The shift to digital selling is already transforming B2B manufacturing sales. After all, if you can purchase a custom-configured Tesla EV online, certainly a rotary joint or single or double fan kit shouldn’t be any different, right?

Except of course, you might argue Tesla is a $95 billion B2C company that can afford to throw lots of resources at this!

Well, your B2B buyers, who are increasingly Millennial and Gen Z, expect it. They want less friction in the selling process, and fewer conversations with sales people. They certainly don’t want to have to request a quote and wait for someone to get back to them. You can evolve with them or become sidelined.

Fortunately, the path to digital commerce doesn’t need to be extraordinarily complex, and moreover, it should pay for itself quickly. Your goal should be to create a seamless customer journey for each touchpoint, from discovery to post-purchase support. You will gain insights from these touchpoints every day that will improve your customer relationships and grow your business.

There are five key components to digital commerce success for B2B manufacturers:

1. managing buying process complexity
2. managing the relationship
3. managing pricing structures
4. providing product information
5. providing payment options.

Let’s go through them.

Managing Buying Process Complexity

Industrial purchases are inherently more complicated. Higher price points lengthen the sales cycle and require the involvement of multiple decision-makers. And increasingly, manufacturers are providing configure-to-order and engineer-to-order options.

Don’t overcomplicate this.

Options can quickly explode potential product configurations into the millions. But you don’t need to support most of those via digital commerce. In fact, in my experience, the 100 most common configurations are likely to reflect 90% of your sales. Support those options online and handle the rest offline.

Then, consider giving registered customers a shared dashboard with a built-in approval workflow. That way, procurement folks can see pricing and operations teams can see operational impact information, and everyone can give their sign-off.

Managing the Relationship

Moving a relationship online doesn’t mean weakening it. In fact, the opposite can be true because digital commerce can give you so much more information about your customers’ shifting needs. Studies from Salesforce have shown that 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers. You’re going to want the information you need to identify and take care of that 20%.

Those customer-specific dashboards – or portals – also signal to your customers that you do view this as a long-term relationship, not just a one-off transaction. You are giving them the information they want to manage the relationship on their own terms – to get technical documents, download past order histories, and get the latest updates on orders in progress. You get information and they get information. That doesn’t mean face time and phone calls don’t still matter. Rather, you’re putting the routine requests under your customers’ direct control so you can invest in those deeper conversations about your customers’ business objectives and pain points.

Managing Pricing Structures

You’re not Target, with a straightforward price for each SKU, so the pre-digital-commerce pricing flexibility you’ve always had needs to carry over into the online world. There are at least three pricing structures to ensure you can accommodate.

1. Volume discounts: These may actually be contractual obligations. Fortunately, rules can be set to trigger them automatically.
2. Dynamic Pricing: Do you want to be able to automatically adjust your prices based on changes in the costs of your inputs or shifts in demand? Moving to digital commerce can actually ensure those pricing changes happen enterprise wide and consistently.
3. Negotiated Pricing: Depending on product price point, negotiated pricing has likely long been a cornerstone of how deals get closed. How do you handle that online? One approach is through customer-specific portals with pricing reflecting contract agreements. In effect, the negotiation happens periodically as contracts are signed and renewed, not with each sale. You can also ensure that account managers can do a manual over-ride in the system for specific customer deals.

Providing Product Information

Industrial customers often require detailed technical specifications, CAD drawings, and evidence of regulatory certifications. Having this information close at hand can make or break a sale. Shifting to digital commerce provides an opportunity for what may have been a fairly manual, ad hoc process to become self-service – dramatically more efficient for you and faster for your customers.

This is the time to create or implement a centralized Product Information Management (PIM) system to collect all this information, and to ensure you update your business processes to ensure as new products are introduced, existing products are updated, or new certifications are achieved that the associated information is available to everyone internally and externally as needed. 

Online, customers can then access this information via product records, via a chatbot, or via search. Ensure your search options is designed for this kind of information, including by model numbers, part codes, and technical specifications.

Providing Payment Options

Finally, B2B transactions require payment flexibility, including accommodating purchase orders, adjusting payment terms according to contract specifications, and even milestone-based payments. You’ll want to be able to handle them simply but not simplistically.

Again, the key is to give your customers’ a personalized experience where possible. Having a customer specific portal means once payment methods and terms are entered into the system for that customer, subsequent purchases are faster and more frictionless. There are also less likely to be mistakes that result in payment delays that cost you money or errors that you have to fix and that lead to upset customers.

Digital Commerce Is Now for Everyone

Digital commerce promises to make B2B manufacturers more efficient while improving customer satisfaction and growing sales. Do work with a partner who has been through this process before to guide your company through the options that are right for you. Think twice about building your own solution when there are good SaaS-based platforms available for B2B manufacturers that get you up and running faster.  This is the case even for companies selling regulated products, marketing to large enterprises or the government, or those needing to accommodate CTO and ETO models.

But don’t let the partner sign you up for a platform not specifically designed for companies of your size and business complexity or you may find the time to implementation eats into the business benefits.

Done right, you can get to a positive ROI in three months, and in my experience you should see a revenue lift of at least 25%!

Alex Sayyah is the CEO of Aleran Software, which provides digital commerce solutions for B2B manufacturers. He brings over 20 years of experience leading e-commerce, digital innovation, and revenue teams for global B2B and B2C brands across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.