Pioneering big customers, Dingding walked out of the 24 months of to C obsession

Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1321

A new leader parachuted in to take over an old team, hoping it would turn in a new direction. This is a common management proposition in the development of large companies. This is often not easy, especially when the old line is not showing signs of decline and the new direction is not yet clear.

Ye Jun, who was transferred to Dingding in September 2020, faced this situation.

Dingding once had a deep-rooted belief to serve small and medium customers. This is related to the history of Dingding, which was born out of the to C social product exchange of WeChat. Ali also believed in the past that what really needed Ali was small and medium-sized enterprises. Large enterprises had money and people, and they could make whatever products they wanted. The key to “making the world without difficult business” is to solve the problems of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Dingding has lost some customers because of this. Two years ago, Xiaopeng Motors, a new car-making force that Ali participated in, decided to abandon Dingding and switch to Feishu. The direct reason is that Dingding cannot meet some customized needs of Xiaopeng. This is a common behavior of large customers, who cannot be satisfied by standard products. But Dingding at the time was unable to undertake such additional development work.

Ye Jun’s goal is to change that. In the past two years, he pushed Dingding to turn to B (for enterprise organizations) more firmly, and established a new set of capabilities to serve large customers.

This direction was once internally questioned. Compared with the easier route of large-scale small and medium-sized customers, it is slower and more difficult to develop large customers. Now, some signs have initially proved the value of large customers: large enterprise organizations with more than 2,000 people currently contribute nearly 1/3 of the activity to DingTalk. In the past two years, the number of enterprise organizations with more than 1 million people, more than 100,000 people, and more than 10,000 people has more than doubled. As of August 2022, DingTalk has more than 30 enterprise organizations with more than one million people, and more than 600 enterprise organizations with more than 100,000 people.

In a mature company like Ali, changes are difficult to come by. In the past 24 months, Dingding never wanted to be a big customer, and was unable to become a big customer. Instead, he turned to focus on big customers, and started to build corresponding capabilities and teams. It was an easy transition, a slow consensus-building process.

To C or To B

The current president of Dingding, Ye Jun, joined Ali in 2006. He has worked for AliExpress and Ali International Station. His last job before coming to Dingding was to be in charge of Ali’s Enterprise Intelligence Division, which is Ali’s corporate information department. It is to serve the “big customer” of Ali well.

Since 2018, based on DingTalk products, the team of the Enterprise Intelligence Division has developed large-scale customized DingTalks such as “Zhezheng DingTalk” for the Zhejiang Provincial Government.

Dingding’s own team, at that time, paid more attention to scale, pursued the growth of the number of users, and focused on the development and operation of standardized Dingding, and did not even give up the idea of ​​making a to C (for individual consumers) super app.

The outbreak in early 2020 further inspired DingTalk’s to C ambitions. Remote office and online classes have brought a large number of white-collar workers and primary and secondary school students to Dingding, and the daily life of Dingding has quickly increased from more than 30 million to over 100 million.

There was a voice in Dingding at that time, and it wanted to make a 1 billion daily active product comparable to WeChat, and achieve it within 3 years. A DingTalk insider told “LatePost” that until 2021, there are still people reading to C. Compared with slow and tiring service to big customers, super app is a more sexy direction.

Ye Jun, who came to Dingding two years ago, has a goal: to reverse the idea of ​​giving priority to large-scale development, and promote Dingding to become a big customer.

This turn comes from the strategic judgment of Alibaba’s higher level. In September 2020, Alibaba proposed the “integration of cloud nails”, and Dingding was incorporated into the Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group.

Major customers are the main synergy between Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk. Alibaba Cloud, which started serving major customers before Dingding, hopes that Dingding will cooperate with it. Cloud services that provide basic capabilities such as computing and storage are for technical personnel, while DingTalk can directly reach enterprise management and business personnel. It is a product closer to customers and is conducive to expanding cloud business. For DingTalk to continue to develop, it must also enter the commercialization stage. Large customers with high unit price and strong renewal ability are a market that cannot be given up.

