For the fiscal first quarter ended April 28, the apparel retailer posted total net revenue of $309.6 million. That compares with $303.7 million in the first quarter of 2022, a 1.9% gain. Net loss was $1.7 million, which compared with a Q1 2022 net loss of $2.4 million.

Lands’ End ecommerce

Ecommerce, which Lands’ End launched in the late 1990s and far ahead of many other apparel and mass merchandise retailers, also remained flat in the U.S. and declined overseas.

For the quarter, global Lands’ End ecommerce net revenue was $203.1 million. That’s a decrease of 7.3% from $219.1 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2022. Compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2022, U.S. ecommerce net revenue increased 1.6% to $177.7 million from $174.9 million.

Lands’ End U.S. ecommerce accounted for 57.4% of all sales compared with 57.6% in the first quarter of 2022.

Our U.S. ecommerce, which represents our largest go-to market segment, saw a sales increase of 2% from the first quarter of 2022, driven by targeted promotions within swim and adjacent product categories, interim chief financial officer Bernie McCracken told analysts on the Lands’ End Q1 earnings call.

“Our Europe ecommerce business in the quarter was down 29%, reflecting the continued lower levels of consumer demand in Europe,” McCracken said.

Lands’ End B2B sales

Lands’ End does not break out its B2B ecommerce numbers, but overall business-to-business sales in Q1 from its Outfitters unit was $74.0 million. That’s a 37.1% increase from $54.0 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2022.

“We continue to roll out our strategic initiatives and expect that the learnings from each successive quarter will enable further refinement,” said CEO Andrew McLean.

In the wake of weak ecommerce sales growth, Lands’ End is bringing in a new senior executive to change up operations. The company in April hired Stuart Hogue as Lands’ End’s senior vice president of U.S. ecommerce. Most recently, Hogue served as a senior advisor for McKinsey & Co. Prior to that, Hogue worked for 15 years at Nike. Most recently, he was vice president and general manager of Foot Locker, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“Stuart is a digitally savvy leader with more than 20 years of industry experience,” McLean told analysts. “He enjoyed a successful career at Nike and joined us from McKinsey, where he advised clients on digital, omnichannel retail, and marketing transformation initiatives.”

Lands’ End is No. 79 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers by web sales.

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Joe Cicman, senior analyst, Forrester Research

Buyers want helpful online product content and purchasing features, demands that have many of them preferring manufacturers’ websites, new research from Digital Commerce 360 and Forrester Research Inc. finds.

“Brand manufacturers win buyers with great content,” says Forrester senior analyst Joe Cicman. “Our joint research indicates the top choice for business buying in 2023 is the brand manufacturer’s own site (57%), beating-out Amazon Business at 43%. Why? Both a surprise and a delight: 85% of buyers tell us that the best source for product information is the brand manufacturer’s own site.”

The joint research project also found that 70% of B2B buyers will increase their online purchasing of goods and services in 2023.

Cicman — who will discuss at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition this month the results of the joint DC360/Forrester suryey and the intersection of online buyer demands and sellers’ ecommerce technology strategies — asserts that sellers must review the functions that address the challenges they face in serving customers, then identify the ecommerce technology platform that covers those w.

McKesson discusses B2B commerce trends

Val DuVernet, senior director of digital strategy and optimization, McKesson

Cicman will speak at EnvisionB2B in a June 21 session to analyze with DC360 the results of the joint research project and discuss digital commerce technology trends with Val DuVernet, senior director of digital strategy and optimization at medical products distributor McKesson.

B2B companies “should examine potential ecommerce solutions to identify which ones cover the specific common functions they most value,” Forrester says in the March 2023 report, “Demystifying the Technical Functions of B2B Commerce Solutions,” written by Cicman with input from other Forrester analysts.

Some of those functions, for example, can include how ecommerce technology manages customer account hierarchies, contract terms and personalized product catalogs for each customer.

Gartner’s Gene Alvarez on technology choices

Gene Alvarez, distinguished vice president and analyst covering digital commerce technology at research and advisory firm Gartner Inc., says B2B companies today have plenty options for deploying ecommerce technology based on their resources and their customers’ demands regarding the online buying experience.

Gene Alvarez, distinguished vice president and analyst, Gartner Inc.

