Longer sales cycles and unique customer needs create opportunities for B2B innovation
Forrester forecast earlier this year that B2B ecommerce in the U.S. would reach $1.8 trillion and account for 17% of all B2B sales in the U.S. by 2023. As the statistic suggests, the days when B2B was synonymous with “whiskey and a handshake” are ending.
Today, B2B companies face new pressures from insurgents such as Amazon Business, whose B2C-inspired innovations further widen the expectation gap between what customers can do and what many company’s legacy technologies can deliver.
With longer sales cycles and unique customer needs, creating an innovative B2B commerce experience becomes an ongoing organizational opportunity to improve the customer experience and boost your brand’s reputation. These four best practices can help a B2B company stand out in ecommerce.
1. Master Content Along the Purchase Journey
Recent surveys reveal that 84 percent of B2B buyers have blamed product content for stopping them from completing a purchase with a supplier. They most commonly cite incorrect product content or a lack of product content as frustrating factors. Not only must content be accurate and easily findable, it must be tailored to both early-stage stakeholders and the eventual users of the product. Supporting a complex buying cycle with content that speaks to your audience throughout the decision-making process requires coordination and the right tracking and authentication technology.
- Ensure the content your sales force sees is the same as your customers
- Develop an approach and cadence for communicating with prospects
- Present examples of industry-specific problems that your solution/products solve
- Your content should speak to choosers and users
2. Enrich the Authenticated Experience
In the good old days of B2B, you would go to work on a terminal and go home. You didn’t have access to a fast computer or a smartphone or a speaker that talked to you. But today, authenticated, or logged in, customers want it faster, smarter and easier.
The home page and product detail pages should be personalized for your registered customers. Pages should provide contextual content such as distributor information, support numbers, recommended replacement times, subscription and re-purchase options, and other features that will eventually become the norm as Amazon Business pressures others to keep up.
For search, leverage customer’s order history to predict and promote search results that will be more relevant to them. A smart type-ahead functionality makes the work of a new purchaser or researcher easier when they don’t have to struggle to find the right model. If you know the customer or client, prove it to them with smarter search results.
Just as search should be finetuned, product recommendations should be tailored throughout a site to adapt to known customers or companies. Gain additional insights from your customers by offering the ability to submit product reviews. Not only do they influence other customers, they help improve customer service if you can respond to, and remediate, negative reviews.
Smarter chatbots know when a user is authenticated, so support should become faster and more targeted. Chatbot scripts should lead with what they already know about the customer and what product might be causing the issue. Above all, strive to remove friction from the digital support process for complex ecommerce purchases.
As the line blurs between work and personal life, consider how mobile procurement can be optimized to ensure anytime, anywhere purchases. Imagine a B2B buyer who lacks permissions to buy a product the company needs now, but the approver is on vacation. Notifying the approver and allowing them to approve the purchase remotely is an example of B2B innovation that many B2C sites never needed to contemplate.
All of these enhancements cost money, but according to recent B2B survey data, 74% of B2B customers will accept higher pricing in exchange for excellent ecommerce or customer portal experiences. And if investing in better digital experiences isn’t considered a good investment, 88% of B2B buyers would turn to a competitor if a supplier’s digital channel failed to keep up with their needs.
3. Integrate and Syndicate
Integrate your technology stack to draw a more complete picture of your customer and to refine how you communicate with them. The customer is already thinking, “You know who I am, you know where I am, you know what I own. Talk to me appropriately and don’t make me talk to 6 different people. If I have a problem, can you as the manufacturer help me solve it?” Don’t botch that critical moment.
Great B2C integrations only make this challenge more urgent. Nest knows when its customers have a thermostat, CO2 smoke detector, and camera. And not surprisingly, when the thermostat knows there is smoke in the house, it shuts off the air. This kind of tightly integrated logic and customer experience leads to higher customer satisfaction and an army of digital loyalists who can be empowered as influencers to praise your business. Consider how a CRM, commerce site, and ERP system working together can help generate more sales.
Tight integration also means having a single source of truth to syndicate your product content to other distribution channels. Giving your customers the flexibility to purchase spares, replacement parts, and accessories across other channels is a decision each business must make, but your customers likely have already made the decision for you.
4. Put Your Data to Work
Marry your first party customer data with third party data to extend and complete the picture of your customers beyond your own website to the Internet at large. Leverage online behavioral data to understand future customer intent and uncover customer needs before your competitors. Putting your finger on the pulse of your customers has never been more attainable. Build a strategy that defines what type of data you want to gather and how that data will be used. What you learn from your customers outside of your site should influence what you adjust on your site. Likewise, what you learn about your customer on your site should influence how you market to them outside of it.
The Bottomline
B2B commerce is not unlike B2C commerce in many ways. Customers expect the same functionality and seamless experiences. But the unique differences illustrate that cookie cutter or “out-of-the-box” solutions crafted years ago may not always be the best solution for your next generation of customers.
