Assess Business and Customer Needs
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how to set your priorities for your B2B ecommerce plans.
- Explain how and when to involve customers in your ecommerce transformation.
Put Your Priorities in Place
Today, ecommerce is a big part of how business-to-business (B2B) companies are working leaner, smarter, and more successfully. If you’re considering making the leap to include digital commerce as part of your B2B organization’s strategy, you want to have a clear playbook for success. In this module, you learn some key strategies to get your B2B ecommerce plan in motion.
It all begins with an honest assessment of your business goals. A good understanding of the challenges you want to solve and the benefits you want to bring to the business should guide your implementation. To stay on track and on budget, resist the temptation (and pressure) to include extra features or to extend the scope.
Then, consider whether you can implement the software for just a single business unit, product line, or geographical area as a proof of concept. Starting small and staying hyper-focused supports your ability to deliver on those priorities.
In this priority-setting phase, ask yourself these four questions:
- What do customers really want?
- How can we improve their experience?
- Should we start using a minimum viable product (MVP) approach to see a return on investment as quickly as possible? This could mean starting with a subset of features, products, or a single business unit or geography.
- How do we plan a phased approach that allows us to guide and adjust the implementation based on real-time market information?
For example, a large renewable energy company had a long wishlist of what it wanted to improve when replacing its commerce site. But research revealed that search was a point of friction for many customers. Buyers were having a hard time finding the right part, so they were leaving the site and picking up the phone to place orders instead. Therefore, the team agreed that user experience and search were the top priorities of the first launch.
Bring Customers on Board
We all think we have a good idea of what customers want, but the reality is, that isn’t always the case. Active collection of customer feedback can lead to important insights and innovations, and should guide your digital commerce plan.
That’s why the energy company’s B2B commerce launch didn’t start with the deployment itself. The team engaged a consulting company to develop a market segmentation, based on several interviews with customers and online surveys. The team then used this customer data to understand the most common pain points (user experience and search), prioritize deliverables, and plan out the roadmap.
Customer insights can come from a wide variety of sources. For best results, conduct research with at least three separate sources with a mix of both qualitative and quantitative data. Try using:
- Customer interviews and focus groups
- Feedback from sales and customer service teams
- Website metrics (page views, time on page, results from A/B testing, and more)
- Data from surveys or polls
- Revenue numbers and other sales data
- The number of customer phone calls or in-person visits, plus their results
Take the experience of a large consumer goods company based in the U.S. For years, the company ran a fully staffed call center to take orders from small accounts. When it added digital commerce, the team expected to streamline processes and cut costs. But as the company analyzed sales, it was pleasantly surprised to see that revenue per customer was increasing steadily, as well. In fact, customers liked ordering on their own and responded more readily to automated cross-selling messaging than to the call center reps. That feedback gave the company confidence to invest in enhancements to its landing page and build more sophisticated cross-sell and upsell capabilities.
OK, so let’s assume you’ve now got a clear idea of the change you’d like to bring about that better serves the expectations and needs of your customers. Is that it? Not quite! In the next unit, you discover ways to make sure your team is aligned.