Companies with limited IT resources can opt for software-as-a-service platforms that support customized customer-facing front ends. But businesses with more substantial resources can move up to even more customizable modular and composable MACH platforms with extensive use of microservices, APIs, cloud and headless infrastructure configurations, Alvarez says.

As competition increases in B2B ecommerce, and companies develop new and innovative ways to interact with buyers and make their customers’ jobs easier, it will be crucial for online sellers to operate commerce technology they can modify to keep up with new standards.

“As new innovation comes along, you need to” be able to bring about that new innovation because it will be table stakes within a year,” Alvarez says. “That’s where MACH brings advantages.”

Alvarez will speak on digital technology trends and strategies at EnvisionB2B. He will lead a June 20 panel and workshop on building customer loyalty.

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B2B sellers make customer expansion and converting sales online priorities

The survey shows most B2B sellers believe they have mastered the basics of ecommerce, such as site search and product reviews. But when it comes to personalized commerce, larger companies are more satisfied with their efforts, while many smaller competitors are investing in this area. Two-thirds of B2B sellers say they are successfully driving online conversions with such widely deployed features as:

• Site search
• Promotions
• Product ratings and reviews
• Showing inventory availability

While companies of all sizes generally believe that personalization is working for them, those with more than $500 million in annual revenue report greater success in several areas. Overall, B2B sellers are seeing the greatest return from tailoring site search results, for example by showing buyers only products they are approved to buy and the prices their companies have negotiated.

But several tactics are working far better for larger versus smaller firms, probably reflecting greater investment. These include personalized site search results, customer-specific pricing and targeting promotions to specific customer segments. Smaller companies are responding by putting some personalization features on their to-do lists for 2023. That includes personalized payment and shipping options (15.8% of smaller firms plan to invest versus 3.6% of larger ones) and personalized product category pages (15.8% versus 1.2%).

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As a sales executive in the software industry, you understand the difficulties of finalizing complex B2B deals. The hint is in the word complex.  It can be a long and complicated process, stretching over several months or even a year. It requires ongoing exploration to identify potential business opportunities with your prospects. Managing complicated (POCs), navigating procurement processes and RFPs, and dealing with competition further add to the headaches.

Moreover, on the buyer’s side, numerous stakeholders and steps are involved. While B2B deals used to have an average of 5.4 individuals in 2015, it’s now risen to an average of 6 to 10 stakeholders, representing an insane 30% increase. And if that doesn’t have you reaching for the Tylenol, most of these steps and stakeholders are beyond your visibility. According to Gartner, approximately 90% of the sales process occurs without your direct involvement, as prospects engage in research, internal processes, and interactions with other vendors. This lack of insight contributes to longer and more intricate sales cycles.

And have you ever considered the complexity experienced by your prospects? (Hint: It’s often even more challenging.)

The buyer’s experience plays a crucial role. Gartner reports that 77% of buyers find their purchasing process complex or difficult. Additionally, they discovered that prospects who have a good buying experience are three times more likely to opt for larger deals. Prioritizing the customer experience, empowering buyers, and making the buying process more seamless can help you establish trust, differentiate yourself from competitors, shorten sales cycles, and improve conversion rates.

It’s never been more important for you to navigate the intricacies of the deal, gain a better understanding of your prospects, and deliver an exceptional buying experience.

Introducing Digital Sales Rooms
Digital Sales Rooms offer an ideal solution for managing complex B2B deals. These platforms simplify and enhance both the selling and buyer journeys. Picture yourself as an orchestra conductor, where each member represents a different step or stakeholder in the sales process. To ensure harmony and synchronization, Digital Sales Rooms provide unmatched convenience.

They enable you to create customized workspaces tailored to each deal. You can include relevant content, customize the appearance, facilitate communication, manage the next steps, analyze buyer interactions throughout their journey, and offer an engaging experience for buyers. This not only helps in building trust and confidence but also proves vital in successfully closing complex B2B deals.

Empower Buyers, Streamline Decision-Making
Digital Sales Rooms enable buying committees to make faster decisions by reducing obstacles, promoting transparency, and facilitating alignment throughout the sales process. Buying software can be time-consuming, and buyers often have to navigate complex procedures while shuttling between sellers and internal stakeholders. They struggle to find important information buried in emails, spreadsheets, and communication platforms like Slack. None of us are strangers to these difficulties.

