How B2B Sales Teams Win with Digital Commerce

Over the last few years, companies have made great strides when it comes to personalizing B2B shopping experiences, but they still have a lot of work to do. Many B2B companies fall short because they still depend on clunky commerce solutions built on top of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. These systems are designed to run back-office operations and optimize workflows, but they can’t effectively manage customer touchpoints or build a 360-degree view of the customer.

To deliver personalized, relevant experiences — and to create them on a reasonable budget — B2B organizations need a platform with the right data and automation tools built in. For example, Salesforce B2B Commerce comes equipped with one-click reorders, smart search, and product recommendations that help you increase sales and drive loyalty. Out-of-the-box features also include artificial intelligence (AI) and connected data that help you create personalized experiences quickly and at scale.

These tools allow sales teams to work smarter, not harder. And they come with significant cost benefits. In fact, one report found that process automation powered by Salesforce B2B Commerce increases agent productivity, yielding up to an additional two hours per day per agent. Over three years and a cumulative total of 51,380 additional productive hours, the productivity lift is worth more than $1.5 million in labor cost savings to the organization.

At every stage of the customer journey, business buyers — especially younger ones — have come to expect an array of digital tools and features from the companies they work with. Millennials make up a majority of B2B buyers today, and they are accustomed to mobile apps, product comparison tools, personalized recommendations, real-time messaging, fast and intelligent search, and proactive service. These features are now becoming table stakes for B2B vendors hoping to retain customers.

Moreover, buyers want to be able to move easily between different channels — in-person, mobile, online, phone, social, text — depending on their needs. They want the flexibility of being able to start a transaction on mobile in the morning and finish it later in the day on a desktop, with the opportunity to work with sales reps who can order on their behalf. With cloud-based commerce technology like Salesforce B2B Commerce, you can deliver flexible experiences and meet the unique needs of each buyer. Because it’s based in the cloud, you can develop commerce capabilities rapidly and incrementally. Teams can roll out solutions — quickly and inexpensively — in a cycle of deploy, test, and adjust. This means you can constantly innovate as customer needs evolve.

Since it’s built on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, Salesforce B2B Commerce is also endlessly configurable. Its capabilities mesh seamlessly with CRM data to create a single view of the customer, which lets companies stay connected at every touchpoint by linking commerce to marketing, sales, and service. That means customer data is available to anyone in the company at any time on any device or platform, with no integration required.

Perhaps the most challenging new reality in the B2B arena is that customers want their vendors to offer different kinds of service to meet their needs at different times. Customers demand highly intuitive self-service options that make routine interactions easier, and many are willing to complete entire purchases through a digital self-service platform. In fact, 90% of business buyers say they will place increasingly larger, complex orders online over the coming two years. Eighty-eight percent say they are increasingly comfortable placing higher-value orders online.

Self-service options not only improve customer satisfaction and drive revenue — they can also significantly lower your cost to serve and increase sales team productivity. By enabling self-service, your reps no longer need to spend time on simple requests like checking on order status, sending samples, checking stock inventory, or invoicing customers. Instead, they can focus on more strategic services like cross-selling, upselling and other consultative tasks.

As technology removes data entry and other administrative tasks from sales teams’ stacked schedules, reps are tasked with more strategic, complex mandates. Sales reps have become much more than order takers, as they now have more time to devote to learning about the business climate, their industries, products, and customers. Despite some fears, self-service and remote B2B purchases aren’t displacing human talent in sales — they are actually helping companies retain better talent and making it easier to recruit.

Experienced salespeople know this. They’ve often worked with the best sales technology available, and they don’t want to go back to the days of spreadsheets. High-performing salespeople are drawn to companies that prioritize digital innovation. That means these companies can take their pick of the top sales talent whenever they need to add to their team — a strong competitive advantage in the throes of a talent war.

Customer trust and loyalty stem from companies’ understanding of their customers’ unique needs and tailored solutions to address them. Trust, however, is becoming a precious commodity in digital commerce. At a time when 71% of business buyers say that most sales interactions feel transactional, there is a big opportunity to leverage data to get a better understanding of customer needs and goals — and act on them quickly.

How can you achieve this? With a real-time view of every customer. By leveraging a real-time CRM, you can quickly turn insights into moments that wow your customers and drive deep loyalty. For example, you can set up “churn alerts” in real time that trigger your sales team to reach out if a customer exhibits signs of dissatisfaction. This ensures your customers that they are valued and their voice is heard. You can also collect data in real time that will help you provide dynamic pricing for every customer — allowing you to tailor every deal to a buyer’s unique profile and market characteristics. With the right insights, you can provide intuitive, proactive service that sets your business apart and drives trust.

