Winning in Global B2B eCommerce: Strategies for Success

Executive Summary

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, B2B eCommerce has become a critical driver of growth for companies around the world. To succeed in this competitive environment, organizations must develop a deep understanding of the unique needs and preferences of B2B buyers, invest in the right technologies and capabilities, and adopt a customer-centric, localized approach to their go-to-market strategies.

Industry research highlights several key imperatives for winning in B2B eCommerce:

Align the customer experience to B2B buyer expectations

• Provide seamless, easy-to-use self-service options across channels, enabling customers to quickly find relevant content, such as Order Status, get answers to their questions, and complete purchases.
• To complement self-service, particularly for complex purchases, offer personal, consultative engagement from sales representatives, subject matter experts, and capabilities such as Guided Selling and CPQ.
• Tailor the experience, content, pricing, and support model to the specific needs of each target market and buyer persona. For example, the same platform can be used to drive a unique experience for a doctor rather than the purchasing personnel at a hospital.

Leverage modular, scalable technology to deliver tailored experiences

• Implement a robust order management system (OMS) to serve as the backbone for distributed order capture, orchestration, and fulfillment across channels.
• To efficiently customize content, utilize modular platforms for knowledge management (KB), digital asset management (DAM), configure-price-quote (CPQ), and other vital functions. These systems should all be integrated with single sign-on.
• Employ AI and machine learning to dynamically match customers with relevant products, services, content, and offers based on their context (offline and online data!)

Optimize for the end-to-end buyer journey

• Coordinate marketing, sales, service, and fulfillment operations around a comprehensive view of target customer segments and their complete journeys.
• Establish shared KPIs and incentives that prioritize customer lifetime value, share of wallet, and advocacy rather than solely focusing on deal volume and margin.
• Promote cross-functional collaboration and data sharing through integrated workflows and a unified view of buyer interactions across touchpoints.

Localize go-to-market strategies and operations by region

• Prioritize investments in countries with large, digitally mature B2B markets while considering local competitive dynamics.
• Customize the customer engagement model, product catalog, pricing and promotions, and fulfillment options to align with each market's norms and regulations.
• Strike a balance between central governance and regional autonomy, empowering local teams to adapt go-to-market tactics within global guidelines. Use the 80/20 rule: Eighty percent of eCommerce features are global in nature, and 20 percent are unique to the local market.

Embrace continuous testing, learning, and evolution

• Instrument eCommerce experiences to gather customer behavioral data and feedback across digital and human touchpoints.
• Adopt a "test-and-learn" mindset, using A/B and multivariate testing to optimize experiences and identify new growth opportunities.
• Encourage teams to experiment, quickly prototype new experiences and offers, and scale high-performing ideas while rapidly abandoning low-potential ones.

Cultivate B2B-centric skills and ways of working

• Recruit and develop digital natives who possess a blend of customer-centric mindsets and deep B2B domain expertise in key verticals and markets. Attending a B2B Online Conference presents an excellent opportunity for networking and recruiting talent.
• Provide training to enhance digital fluency and data-driven decision-making across functions, from marketing and sales to product and IT. Again, you should send your team to the B2B Online Conference annually.
• Embrace agility through cross-functional teams, iterative development processes, and flexible planning and budgeting cycles.

Delivering Exceptional B2B Customer Self-Service

Creating an outstanding online B2B customer experience begins with enabling buyers to easily find what they need and complete purchases through intuitive self-service. However, the standards for "ease" are continually increasing as B2B buyers become accustomed to sophisticated B2C experiences. Leading B2B companies offer:

1. Dynamically served, relevant content: Product specifications, how-to guides, and peer reviews are crucial in helping B2B buyers advance their purchases. However, the vast quantity of content can be overwhelming. AI-powered search and recommendation engines personalize content to each buyer's context, enhancing relevance and conversion rates.
2. Conversational support for common inquiries: Intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants can handle an increasing range of customer inquiries by engaging in natural, human-like dialogue. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, they can interpret customer intent and provide highly relevant, conversational responses, increasing self-service containment rates.
3. Access to in-depth expertise: Buyers value access to deep expertise for complex technical and application-related questions. Online Q&A forums and "ask an expert" services provide customers with direct access to internal professionals and experienced peers who can offer trusted guidance, supplementing bot-based support.
4. Immersive, interactive visualization: Leading B2B websites bring products to life through interactive 3D models, videos, configurators, and virtual reality experiences. These immersive visualizations help buyers better understand offerings and customize them to their specific needs, accelerating the progress of deals.
5. Simplified checkout and reordering: B2B purchase workflows are inherently complex, involving contract pricing, approvals, purchase orders, invoices, and more. Minimizing friction is essential. Leaders provide one-click reordering for frequently purchased items, support e-procurement (e.g., punchout), and enable e-signature to streamline contract execution.

A Robust Digital Foundation for B2B eCommerce Growth

As B2B companies expand their eCommerce operations globally, a robust yet adaptable technology foundation becomes crucial. The cornerstone of this foundation is an order management system (OMS), which orchestrates processes from order capture through fulfillment.

