B2B digital transformation: Sales channels must adapt e-commerce, STAT

Despite automation in the supply chain, B2B businesses often rely on personal interactions when selling and servicing complex products and solutions – and nothing improves the human factor of sales like B2B digital transformation.

B2B sales require deep understanding of a customer’s processes and demands, consultative selling to multiple buying centers, and complex contract negotiations.

We’ve seen what happens when a global crisis hits all the players involved in this value chain:

Production processes break apart while order intake and cash flow are severely impacted due to lockdown measures and restricted personal interactions.

Established processes, business behavior, and business models might even completely fall apart from one day to the next.

The pandemic crisis has taught us a critical business lesson: Businesses must diversify and digitalize their customer facing sales and service channels. Companies that hadn’t started investing in digitization of business processes have been hit hard.

B2B sales channels: Reset & renew

How should businesses move forward? According to Gartner, senior leaders must make strategic decisions that will lead them to a “renewed future state.” Companies need to reset, which Gartner believes consists of three stages:

1. Respond: immediate actions to ensure people are safe and critical business functions are operating
2. Recover: stabilize operations and plan for restoring scalable operations
3. Renew: implement learnings from current state as elements for a new foundation

While the respond phase primarily focused on people’s safety and avoiding complete supply chain disruption, the recovery phase has focused on communication to company’s stakeholders. For example, letting customers know that you’re still in business, explaining any changes to the customer relationship, setting expectations for products production and delivery.

Moreover, your customers need to know how they can reach you.

B2B Survival Guide

Discover how B2B digital transformation helps keep brands afloat, no matter how stormy the seas HERE.

You may want to point customers to digital channels for placing orders, getting information on their order status and product availability.

These efforts may be remotely supported by:

• Sales
• Service
• Back office staff

Via phone, email or other digital channels.

In most cases, the renew stage will lead to the need to revisit and further digitize business processes. If your business has already completed a B2B digital transformation, congratulations! Unfortunately, many have not.

B2B sales and e-commerce: A critical combination

This is where complementing complex, people-centric B2B sales processes by globally scaling e-commerce web and mobile channels, and leveraging chat, IoT devices, and other advances is essential.

Technology is typically not the bottleneck these days; heavy lifting is required to organizationally change and re-invent business models.

Companies that diversify their customer-facing sales and service channels balance business risk. With proven, efficient and established e-commerce channels, they can avoid downtime in future crises.

B2B digital transformation: Adapting to change and building resiliency

How can companies manage constantly changing business realities in a sustainable way?

Gartner’s old concept of PACE layered architectures may come in handy today. While Systems of Record are stable and optimized for efficiency, Systems of Differentiation are applications that help companies differentiate themselves, like e-commerce- and customer experience applications.

These applications need to be agile and should enable efficient, but differentiated digitized customer journeys. E-commerce and customer experience applications even reach into the space of Systems of Innovation, typically by allowing companies to experiment with new business models or via extensibility concepts that enable creativity.

Here are three ways to renew your business and prepare for a sustainable business going forward:

1. Review your technology stack in the e-commerce and customer experience domain. Technology has made great progress in the past years to allow for differentiated customer experiences. Mobile-first, API-first, cloud-native, and headless commerce are a few key concepts to know.
2. Assess your digital business maturity. According to Forrester’s Ted Schadler, only 14% of businesses are advanced in their digital business maturity. You need to assess your status to understand how you need to proceed.
3. Choose one or few providers that can help you bridge potential gaps in your own digital business maturity. Pick ones that you trust, and look for open architectures, pre-defined integrations, and financial stability.

These efforts will enable you to keep running in a continuously changing environment and withstand future crises.