Dear Distributors,
You have an opportunity.
The B2B eCommerce industry is worth roughly $1 trillion in the U.S. alone today, according to estimates from Gartner Group and Forrester Research, Inc. This is not to mention the fact that the industry is growing at nearly 4 times the rate of B2C eCommerce as distributors like you respond to the growing demand among buyers to buy online and on-the-go.
Not only are your buyers demanding it, but soon your business is going to demand it, too.
Getting your offline users online is going to benefit your business by improving retention, driving top line growth and saving money.
- The retention story usually looks like this: build an electric fence around your customer. Once they are buying online, you got ‘em, because technology is sticky. It’s a barrier to switching. And it’s a competitive advantage for you and your business. Every distributor out there has email and can take orders via email. But they can’t respond with the swiftness and accuracy that your customers demand today with email ordering forever. B2B eCommerce is vital if you are going to retain today’s buyers.
- In addition to the fence, there are top line benefits. Something magical happens when you load up your new B2B eCommerce sites with the right mix of products…people buy them! This is an important message to spread to your offline users that are considering moving online. We often talk to offline users about starting with a single product line (like business cards) as a starting point, and then expanding from there until your solution becomes a true ordering hub. This helps to streamline reporting, eliminate redundant systems and gain purchasing power.
- Finally, there are cost saving benefits to moving online. The appeal goes something like this: What if your CSRs didn’t have to deal with these four big operational inefficiencies?
- Taking an order using phone/fax/email — slow, error prone
- Responding to “Where’s my order?” calls and emails
- Running reports on order activity
- Selling fewer products due to capacity
By giving your CSRs the opportunity to take orders online through an easy to use B2B eCommerce platform, you’re giving them the ability to streamline their efforts and focus on activities that will provide more value to your organization at large, like more consultative selling and a more personalized approach. Generally, when we see customers move their ordering platforms online, they experience exponential cost savings in the form of costs per order.
Another way to look at this, is if your best sales rep works with 5 clients per month, you know that adding 1 more client offline is going to create more human-intensive work for that sales rep. In general, this isn’t a very scalable strategy if your goal is to add more than 1 new client per month in the future. If you get comfortable with the way things are now, you’re going to find yourself hiring more and more sales reps as your business grows over time. This will eat up your margins and take away from the bottom line. Adding 1 more client online, however, isn’t going to add to your reps’ human-intensive workload, and you’re going to be able to scale that growth rate much easier.
You have an opportunity to improve the course of your business and move your offline users online. If there’s anything we can do to help you do that, please email us at info@four51.com.
Sincerely,
Four51
[Photo by Flickr Artist Austin Cadore]
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Labels: cost savings, B2B eCommerce, customer satisfaction