Reimagining the Way You Deliver B2B Expertise Given the Shift to More Virtual and Always-On Engagement

The business-to-business (B2B) landscape has undergone significant changes, with the shift to more virtual and always-on engagement. This shift accelerated during the pandemic, which presents both a challenge and an opportunity for BtoB companies.?As the world becomes increasingly digital and companies spend less time face to face with customers, it's crucial for B2B companies to reimagine the way they deliver expertise to their clients. This requires embracing new technologies, leveraging data-driven insights, and taking an agile approach to launch and iterate on your prioritized CX opportunities.

BtoB companies need to deliver expertise to customers along their customer journey to influence their specifications and create stickiness in their customers’ value chains.?With the rise of remote work and virtual interactions, traditional in-person meetings and conferences are no longer the norm, which is raising the stakes for creating digital experiences that preserve and expand your ability to deliver expertise to customers and to create more efficient and effective marketing, sales, and service interactions through your own teams as well as your distributors and partner ecosystems.

To go on offense and not just play defense, you can focus on several strategies to innovate your approach for engaging customers via always-on, content-based experiences that differentiate your brand and reinforce a flywheel for growth.?These strategies go beyond simple adoption of video conferencing, webinars, and communications platforms to connect with your clients. By embracing one or more of these digital strategies, you can overcome geographical limitations and foster meaningful engagement with clients regardless of their location, turning a challenge into a strategic opportunity.

1.???Guided selling

B2B companies can leverage data-driven insights to deliver personalized expertise. By analyzing customer data and understanding their pain points, challenges, and goals, you can tailor the ways your salespeople engage with customers during their sales interactions.?In addition to experiences where salespeople bring a tablet to a meeting, you can also curate the end-to-end sales cycle including your virtual interactions with customers and enable a faster and more effective continuous improvement cycle.?This can include content that is shared with customers before, during, or after a meeting, as well as interactive tools that customers can use that tailor the experience based on data.?As more of these interactions are digitized, there is an opportunity to mine these interactions to provide coaching to your salespeople, as well as to further fine tune the digital content and tools that you provide customers on their journey.?Companies can apply the best practices from call centers and social media engagement to their BtoB sales cycles to power this continuous improvement cycle.

2.???Digital trade shows and innovation centers

Many BtoB businesses rely on trade shows as a way of more efficiently reaching fragmented customer bases that are hard to reach through dedicated sales teams.?Trade shows allow you to interact directly with customers and reduce your reliance solely on distributors for market coverage. ?But even before the pandemic led many companies to cut back on in person events, the vast majority of a company’s customers didn’t attend a trade show.?Innovative BtoB companies are responding to this challenge by bringing the trade show to their customers via well designed digital experiences.?Some are also creating an always-on experience for their innovation centers that complements the experience that customers have visiting them, curating an immersive experience that showcases their innovation and providing a deeper opportunity for customer collaboration.

3.???Customer collaboration and co-innovation

Many BtoB companies have invested in content marketing to reinforce their expertise with customers.?Most have explored ways to leverage ecommerce to drive sales and optimize engagement along their customers’ path to purchase.?But BtoB ecommerce is more complex than consumer ecommerce experiences.?There are many speed bumps along the BtoB customer journey that often cause customers to shift from self-service back to human interaction to complete specific steps in the journey (e.g. custom price quotes, seeking information about specifications, asking for customization of the product, asking suppliers “where’s my order” when there’s less transparency and reliability in the supply chain).?This provides an opportunity to create solutions for specific customer personas that enable better always-on collaboration with them during their journey.?For example, customer collaboration portals provide an opportunity to deepen your relationship with strategic customers and create an easier and more scalable approach to co-innovation with customers throughout the year.?These investments are complementary to ecommerce and require the right cross-functional teaming to implement them well.

4.??Always-on voice-based or virtual reality experiences

The explosive growth in ChatGPT has sparked a lot of interest in generative AI and how it can be applied to automate and enhance a broad set of customer interactions.?This builds on the learning many of us have had using Siri or Alexa across a broad set of use cases in our personal and professional lives.?Many of the earlier use cases for AI and self-service have been via chatbots related to customer service.?Increasingly, companies can extend their application to a broader set of BtoB use cases that allow for always-on engagement with your customers.?Think of the opportunity as replicating the value of a co-located sales representative or presence down the street.?Virtual reality presents another opportunity to make these experiences more emotionally engaging.?Like in the call centers or training other frontline employees, you can mine your customer interactions to understand the “words that work” during the experience.?Engage your frontline employees to optimize this over a continuous improvement cycle.

All of these BtoB innovation strategies benefit from an approach that combines human-centered design with data science and enterprise agility.?Your approach to change management and activating a set of prioritized customer-driven behaviors will be key to your success. See also my blog series to Drive Change & Evolve the Culture here for more on how you can enhance your organization’s effectiveness for working on these innovation opportunities.

?In conclusion, the shift to more virtual and always-on engagement in the B2B space necessitates a reimagining of how we deliver expertise to our clients. By embracing virtual engagement tools, leveraging data-driven insights, adopting a proactive and continuous approach, fostering collaboration, and investing in employee development, you can stay ahead of the curve and provide exceptional value to your clients. Embracing this new paradigm of expertise delivery will enable you to thrive in the digital era and drive success for both your customers and your organization.

To see the other blogs in this Amplify Innovation series, click here .

To learn how you can capture cost savings in your research and testing, vendor rationalization, and customer service costs to fund these investments in an innovative BtoB CX, click here .