B2B brands are often years behind their B2C counterparts in digital transformation. Most successful B2C companies long ago recognized that they could not expect to keep their customers if they didn’t digitize and create personalized, convenient experiences. But many on the B2B side have been slower to adapt, perhaps assuming that the prototypical digital-first consumer is not their customer.
That assumption is no longer tenable. Older millennials are now often B2B decision-makers, and that generational shift is only going to become more intense year by year. Add the leap in digital expectations driven by the pandemic as well as the increasing influence of Gen Z in the workplace, and B2B companies that fail to cater to savvier digital buyers will see greater churn and less evangelism, which they can’t accept, especially with a downturn looming.
Many B2B brands are curious or even intent on starting digital commerce programs — they just don’t know where to start. Here are the steps those brands can take to jumpstart their digital programs.
Figure Out a Digital Strategy
Before starting a digital program, brands need to do strategic legwork. What is your identity as a company? Who do you want to be? Where do your customers spend their time, and what do they care about?
Digital vendors will try to sell B2B brands on many different, often high-ticket items. Determining what matters to the brand and, most importantly, to the customer is how brands cut through the noise and determine what’s worth precious dollars.
For example, if a company is selling drill bits, it may not want to pour a substantial amount of budget into a particularly sexy website. But it might be able to make its customers’ lives significantly easier — and boost retention, revenue, and referrals — by transitioning its order process from forcing customers to sift through Excel spreadsheets to a self-service model. These are the decisions that accelerate positive change.
Take a Holistic Look at Your Customers
Many organizations claim to be data-driven, but in practice, that entails standing in a data lake, picking up on a random data point, and launching a program based on that insight. For example, a marketing or analytics team might discern that customers in a certain age range respond especially well to advertising on a social platform. So, the team heads off to deploy that data by devoting money and time to an Instagram advertising initiative.
A better approach is to take a holistic view of the customer to understand how that person behaves across a company’s properties or those where the company is discoverable. By mapping the customer journey, the brand can better predict inventory, customer lifetime value, and potential churn points, among other indicators. Together, these insights help a B2B company launching a digital program prioritize initiatives and craft a holistic strategy to improve marketing, sales, and fulfillment.
Adopt a B2C Mindset
Many of the companies that have failed or almost failed due to their inability to keep up with digitization have adopted the mindset of training the customer. These brands set up the customer experience in a way that was efficient for them and expected customers to get on board. They should’ve taken the opposite approach: analyzing how customers behave and constructing a digital experience based on that information. This is more of a B2C mindset, and B2B companies are ultimately selling to individuals.
One way to operationalize a B2C mindset is to consistently ask for feedback. Send customers surveys after, say, 30 and 90 days, and analyze how they interact with you, what they especially like about your service, and what they’d like to see change. This fosters a process of analysis and customer-driven optimization that should guide continuous and collaborative innovation.
Another B2C imperative that should inform B2B digital programs is personalization. In B2B as in B2C, customers should not be able to sense when they cross a business unit. If marketing learns something about a customer, that learning should be reflected in customer service. If a restaurant always places a similar order, a food distributor should be able to anticipate that customer’s needs. This has become expected in B2C; the same expectation is becoming table stakes in B2B.
Test and Learn
All the digital businesses that have built empires have done so through a robust process of strategy, analysis, and ongoing testing and learning. B2B brands should compile data, modify their actions based on that data, and rinse and repeat. This is how to break free from the old way of doing things. And it’s how legacy B2B brands will secure their place in an increasingly digital future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jon Reily, SVP, Commerce & Loyalty Center of Excellence, Bounteous
Jon Reily is Senior Vice President of the Commerce & Loyalty Center of Excellence, Bounteous, and Chairman of Corpus Christi International Airport. Jon is a 25-year eCommerce veteran and Global Top 100 Retail Influencer who founded and sold two successful companies in the first dotcom boom of the 1990s.