Align Your Team
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the benefits of an ecommerce implementation to your sales organization.
- Discuss the importance of bringing in cross-functional stakeholders as early as possible.
- List the essential steps for a B2B ecommerce launch.
Digital Commerce Benefits
Let’s think about the traditional sales culture: obsessed with making calls and filling quotas. Thanks to digital commerce, there are better ways for sales to get things done now—and support the customer at every stage of their journey while they’re at it! Digital commerce gives customers more ways to interact with your brand, and helps sales teams see things from a different, customer-centric perspective. Many sales professionals are worried about how digital commerce might impact their day-to-day role. But they needn’t be.
The good news is that ecommerce solutions streamline order processing, which means sales executives can make better use of their time. According to our recent Salesforce State of Commerce report, 63% of B2B sales leaders say that digital commerce has freed their teams from the logistics of order processing and allowed them to fulfill an important role: as strategic advisors to their customers.
With digital commerce, the sales rep role can become much more dynamic. Reps can discover new customer insights and devote more time to understanding the business climate, industries, and products.
Calling All Stakeholders
Once you’ve decided to implement ecommerce for your B2B business, you need to get the most important stakeholders, including your sales organization, on board as early as possible. Ask these stakeholders to participate in implementation planning—and be proactive about when your colleagues can expect changes.
Partner with sales leaders to determine how reps will be compensated for digital orders, and make sure they’ll be advocates of the new storefront. Focus on how B2B commerce will help them (tip: Offer to brainstorm how they’d like to spend their new free time!). We’ve found the following points to be especially exciting for sales staff.
- Fewer mundane tasks, like updating spreadsheets (no offense if that’s your thing)
- Less time spent on repeat orders, and more time spent finding new business
- New insights from new ecommerce data
- More bandwidth to provide personal experiences to high-value customers
- The opportunity to be perceived as more of a trusted advisor than a traditional order taker
Of course, the faster you begin selling, the sooner the system starts paying for itself. But if key stakeholders in the organization aren’t aligned around the business case or strategy, the project can stall in midstream. On the flip side, if you get too many stakeholders in a room, you’re unlikely to be able to make decisions quickly. In short, a smooth implementation requires determining who has decision rights and including those people from the very beginning of the project.
Trade-offs between features, cost, and speed inevitably crop up in the planning process. It’s critical that everyone contributes to these decisions, so a consensus emerges around the overall rationale for the project. Full alignment is key to success.
It may seem obvious to bring in cross-functional stakeholders to your planning, but often with so many priorities, a critical function gets left behind. Make sure you have alignment with:
- IT: This team may have concerns around technology integration and impacts to uptime. Make sure to set up a process to gather analytics to measure the success of launch.
- Sales: This group may have concerns about how a digital storefront will impact salaries and day-to-day work. Proactively determine the compensation of sales reps for digital sales. Show the value of the insights they will gain from the digital experience, and how they will benefit. Ensure they get commission so they encourage buyers to adopt.
- Customer Service: Consider integrating service options within the commerce site to deflect cases and help service reps increase efficiency. For example, service teams can add knowledge articles to the site or integrate a customer service chat.
- Legal: Consider privacy and data governance concerns like GDPR in your plan. Make sure terms and conditions on your site are reviewed by a legal representative.
- Marketing/Business Units: Integrate with the new product launch process so that product details like names, descriptions, and images go live on the commerce site. Align with marketing regularly to make sure promotions for the site are ready for launch.
High-impact salespeople are drawn to companies that prioritize digital innovation. They have often worked with the best sales technology available, and they don’t want to go back to the days of spreadsheets and order taking. That means companies that prioritize their digital strategy can take their pick of the top talent when they need to add to their team.
To do this, make sure you add in language around your digital commerce strategy in the job description—either in the experience or requirement section. Also give candidates a preview into your plan during the interview process, and take note of how they react.
Your Checklist to Launching Fast
Let’s simplify things. Want to see the key steps for your B2B ecommerce transformation? Look no further.
- Develop a minimum viable product (MVP) plan.
- Survey existing customers to identify top pain points.
- Consider company goals and sales team pain points.
- Select your top three priorities.
- Work on the roadmap: What features will launch in what release?
- Identify the working team.
- Get internal buy-in across functions.
- Create a proof of concept (POC) based on the MVP plan.
- Use the POC for feedback and buy-in.
- Connect the MVP plan with the pain points it will address.
- Establish a communication cadence with key stakeholders to get and keep their support.
- Develop a communication plan with existing buyers to drive adoption.
- Enable sales on using a POC storefront so they can demo the site to buyers.
- Consider posting instructions on how to use the new website, like video tutorials.
- Go live—time to celebrate!
- Track results and report on key metrics.
- Grab a coffee and begin planning for the next launch.
Summing It Up
It’s great to have an understanding of the transformative value that ecommerce presents, but without your entire team on board, even the best plans can stall. Assess and envision the big changes you hope to address with an ecommerce strategy, and understand the perspectives of key departments, and how it might affect them. Alignment is everything!
