Many established B2B businesses are stuck in a rut. They’ve offered the same things, in the same ways, for years—sometimes decades—and they don’t see why they should change.
When someone at the office, a colleague in the same industry, or even a competitor discusses incorporating B2B eCommerce into their current business model, your management team scoffs.
B2B eCommerce is no longer “cutting edge” or “the latest craze.” For manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and importers who haven’t jumped to digital, going digital isn’t a luxury or an optional necessity. This is something your customers have come to expect.
Any good B2B eCommerce strategy is built on a solid foundation, but that foundation will crumble if it doesn’t consider customers' needs.
Your customers, whether you’re aware of it or not, are only interested in a handful of things:
It’s harder than ever to attract and retain new customers or upsell your current customers, and yet it’s easier than ever for them to leave. That brings us to one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve your customer service while improving your fulfillment times, accuracy, and ability to scale.
I want to start with some basics about fulfillment strategy and then dig into the details. Many B2B companies struggle with this, but getting it right can be the difference between blowing customers out of the water and failing to impress.
It’s one thing to attract new business to your website, but it’s another to retain that new business. All customers want a streamlined, easy ordering process, but customers in the B2B segment are often relatively neglected compared to those in B2C.
QuickBooks is a powerful software, but, like all software, it has limits. This is nothing against QuickBooks — far from it. QuickBooks does what it does very well, it’s designed to take care of very specific tasks, and it doesn’t make the mistake that many pieces of software have made over the years by trying to be something it’s not.
One of the most difficult aspects of order management for wholesalers has always been the management of sales reps.
Even when a rep is doing everything they’re supposed to do, even when they’re an impressive example of what a sales rep should be, the simple reality of order and inventory management has often been, at best, a barrier to efficient operation.
Years ago, Amazon didn’t exist, the World Wide Web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, and nobody (except maybe a few science fiction authors) could have possibly predicted the effect that eCommerce websites and online sales systems would have on the world.
It’s never a bad thing to get new orders. After all, orders keep your business running. The speed bumps arrive when you need to fulfill the order. You’re not alone if you have yet to find the perfect system for fulfilling customer orders as efficiently as possible. Most businesses don’t have a system as streamlined or effective as they’d like.
Why is that?
It starts with the order-taking process. A salesperson may have handwritten a form, called it in, or emailed it, or customer service has taken a handwritten order of its own.