Sellers face similar challenges. Just think about the amount of time spent daily searching through archives for past conversations, creating personalized presentations and documents, and responding to repetitive email requests for pricing sheets.

Sales interactions can swiftly become a tangled web.
Sales interactions can quickly become complicated. Digital Sales Rooms change how sellers and buyers work together. They bring together all shared content and communication in one place, making sure nothing gets lost, no matter how long the sales process takes. Instead of long email threads, you can leave comments in the Room to keep everyone updated.

Digital Sales Rooms are a reliable source for past conversations, tasks, and resources. They are a powerful tool for promoting your solution internally and providing a central hub for the entire buying committee to access information easily and quickly. Working with sellers through Digital Sales Rooms gives prospects a unique experience that builds trust and confidence in your partnership.

Work off buyer’s signals with analytics
Digital Sales Rooms offer a VIP experience for each deal and provide valuable insights and analytics to keep you informed. By understanding your buyer’s behavior, intentions, and preferences, you can better understand their needs and take appropriate actions.

The moments when you wonder about a prospect’s level of interest, their progress, the key stakeholders involved, or their responsiveness are no longer. Digital Sales Rooms remove these uncertainties. Since a significant part of the buying process happens in this digital space, you can see all the activities that occur outside of your direct interactions with the prospect.

You won’t let any deals slip through the cracks anymore. Digital Sales Rooms send real-time notifications, allowing you to track how buyers engage and interact within the room throughout their entire journey. When it’s time to review the deal, you’ll have a clear understanding of its status.

Take Control of Next Steps and Timelines
Digital Sales Rooms also simplify the creation of Mutual Action Plans, facilitating faster deal closures. Mutual Action Plans are known to be a key factor in the success of top-performing sales representatives. These plans track agreed-upon milestones and eliminate guesswork and wasted time for both buyers and sellers.

Don’t assume that buyers know how to navigate the buying process with you. Dealing with inexperienced and uncertain buyers is a major challenge for sellers. Instead of depending on internal meetings, constant email follow-ups, and non-collaborative spreadsheets for action plans, Digital Sales Rooms offer an excellent solution to keep everything organized.

Digital Sales Rooms help you establish a clear path to success, monitor progress, and close deals more efficiently. They foster a strong partnership with the buyer committee, promoting alignment and collaboration throughout the process.

Access and Engage with Stakeholders
Digital Sales Rooms facilitate access to all relevant stakeholders involved in the customer journey, both on the buying and selling sides. Remember, deals often require engagement with 6 to 10 decision-makers, each bringing unique perspectives, preferences, and challenges. Therefore, having access to the right stakeholders is crucial.

Collaborating with buyer committees is important, but working together as a team is everything. It’s essential to navigate internal peers and managers to succeed in business.

Digital Sales Rooms help you keep both sides aligned by providing a clear process, action items, and timeline. You don’t have to rely on forwarded email chains anymore. Instead, all members of the buying team can come together in one place: your Digital Sales Room. This central hub allows everyone to access information about your offerings. They can manage action items, have conversations at each step, share files, schedule meetings, and more. This unprecedented access to stakeholders makes it easier to build relationships with each of them.

Conclusion
It’s clear why Digital Sales Rooms are becoming the preferred choice for handling complex B2B deals. We invite you to experience Aligned’s Digital Sales Room. According to Gartner, by 2026, one-third of B2B sales cycles will be managed through Digital Sales Rooms, and by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

If you want to improve your complex B2B sales process, Digital Sales Rooms provide an ideal solution. Give them a try and see how they can greatly enhance your B2B selling strategy. It’s as simple as that.

[Gartner] “DSRs will be driving ⅓ of sales processes by 2026

1. [Gartner] “Create a virtual selling experience that enables buyers to drive their journey through the deployment of DSRs”
2. [Gartner] “Ensure that DSRs are comprehensive by evaluating vendors with capabilities that will allow for a completely digital sales process and, at a minimum, capabilities for bidirectional content sharing and collaboration through integration with collaboration and messaging tools.”
3. [Gartner] “Develop a better customer experience for your buyers/customers by understanding the relationship you have with them through the use of analytics such as engagement analysis, conversation intelligence, or emotion AI.”
4. [Gartner] “By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.”
5. [Gartner] “By 2025, 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales process, sales applications, sales data, and sales analytics into a single operational practice.”

