Commerce Talk

Embracing B2B Digital Transformation (Part One)

Jeff Schaffner, Business Development Team Lead here at Acro, discusses when and why B2B organizations should embrace change in the form of a digital transformation.

Older, antiquated systems often hinder innovation, making it harder for established B2B organizations to grow and adjust to changing buying behaviours. Learn how a digital transformation initiative can improve workflows and customer experience while ensuring that you are keeping up with or outpacing your competition. Watch now.  

Transcript

Hey everybody, it's Jeff Schaffner here again with another episode of Commerce Talk.

Today, we're going to be starting part one of a two-part series discussing the pivotal role of digital transformation within the business-to-business space, or B2B space. 

Digital transformation, just to start out with, does sound like a buzzword, and maybe it is, but it is definitely not a trend. Companies are continuously looking to their competitors, they're looking to the market to innovate, to stay ahead of and to continue to grow as technology continues to evolve. 

There are clear signs indicating when to embrace change, and that's what we will be talking about here in part one. Just a couple of simple steps. The first is talking about what you have, so the legacy systems. 

Many companies operate on these older antiquated systems that are 10 to 20 years old, and while your business is familiar with these, they're typically going to be hindering innovation. So, if you feel like you're restricted by the outdated system limiting your customer engagement or fulfillment, then it may be time to consider ways to restructure your business operations to improve workflow and customer satisfaction, which, of course, is always the big one.

Competitive benchmarks. Don't look away from your competitors, look at them for sure. So if they are ahead of you, or if they're behind you, of course, and there's a missed Market opportunity, then that's definitely going to be a green flag or a call to action to say let's get on it, let's make sure that we are the ones that are leading the charge. But you're competitors around you you should be taking a look at and doing an audit of maybe every few months.

Ecommerce is a big one here. So, the nuances of B2B ecommerce are that it is not like a simple customer transaction, in the fact that we're just selling shirts here. We don't have sizes and colors and here's the product.

When dealing with B2B ecommerce, it's typically best to work with an agency simply because the solutions can do complex things, like enhance your sales team's fulfillment capabilities, and you're dealing with a lot of different companies and a lot of different databases. Also, there's going to be, you know, improvements on things like the customer satisfaction levels, of real-time interactions and product modelling to be able to help companies understand what it is they're buying better. That is where an agency is going to be able to be a big assistance, especially with the planning phase and the architecting of what that's going to look like.

That's pretty much it for today, I'm already over time, but if you do recognize any of these challenges or opportunities within your company, then it might be time to discuss what a digital transformation journey would look like for you.

I think in part two, we're going to break down what it looks like to work with a company like Acro Commerce when we're looking to guide you through the process of these large lifts.

Thanks again for tuning in, it's been a pleasure. This has been Commerce Talk, I'm Jeff Schaffner, and I will see you in the next segment.

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