Most of the leading B2B companies pay attention to the latest trends and include them to improve their business. In this article, you will get to explore the B2B eCommerce trends that are working for B2B companies but are still beneath the radar and unlikely to go mainstream until 2018.
Implement any of these over the next six months and you’ll be ahead of the game and ahead on profits.
Things To Skip With B2B E-commerce
The biggest challenge is that many of your customers may not be ready for high levels of interaction and a plethora of special offers served up via regular emails. They want to be able to do business with you as easily as possible, finding what they need, when they need it and at the volumes and on the terms that they require. It’s highly likely you’ll still need to make inquiries over the phone and continue to utilize your frontline sales force with face-to-face meetings, but e-commerce provides another route to market and a highly lucrative one.
Do not underestimate the level of technical and creative requirement to successfully implement what seems like a simplification. It takes a lot of planning and configuration to ensure a seamless online journey for the B2B customer. With many B2B companies operating on a high-value-per-order and repeat business model, if you get it wrong it could cost you heavily.
Dynamic Personalisation
If your business operates across many product lines, has a large catalog, and serves many different sectors, then dynamic personalization can significantly increase your online revenues.
Dynamic personalization allows you to deliver the right content to the right people and that too at the right time to build trust and tailor your calls to action without overwhelming your audiences with multiple messages. Although it may seem like a daunting challenge, the underlying technology is relatively easy to implement and can make a considerable difference to the revenues your website delivers.
Integrate Your Sales Team
E-commerce will not replace your sales team, but it will allow them to function more effectively and close more sales for your business. As people become freed up from repetitive administrative tasks, which are more suited to the automated nature of e-commerce, your salespeople are better placed to have a greater financial impact on your company.
In the B2B decision-making chain, it’s possible your potential customers will need a number of interactions with your company before they reach an agreement to purchase from you. It’s likely there may be several people involved in the purchase decision. This is where your sales team can help to steer the conversations, counter any objections and focus on the key benefits for each individual customer. Depending on the complexity of your product, an e-commerce solution will be able to handle much of the journey. However, workflow and finding the right place in your customer journey for the sales team is crucial to maximizing the positive impact of your e-commerce system.
Integrating your e-commerce function into your sales mix also means that your sales team can refer existing clients into the system. It’s likely that many will welcome the flexibility and convenience of repeat orders from your website. In addition, if you build a commission element into your e-commerce system for sales team referrals, you’re likely to find the website being promoted more often, pushing it to the forefront of your marketing and sales campaigns, freeing your sales team to pursue incremental new business even more.
Mobile Commerce
Research shows that, in some core B2B sectors, a growing percentage of buyers are investigating new products and suppliers from a mobile device. This means that your website has got to be responsive and easily navigable from a mobile phone or tablet. Furthermore, if your customers are likely to make purchases while on the road or if they move from site to site as a requirement of their job, then you need to consider implementing an e-commerce element to your website before your competitors do. For the right industries, integrating mobile into your sales process can provide a valuable additional revenue stream, delivering additive sales rather than cannibalizing from elsewhere.
Customer-Specific Pricing
Whether you’re selling rubber gloves or complex electronic measuring equipment, you need to treat your B2B customers as individuals with their own specific needs. We’ve covered off some of this under the banner of dynamic personalization, but as well as providing technical specifications, product benefits, and value comparisons, it’s likely you’ll need to offer your customers the option of buying on account, managing a variety of pricing structures and offering a range of shipping options.
Last Words
Hope you like this post and you are well-versed with the latest eCommerce trends of 2018 that will give your business a boost if they are implemented correctly. Do share your thought with us about this post.