A positive future for B2B post Covid-19?

There was a fascinating article in the FT this week, charting the 100 companies to have added most shareholder value (market cap) since the onset of the virus.

For reference, the article’s here.

Being a proud B2B-er, I was pleased, but not that surprised, to see that over half the list were either completely business-to-business companies, or ones that yield a significant amount of their revenue from B2B operations. Even Amazon (obviously top of the list with a whopping $401bn added to value) makes the vast majority of its profits from AWS, which is of course a B2B play.

There were also some interesting industry trends confirmed: EdTech, Pharma and PharmaTech, eCommerce, online collaboration and automation companies have all fared amazingly well.

So what?

1. Everyone bangs on about ‘the world has changed’ because of Covid-19, but I maintain that predominantly it’s accelerated a future that was already happening.
   
2. If you’re in marketing, you’d best be in B2B marketing – there’s huge growth potential ahead and I am delighted to have (albeit accidentally) forged a 20+ year career in the B2B world.
   
3. Pick your sectors wisely – the EdTech revolution hasn’t even got close to Inside the Tornado yet, but it will do. Witness the effect of lockdown on education across all age groups and the direction is only going one way. The same is true for PharmaTech and Telemedicine – it’s not tech maturity that’s held these companies back, it’s attitudes and an old-guard medical view of ‘we’ve always done it this way’. That all changed because it had to.

From my Agency’s perspective, I thank my lucky stars to have been fortunate enough to work with some of the names on this list and ones not mentioned but firmly in these hyper-growth areas – Microsoft, Vodafone, R3, Softbank Robotics, Truveris, Mastercard, Fiserv and others. It’s great to see these companies have grown their B2B operations and long may it continue.

We’ve started looking at where things are going for all of us in B2B, it’s a resource that’ll grow over time – have a look and all thoughts welcome on what our Earnest Insights team should be focusing our research on:

Interesting times ahead…

(This post originally appeared on LinkedIn)

══════════════════