There were signs at the time that the big account strategy was sound.

In the second half of 2020, when the epidemic eased, DingTalk’s soaring DAU dropped rapidly. In less than half a year, it dropped from 150 million at the peak of the epidemic to only more than 60 million at the minimum. This is because Dingding has provided less value to customers in the past, mainly punching cards, meetings, and online classes. Users come and go quickly.

And those users who didn’t leave, many of them are big business personnel who started to use DingTalk spontaneously during the epidemic. The DingTalk team later re-invested. These large companies may have built their own products, but the epidemic came too suddenly, and DingTalk became the ready-made hand tool. DingTalk hopes to better retain these customers, which requires building new service capabilities consciously and systematically.

Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Zhang Jianfeng unanimously support DingTalk as a major customer.

However, switching consensus is not easy. From the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, some people who did not agree with the strategic direction quickly left Dingding. At that time, there were even some concerns inside: DingTalk was a rare internal entrepreneurial project initiated by employees in Ali. “Will it disappear later?”

The resistance also lies in the fact that it is difficult to prove in the short term whether the big customer’s path is right or not. By making an app with the idea of ​​to C, you can see the feedback of daily activities and monthly activities more quickly, and the team has a more sense of purpose. However, serving large customers is relatively complicated and slow. In the early stage, it is necessary to sort out customer needs and provide consultation to customers. In the middle stage, it needs to be delivered, and in the later stage, continuous service is required. Dingding used to be a product co-created with small and medium-sized enterprises. During the epidemic, it invested heavily in projects such as education and resumption of work and production. The just-needed products of major customers such as documents, audio and video, conferences, and project management still need to be further polished.

“Large customers need service for a long period of time to be valuable. In a short period of time, this value cannot be proved by income or daily activity. Is it satisfied with satisfaction? Customers can’t be satisfied in a day or two. So the proof is The cycle is relatively long.” Ye Jun said.

In order to promote the business of major customers, Ye Jun’s strategy is to stabilize the base of DingTalk first: to ensure that the base of small and medium customers is still growing; on this basis, consciously accumulate the ability to serve major customers, and balance between new and old customers. .

From October 2020 to the first half of this year, this transitional state lasted for 18 months, and a consensus was gradually formed.

Dingding did several important things. The first is to repeatedly unify the team’s cognition: valuable daily activities are the foundation of the to B business, and worthless daily activities are useless no matter how high they are. During the period of aggressive pursuit of scale, Dingding would even promote products to aunties who dance in the square, who are not the core users of to B products.

In 2021, Dingding will set up a new key customer team. They have selected 1,000 large enterprises with more than 5,000 employees as key potential customers, visit regularly, listen to needs and suggestions, and respond in a timely manner.

In March this year, Ku Wei, vice president of Alibaba Group and former general manager of Alibaba Cloud IoT, joined DingTalk as the COO of DingTalk, and began to take charge of a more comprehensive key account team, including product, sales and ecological functions. Ku Wei was a senior executive of China Unicom operator and has rich experience in government and enterprise customers. The Kuwei team focuses on serving some organizations with more than 2,000 employees, which is Dingding’s current benchmark for major customers.

From the second half of last year to the first half of this year, the value of major customers has gradually been proven. Dingding told “LatePost” that, unlike individual users who fluctuated in the past, large customers not only brought considerable new daily activities, but also the number of daily activities only rose and did not fall. The number of users in the customer organization, the average usage time, The number of apps used is steadily rising.

Data from third-party agency QuestMobile shows that in August 2022, DingTalk’s monthly active and daily active users were 205 million and 84.82 million, respectively, setting a record high in the summer of DingTalk. In the past, once the summer vacation came, there were fewer students taking online classes, and the number of active users of Dingding would drop.

In September last year, Dingding removed its goal of increasing daily activity by 50% every year. From the previous point of both value and scale, it is clear that value is first and scale is second.

The new measurement dimension has become the “number of daily active companies”. The standard for active companies is that at least one-third of the company’s people use DingTalk every day and use at least 6 business systems.

