The following statement will be true whatever the sector or market in which a company operates: whether buying as private individuals (B2C) or operating as businesses (B2B), customers expect a personalised and seamless experience throughout the entire purchasing process.
Firms with a B2B-oriented sales model have traditionally relied on a physical sales force on the ground to generate new income. Today, however, there are many reasons fuelling a shift towards a digitised sales experience, in the wake of trends brought about by the B2C market.
B2B companies can ask themselves a variety of questions to trigger the first step of the transformation process. For example, what buying experiences are being offered? Does the sales strategy already provide for a digital point of sale oriented towards B2B sales? If you already have a portal, is it also used to generate new business or is it exclusively a re-ordering channel for existing customers?
Today, it is possible to transform a simple order portal into a B2B Commerce solution, turning it into a strategic sales channel and an active marketing tool to gather new leads!
Find out how Alpenite supported the Fedrigoni Group and download the success story.
Explore the ten digital challenges below that business-to-business companies are facing and discover how Alpenite can support them in their digital transformation journey.
1. Custom portals that are difficult to scale up and improve
Customised solutions are often obsolete and understood as extensions of ERP or CRM. Such a solution poses a high lock-in risk as it is not a market platform. Custom solutions have no product roadmap, are often implemented by unstructured players and are difficult to improve, extend and scale up. Being tools closed to the outside, they can only handle replenishment by existing customers.
The solution:
Many market solutions exist to enable B2B business in an enterprise context. From solutions with a fast time to market such as Shopify Plus B2B Solutions, to more structured solutions such as Adobe Commerce B2B, Intershop, Shopware, Salesforce B2B Commerce, SAP Commerce B2B, and many others, not to mention recent composable platforms. Alpenite works with leading enterprise-level commerce solution vendors. Solutions, with a solid roadmap and global support, that can be integrated into any business context.
2. Order-taking portals geared to existing customers only
Often the B2B order-taking portal is oriented – as is the case for EDI interfaces by definition – solely towards replenishment by existing customers: consequently, the portal can never become an active sales channel for new customers. In fact, these portals are often closed to the public and cannot be used for marketing actions. This results in a missed opportunity for generating new business.
The solution:
B2B commerce projects must enable a platform that also generates new business, in addition to handling orders from existing customers. Targeted content creation activities make it possible to tell potential new customers about the company and its products. By combining this with marketing automation scenarios, conversion funnels can be created to gather new, increasingly profiled leads.
3. Need to improve the after-sales service
There are many cases in which, even in the presence of a digital channel for taking and/or orchestrating orders, the experience is interrupted after the order is received. These are the cases in which the B2B customer is asked to contact customer care or support via e-mail or telephone, creating strong friction during the online experience.
The solution:
Alpenite implements integrated after-sales support solutions within the commerce solution to ensure a seamless user experience.
4. The product information is lacking structure
To build a sales catalogue, product information and related assets must be generated in an orderly and controlled manner.
The solution:
Alpenite can support this process with its PIM and DAM solutions, which respectively make it possible to manage product-related information and product-related multimedia assets. Technical data sheets, photos, videos, brochures and other documents can thus be part of an orchestrated flow of data collection, processing and subsequent sharing to systems that require this information, such as the e-commerce system.
5. Need to manage a multitude of pricelists and customised catalogues
Typically, in the B2B sector, there can be a lot of complexity in the way pricelists and product catalogues are structured for different types of customers.
The solution:
B2B commerce enterprise platforms offer structured management tools, which can be integrated with legacy systems as well as with any third-party pricing tools. This must be guaranteed without leading to poor performance that adversely affects the platform’s conversion rate.
6. Need to integrate the commerce platform with the various legacy systems
Typically, an enterprise scenario involves seamless integration between the various components such as e-commerce, portal, PIM, DAM and CRM.
The solution:
All the enterprise solutions that Alpenite uses in its B2B commerce projects are easily integrated and allow dialogue with other systems. We have an area of expertise that is fully focused on system integration, in which we adopt middleware solutions and integration layers or iPaaS.
7. B2B commerce as part of a broader customer centricity strategy
With an existing B2B order management solution, it can be worthwhile integrating and orchestrating customer data and pursuing customer centricity. This allows you to get to know your customer and be able to implement a proactive sales strategy based on the contact’s purchasing preferences.
The solution:
An e-commerce system would struggle to ensure business results if it is not integrated with a CRM platform, a repository of all customer data, like a source of truth.
Alpenite and Arsenalia Group companies develop CRM and marketing automation projects, as well as CDP, identifying the best solution among those available on the market.
8. Current order management solution underperforming
Sometimes the market solution that has already been adopted does not fully meet the needs of the business. After researching the solutions on the market, the best decision for sales is to change technology, launching a replatforming project.
The solution:
Alpenite has strong expertise in all major B2B procurement and e-commerce solutions. A B2B project is never just a technology project but also a healthy opportunity to redefine processes, flows, markets and functions to improve sales. Because of this, the first project activity often has a strategic aim, defining the scenario in which the company operates.
9. Modernisation of the existing B2B platform
There are scenarios in which it is not necessary to replicate the entire B2B solution, as in the previous point. Instead, the need is to define a renewed transformation roadmap, identifying and then introducing scenarios and functions that can generate new business.
The solution:
The introduction of an appropriate marketing automation solution can often enable the existing sales portal to offer a new, improved level of customer experience.
10. B2B solution missing from the tech stack
Orders are taken in an unstructured manner. The sales force takes opportunities autonomously, but there are no centralised processes and management for this activity. A scalable solution is therefore required.
The solution:
The notion that a B2B solution must be the enemy of the sales force on the ground is a concept that belongs in the past. Commerce platforms enable sales or order-taking in self-service mode, allowing the B2B customer to be autonomous in their activities, as well as being a valuable tool in supporting the sales team in taking orders from their customers.
Our end-to-end roadmaps can support B2B companies and organisations in reorienting their sales and marketing operations. In order to make the potential benefits of a B2B transformation path as tangible as possible, we would like to share a successful case study from the manufacturing sector implemented by Alpenite.
Learn more about the project realized for Fedrigoni Group, download the paper.
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