* [Gartner] “DSRs are not digital commerce platforms, but they do link to digital commerce to allow customers to complete the buying process digitally if desired.”

FAQs

What is a Digital Sales Room?
A Digital Sales Rooms is a digital platform that offers B2B businesses various tools and features, including document sharing, video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

What are the benefits of using Digital Sales Rooms for B2B deals?
Digital Sales Rooms provide a range of benefits for B2B deals, including:

• Enhanced collaboration and communication,
• Improved efficiency
• Increased security
• Deal insights
• Speeds up sales cycles
• Streamline complex deals

What kind of businesses can benefit from using Digital Sales Rooms?
Any B2B business that conducts sales meetings, negotiations, or deal-making can benefit from using Digital Sales Rooms. This includes businesses in industries such as technology, manufacturing, and more.

Are Digital Sales Rooms secure?
Yes, Digital Sales Rooms are designed with security in mind. They use encryption and other security measures to protect sensitive data and documents shared during the sales process.

Do I need special software to use Digital Sales Rooms?
Most Digital Sales Rooms are web-based, which means you don’t need any special software to use them. You will need an internet connection, a device (such as a laptop or tablet), and a web browser.

How much does it cost to use a Digital Sales Room?
The cost of using Digital Sales Rooms can vary depending on the provider and the features included. Aligned offers a free forever plan as well as some other pricing options, while others require a subscription or a one-time fee.

Can Digital Sales Rooms replace in-person meetings?
While Digital Sales Rooms can be a great alternative to in-person meetings, they may not completely replace them. In some cases, in-person meetings may still be necessary or preferred, depending on the nature of the deal or the preferences of the parties involved.

How do Digital Sales Rooms integrate with existing CRM and other business systems?
Many Digital Sales Rooms are designed to integrate with existing business systems, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and other tools. This integration allows for a more streamlined sales process and enables businesses to easily share data and insights across different teams and departments.

What role does AI play in Digital Sales Rooms?
Some Digital Sales Rooms are leveraging AI technology to enhance the sales process. For example, AI-powered chatbots can assist with customer inquiries and help guide prospects through the sales funnel. Additionally, AI can be used to analyze data and identify patterns that can inform sales strategies and improve the overall effectiveness of the sales process.

The post [Sponsored Content] The Next Thing In Sales: The Digital Sales Room appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.

Scott Dushane, director of IT, Fairmount Tire & Rubber

“One of our biggest differentiations is when we answer the phone, it’s on the first couple of rings, every single time,” says Scott Dushane, director of IT.

But while that helps build personal relationships with customers, it’s not a scalable-enough business strategy to meet Fairmount’s goals. And those goals are ambitious — like providing an Uber Eats level of a transparent order and delivery service.

“Just like you can now go to Uber Eats, order a burrito, then know the driver’s name that’s going to pick up that burrito and then hand it to you in exactly 23 minutes, we want that same experience to happen for wholesale tires,” Dushane says.

“It’s a much less sexy industry, but the genie’s out of the bottle — we need to provide the same level of service and supply chain transparency that Uber is providing.”

Making strides in service and sustainability

Fairmount Tire & Rubber primarily serves the four-state region of Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah. It uses its home-grown self-service ecommerce site integrated with an online delivery management system to improve and expand its business. At the same time, it is drastically cutting out paper documents, increasing its sustainability and operating efficiency, Dushane says.

He says Fairmount is making significant strides in upgrading how it engages B2B customers online, matching buyers with the particular tire SKUs they need from a long list of options — such as the many tire brands, sizes, and applications like tread patterns for different types of weather — and providing transparency in deliveries, including same-day service.

Fairmount uses an online delivery management system that has streamlined and expedited the distributor’s delivery system and lets customers know through a GPS-based mobile app what tires are coming and when.

The delivery management system, from Descartes Systems Group, integrates through Google Cloud with Fairmount’s digital commerce platform and other technology systems and applications, including enterprise resource planning, product information management, customer relationship management and warehouse management.

Dushane says that, until recently, the most common call Fairmount’s agents received was “Where’s my tires?” But with the new system, Fairmount can replace those inbound customer service calls with outbound sales “rainmaker” calls often made by the same agent.

“This is real money,” he says.

No more shuffling paper for invoices

The old system had relied heavily on paper documents about customer orders and available delivery trucks, resulting in a difficult process for planning order fulfillment and delivery.

