From Katie at Ultra Commerce and Kingston at Now Comms Group
The maturation process when embracing digital commerce is different for every B2B company. For those rooted in traditional commerce it takes time to go from offline selling to online to finding not just any customer but the right customer to technology-focused automated selling across multiple channels. But for those organizations that are diligent and trust the process, revenue growth waits at the end of this successful digital commerce journey.
According to Gartner, 80% of B2B sales interactions between supplier and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025. This is significant when you consider just how far B2B has come in digital commerce in recent years, compared to the B2C or D2C organizations that embraced digital commerce early on in order to win consumer business and grow revenue. These B2C/D2C organizations have since achieved digital commerce excellence, but B2B enterprises are not far behind.
The journey a B2B company takes in digital commerce is different, depending on their history, tools and motivation to become fully digital. Which phase of the journey are you on?
Mapping your course in B2B digital commerce
B2B organizations in the early stages of this digital commerce journey should not be dismayed. The time and resources it will take to build a digital commerce foundation and grow and learn from it before achieving flight is critical. It’s akin to an engineer building an aircraft with every component necessary to take off but is missing the landing gear.
Inversely, B2B operations that have already embraced digital commerce and have been working toward the end goal of fully automated selling, voice activated transactions, AR/VR, AI, machine learning, etc. may benefit from looking back to ensure they didn’t miss a fundamental step along the way.
This is just an introduction as we will be digging deeper in the B2B digital commerce journey and all that entails in the coming weeks. For further learning in the meantime, download our recent webinar on the topic, Growing B2B Online Revenue.
