B apps seem to have the attitude that goes something like: “too bad…just wait…you don’t have another option anyway,” which obviously isn’t a winning attitude. For B2B apps, that waiting time is probably spent wondering if your competitors are faster.
Notifications and alerts.
This is the lifeblood of so may B2C platforms. They are used to keep users engaged and coming back to the platform. They are granular and link into just the right place on the site or in the app. B2B notifications are generally a mess. There are often few controls to pick and choose what you want to be notified about and links in those notifications often don’t take you to the right place.
There are a few more areas that I won’t cover here (plus the aforementioned support/help issues): personalization, navigation, and integrations with other tools are just a few. The critical thing to remember when building is not only who your direct competitors are but also what your customers’ basic expectations are of ANY application. This is where you can really stand out from the competition and take advantage of tried and tested functionality that will retain your customers as well.
Before you go…