Personalized over Generalized: Digital Experience Value #6

In an earlier XaaS Product Insights article, I established the need for a compelling and differentiated digital customer experience as a defining attribute for success in B2B tech businesses. Despite almost unanimous agreement on the benefit, less than one third of B2B businesses have a well-defined set of digital experience values that they can easily articulate. This is an unfortunate truth in the B2B tech industry today and creates enormous opportunity for those willing to address this gap.

With that context, here I introduce Personalized over Generalized as the sixth value, in a series of eight, for B2B businesses to embrace in their pursuit of DCX distinctive competence. 

At their extreme, generalized solutions implies a one-size-fits-all for all markets and a one-size-fits-all experience for all users. While there are some benefits to developing generalized solutions, research demonstrates that the benefits of a strong vertical product-market fit and personalized user experiences far outweigh any generalized approach when it comes to sustainable growth and profit.

When we think about personalization, we often think mainly about user experiences and less about vertical markets. Both are critical in designing and delivering on the customer needs and deeply establishing the feeling amongst customers that ‘this vendor gets me’. 

Vertical Markets

While any business loves massively horizontal markets, the general trend in B2B Tech is towards deeper verticalization. Why? Because in the world of XaaS, it’s critical to create and deliver compelling solutions that have zero, or minimal, gap between the value proposition and the business objectives of the customer.

The only way to achieve that is to deeply understand the customers’ business processes in the market that they live in, and contributing to the business outcomes they need. By definition, verticalization is more likely to deliver higher value to the customer and a stronger product-market-fit resulting in higher willingness to pay. When coupled with other economies of scale associated with generalized solutions (think platforms, shared services, modular architectures, effective distribution, etc.), businesses are realizing higher levels of customer retention, growth and profit.

Verticalization becomes an important strategy in the current business economic climate where investors demand profitable performance. Case in point, even larger horizonal B2B application solutions like Salesforce and ServiceNow along with cloud compute vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are doubling down on serving the unique needs of verticals as a profit generation strategy. Vertically focused companies Veeva Systems (dedicated to CRM for Life Sciences industry) has delivered operating profits every year since its IPO in 2013.

Reach out for more industry examples

User Experience Personalization

User experience personalization becomes essential to making solutions sticky, leading to higher retention rates and increased business viability. All user personas expect vendors to ‘get’ them, by delivering experiences that understand their behaviors, are immersive, personalized, persistent across all access channels, and intelligently anticipate their needs as they engage.

There are many great examples of product personalization across B2B Tech solutions from Marketing Automation Platforms like HubSpot, Adobe’s Marketo, Salesforce’s Pardot, and Oracle’s Eloqua that allow B2B marketers to deliver personalized content and messages to different segments based on user behaviors and preferences. This leads to more targeted and relevant communication, enhancing user engagement. Another category leveraging data driven personalization is the industrial equipment sector where companies like Siemens Digital and General Electric incorporate sensors into their industrial hardware and IoT technology. Through the collection and analysis of key data, these devices provide predictive maintenance insights and personalized operational recommendations for their maintenance and operations users.

Reach out to me for other user experience examples

Closing Thoughts

As the value of Personalized over Generalized takes hold in your organization, these are just a few probing questions to challenge yourself as you strive for ever-increasing levels of personalization to strengthen the product-market fit and willingness-to-pay for sustainable profitable growth.

1. Do we have industry domain knowledge for each target vertical and sub-vertical?
2. Have we mapped the customer journey for each vertical market we serve?
3. Are the needs of the (sub) verticals identical? What are the differences?
4. For each of the verticals we serve, have we created detailed persona profiles to understand their needs and preferences?
5. Are we effectively leveraging data and analytics for insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and interests?
6. Do we support modular architectures that enable rapid innovation to meet unique vertical needs?
7. Do our products, services and data strategy uniquely deliver to the identified vertical differences?
8. Are the workflows we’ve designed aligned with the tasks and goals of each user persona?
9. Do our products present personalized experiences based on user personas and their preferences?
10. Are we applying persona specific knowledge in our marketing campaigns?

Reach out if I can assist you and your team

with improving product personalization.

What challenges have you seen with personalizing product experiences and vertical offers? Let us know your thoughts!