Growth Strategies
Strategic Budget Planning for Manufacturers During Economic Downturns: The Importance of B2B E-Commerce New Post
Managing the transformation to SAP-integrated ecommerce is no walk in the park, especially at a B2B manufacturer. At a high level, you know you need to move customer relationships to ecommerce.But when you get down in the weeds of your organization, what does that actually mean? How do you get from “we need ecommerce” to “we’re doing ecommerce, and we’re thriving”?
Magento’s webinar, What It Takes to Be a Leader in B2B Ecommerce, offers great insight into this problem. In the webinar, Forrester Analyst John Bruno says the #1 way to kill digital commerce is to not incentivize your Sales team to use it.
We couldn’t agree more. Sales is your top ally in making B2B ecommerce a success. Yet sales professionals may view self-service ecommerce as a threat to their commission (and even their jobs).
Can you collaborate with Sales to ensure the success of ecommerce? Absolutely! Here are 5 steps you can take to build Sales-friendly ecommerce that works for everyone involved.
Before you begin evaluating ecommerce solutions, it’s critical to understand where Sales is coming from. You need to get inside their heads and see the world as they do.
Here’s why Sales may perceive ecommerce as a threat:
If you can, take some time to get Sales’ input on ecommerce. Ask them what their greatest fears are and what they look forward to in ecommerce. Your Sales team may phrase it differently, but most likely, their concerns will fall into some or all of the buckets above.
In reality, ecommerce is NOT a 1:1 replacement for your Sales team. That might be true in B2C, where transactions, pricing, and availability are much simpler, but it’s not true in B2B.
After the launch of ecommerce, your Sales team will continue to fill roles that software never will. Those roles fall into two categories: strategic/internal, and customer-facing.
Strategic/internal roles for Sales in an ecommerce-empowered business:
Customer-facing roles for Sales in an ecommerce-empowered business:
It’s time to develop your plan for partnering with Sales for ecommerce success. Your plan should address the specific concerns that your Sales team shared with you. For the purposes of illustration, we’ll create a plan that addresses the concerns outlined above, but you should create a plan that fits the unique needs of your Sales team.
Your plan for Sales + Ecommerce should:
Once you have a clear, concise plan for Sales’ role in ecommerce, you should communicate it through a series of meetings. If your organization is small enough, you should get the entire Sales team together for these meetings so that everyone feels they have a voice.
The methodology for this process is simple: Outline the plan and take feedback from Sales. If objections are raised which the current plan does not address, consider revising the plan and iterating—meeting with Sales again to review the new version.
Once you have a finalized plan and you’ve secured the buy-in of Sales, you’re ready to move forward with ecommerce.
If you’ve listened to the concerns of Sales, charted the role Sales can play in ecommerce, developed a plan, and communicated it, you’re ready to launch ecommerce.
Contrary to popular belief, though, an ecommerce project doesn’t end on Go Live day. In fact, that’s just the beginning. Ecommerce is a living, breathing entity that needs continuous buy-in from your customers and internal stakeholders (i.e. your Sales team). To ensure that your ecommerce initiative thrives, you need to develop metrics for success—things you can track over time.
Here are some metrics you can use to measure Sales and customer buy-in:
When it comes to collaborating with Sales for ecommerce success, the biggest thing is to iterate. Get feedback, listen to the problems of real people, and improve. Ecommerce doesn’t have to be perfect on Day 1; it just has to be scalable and ready to grow as your organization makes the transition. That’s what Corevist Commerce is all about.
Curious about what this looks like in real life? Listen to this webinar with Corevist client Bioventus. Brian Poole, Director of IT Architecture at Bioventus, discusses how his Sales team transitioned from skeptics to believers in Corevist Commerce. It’s a great story—truly inspiring. Go watch it now.
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