“For many years, it was a stack of papers on someone’s desk. And you would do the old shuffle and figure out how to route and how to build trucks,” Dushane says.

Fairmount now uses its integrated ERP, order management and delivery management systems to automatically coordinate how orders are delivered with the most efficient use of trucks and routes, he adds.

“It is an unbelievably difficult problem to route trucks throughout a city, like mathematically,” he says, adding, “Descartes comes up with sort of magical solutions that [we] never came up with for the last 30 years of running the same routes.”

As customer orders come into Fairmount’s B2B ecommerce login customer portal, at b2b.fairmounttire.com, the tire distributor’s financial software generates electronic invoices that the delivery management system allocates to delivery trucks based on their availability and capacity.

One advantage of the new system is replacing a system that used to require three sheets of paper for each invoice. When drivers make deliveries, they use mobile devices stored with order details and e-invoices to receive customers’ digital signatures and generate delivery confirmation notes.

“We totally eliminated paper,” Dushane says.

Reworking delivery routes for more service and sales

In addition, Fairmount speeds up deliveries by using its software to arrange multiple orders on the same truck in a way that makes them faster to unload at each customer’s destination.

And that has opened the door to more sales opportunities as well as greater efficiency, Dushane says.

“We have been able to start to run second and third routes because of Descartes … because we know when the drivers will be coming back and what the trucks can be filled up to — there’s no obfuscation,” he says.

“We have fixed costs,” he adds. “So let’s use those fixed costs to the best of our ability.”

This article is included in a special report covering B2B digital technology trends and a preview of the 2023 EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition.

Scott Dushane will speak during a panel and workshop on order management, fulfillment and delivery operations at the 2023 EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition.

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact editor Paul Demery at paul@digitalcommerce360.com and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.

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The $140 million raised by Austin-based 8fig will be used by the company to make upgrades to its supply chain management software platform for online sellers and for offering B2B and B2C sellers new ways to finance operations and expansion.

“8fig is providing these online sellers with the financial support and tools necessary to thrive in any economic climate,” says CEO Yaron Shapira. “The latest funding round has proven that the market has great confidence in 8fig and the important role 8fig continues to play in the ongoing growth of ecommerce.”

The latest round of investment is from Koch Disruptive Technologies with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures and others. Since 8fig’s founding in 2020, it has raised more than $195.6 million in financing. It has provided more than $500 million in financing to online sellers, the company says.

“The global macroeconomic challenges we are experiencing make it difficult for ecommerce business owners to access the resources they need to succeed,” Shapira says.

The company provides growth plans for small and medium-sized ecommerce businesses that have some sales history. The plan includes funding and financial tools for supply chain management, financial planning, and freight and logistics coordination, according to Crunchbase.com.

With the new funding, 8fig plans to implement enhanced financial management capabilities for sellers, including more banking alternatives and cash flow prediction models that will include alerts and insights based on business performance. 8fig also says it is collaborating with ecommerce marketing agencies on a financial tool to evaluate their clients’ cash flow requirements and mitigate risks by providing alerts and actionable insights.

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Maeve Condell

There was the world before ChatGPT, and there is the world after ChatGPT.

In fact, ChatGPT’s emergence is being hailed as the next Industrial Revolution. With over a billion visitors per month, this generative AI tool is being rapidly adopted in fields ranging from creative industries like graphic design and content writing to more technical roles such as software development. Its potential has continued expanding into other arenas, including customer support.

No doubt, generative AI is the future of CX. And with 88% of business leaders reporting that their customers’ attitudes towards automation have improved over the past year — it’s no longer a matter of if you should look to automate your support but when.

The benefits for B2B ecommerce brands are clear. Since 80% of customers identify CX as a key differentiator and think it is just as important as products or services, gen AI is a crucial way to improve your customer support offering and get a leg up on your competitors. Yet, because this technology is relatively new, and many B2B companies have more complex product packages and setups, you may still be wondering how, in practice, generative AI can enhance your customer support.

First, let’s take a look at what makes generative AI tools like ChatGPT so much better than their predecessors in simulating human-like conversations. From there, we can better understand how this technology can optimize your customer support.