Big customer solution without a lot of people

After clearly turning to major customers, Dingding has more competition with corporate WeChat and Feishu.

These three products are office collaboration software, with core functions including instant chat, audio and video conferencing, collaborative documents and project management. Different from software that serves corporate business or administrative processes such as sales, finance, taxation, and human resources, collaborative software is an entrance that can carry other corporate applications, and is the most frequently used portal within an enterprise, making it a giant battlefield.

In this basic form, what to do, what not to do, and how to do it, Dingding, Enterprise WeChat and Feishu each gave different answers.

The feature of Feishu is that, in addition to the core functions such as chat and documents, it will do some business-level applications by itself, such as manpower and electronic signatures. Feishu will also invest more of its own teams to provide customers with consulting and customer service services, and respond to customers’ customization and update needs in a timely manner. This is one of the reasons why Feishu won Xiaopeng and Ideal.

The price is that to complete the above work, people and money are indispensable. Feishu, which has developed for 6 years and has been abroad for 2 years, now has 7,000 people.

Enterprise WeChat, which can be connected to WeChat, is suitable for communication scenarios with customers, such as customer service, marketing, etc. As a result, enterprise WeChat has gained a large number of users, and the monthly activity is second only to DingTalk. According to QuestMobile data, in August this year, Dingding had 205 million monthly active users, ranking first for collaborative office apps, 104 million for enterprise WeChat, and 7.89 million for Feishu.

DingTalk has maintained a relatively lean team. Their idea of ​​becoming a big customer is to focus on the core base and hand over the upper-layer applications to ecological partners, that is, “PaaSization + ecological openness”.

PaaS is Platform as a Service, platform as a service. It is a set of basic capabilities. On this base, customers can integrate and connect their existing systems, and this base can also be integrated by other companies and products in the ecosystem.

DingTalk can be either a piece of furniture out of the box or IKEA, giving you materials (data, etc.) and tools (such as the low-code tools developed by DingTalk), allowing you to assemble according to your needs.

If you find it troublesome and don’t want to do it yourself, DingTalk will find its partners to help you, such as large software service providers Accenture and iSoftStone. This is part of the open ecology: Dingding tries not to touch the delivery work such as furniture installation, but finds another company to do it, and everyone serves customers and makes money together.

Another part of the ecology is a large number of software product companies, which provide business applications and vertical applications, just like manufacturers of furniture accessories, which can meet the individual needs of customers: the same set of IKEA cabinets, you can use different stickers to decorate, Change to a different handle. Through the DingTalk platform, customers can now use the reimbursement application of Yikuaibao, the procurement application of Pinbangbang, and the labor application of Human Resources.

At present, the total number of DingTalk ecological partners has exceeded 4,000, and the number of applications on the open platform has exceeded 1,100. In order to allow partners to make more money, Dingding reduced the proportion of commissions from software manufacturers last year. It used to be 30%, and now it is up to 15%.

Ye Jun told LatePost that in addition to profit sharing, the more important factor in retaining partners is the performance and openness of the PaaS base.

“Dingding has opened up the most frequently used group chat interface to partners. They can insert applications built by them, and third-party components can also be inserted into documents.” Ye Jun said.

Some branches were cut down one after another. In March of this year, DingTalk stopped social products such as me and DianDianZong, and also stopped hardware businesses such as attendance machines, leaving these spaces for partners; DingTalk also no longer touches industry applications or business applications. Such as taxation, HR and OKR systems.

Dingding freed up his hands and spent more energy and resources to improve the core functions of the office collaboration software, focusing on audio and video conferences and online documents.

In March of this year, Dingding acquired Paileyun, an audio and video service company. The founder, Zhao Jiayu, is now the No. 1 position of Dingding’s audio and video division. At the same time, Dingding has increased the investment in research and development of documents.

Through the PaaS + open ecosystem, DingTalk tries to solve the long-standing contradiction in the field of enterprise services: on the one hand, large customers have customized needs, and on the other hand, suppliers hope to serve more customers on a large scale.

