I’ve always thought “B2B2C” as go-to-market strategy can be a dubious cop-out. A buzzword companies reach for when they’re afraid to pick a side, or perhaps, don’t know whose problems they can best solve.
But strip the term away and there’s a real thing underneath it and now I finally understand when and how it might actually be meaningful.
Every estate attorney I’ve talked to has told me the same thing, nearly word for word: “One of the hardest parts of my job is keeping multiple concurrent families up to date on where the administration stands at any given moment.”
That statement itself is characterizing two distinctly different viewpoints, and needs. On one side, an attorney managing a dozen estates at once, each with a family that needs to know what’s happening, and no good way to keep all of them current without eating their day away doing so. On the other side, a grieving executor. A daughter who just lost her mother, now responsible for settling everything, calling the lawyer’s office for updates, waiting, anxious, in the dark on top of her grief.
These look like two different problems. The professional’s burden. The family’s anxiety. Two audiences, two products, which is exactly the thinking that could make “B2B2C” a cop-out.
But really, they’re the same problem. The family is anxious because keeping them informed is hard for the attorney. You don’t solve that with two disconnected tools. You solve it with one.
So, we built one feature that serves both sides from the same system. The attorney decides exactly what each family sees and when, because disclosure in estate work isn’t casual, it’s a dutiful obligation. And the family gets a calm window into where things stand: what phase the estate is in, in plain language, what’s coming, and a direct line to the professional guiding them.
Today, that still takes a few minutes of the attorney’s day. Tomorrow, the family’s view fills itself from the same ledger the attorney already works in, and even those minutes disappear. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close, and we’re moving fast with our customers in the conversation.
Now I am quietly becoming more a fan of B2B2C and there’s something extremely satisfying about being able to provide solutions to both sides of the same troubled coin.