Complex B2B purchases require a high-touch approach and an experienced sales team. Let’s discuss how digital technology can empower your salespeople.
Some salespeople are distrustful of online eCommerce, perhaps due to fear of it taking away their ability to sell to customers or its disruptiveness into existing processes. But contrary to popular belief, sales teams will continue to play an essential role in organizations that sell to businesses.
When you give the buyers tools to process orders independently, you’re also encouraging them to engage with your website’s other features and brand. Customers feel empowered when they can take action independently and satisfied when they find the support they need. Both roads have the same destination: increased customer loyalty.
Buyers made it clear they prefer a cross-channel mix of interactions, including remote, in-person, and digital self-service. E-commerce aims to support all existing selling channels by making them more consistent, convenient, and efficient across the buyer’s journey.
Salespeople are critical for businesses, particularly when selling wholesale or B2B. Sales teams will love e-commerce if B2B companies invest in digital tools to enable sales staff to perform their jobs at a higher level.
Digital commerce operations provide many new benefits for a traditional sales team. They increase productivity by eliminating repetitive, tedious tasks and allowing reps to act strategically and spend more time closing the highest-value sales opportunities, where solutions-based selling is critical.
Instead of manually processing orders, following up with smaller clients, and checking customer order status and inventory levels, many of these tasks can be automated and handled through e-commerce and online self-service functions.
For many businesses, the website has replaced the online catalog, providing product information and specifications. Salespeople can easily send customers to the website to compare products, find the right choices for their business, and move ahead with orders more quickly.
If salespeople in your industry tend to make recommendations before purchase, leveraging Sales Quotes to build draft orders can be another way to use modern technology to guide the order process. Customers get recommended orders built by their salesperson online and convert the quote to order from their office without further interaction.
Using the eCommerce website as the home base for all orders placed by customers or salespeople, you have uniform data and a single source for keeping an eye on all orders placed. Customers can log in to see orders input by salespeople, and salespeople can see the last time customers placed an order. That will give them valuable data on when to check in with their customers to place another order.
Another alternative is to provide salespeople with a B2B mobile app that can place orders into the same B2B eCommerce system as self-service orders placed by your buyers. That can provide a more purpose-built option for salespeople while retaining the centralized order benefits when everything is in one place.
