Deep Dive: Searching for B2B’s undiscovered secrets

Where do we find the ‘pearls of wisdom’ in our work and that of our customers that can lead to world-shattering value?

In this week’s edition, I share a quotation from my recent work around distributor innovations during the pandemic, offer a few observations, and then suggest important questions for B2B innovation. I invite you to share your observations and questions, too. I will pursue answers in my everyday research and share them as they become available. I hope to explore the progress that B2B companies have achieved, understand why they can’t go further, and look for ideas and solutions. In this way, I hope to make my newsletter a tool for innovation teams, working groups, cohorts, and masterminds.

Innovation as discovering secrets

In his excellent book, Zero to One, Peter Thiel makes the case that there are many things to be discovered and that absent a belief in discovery, innovations won’t amount to much more than small tweaks to conventional wisdom. Applying these ideas to B2B means understanding that all of the disruptive innovations now accepted as common practices were once secrets. That is, they were once ideas waiting to be discovered. Looking for new secrets - world-shattering ways to create value for customers - must be the essential mindset of all B2B innovators.

Thiel further explains that there are two types of secrets: secrets about nature and secrets about people. For B2B, secrets of nature are about finding actionable opportunities within the immense complexities of varied buying personas, differing customer journeys, multiparty decision-making, demands for provable returns-on-investment, value-chain collaborations between suppliers and distributors, manual processes, experiential knowledge, leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) data, and much more. Secrets about people might be about understanding the purpose that drives customers and engaging a supplier’s people to enable that purpose. Or, through platform strategies, they may be about enabling users to create value for other users. Either way, the task for innovators is to commit to discovery and the search for secrets in B2B’S nature and people, with a hyper-focus on creating game-changing value for customers.

B2B as the champion of work, safety, and community betterment

Every B2B company helps customers fulfill their business purpose safely and productively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing and mask requirements disrupted normal work processes and, when in effect, lockdowns completely shut down work. In Distribution Leans In: Stories of Resiliency and Innovation During the COVID-19 Pandemic, I share 10 stories of how distributors stepped up to help customers with these challenges.

In a conversation shared before the pandemic, Mike Sain, president of Material Handling, Inc., explained his company’s commitment to community betterment as a critical leadership mission, business strategy, and essential cultural ingredient:

We have a responsibility to be involved in finding ways to make our communities better. Nashville is a great location for a distributor and service provider, but the area is growing rapidly and has transportation issues related to the growth. Distributors know logistics, so we got involved and shared our advice. But serving a community is more than just giving advice. It’s about what our people do every day and how we can help them deliver excellence to the customer. It’s not esoteric and we work on it. It’s a big part of how we build our brand as a member of the community—something that virtual marketplaces can never be.

Mike explained a core process for attracting employees who will commit to better their customers as a community. In every meeting, leaders and managers ask employees to share projects they are working on in their personal lives for the betterment of friends, family, and the local community. They ask how Material Handling can help via knowledge and resources. By making this commitment part of Material Handling’s way of doing business, and by supporting personal initiatives, Material Handling models the behaviors used on the job for helping customers achieve their goals.

During the pandemic, Material Handling’s leadership stepped up to keep their people safe and working, and then extended that commitment to help their customers do the same:

From day one, our mantra was that our first responsibility was to keep our people safe. The second responsibility was to keep them working. Keep them safe. Keep them working. At the beginning of March, we knew that something bad was coming. By the middle of March, it was happening. Many of our employees are technicians, so we needed to make sure they could work safely at customer locations. There was a lot of uncertainty because state guidelines varied significantly, as did individual customers’ guidelines. We processed mountains of information from the federal and state governments. We had to check what our customers were doing and, in some cases, ask them to step up and improve their protocols to make for a safer working environment. [emphasis added] … We believe that looking after our employees and their families’ welfare is one of our core purposes as a business. It defines our culture. The pandemic is a challenge, but it is only strengthening our beliefs.

Material Handling’s commitment to enabling work and ensuring safety during the pandemic was the pursuit of a noble cause. Their ability to act when a challenge arose was rooted in a long-term commitment to employees and community betterment. By acting on these principles, the company created a virtuous cycle of continual commitment and customer assistance.

Questions for innovating B2B

Material Handling’s approach works for them. By digging in and considering their own culture and opportunities, every B2B company may uncover secrets to be acted on for their human-first, technology-enabled innovations. In a slight break from my normal newsletter format, I offer several questions, rather than ideas, for innovating B2B. My goal is to kickstart a pursuit of secrets around innovating that stems from a foundation of enabling work, safety, and community betterment. I don’t have the answers, but will pursue them. I encourage you to do the same and to let me know of your progress.

1. What is the purpose that drives your customers’ business?

2. How is that purpose reflected in the way your customers do their work?

3. Did your customers change how they work during the pandemic and are any pandemic practices carrying forward?

4. Are your customers aware of and acting on future work trends for their own business?

5. How can you leverage your products and services to help customers do their work and to better achieve productive operations and experiences for their customers?

6. How can you leverage your employees’ knowledge and experience to help customers do their work and to better achieve productive operations and experiences for their customers?

7. Can you extend your work with individual customers to working with communities of customers?

8. Are the ideas and actions that flow from answering these questions codified in how you define and manage your company’s culture?

9. Can you lock in your company’s commitment to enabling work, safety, and community betterment by establishing metrics for measuring effort and outcomes?

10. Can you create a virtuous cycle for enabling work, safety, and community betterment by telling stories of your customer’s progress or other means?

Join the journey

In a previous post on essential leadership skills for the digital age, I highlighted the need for leaders to think of strategy in terms of platforms. Platforms are spaces where users can create value for other users. I can imagine these spaces may exist in the virtual world, the real world, or a hybrid of both. For B2B innovators, the opportunity is to design platforms where users can create value for other users. The innovator’s role is to create the space and ensure it is productive, helping individual businesses and working toward community betterment.

I’m looking for modern, digital-age examples of such platforms and spaces. If you know of one or can conceive of how one might operate, please reach out!

Looking ahead, I can sense how a B2B innovation process around enabling work, safety, and community betterment might complement (or replace?) traditional methods for understanding customer needs and designing benefits to be fulfilled by products and services. Traditional methods lead to segmenting, targeting, positioning, and selling. A new approach around work might be about discovering secrets, developing cultures, and bettering communities.

I’m working on this and would appreciate your help. Please share your ideas and suggestions in the comment section below. Or, if you prefer, reach out directly at mark.dancer@n4bi.com. Together, we can kickstart the B2B revolution!