B2B businesses can no longer avoid omnichannel
An omnichannel strategy is an approach to marketing, sales and customer relations that strives to create a single, unified experience for customers across all touchpoints. And it’s becoming essential for B2B businesses.
Perhaps because omnichannel is already dominant in B2C, B2B buyers increasingly expect a buying journey that’s equally seamless. Businesses that deliver will add market share, while their slower-to-adapt competitors will likely fall behind.
However, moving to an omnichannel strategy is complicated and heavily dependent on aligning tools, data and teams. Keep reading to learn how B2B businesses are implementing omnichannel to create new opportunities, plus how you can join in.
B2B companies use CRMs to drive their omnichannel strategy
Digital is an essential part of omnichannel. B2B companies use digital tools to make their omnichannel strategy more personalized, efficient and scalable.
The most valuable tool here is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Rather than siloing data between different marketing, sales and customer relations platforms, a CRM helps bring all your customer data together into one central source of truth.
This allows you to track interactions with leads, prospects and current customers at every stage of the customer life cycle. You’ll gain insights into both broader trends as well as your relationships with individual buyers, allowing you to make smarter decisions on both the macro and micro scale.
And you’ll be able to create more consistent engagements, whether through sales reps, e-commerce or service channels.
Additional key tech tools include:
- Self-service configure, price and quote (CPQ) tools and digital deal rooms: These systems help streamline complex quoting processes, helping to ensure accuracy and speed across channels. Both should be integrated with your CRM via APIs, connectors or iPaaS solutions.
- AI tools like chatbots and agents: Companies are turning to AI to automate tasks like lead scoring, pricing and proposal generation, as well as using sales co-bots and smart chatbots to guide customers through sales and customer service engagements. The key to making this work is structuring your data to be AI-ready by making sure it’s clean, organized and labeled appropriately.
Traditionally offline B2B fields can no longer avoid e-commerce
E-commerce is a core component of omnichannel. That means it’s no longer optional even for businesses in historically offline sectors like manufacturing and distribution.
B2B customers now expect a smooth online buyer’s journey — and will flock to companies that offer one.
This is showing up in long-term business trends. Gartner projections estimate that by 2028, e-commerce will account for 60% of B2B transactions. Smart businesses now view e-commerce as not just a transaction platform but as a central part of the overall customer experience strategy.
- While traditional, in-person interactions are still critical to sales and retention, more companies are using digital tools to support in-person meetings. B2B sellers now turn to customer-specific portals, integrated pricing and quoting platforms like DealHub.
- Platforms like Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, which include CRM capabilities, are essential here.
- AI can help deliver predictive product recommendations, take over routine service interactions, and offer sales teams valuable real-time insights.
The more integrated your tech stack, the better
Unifying all your data into a single source of truth is a key element to delivering a seamless B2B omnichannel experience. Doing that means building an integrated tech stack.
Data integration starts with your CRM. But ideally, it should tie smoothly into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform you use to run the operational side of your business, as well as any additional platforms you use for ecommerce, customer portals and analytics.
- An iPaaS solution or integration layer can help do all this by facilitating real-time data flow to the right systems and users.
- Customer data platforms (CDPs) help you deliver relevant experiences to individual buyers via detailed analytics on their purchase history, intent signals, marketing interactions and even social engagement.
- AI can use this integrated data ecosystem to surface next-best offers, optimize pricing in real time and automate customer service answers.
In other words, it’s not enough to collect data. You also need to use it to fuel smarter, more connected buyer interactions, via detailed analytics and emerging technology like AI agents.
When implemented correctly, you’ll be able to use your integrated data to bridge digital and physical channels so you can see the entire customer journey across all stages. This includes not just direct sales through your sales teams or ecommerce platform but also physical sales through distributors, trade shows and wholesalers.
Cultural challenges, not technical problems, are the biggest challenges to adopting omnichannel
You might assume that businesses moving to omnichannel most often struggle with technical problems. But while those can present a challenge, the bigger blocker is often cultural.
Companies that flail when trying to adopt omnichannel often face conflict between sales, marketing and product teams. These teams each may have different priorities, the impact of which can be highlighted during major transitions.
Your business as a whole will also likely feel a certain amount of turbulence as you change long-established processes. This can lead to employee frustration or challenges in getting normally routine work done.
But cultural challenges have a cultural solution. The best thing you can do here is communicate — and specifically, articulate a sharp vision of how moving to omnichannel will help your entire business.
Get your team excited. Generate buy-in. Help people understand why omnichannel matters and how it will deliver tangible results.
By building and sustaining this alignment over time, you’ll help your team get through any transitional rough patches and reach smoother waters on the other side.
Track progress via three main KPIs
How do you know if your omnichannel strategy is working? By monitoring these three KPIs:
- Customer engagement rates
- Average order value (AOV)
- Increased conversion rate
Bringing together data on engagement, conversion and AOV will give you a high level perspective on buying trends. Then you can determine which elements of your buyer’s journey are most successful and gather additional actionable insights on how to increase conversions based on real customer behavior.
What benchmarks should you aim for? These vary widely by industry and also depend on your customers’ buying expectations.
However, you could look to a McKinsey study that found distributors who invested in digital channels gained a 20% uplift in orders or data that shows digital can drive a 100-200% increase in customer engagement along with higher customer satisfaction. If you’re in the ballpark, your omnichannel strategy is probably working.
Omnichannel often means rethinking B2B sales
As your business adopts omnichannel, you may have rethink how your sales and service teams show up for customers. The big shift is often sales reps who go from primarily facilitating orders to serving as consultants to guide customers through the buyer’s journey and add value via real-time insights.
It’s no coincidence that this is happening just as many aspects of B2B sales become automated. When customers who rely on portals, digital quoting and chat support don’t need to talk to a rep to place an order — but many find a great deal of value in speaking with someone who understands their business problems and can point them toward solutions.
- Again, an integrated tech stack is key here, as buyer intent and sales intelligence tools give your sales team useful insights before ever speaking with a buyer.
- Ditto for fostering collaboration between sales, marketing, and service teams around the buyer’s journey.
- You should also invest in upskilling to make sure your whole team is comfortable using omnichannel tools and speaking to today’s buyers in their own language.
Look to B2B industry leaders for examples
Industries like manufacturing, industrial distribution, and healthcare supply are leading the B2B field in moving to omnichannel. Wisely learning from B2C, businesses in these sectors are making customer experience simpler, highly personalized and increasingly automated.
The organizations getting the most from omnichannel also treat it as a combined sales and marketing effort. Per a recent study by Gartner, businesses that ask their marketing and sales teams to co-create their buying journey are 1.8 times more likely to exceed expected profit.
If you’re just beginning your omnichannel journey, look to these ideas as a starting point. Don’t look at digital as something to add on or a part of your business that’s just for sales and marketing, but as the glue that keeps your entire operation running.
The more you’re willing to rebuild your entire go-to-market strategy around how your customers actually want to buy, the more your business can achieve.
How Wipfli can help
We help you create a seamless online buying experience for your customers. Work with us to implement a B2B omnichannel strategy to strengthen your marketing, sales and retention. Learn more here.
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