SAP Commerce Cloud stands out as a highly scalable, global-level eCommerce platform that can support multiple channels (i.e., omnichannel) and manage multiple country-specific stores. Its advanced OMS capabilities offer numerous benefits, such as:

1. Greater online availability and choice: Companies can expand their online assortment without additional inventory by integrating OMS with product information systems and vendor drop-ship programs.
2. Intelligent order orchestration: SAP Commerce Cloud's advanced OMS utilizes AI and real-time inventory data to dynamically allocate orders to optimal fulfillment locations and routes based on cost, speed, and capacity.
3. Resilient, flexible fulfillment: The platform's distributed order management (DOM) capabilities allow for the dynamic rerouting of orders across locations, which proved vital in maintaining service levels during COVID-19 disruptions.
4. Efficient delivery and service: SAP Commerce Cloud's store fulfillment, click-and-collect, and service desk tools enhance the efficiency of sales and service staff in quickly delivering orders to customers.
5. Continuous innovation: Customers benefit from SAP's rapidly adding new capabilities, such as support for curbside pickup, ship-from-store, and supplier drop shipping. The platform's configuration tools also simplify the process of adapting workflows.

In addition to OMS, SAP Commerce Cloud offers modular platforms for product information management (PIM), configure-price-quote (CPQ), digital asset management, and subscription billing, which are essential for efficiently scaling eCommerce operations. API-based integration between these and other enterprise systems is critical for delivering holistic customer experiences.

For alternatives to SAP Commerce Cloud, consider SANA Commerce and Corevist . They are excellent eCommerce platforms if you run SAP ECC or SAP S/4Hana, which most large global enterprise companies do.

The Path to B2B eCommerce Excellence

For B2B companies to thrive in the coming years, they must continue to elevate the digital customer experience while localizing by market and driving operational efficiency globally. Key priorities include:

• Center the digital experience around customer jobs to be done. Organize content, tools, and transactional capabilities to help customers complete specific buying tasks with minimal friction.
• Harness data for personalization and efficiency. Capture behavioral data across touchpoints to tailor experiences and optimize inventory, pricing, and fulfillment decisions.
• Cultivate digital-savvy talent. Hire and train for valuable skills like data science, UX design, agile development, and digital merchandising alongside core B2B domain expertise.
• Balance global scale and local relevance. Identify opportunities to centralize capabilities for efficiency while empowering regional teams to tailor go-to-market approaches.
• Establish innovation as a discipline. Create mechanisms to surface promising ideas from anywhere in the organization and rapidly test, learn, and scale using agile practices.

The Perils of Fragmented Technology Stacks in Global Companies

As global companies expand their operations, they often face the challenge of balancing local needs with global efficiency. In an effort to quickly address country-specific requirements, local teams may engage small, inexpensive vendors to build custom systems. While these localized solutions may seem cost-effective at the regional level, they can lead to a fragmented technology stack that ultimately costs more than global enterprise systems, such as SAP Commerce Cloud.

Over time, a global company may find itself managing dozens of non-scalable platforms worldwide. Although these systems may have been implemented with the best intentions, they can create significant organizational challenges. IT teams are burdened with maintaining these disparate systems, which often have overlapping functionalities. This fragmentation increases overall costs and hinders the company's ability to leverage economies of scale and maintain consistent quality across regions.

One of the primary issues with localized solutions is data silos. Product information and other critical data are often enriched within these silos, preventing the company from realizing the benefits of mass-scale data management. Local teams may resort to using Excel spreadsheets to manage data, leading to inefficiencies and potential inconsistencies. Additionally, the quality of these custom local platforms can vary greatly, as smaller vendors with limited resources and expertise often develop them.

It is important to recognize that approximately 80 percent of eCommerce functionality is universal, while the remaining 20 percent requires hyper-localization. However, many countries and business leaders from different regions may reject global platforms, claiming their situation is so unique that it necessitates a completely custom solution. This mindset can lead to unnecessary complexity and hinder the company's ability to leverage global best practices and innovations.

Moreover, it is crucial to remember that most companies are in the business of distribution or manufacturing, not software platform development. It is unlikely that a small team of developers working on a local platform will be able to out-innovate a global eCommerce software company like SAP, which invests heavily in research and development. Companies can benefit from the continuous innovation and best practices these software providers offer by adopting a global platform.

Another challenge arises when local platforms become pet projects of regional managers. While these managers may have initially solved a business need and been recognized for their efforts, they may become attached to their "babies" and refuse to abandon them in favor of a global solution. This attachment can become more of a political stance than a business one, hindering the company's ability to make strategic decisions that benefit the organization as a whole.

To overcome these challenges, global companies must find a fair way to fund and implement global platforms that bring all regions on board while taking into account the budget constraints of developing countries. IT and leadership must work together to ensure that the costs of a global platform are distributed equitably so that all regions can benefit from the enhanced functionality, scalability, and innovation these solutions provide.

Companies can streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience by investing in a global eCommerce platform like SAP Commerce Cloud. This unified approach not only helps to break down data silos but also enables the organization to leverage global best practices and innovations. As a result, the company can focus on its core business objectives while relying on the expertise of a global software provider to drive its eCommerce success.

Conclusion

By adopting a customer-obsessed approach to digital transformation, powered by robust and scalable technology like SAP Commerce Cloud and adaptive ways of working, leading Global B2B companies will fortify their positions in an increasingly competitive B2B eCommerce landscape. Those who fail to evolve risk losing relevance, with digitally native buyers shaping the future of international B2B digital commerce.