We hope you’ve enjoyed our series inspired by the Forrester report “B2B E-commerce: A Trillion Dollars For the Taking”. Parts I-III covered:

Optimizing the B2B Experience to Meet B2C Expectations 

Overcoming B2B E-commerce Channel Conflict

Source B2B E-commerce Talent Creatively

In this final Part IV of the series, we’re going to wrap up with a summary of the fundamentals for today’s B2B sales organization.

Three Fundamentals for B2B E-commerce Success

1. Build a customer-centric B2B e-commerce experience

  • It’s not like the old days — Online commerce has made customer loyalty harder to come by. It’s not like the “old days” when there was a high cost associated with changing vendors and the interaction with a sales rep was the buying experience.
  • B2C sets the standards — Today, B2B e-commerce organizations need to adopt a customer-first strategy and build experiences that meet or exceed customer experience standards that have been set by leaders in the B2C industry.
  • B2B competition is about adding value even after the initial sale — The B2B organizations that will succeed in the future are the ones that employ best practices to deliver relevant and value-added experience that go beyond the initial sale.

2. Implement self-service tools and migrate customers online

  • Make it easy and profitable for your company to do business with companies of any size and reduce the costs associated with routine account management tasks by using an e-commerce platform with self-service tools.

3. Think creatively about staffing

  • Think about B2C experiences — In addition to educating and training internal resources to be valuable contributors to your e-commerce team, invest in experienced B2C professionals to add to your team.
  • Use recruiting tools — Find B2C pros through organizations such as Shop.org, tap into personal and professional networks and use recruiters such as Ecommerce Recruiter, who specialize in finding and placing e-commerce professionals.