Strategic discovery phase for B2B companies
A common scenario today is that there are ideas within the business around greater digitalisation, but management finds it hard to agree on a way forward. The tools to analyse the possibilities objectively are missing, which means decisions never get made. That in turn creates a real risk that the business loses competitiveness against players who act faster. Once this is discovered, it's hard to catch up the lead that competitors have gained.
To solve this, we have developed a method that helps you identify your potential and agree on the way forward.
Prioritising correctly in B2B projects — effect mapping combined with OKR
The ideas are rarely the problem. The hard part is deciding what to leave out. In a B2B e-commerce project, product owners, sales managers, IT, customer service and purchasing often want to pull in different directions, and without clear prioritisation you risk building a platform full of features that no one really needs. The solution is to start from what you actually want to achieve, and how you're going to measure it.
Two important questions to find the answers to
Whether it's a new B2B portal, a platform change or the further development of an existing store, we always ask the same two questions first:
- What do we want to achieve?
- How will we know we've succeeded?
In B2B e-commerce, the goals usually aren't just about pure transactions. Common effect goals are a higher share of self-service, higher repeat-purchase frequency from existing customers, shorter lead times in order handling, higher average order value, or relieving the load on inside sales and customer service.
Effect mapping: the effect arises in use
Effect management (Effektstyrning) is a Swedish-developed project methodology for IT projects (by Ingrid Domingues and Mijo Balic) that puts the desired effect at the centre. The basic idea is simple but often overlooked: a goal can never be reached unless it's matched against a real need in the user. A B2B store creates business value when the buyer experiences it as faster and easier than emailing or calling their salesperson. It sounds obvious, but in practice the discussion usually ends up in technology choices, design or features instead of in effect. The effect map is built on four levels:
- Effect goals describe what the business wants to achieve
- Target groups are those who will make the effect possible
- User goals define what each target group wants, must or should be able to do
- Solutions are the features and content that support the user goals
OKR as the engine for implementation
The effect map is excellent for prioritising what should be built. But in modern B2B projects, it isn't enough to prioritise once at the project's start. Reality changes, assumptions turn out to be wrong, and some features don't deliver the effect we thought. Here we like to complement it with OKR (Objectives & Key Results). Where the effect map answers what and for whom, OKR gives us an ongoing rhythm for how far we've come. The effect goals are translated into quarterly Objectives, and the expected outcomes of the user goals become measurable Key Results.
An example:
- Objective: Make it easier for existing customers to order on their own
- KR1: Increase the share of order value via self-service from 35% to 55%
- KR2: Reduce the share of order-related support cases by 30%
- KR3: 70% of active customers have used the reorder function at least once
The combination is powerful: the effect map gives direction and traceability, OKR gives pace and follow-up. Together they create a framework where every feature we build can be linked both to a user's need and to a measurable business outcome.
A structured prioritisation process that avoids subjective opinion
On the effect map, we assign percentages: how large a share of the effect goals does each target group carry? And within each target group, which user goals weigh heaviest? With that distribution it becomes considerably easier to handle time and budget constraints, while bringing the whole organisation along in the decisions. The discussion shifts from opinion to a shared reasoning about what delivers the greatest effect. If you then layer OKR on top, you also get a recurring check: does what we built actually deliver the effect we expected? If not, it's time to adjust, learn and re-prioritise. That's how we think modern B2B e-commerce projects should be run.
A few of our customers
From fast-growing e-commerce businesses to established industrial companies. We work with customers across different sectors and sizes, and our collaborations often run over a long time.
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