How B2B Sales Teams Win with Digital Commerce

Technology has fundamentally changed what customers expect from companies — and that includes B2B buyers. Business buyers want the ability to quickly research, browse and transact — any time, anywhere. Digital commerce makes it possible. And it’s not just buyers who benefit from digital commerce. Digital channels help B2Bs reduce costs, increase productivity and boost revenue.

That’s why B2B organisations are moving fast to implement and optimise their digital channels. In fact, B2B commerce leaders expect more than half of revenue (54%) to come from digital channels within the next two years. Why? A whopping 87% of B2B buyers say they would pay a premium for a supplier with an excellent ecommerce portal. Alternatively, 90% would turn to a competitor if a supplier’s digital channel couldn’t keep up with their needs.

Business buyers have come to expect a commerce experience that is every bit as intuitive as what they get in the retail world as consumers. It also demonstrates that because business relationships are often more complicated than retail relationships, expectations can be even higher. That’s a tall order for B2B organisations — especially in the midst of disruptions like advances in AI, rising costs and budget constraints.

The good news: With the right digital commerce strategies, you can deliver on buyer expectations without breaking the bank. By marrying data, analytics and cloud-based commerce tools to create a digitally enabled customer experience, you’ll be able to increase revenue and loyalty, reduce costs and unlock efficiency for your sales team. Here’s how.

• The holy grail of B2B ecommerce: Your self-service portal
• Thoughtful AI implementation can make a big impact on sales
• Create a personalised experience that sets your business apart
• Give B2B buyers more flexibility — transact on their terms
• Implement the right data strategies to build trust and loyalty.
• Three practical ways to exceed customer expectations.
• Practical advice to get started and improve B2B ecommerce

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.

Self-service options not only improve customer satisfaction and drive revenue — they can also significantly lower service associated costs 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. Offloading and automating tedious, mundane tasks is crucial, especially at a time when reps reportedly spend 70% of their time on nonselling 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. In fact, sales teams report an 18% average staff turnover over the last 12 months — down from 25% in 2022.

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 prioritise digital innovation like generative AI and automation. 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.

Four in five sales teams are experimenting with or have fully implemented AI. As adoption becomes widespread, sales teams are taking stock of the gains. The top improvement from AI is to sales data quality and accuracy — for example, by syncing customer interaction data

across systems to ensure that it’s always correct and up to date. Sales teams are also addressing the top challenge of meeting customer demands by using AI to personalise their communications — for example, by generating emails grounded in customer data.

These gains extend beyond internal sales teams to the customer experience. Commerce leaders also credit AI with major improvements in customer satisfaction, product discovery, customer loyalty, personalisation and more.

How are B2B organisations implementing AI? Along with using it to enhance and personalise communications with buyers, many are using generative tools to tackle tedious, time-consuming tasks like writing and updating product descriptions. This is especially useful for companies with complex, technical and expansive product catalogues. In minutes, generative AI can create accurate, detailed descriptions that will lead to conversions — and ensure that business buyers have all the information they need to make a purchase on their own.

Platforms with built-in AI tools allow you to quickly set up, manage and customise your B2B store with templates built for even the most complex needs. Automate essential tasks like inventory updates, price adjustments and personalised promotions, all driven by real-time data insights to increase sales.

Consumers today are conditioned to expect a new level of instantaneous, personalised, friction-free service. And business buyers see no need to compromise as they bring an increasing amount of their business buying online. In just two years, B2B organisations expect 54% of their revenue to come from digital channels. To win sales and drive loyalty, it’s critical to deliver relevant, personalised and genuinely helpful digital experiences that make B2B customers feel valued and understood.

What do personalised experiences look like? Business buyers expect vendors to have connected processes like seamless handoffs between departments. Rather than having to explain to service what they already told to sales, buyers want contextualised engagement based on earlier interactions.

Buyers also want personalised product recommendations and intelligent search. This makes it easier for them to quickly find what they’re looking for — which translates to higher average order value and increased loyalty. These intelligent commerce features are a major differentiator for B2B companies that often have large, complex product catalogues.

Over the last few years, companies have made great strides when it comes to personalising 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 optimise workflows, but they can’t effectively manage customer touchpoints or build a 360-degree view of the customer.

To deliver personalised, relevant experiences — and to create them on a reasonable budget — B2B organisations 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 to increase sales and drive loyalty. Out-of-the-box features also include artificial intelligence (AI) and connected data that help you to create personalised 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 automations enabled by Salesforce B2B Commerce save organisations 18,000 hours of manual labour across 40 operations staff, driving $672,000 in savings.

At every stage of the customer journey, business buyers — especially digital natives — 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, personalised 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 quickly 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 teams across the business always have access to necessary data — with no integration required.

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 49% of customers say they don’t generally trust companies, there is a big responsibility (and opportunity) to ethically leverage data to make genuine improvements on understanding and delivering on customer needs and goals.

How can you achieve this? With a real-time view of every customer. By leveraging a trusted, secure, real-time CRM and data intelligence tools, 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 keep in touch 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 to 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.

So what can companies do to improve performance in the age of the digital B2B 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 organisation 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, personalised experiences across the customer journey. The most effective B2B sales organisations 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.

Sales is a unique role, requiring expert people skills and a wealth of organisational knowledge. But customers’ elevated expectations require salespeople to find time in the sales process for non-selling activities. Successful strategies give customers the self-service, mobile and automated options they prefer for many routine interactions like ordering and product research — and relieve 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 prioritising 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 task

The best sales teams distinguish themselves by taking the guesswork out of the gig. 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 personalised, insightful solutions for their customers. Consider that high-performing sales teams are more likely than underperformers to use data to help prioritise 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. In fact, teams are already using AI agents to suggest next best actions based on all the data they ingest. This means sales reps get recommendations to take action — like offering a small discount or following up with buyers at the right time to maximise 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 prioritise 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 analyse 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.