Due to the complex business and process, large customers generally need additional functions beyond standardized software products. However, if all requirements and functions are developed separately, the supplier needs to invest too much resources, the service cannot be sustained, and it is difficult for the supplier to expand.

The poor balance between customization and scale is one of the reasons why it is difficult for large companies such as Salesforce to be born in the Chinese enterprise service field. PaaS + open ecology is a targeted solution: PaaS provides a set of relatively standardized capabilities and tools for building customized functions, which can be used by a large number of ecological partners. This allows DingTalk to serve more large organizations with controllable resources, rather than relying on crowd tactics.

Dingding, which did not retain Xiaopeng in the past, has now taken up the complex needs of larger companies.

Dingding told “LatePost” that this spring, in the bidding of a leading power battery manufacturer, Dingding dispatched fewer orders than competitors, but still won this customer, which will bring Dingding a lot of money. Millions of dollars in income every year.

Ye Jun believes that one of the advantages of Dingding is a purer thinking of Party B and a better understanding of to B: “To be to B, we must respect the cognition of each industry. We did not recommend Alibaba’s working methods to this customer, it is their I agree with our point. You can’t say you are a genius, you teach others to do things. For example, if it has its own documentation, we will integrate it instead of ours.”

Dingding redefines the boundaries of what it does and what not to do.

Slow and fast digital base

The major customer business is on track, and commercialization is on the agenda this year.

Dingding really starts charging, and it will launch a professional version of 9,800 yuan/year in early 2021, which is a standardized paid version for organizations with less than 500 people. Further up, Dingding has successively launched an exclusive version for medium and large enterprises (from 100,000 yuan/year), and a proprietary version for super-large government and enterprise customers (from 1 million yuan/year).

In addition to the exclusive version and the proprietary version, DingTalk has also established two ways to serve major customers with ecological partners: one is to allow major customers to develop “industry nails” based on the DingTalk base and provide them to upstream and downstream enterprises or industries. Other companies, such as “Qi Ming Nail” developed by FAW, “Cloud Assist Nail” developed by Greentown, and “Hope Nail” developed by Dongfang Hope; the second is to let software manufacturers in vertical industries develop based on DingTalk according to their own customers or scenarios. “Partner nails”, such as “Lanling nails” developed by OA (office automation) manufacturer Lanling, and “Black Lake made nails” launched by industrial Internet company Heihu. In the industry nail and partner nail models, Dingding’s income comes from continuous annual fee sharing.

The “three-specialty” products consisting of the professional version, the exclusive version, and the proprietary version are Dingding’s current revenue source. In 2021, Alibaba Cloud will bring nearly one or two hundred large customers with a scale of more than 10,000 people to Dingding. Ye Jun hopes that within a year, the income of the “three specialties” will at least double again.

Ye Jun told LatePost that Dingding will not expand on a large scale until it reaches the break-even point. When a giant’s products show restraint, partners will feel more comfortable and secure, which is conducive to expanding the ecosystem. When some software companies cooperate with big Internet companies, one of the concerns is that the internal team of the big company may make a similar product by itself.

A person in charge of a software manufacturer who has cooperated with Dingding, Feishu, and corporate WeChat told LatePost: Feishu has done relatively little in the ecology, and prefers to make applications by itself. Both DingTalk and WeChat are promoting ecological cooperation. Enterprise WeChat provides financial subsidies; DingTalk’s changes in the past two years have begun to promote deeper cooperation such as industry DingTalk and partner DingTalk, shrinking the action of making products by itself.

Ye Jun said that Dingding is “first and firm” in the direction of the PaaS+ ecology, and the process is slow and then fast: “The PaaS base will accumulate more and more business data, and there will be a lot of viscosity in the future. , Dingding will get faster and faster.”

At the end of this road, DingTalk hopes to become the base for the digitalization of Chinese enterprises. Ye Jun believes that advancing in a more restrained manner is the appropriate path to this goal.

This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1321
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