For sales reps, establishing trust is a must from the get-go. In fact, 87% of business buyers now expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors.

So what can companies do to improve performance in the age of the connected customer? The data suggests that two things make a big difference. First, top-performing companies are responding to higher customer expectations by becoming more collaborative, data-driven, and insightful. Second, they are empowering teams with tools that make sales people smarter and the entire organization more efficient and responsive.

Companies with top sales teams (those with significant year-over-year revenue growth) are more likely to share three characteristics:

• They use a single view of the customer to collaborate
• They deploy self-service and automation to free up time for selling
• They trade intuition for data-driven insights

As we’ve seen, business buyers are gravitating to vendors that understand them and provide consistent, personalized experiences across the customer journey. The most effective B2B sales organizations deliver by using a 360-degree view of the customer to collaborate with other departments as never before.

This means that no matter how customers choose to engage with the company, the interaction will be contextual and meaningful. Business buyers end up feeling they are dealing with a single, knowledgeable vendor — not a collection of siloed departments — saving time and energy for everyone involved.

A robust commerce platform like Salesforce B2B Commerce can be transformative. By collecting commerce and CRM data in a single customer record, Salesforce enables everybody in the company to see the customer’s history; the status of outstanding orders from online, in-person, and any other channel; service issues; and notes from the salesperson or service engineer — all in real time. Arming sales reps with mobile access to that data gives them the ability to connect with customers on the go, putting vital information at their fingertips in customer-facing situations.

Sales is a unique role, requiring expert people skills and a wealth of organizational knowledge. But customers’ elevated expectations require salespeople to find time in the sales process for non-selling activities. High performers are more likely to give customers the self-service, mobile, and automated options they prefer for many routine interactions like ordering and product research, relieving reps of the “order-taking” burden that gets in the way of solving bigger issues. Digital leaders are finding success by automating the following sales tasks: logging data and customer notes, generating quotes and proposals, and prioritizing leads.

Automation frees up reps to research customer needs and come up with solutions that lead to a sale. With digital tools taking on the brunt of straightforward processes, salespeople can focus on what they do best — selling — rather than administrative tasks.

The best sales teams distinguish themselves by making every minute more productive. While high performers still rely on experience and intuition to spot opportunity, they increasingly turn to data and analytics to both sharpen their own sales strategies and craft more personalized, insightful solutions for their customers. In fact, sales leaders named data accuracy and quantity as one of their top tactics for success. Consider that high-performing sales teams are more likely than underperformers to use data to help prioritize leads.

Reps are becoming experts at things like calibrating the customer’s past relationship with the company, measuring estimated revenue, and predicting the potential for add-on business. With commerce, sales, and other data connected, companies can unlock recommendations for sales teams in providing next best actions. This means sales reps get recommendations to take action — like offering a small discount or following up with buyers at the right time to maximize buyer satisfaction and sales.

An effective commerce implementation should begin with a clear ambition for how it can improve the customer experience. But companies are too often tempted to include every feature imaginable, which creates interminable delays and larger-than-necessary budgets.

A solution that’s purpose-built on a cloud platform offers a clear alternative. Starting with a minimum viable product, the company can get in front of customers quickly, collect real-world data, and use it to sharpen the next rapid iteration. The advantage is that the company can begin generating ROI, score some quick wins, and arm itself with intelligence about what’s working and what’s not.

Flexibility and speed to market are especially critical at a time when budget constraints and economic uncertainty are top of mind. To make your implementation as efficient and effective as possible, begin by asking your customers what they want. Don’t assume you already know. Too often, large B2B companies try to deploy every feature in the first round, taking on too much at once. Instead, do it in stages and prioritize what your customers say they need.

One of the key benefits of implementing a commerce platform in manageable stages is that customer feedback becomes part of doing business. The company can gather data and insights on the fly, using them to make better decisions. Creating tight feedback loops to gather and analyze sales data helps companies understand what’s working or not, so features can be tweaked, built up, or abandoned if necessary.

A smooth implementation also requires determining who has decision rights — IT, marketing, finance, and so on — and including those people from the very beginning of the project. Trade-offs between features, cost, and speed inevitably crop up in the planning process. It is critical that everyone contributes to these decisions, so a consensus emerges around the overall rationale for the project. Anything less than full alignment is a threat to success.