Driving Massive Opportunities with B2B Commerce
For decades, B2B business has been dominated by ERP. It was everything to a business. But no more. CRM has taken its place, and digital commerce is one of CRM’s fastest-growing components.
There’s a simple reason why. Every B2B buyer is also a consumer. And our best experiences anywhere, as consumers, drive every engagement expectation we have everywhere, including as a B2B buyer. It should be as seamless, personalized, and connected for a retail buyer to stock store shelves as it is to fill one’s personal closet shelves.
The data backs this up. Forrester predicts that U.S. B2B commerce will grow from $889 billion today to $1.2 trillion by 2021. A recent survey* of 400 B2B companies found that 89% attribute expected business growth to the success of digital commerce. The opportunity is massive.
That’s one of the reasons we’re excited to share that Salesforce’s acquisition of CloudCraze is final. CloudCraze, a leading B2B commerce platform, is built natively on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. Across our company, we’re energized by the opportunity that this union brings not only for our own innovation, but, more importantly, what it offers our customers and partners.
This Coca-Cola case study testifies to the B2B digital commerce opportunity. Historically, Coke sales reps would visit a retailer and take orders in person, or the retailer would place an order with a service rep by phone. But there was no mobile or online ordering option. Salesforce and CloudCraze showed Coca-Cola how to bring digital into its business process.
The results have been eye-opening. Average order size is up 15%, cost per interaction has seen savings up to 85%, ecommerce platform accounts jumped 20x in 13 months, and customer retention and satisfaction are up significantly.
“Our sales team can see the orders that are coming in from ecommerce. So can our customer call center agents. So everybody has the same view of the customer. We’re seeing growth. It’s fantastic.” — Marta Dalton, Director of eCommerce, Coca-Cola
This is is the kind of success that we want for all of our partners and customers. Salesforce already enables companies to deliver unified B2C journeys across channels. With CloudCraze, Salesforce customers and partners will be able to create the same kind of experiences for B2B, all from a single platform.
When we have acquisitions like this, one of the questions that partners typically ask is how the change impacts their own business. Collaboration on the Salesforce platform enables all partners to work together for customer success while playing to their specific strengths. Salesforce is proud to have an open platform, and we’ll continue to support our vibrant ecosystem as we believe strongly that our partners are a key enabler of our customers’ and company’s success.
We welcome CloudCraze’s incredible team to the Salesforce family. To learn more, check out the Salesforce Newsroom.
*Why Digital Will Become the Primary Channel for B2B Engagement, CloudCraze.