Generative AI’s technology and how it works

Before we explore some of the best use cases for generative AI in the B2B ecommerce support context, it’s a good idea to understand what the technology is and how it works. Gen AI refers to the particular iteration of artificial intelligence that powers tools like ChatGPT — as well as a growing host of other bots like DALL-E, Google’s Bard, and MidJourney. Gen AI is distinct from previous forms of automation because it enables bots to hold impressively natural conversations. This is because generative AI draws on large language models (LLMs) that, in the case of ChatGPT, have even passed the Turing test, a method of proving machine intelligence.

But what exactly is an LLM and why is it so revolutionary in the AI space? What sets these models apart is the use of “transformers” (as if there wasn’t already something so sci-fi and “Marvel-esque” about this technology). Transformers effectively in mimic human conversational style because they can process all inputs simultaneously rather than needing to be fed data sequentially. This means that, in the case of ChatGPT, the bot can process all of the written content on the internet (up until 2022) to generate the answer to a given prompt. This holistic processing capability allows it to produce responses with the context and tone you expect when talking with a regular person.

As you might have guessed by now, this can be especially useful for customer support automation. This is because a virtual agent that uses generative AI can seamlessly mimic your brand tone of voice as well as the conversational style of your human agents. As a result, you can offer an improved conversational experience for customers, make your support agents’ lives easier, and provide your customers with more than ever before.

The top 3 generative AI use cases revolutionizing CX in the B2B space:

1 – A more advanced conversational experience for customers

With generative AI offering such natural and human-like conversations, you don’t have to worry about automation damaging the customer experience with your brand. With the help of generative AI, the virtual agent can instantly pull info from your FAQ pages, knowledge base, help center, or any other company page — and serve this to customers in a natural, conversational way. There’s no training required, and you can get started in minutes.

As long as a topic is covered in your help center, the bot can process all of the articles available to answer customer queries. So, if a customer asks, ‘Where can I find and download my last invoice?’ the bot can instantly provide instructions.

In this scenario, your customers can have their cake and eat it too — by getting the information they need much more quickly through self-service, without losing the conversational format of speaking with a human agent. This will boost your automation rate, while ensuring that your customers still feel supported with high quality customer service.

2 – Assisting support agents

While a virtual agent powered by generative AI may be able to effectively do the work of several human agents, it doesn’t mean that they will be replacing them anytime soon. Rather, automation serves as a tool that can help agents to do their jobs better. For instance, a virtual agent that uses generative AI can offer a more seamless transition from bot to human agent by helping to structure, summarize, and automatically populate tickets so agents don’t have to. This will lead to much faster response times and a cleaner handover to agents in cases the bot can’t fully resolve. In addition, agents can prompt generative AI to offer suggested replies that help them to draft responses more efficiently.

These things can be a major game-changer in the event of an uptick in queries, unexpected or otherwise. This makes automation useful for answering simple questions like order status or requesting a password change. It also helps to free up agents’ time to deal with more complicated issues. For B2B ecommerce brands where queries can be complex and technical, having a primer from the bot allows agents to hit the ground running when addressing customer issues. With the help of generative AI, the bot assists your agents in having better and faster insights into customers’ needs and helps your team work more efficiently.

3 – Understanding your customers and what they’re asking

Lastly, generative AI will help you to educate your customers and offer them even more value than they were expecting from interactions with your support team. Businesses often shop around between different suppliers before making a purchase, so you want them to discover the unique selling point of your product offerings as quickly as possible. This discovery process is where generative AI comes in. It can comb your existing content to offer useful, educational suggestions to answer any pre-purchase questions. It can also provide such content to busy support agents when prompted. Through the transformer model that powers it, generative AI can instantly serve up this information without needing to be manually updated as you publish new content on your site.

Conclusion

Generative AI is the latest and most sophisticated edition of automation technology, and it has real potential to optimize the B2B customer experience. In particular, it has the capacity to mimic natural conversations, assist your agents in structuring support tickets, and provide customers with an enriched support experience — all without hiring any extra agents. It’s a time-efficient, affordable, and scalable solution to mitigating long wait times, depersonalized CX, and clunky self-service offerings. While the technology may be new, the sky is hardly the limit on its potential for supercharging your CX as the number of applicable use cases only continues to grow.

About the author:

Maeve Condell is a solution architect at Ultimate, a customer service automation company. Her focus is on combining AI and conversation design to build personalized virtual agents.

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Digital Commerce 360: How does your organization define connected commerce and how important is this strategically for the company?

