Bringing B2B Into The eComm World and Other Industry Trends
B2B’s shift into the ecomm space, and how large companies are trying to scale personalized connections with customers
Ecommerce has come a long way from its early days as just a separate part of the company that you set up and hope to see some returns on. Now, ecommerce is pivotal for just about every organization — but there is one faction of businesses that still lags behind.
There are $17 trillion dollars worth of B2B payments made every year. Yes, trillion with a T. And half of those payments are still being made manually. Clearly, there is a massive shift that still needs to happen in the B2B space, and Deloitte Digital is helping make those digital transformations a reality.
Paul do Forno is the Managing Director at Deloitte Digital, and he helped us understand some of the struggles B2B brands are facing and how moving them into the digital space could spell a massive sea change in the ecommerce industry.
“If you actually look into what the B2B challenges are, number one, many B2B purchases are very complex and there’s many personas,” do Forno said. “There’s no quick, easy, CX solution. Then the bigger piece is, traditionally how B2B sold was with a handshake over lunch, right? …obviously we know that’s all changing and… millennials are now the largest part of the workforce. Guess what?… Your expectations of your salespeople now are, ‘Hey, where are my digital tools?’ When you talk about B2B commerce, it’s about what are all the digital ways to interact, to be easier to do business with as you sell? In fact, what ends up happening is the top three things that people like for B2B commerce is order status, product information, and just doing a quick re-order. When you look at that, it’s more about, hey, how do I make my life easier interacting with my customers?”
Making life easier for customers is one of do Forno’s key responsibilities, and hedoes it by bringing them effective strategies that meet business needs. For example, do Forno said that there is one big challenge many of the larger brands ask for help with that he needs to develop solutions for: connecting with customers at scale.
“For some of the smaller brands dealing with a few interactions, it’s somewhat easier, but when you have thousands and thousands of followers, how do you manage that [one-to-one connection] on scale?” do Forno said. “What they mostly get concerned about, they want to be closer to the consumer and listen to them and interact, but being able to scale that in both a combination of A.I.-related tools and responses, but also human responses that can do it in scale that are tailored to the brand voice, that’s the challenge.”
Implementing new technology and tools is one of the ways that these big brands are finding ways to scale their engagement. But the amount of engagement and places to engage can also be overwhelming. do Forno explained that often, brands think they need to be keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to the social platforms and the hot new trends, but do Forno advocates for doing less.
“Try and be good on one platform first,” he advised. “It’s easy to think, ‘Oh my god, we’re so behind. We’ve got to have a Tik Tok. We’ve got to have Facebook, we have to have all the platforms all at once.’ We guide them to start with one that’s as close to your authentic brand as you can find, and then try and build it and iterate on it and master one before you really try and go after another because, again, there’s limited resources and limited people. Trying to spread it across all is a lot worse than trying to be good at least on one.”
Those are only a couple of the big trends do Forno has been seeing in his work. To hear more, including how ecommerce is growing around the globe, particularly in Latin America, be sure to tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce
