B2B is the fastest growing segment of e commerce but still only 20% of sales are being made through an automated online selling platform.
It’s true that the wholesale marketplace and wholesale transactions can be full of complications. This makes it vital for b2b companies to come up with a gameplan to secure their success in the industry. By removing the barriers for B2B e commerce with SaaS platforms or internally built systems, new possibilities around understanding your sales metrics are made available.
Let’s take a look at some of the common issues surrounding B2B sales.
Blind Spots in B2B Sales:
Manual Data Entries
The list of issues that surround b2b e commerce are that brands have often been doing sales the old way: spreadsheets, static catalogs and manual emails.
Lack of Visibility
Currently, brands and sales executives are disconnected to their sales teams and customers because of a lack of visibility into the communication and messaging frequency that sales reps have with their customers. With tiered visibility, sales managers can leverage the tools that sales teams can utilize to penetrate the market with campaigns and catalogs.
Misaligned Communication Plans
Sales managers can send emails to the sales team on what to promote for a season, but they can be short-sighted to how the sales reps will communicate the message over to customers. Of course, sales reps should be given the freedom to customize the messaging based on their target audience, but sales managers often miss the opportunity to check the quality of how these efforts are being implemented. With the proper tools provided by a b2b ecommerce platform, sales managers can skip this oversight and track all sales reps’ activities to make sure all communications are aligned with the overall promotional efforts a brand aims to push out.
Dropped Products
Oftentimes, we’ve seen products being dropped from an order just because they don’t meet MOQs or other reasons. We have seen products dropped from a prebook catalog as high as 40% and in the 10’s of millions of dollars for one brand. Metrics are hard to know, because of this lack of visibility inherent in the manual order process that doesn’t make use of b 2 b tools. The problem lies in customers wanting to buy your product, but not buying what will actually get produced.
With a b2b platform, tools can be put into effect to give real time booking metrics of how a style is trending and what key accounts are interested in the product. With machine learning and Collective Intelligence modules, it is now possible to reset the catalog offering in real time to remove dead styles that will not meet MOQs and substitute products that will make production all to keep your customers well informed.
Tools that make a difference:
With the MyAtOnce B2B ecommerce platform, tools are built with both the sales reps and customers in mind. With the interconnectivity between the brand, sales reps, and customers established, a whole set of new metrics are possible. Allowing a clear visibility and communication between sales managers and sales reps. Now Sellers (Brands and Sales reps) can view metrics that were previously unavailable without a b2b ecommerce platform — what time was the order placed? Who placed the order? What is their open rate on promotion sent to the site.
Going the extra mile, the MyAtOnce B2B ecommerce platform is also geared to allow customers to self-serve their orders, resulting in a high percentage of orders placed.
To accomplish an effective method of evaluating, communicating and recapturing data is complicated, but it can be made easy to the end user. This is what we are all about.
Experience a new B2B experience that removes the complexities of B2B Sales!
Empower your brand with powerful tools in the MyAtOnce B2B ecommerce platform today! Contact us today.
By : John Bostwick