Michael Eichinger: Connected commerce for Bay Supply is all about providing our customers with the convenience of transacting business using analog or digital communications to manage credit accounts, digital and analog payments, sales taxes, and data transmissions.

Connected commerce is a vital part of digital transformation and remains ahead of customer’s future expectations of quality support and service.

DC 360: The maturity curve. How far along are you in implementing connected commerce? (Please be specific.) Where do you expect to be 12 months from now?

Michael Eichinger: We are extremely far along on the maturity curve today. We still face challenges, but today our customers transact business with our company on our online vertical marketplace, offline through emailed purchase orders or even over the phone. In all cases, our customers can utilize credit term accounts or pay by credit card. Our credit Terms program for users on our vertical marketplace provides an employer identification number (EIN) upon registration and by the time they complete adding products to their cart and checkout, they can utilize their new Net 30 Credit Terms account and are provided their limits. That is as instantaneous as it can be, and we built this in our partnership with “Balance” over the past 2-3 years. We still have much to do on the data transmission front, but our immediate challenges were not only to provide a seamless experience with our customers across various channels of communication, but to provide analog and digital methods of invoicing, collecting digital payments and still secure a process of check payments most effectively in a traditional fashion for orders placed digitally.

DC 360: What are the top three digital goals and objectives for achieving digital commerce and why these three? (Please be specific).

Michael Eichinger: I believe these three digital goals will vary by the type of organization, industry, and customer persona. For Bay, our three digital goals are:

• Transform long-term, traditional, analog relationships with our customers by providing a seamless way of engaging and transacting business from an all-analog approach to include a digital option for communications, purchasing, paying, and managing credit accounts. We believe the customer should see minimal impact in how they opt to conduct their business with our company depending on where they are in the digital transformation process as an organization. Many companies are moving to all digital payments, while others remain analog for all purchase orders and payments but communicate with us online and source plan from our online marketplace platform. Every customer is different and at a different stage of digital adoption. The challenge is to continue to engage and move ahead of the customer’s ultimate expectations because these challenges are not quickly met.
• Duplicate your analog customer experience with your digital experience. Most companies fail at capturing more than 5%-15% of their business digitally because they restrict customer options far more digitally than analog. They may not offer quantity break pricing or customer contract pricing digitally, but the customer can certainly get this flexibility offline. Digital commerce is about mirroring the customer’s analog experience as much as possible and this is not as easy as it first appears. Communications, resource tools, educational content, transaction management, RMA’s, order modifications, scalable and realistic pricing for bulk to minimize the noise of RFQ and Quote submission management. This also includes order tracking, backorders, lead times, account oversight and a variety of digital payment methods that can work concurrently with analog check submissions. The future is all digital, but this goal has no shortcut.
• Establish connectivity within your enterprise resource planning (ERP) for transparency and ability to leverage automation digitally to provide scalability and foundational resources required to communicate with your customer via data transmissions in the ways that they may prefer today. This may include punchout, EDI, API, JSON, and XML. This landscape is moving just as fast. We are attempting to change the industry landscape for the fastener industry by providing a custom digital quotation software program that will reduce the time and efforts for buyers and sellers to request and submit quotes. It includes a method of syndicating requests from buyers to the supply chain of relevant suppliers, analysis tools for quote submissions, the ability to convert a quote to a purchase order to complete a transaction or print the consideration list for internal management and analog purchase order submission.

DC 360: Connected commerce embraces new digital and cloud-based applications such as headless commerce, IoT, AI and advanced analytics. Are you implementing any or all of these?

Michael Eichinger: We are in the planning stages with one partner to utilize AI for true customer personalization related to their digital interactions with our company through capturing a few datapoints based on their activity sessions on our marketplace and engagement with educational blogs and resources that may occur in other online channels.

Since we are a marketplace, we have approximately 2,000 categories and are continuously adding new products. We are exploring AI options that will help to eliminate the degree of manual data manipulation to align products appropriately to categories within our taxonomy. These applications of AI are just beginning to emerge.

DC 360: What are your top challenges in achieving connected commerce and how are you overcoming them?

Michael Eichinger: As a marketplace, our top challenges are not what other traditional companies have. We do have the same challenge of any other business to blend the customer analog experience and expectations with the digital experience in every aspect of our engagement together and with the smallest degree of recognizable change or perceived burden by our customers.

