“In B2C, we have let the Americans and Asians take the bread out of our mouths in Europe. This must not happen again in the b2b sector,” argues Peter F. Schmid, CEO, Visable.
Peter is in a great position to make this observation. There are a few people better placed to understand both the challenges and the opportunities afforded by b2b in Europe. A digital entrepreneur of 20 years standing Peter is now the CEO of Visable, which operates two leading b2b marketplaces: EUROPAGES and “Wer liefert was.”
At DIS 2020 Peter will be explaining how „Wer liefert was,“ a 90 year old company reinvented itself as an agile internet enterprise. Here he talks of the potential of new technology like AI and AR in the b2b space as well as his ambition to create in Visable a European b2b Unicorn.
***Peter is one of many influential speakers who will be presenting at DIS 2020, taking place on 24 to 25 March 2020 in Berlin. Sign up here***
Tell me about your career to date. What brought you to Visable?
I have been an Internet entrepreneur for more than 20 years. I helped to build Autoscout24, was responsible for the European Classifieds business at eBay and was CEO of mobile.de. After that I developed Parship into the leading online dating platform. In August 2012, I joined „Wer liefert was“ as managing partner, from which Visable was created in May 2019.
I believe that all the positive things that the Internet has already achieved in b2c will also come in b2b. Nevertheless, we are still at the very beginning of the digitalisation of the b2b sector.
What key problem would you say that Visable is trying to solve and how do you do it?
Visable operates the two leading b2b marketplaces in Europe: EUROPAGES and „Wer liefert was“. With these two marketplaces we reach up to 3.9 million professional buyers every month. In other words, we bring European SMEs together with their key target group, the professional buyer. In this way we provide our customers with visibility and reach on the Internet and we solve the problem of acquiring new customers worldwide in a cost-efficient way, thus creating equal opportunities.
How important do you think content and social platforms are in b2b marketing? Is their importance increasing?
The most important thing for companies in the b2b sector is that they and their products can be found on the Internet. Good content plays a decisive role in this and its importance will continue to grow in the near future. Furthermore, the content must also be well maintained. Because only up-to-date content is good content. For our marketplaces EUROPAGES and „Wer liefert was“, this means that the profiles shown on these two platforms are filled as fully as possible and are always up to date.
You largely focus on industrial SMEs. Do you think your approach could be replicated in other market niches, or is that sector unique?
To develop and keep a horizontal product marketplace with over three million providers up to date is a mammoth task. We are the market leader in this field and it is not easy to copy us. But there are some vertical marketplaces that specialise in one category, such as CNC milled parts, that do a good job.
Your talk at DIS is called ‘Transformation from head to toe: Turning a 88 year old business into a digital company’; what briefly do you mean by this?
„Wer liefert was“ was founded in 1932 as an exhibitor directory of the Leipzig Fair. For most of our history we were a publishing house that printed reference books for suppliers, a kind of Yellow Pages for the b2b sector. When I joined wlw in the summer of 2012, we were online, but we still had the publishing house DNA in us. We have now left these structures behind us. Today we are an agile Internet company with 380 employees at locations in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. In my presentation I will tell you about this change, from publishing house to re-startup and about the resistance I had to face.
Are there any emerging technologies, such as AI, Blockchain etc, that might be disruptive in b2b marketing?
AI is certainly a very exciting topic and will gain immense importance and scope in all areas of the business world in the next few years, including b2b. We ourselves are already using AI, e.g. with our new service wlw Connect. There we search for the right supplier from our database for the buyer based on his enquiry.
But technologies such as AR and VR will also continue to revolutionise the B2B sector. I am convinced that in ten years, a large part of today's industrial trade fairs will have become superfluous, because information on new production machines will be available online in every detail and the machines can be viewed in virtual space. Expensive transport of the machines around the world to exhibit them for two weeks at a trade fair will no longer be worthwhile.
What future plans do you have for Visable?
I joined Visable to develop the company into a European champion and to expand it into an Unicorn, a company with a valuation of over €1 billion and annual sales of over €100 million. In B2C, we have let the Americans and Asians take the bread out of our mouths in Europe. This must not happen again in the B2B sector. With Visable we are in a good starting position to make these goals a reality.
***Peter is one of many influential speakers who will be presenting at DIS 2020, taking place on 24 to 25 March 2020 in Berlin. Sign up here***