Support Your Buyer’s B2B Journey
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you will be able to:
- Envision your storefront as an extension of your brand.
- Describe the unique needs of your individual B2B buyers.
- Optimize your storefront for the best B2B buying experience.
Exceed Buyers’ Expectations
As we mentioned earlier, your Salesforce B2B Commerce buyers expect a shopping experience that’s on par with the digital experiences they’re used to in everyday life. Buyers expect the same level of selection, service, and transparency for their Salesforce B2B Commerce purchases.
The Salesforce Research report, “State of the Connected Customer,” found that 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. The report also says that 66% of customers are willing to pay more for a great experience. In other words, a compelling and intuitive buyer experience is essential for manufacturers and distributors that are trying to grow their business.
Your Storefront Is an Extension of Your Brand
In the last unit, we saw how your storefront can help your brand build awareness and a customer base in new markets before your company establishes physical assets and staff in those regions. With that goal in mind, remember that your storefront is an entry point to your brand—for new and current customers alike. You want to establish the same trust, tone of voice, character, and comfort that have helped you grow your business to this point.
Let’s see how Maria Jimenez, Salesforce admin at Ursa Major Solar, integrates her storefront with her existing brand. Ursa Major Solar, Inc. is a supplier of solar components and systems based in the southwest United States.
Maria Jiminez, Admin, Ursa Major Solar
Maria says, “At Ursa Major Solar, we wanted to set up our storefront like a virtual showroom. We really believed that this was a great way to showcase our brand online, present our products in the best fashion, and highlight why our customers should purchase online with us.”
Maria and her team use Salesforce B2B Commerce to define a theme with a branded look and feel across Ursa Major Solar’s entire storefront—including colors, fonts, company logo, and other visual identity rules. To further personalize the experience for certain buyers, her team also develops a custom theme for a specific account group. When those buyers log in to the storefront, they experience the storefront with Ursa Major Solar’s unique theme that shows the company colors and logo instead of the storefront’s default theme. With this extra step, Maria extends her showroom idea so the content is more individualized for her buyers.
Support Your Buyer’s Unique Journey
Not every buyer’s journey is the same. Some buyers come to your storefront and already know exactly which product SKUs and quantities they plan to purchase. Other buyers may be entirely new to your brand and products, and will spend significant time browsing, comparing, and quoting before making a purchase. They may even leave your storefront, and revisit several times before completing a purchase. Some buyers become loyal, repeat customers very quickly, while other buyers may need a lot of hand-holding and multiple positive experiences before they’re willing to trust your brand.
Salesforce B2B Commerce includes several features that support different steps of a buyer’s unique journey, and help keep your buyers informed, connected, and motivated to purchase—all of which help build trust and loyalty in your brand. For example, a buyer explores your storefront and starts adding products to their cart, but—for whatever reason—the buyer never completes checkout. Salesforce B2B Commerce allows you to send an abandoned cart email to the buyer, which can help maintain a connection with the buyer and entice future sales.
Ursa Major Solar faced challenges in its buyer’s journey when it came to confirming orders.
“Buyers would call or email me to finalize and confirm their order, which was a significant chunk of time in my daily workload,” says Erin Donaghue, an Ursa Major Solar sales rep.
Erin Donaghue, European Sales Rep, Ursa Major Solar
With Salesforce B2B Commerce, buyers can order online and receive a real-time notice in their inbox. They also have self-service access to modify carts, review their order history, update their contact and payment information, and more. This means less phone calls asking for help and more time for the team to focus on valuable tasks like closing new deals.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When you’re trying to grow your business and attract new buyers to your storefront, you can’t rely on direct sales reps or outbound call center leads alone. You may want to engage previously unknown buyers. One way to do this is by making sure that your products appear in external search results. If the right product or storefront data appears in a buyer’s search, you’re more likely to convert new clicks to purchases.
Not sure how SEO is important to your business? You’re not alone. One Ursa Major Solar sales rep needed some convincing.
“I didn’t understand SEO or appreciate how a good SEO strategy could help drive my sales numbers, until Maria, our Salesforce admin, explained all its benefits to me. Getting our site ranking at the top position of search engine results (compared to our competitors) helps us feel confident that we’re attracting new buyers and growing new business. Our storefront is developing new leads on its own, and is helping me to effortlessly expand my sales pipeline,” says Lance.
Lance Parks, European Sales Rep, Ursa Major Solar
A good SEO strategy complements a good marketing campaign. Marketing helps generate brand awareness, and SEO provides one component of that strategy. You can infuse your SEO metadata with your marketing campaign keywords, use cases, and other language. Search engines use that data they collect about your storefront to build an index of your pages and show certain content directly in search results. The more consistent and complete the information search engines have, the more likely it is that searches can return results from your storefront.
Salesforce B2B Commerce provides several default features that contribute to elevating your storefront’s SEO profile. Some setup is required, but you can quickly deploy human-friendly URLs, product and storefront metadata, alternate language link URLs, sitemaps, and more.
Once your SEO strategy is deployed, it takes some time for search engines to show your storefront content in search results. Remember, SEO is not a one-time task, but a sustained effort that you should plan to maintain. You should adjust and refine your SEO strategy quarterly, based on the results you see. You might also want to evaluate the SEO strategies of your competitors. If you don’t have the resources internally, there are external agencies who specialize in SEO and can make sure you have the right talent and strategy in place to stay ahead.
Let’s Put It All Together
It’s important to support the unique needs and preferences of your different buyers—from those who are already loyal to your brand to those who are exploring your storefront for the first time. Help your buyers easily find what they’re looking for, without frustrations, in a comfortable, familiar user experience. Salesforce B2B Commerce makes it easy to cultivate loyalty, grow your business, and stay ahead of your competition.
