Businesses must prioritise data in shift to digital sales

The events of the past 18 months have accel­er­at­ed many organ­i­sa­tions’ dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions by months or, in some cas­es, years. In par­tic­u­lar, we saw a surge of invest­ment in dig­i­tal sales chan­nels with in-per­son meet­ings and phys­i­cal pur­chas­es no longer an option.

This has been reflect­ed in a wave of online pur­chas­ing – both by con­sumers and in busi­ness to busi­ness (B2B) trans­ac­tions. Indeed, B2B online shop­ping increased by almost a quar­ter last year, with 46% of pur­chas­es now made online. Addi­tion­al­ly, more than three quar­ters of B2B buy­ers say they now pre­fer pur­chas­ing online and remote inter­ac­tions with sales reps. Only about 20% of B2B buy­ers say they hope to return to in-per­son sales post-pan­dem­ic.

This has result­ed in organ­i­sa­tions mak­ing their pur­chas­es through more chan­nels than ever before. As an exam­ple, online B2B mar­ket­places gained huge trac­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Hav­ing already pre­dict­ed that 17% of the $13tn in B2B spend would flow to mar­ket­places by 2023, ana­lyst For­rester is now say­ing that we will hit that much soon­er — per­haps this year.

Impor­tant­ly, these pur­chas­es are not restrict­ed to small­er-tick­et items. Sev­en­ty per­cent of B2B deci­sion mak­ers say they are open to mak­ing new, ful­ly self-serve or remote pur­chas­es in excess of $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000.

The challenge of siloed data

This presents some new chal­lenges for B2B organ­i­sa­tions and their sales teams. For exam­ple, many sup­pli­ers have devel­oped long-stand­ing rela­tion­ships with their cus­tomers – and this can often man­i­fest into an expan­sive land­scape of unique pur­chase terms and agree­ments with dif­fer­ent cus­tomers. As tricky as man­ag­ing these dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios were in-per­son, the sit­u­a­tion has been fur­ther com­pli­cat­ed with the switch to dig­i­tal plat­forms.

In the effort to sup­port all these dig­i­tal chan­nels, we’re see­ing organ­i­sa­tions end up with con­flict­ing pric­ing infor­ma­tion and data blind spots across the organ­i­sa­tion.

“A lot of the data that’s required for those expe­ri­ences becomes unin­ten­tion­al­ly siloed,” says John Bruno, vice-pres­i­dent of com­merce strat­e­gy at PROS. “So your sales team uses one sys­tem that has cer­tain prices for prod­ucts, and in ecom­merce there is a dif­fer­ent sys­tem that uses dif­fer­ent pric­ing for prod­ucts.

“The more chan­nels that you sup­port, the more it cre­ates more oppor­tu­ni­ty for infor­ma­tion to be wrong and for the expe­ri­ence to break.”

This is a cru­cial point – the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) has nev­er been more impor­tant than it is today, with pur­chasers reliant on online plat­forms to access prod­ucts and ser­vices. Tak­ing a lead from con­sumer sales, busi­ness­es today expect a fric­tion­less expe­ri­ence and excep­tion­al cus­tomer ser­vice – and if a sup­pli­er fails to impress, they won’t hes­i­tate to go else­where.

Changing purchasing behaviour

Com­pound­ing the prob­lem is that most cus­tomers today are more than halfway through the buy­ing process before even meet­ing with a com­pa­ny rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Much of the B2B customer’s research takes place on social chan­nels, with 60% of buy­ers pre­fer­ring not to com­mu­ni­cate with sales­peo­ple as their pri­ma­ry infor­ma­tion source. Being forced to engage much lat­er in their buy­ing jour­ney means the win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty for sales­peo­ple to influ­ence cus­tomers is small­er.

“There’s many things hap­pen­ing out­side the purview of the tra­di­tion­al sales­per­son,” says Bruno. “Even if you’re enter­ing bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from an engage­ment stand­point, your cus­tomers are already 10 or 15 steps ahead of you. They’re already more informed when you start engag­ing with them. With­out that con­text, you start telling them things they already know. That’s when frus­tra­tion starts to set­tle in.”

This high­lights anoth­er poten­tial pit­fall in the tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal chan­nels – the need for sales teams to have insight into where a cus­tomer is on their buy­ing jour­ney. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant giv­en that a typ­i­cal B2B buy­er jour­ney may tra­verse mul­ti­ple touch­points with­in that jour­ney. These data points pro­vide con­text to the cus­tomer and the prob­lems they’re try­ing to solve.

“It’s about get­ting the data right and expos­ing that data in a way that’s mean­ing­ful – for your buy­ers to be more autonomous, to do what they have to do more quick­ly, more eas­i­ly and with more con­fi­dence,” says Bruno. “It’s also how you deliv­er that data to your sales­peo­ple, so they can pick up the customer’s jour­ney in stride and add val­ue to it.”
The abil­i­ty to view what cus­tomers are brows­ing – and what they don’t – is a pow­er­ful one.

“Imag­ine if you added a bunch of items to a cart, and you aban­don that. The sig­nals are real­ly pow­er­ful for a B2B sales­per­son to pick up and think, ‘maybe there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to reach out, based on what I know about you, to see if I can get you over that hump and get you to make the pur­chase.’ Those kinds of data insights are incred­i­bly valu­able for B2B,” says Bruno.

Digital technologies shaping the future

Many organ­i­sa­tions are rac­ing to dig­i­tal – an obvi­ous move in today’s cli­mate. How­ev­er, it would be far more valu­able to them to do so in a thought­ful and prag­mat­ic way, instead of sim­ply stand­ing up an ecom­merce plat­form that will unin­ten­tion­al­ly cre­ate more data silos, says Bruno.

“Focus on the things that are always present, that are com­mon across all of those chan­nels. Spend more time look­ing at clean­ing and ready­ing your data, so it can be lever­aged for this omnichan­nel world. Organ­i­sa­tions that rush to the flavour-of-the-week expe­ri­ence or touch­point tend to neglect that and they get them­selves in a lot of trou­ble.”

PROS sup­ports busi­ness in their tran­si­tion to omnichan­nel and dig­i­tal sell­ing with an AI-pow­ered plat­form that man­ages and opti­mis­es a busi­ness’ prod­ucts and pric­ing, regard­less of the sales chan­nel, help­ing busi­ness to adapt to every cus­tomer and every trans­ac­tion flu­id­ly.

Ulti­mate­ly, Bruno advis­es: “Are you putting the right prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions and prices in front of a cus­tomer? Are you help­ing the sales­per­son do a bet­ter job at con­nect­ing the val­ue of your prod­ucts to your cus­tomers? It’s a real­ly excit­ing time to be in B2B and think about the role that dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies have in help­ing shape the future.”

Want to learn more about the PROS Plat­form and the B2B path to dig­i­tal sell­ing? Vis­it pros.com

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