As I pointed out, mirroring your analog world of engagement with your customers digitally is a huge undertaking, but is necessary as your customer digital requirements for data transmission continue to evolve. One cannot effectively evolve or scale realistically with connected commerce and their customers if they fail to set the necessary foundations required for their customers to engage with them digitally seamlessly. The plan will inevitably fail as technology innovates along with customer expectations.

As a marketplace, we must find ways to transmit and receive data from our sellers and our customers. We are evaluating a single partner for an assortment of requirements in lieu of addressing each requirement individually.

DC 360: How will connected commerce help you better connect with internal and external stakeholders and across which digital channels?

Michael Eichinger: The answer here is “In Every Way.” Placing a business’s purpose, service, or product aside, we are living and breathing buckets of ever-changing data points in every way. From communications to transactions to KPI collection and measurement to customer personalization, to product and transaction communications. If the digital foundations are built from the ground up to create these buckets and accumulate the data, agility, scalability and use of this information can emerge and capitalized on resourcefully to communicate with internal and external stakeholders while still serving all in a traditional analog way as the industry evolves to meet with your digital capabilities in place.

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The survey of 403 companies with annual revenue of at least $20 million and located in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden finds that 78% of organizations have an ecommerce site or digital self-service portal.

64% of companies also plan on increasing their ecommerce investment this year while on average about 52% of all sales are digital. “The results paint a picture of a market alive not only to the immediate revenue opportunities ecommerce represents, but to a raft of broader competitive advantages which ambitious organizations can capitalize on in 2023 and beyond,” the report says.

Other findings include:

• The impact of ecommerce extends beyond transactional benefits within the purchase process, and this is reflected in the channels by which businesses receive orders. Online websites are the most popular channel for sales, with 64% of companies with 500 or more employees citing it as the source from which they receive the most orders. By comparison, 49% of businesses with less than 500 employees cited online websites as their top sales channel.
• 83% of companies consider an omnichannel approach as important for their overall sales and marketing strategy.
• 59% of respondents use their ecommerce portal to assist sales representatives.
• More than half (51%) of firms now sell via online marketplaces.
• Businesses using online marketplaces generate half of their business that way and expect those sales to increase by around 40% in the coming year.
• B2B buyers increasingly expect a consumer-grade experience from their purchase experience, including the option to use mobile devices. 72% of firms have responded to the growth in demand for browsing, researching, and buying on mobile devices by adding more tools and features.
• 59% of companies are using a product information management system (PIM) to help manage product information.

“Customer experience is the new battlefield for many B2B firms, and ecommerce – with its potential for 24/7 availability and personalization – is proving a valuable weapon in an organization’s arsenal,” the report says.

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Experts project business buyers will increase their online purchasing. Research and advisory firm Astute Analytica forecast a 14.1% compound annual growth rate in global B2B ecommerce from 2022 to 2027, reaching $18.8 billion. In the U.S., B2B ecommerce will grow by 10.7% annually during that period and will account for 24% of all B2B sales by 2027, up from 16% in 2021, Forrester Research says.

Given that projected growth, it’s no surprise that B2B companies would put ecommerce platform and applications at the top of their tech shopping list for 2023. That’s closely followed by digital marketing applications and customer and site analytics solutions.

Larger firms are more focused than smaller ones on payment and security investments (28.9% to 15.8%). That may reflect the greater likelihood that larger firms are launching ecommerce sites in new countries where they may need to offer popular local payment options and address new security issues. Smaller companies are prioritizing order management (32.9% to 18.1%) and technology for building their own marketplaces (18.4% to 3.6%.)

It’s a sign of the growing appeal of B2B marketplaces that several vendors have emerged offering software that enables even midsized and smaller companies to invite outside firms to sell on their ecommerce sites. It’s noteworthy that only 13% of respondents are investing in what’s known as “headless commerce,” which separates what website visitors see on a website from the back-end ecommerce systems.

That’s touted to provide additional flexibility in website design. But it adds complexity to site design and management as it requires continual data exchanges between the front-end presentation layer and back-end systems.

The headless approach may be best suited for organizations with the IT resources to ensure the smooth flow of data between systems. In our survey, 14.8% of larger companies cited headless as a priority. versus 11.8% of smaller ones.

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Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at mark@digitalcommerce360.com. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan.

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