Businesses in the B2B space have always been subject to dynamic market conditions and shifting trends. While digitization isn’t new, its rapid acceleration post-COVID has stretched businesses’ ability to adapt to the fullest extent.
There are a number of pain points that make B2B commerce particularly challenging compared to B2C:
- Intricate procurement processes
- The involvement of multiple stakeholders in every buying decision
- Complex inventory and supply chain management
- Highly competitive and fluid pricing trends
- Managing complex ecosystems with various essential tools
- Navigating a stringent web of regulatory requirements
Furthermore, B2B commerce requires very different channels of communication and distribution, each with its own inherent challenges. Relationship-selling and bulk transactions are other cornerstones of the B2B market, which makes it very different in practice from B2C.
Even if you use D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) to bypass traditional intermediaries and reach consumers directly, you’ll face some of these challenges.
TMG partners with forward-thinking organizations to innovate and reach digital maturity. Our B2B services are tailored to the unique challenges of enterprise businesses, leveraging our team’s extensive industry experience across the manufacturing, wholesale, life sciences, and automotive sectors.
We partner with you to provide expertly crafted digital strategies to enhance your operational efficiency, reduce churn, and future-proof your business.
Below, we’ll look at concrete examples of the pain points B2B businesses face and how TMG helps address them:
1. Complex Sales Cycles
When dealing with B2B customers, you likely won’t be selling to a single person. You’ll need to convince various stakeholders with different roles and responsibilities. As part of the client’s procurement process, you may even need to formally receive approval at multiple points.
Just as you have your own controls and procedures in place, so do they.
This significantly complicates the sales journey. Instead of having a single customer profile to keep in mind, you may need several at different times. It also means that individual sales take much longer than in B2C — from months to over a year.
This has several consequences. First, it greatly complicates the sales process. You need to keep track of more information about the company, its stakeholders, and its procurement processes.
Secondly, because sales cycles are longer, it can bottleneck or restrict cash flow. You may work a long time on a sale that may or may not pan out, and even then, you may need to wait a while longer for payments to be finalized.
What’s the solution?
The solution is to minimize your reliance on manual processes and digitize the experience. Tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can integrate all your client data into a centralized system.
TMG offers enterprise eCommerce solutions to help sellers streamline and modernize their sales processes. We’ll help you centralize all your sales operations so that your agents have all the data they need at their fingertips at all times.
At the same time, you’ll be able to better synchronize and coordinate sales not only within your sales team but across all your finance and marketing operations.
2. Customer Relationship Management
Fostering healthy and mutually beneficial relationships is crucial in the B2B space. Every customer has the potential to lead to a high-value, long-term contract.
However, relationship management is inherently more challenging when dealing with an organization instead of a single person. With multiple stakeholders and a whole organization to understand, your CRM system and practices must be able to handle the complexities of handling multiple profiles.
Poor CRM practices can lead to missed opportunities, customer churn, and a negative brand reputation. They also directly impact your bottom line, with winning a new customer costing 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one.
What’s the solution?
When dealing with B2B customers, effective CRM depends on streamlining the integration of sales, analytics, inventory, and warehousing systems. The CRM solution you decide to use should also be geared towards handling the nuances of B2B customer data and seamlessly integrate with these solutions.
TMG takes a holistic approach, helping you get set up with a CRM that integrates CRM, ERP, and other related systems. This will empower your teams to deliver personalized customer experiences and manage your relationships with minimal friction.
3. Inventory and Supply Chain Management
B2B companies face unique challenges regarding managing inventory levels and supply chain logistics. Depending on your industry and each individual customer, the timing, size, and types of orders can be massively variable compared to B2C commerce.
This can lead to various inefficiencies in your inventory management processes that can spill over into your sales and impact your bottom line. For example:
- Overstocking can lead to logistical issues and increased warehousing costs.
- Stockouts can stall or kill sales, causing a loss of income.
- Repeated issues with running out of stock or being unable to fulfill deliveries in time can harm your reputation.
What’s the solution?
TMG will advise you on developing solutions to streamline supply chain operations for B2B sales. We’ll empower you to achieve real-time inventory visibility with tools to help efficiently coordinate with suppliers. This will help you keep your inventory and acceptable levels according to your sales forecasts and current sales pipeline.
TMG can help businesses transition from outmoded ERP systems to dedicated order management systems (OMS). OMS helps manage orders originating from different sales channels and locations in an integrated platform. By automating the entire sales cycle, from fulfillment to tracking to returns and exchanges, you can easily scale B2B sales.
Plus, with data-driven insights and analytics, you’ll be able to stay on top of all vital inventory management metrics.
All of this helps B2B customers maintain a seamless flow from inventory management to order fulfillment. With your products always there when they’re needed, you won’t have to turn away customers.
4. Pricing and Discount Management
Effectively managing pricing and discount strategies is crucial to driving customer engagement and building long-term relationships. However, once again, it’s more challenging in the B2B context due to the differences in purchasing power, order volumes, and unique requirements of customers.
Plus, the stakes are much higher regarding ensuring profitability. Studies have shown that just a 1% price increase can boost operating profits by as much as 8%. So, it’s vital that your pricing strategies are accurate to achieve the healthy profit margins you need.
Manually setting prices and discounts comes with the risk of human error or other inconsistencies. Plus, with dynamic and fluctuating market conditions, it can be hard to respond to changes fast enough to remain competitive. This can cause you to lose out to competitors or damage customer loyalty.
What’s the solution?
TMG can help you take on the challenge of accurate and dynamic pricing strategies by employing sophisticated pricing and discount management tools. We empower businesses to find ways to create, manage, and apply optimal pricing strategies dynamically and at scale.
This way, you can ensure that your pricing models are consistent and error-free. And, more importantly, that your pricing strategies support your goals for revenue generation and growth. At the same time, you can take advantage of changing trends to optimize customer satisfaction without damaging your profitability.
5. Integration with Existing Systems
Often, B2B businesses end up with a messy ecosystem of monolithic solutions with no clear idea of how they fit into the bigger picture. ERP, CRM, and OMS solutions are all fundamental to operating a healthy, efficient, and profitable B2B business in this day and age.
However, the challenge is to effectively integrate them to maximize the benefits without further complicating your sales processes. This means enabling real-time data flow and updates across platforms and teams, eliminating time-consuming manual data entry tasks, and reducing the risk of errors.
Poor integration, on the other hand, can result in operational inefficiencies and data silos. Businesses lose hundreds of millions, as much as 20-30% in revenue annually due to data silos alone.
On top of hurting a business’ profitability, manual data transfer also leads to operational delays, which can negatively impact customer satisfaction. Not to mention the typical risk of errors due to manual data transfer.
What’s the solution?
TMG offers customized solutions that ensure your entire ecosystem is seamlessly integrated. We thoroughly analyze your existing infrastructure and advise you on using middleware and direct integration techniques to ensure flawless communication between systems.
This provides your teams with a unified view of data across your enterprise, allowing you to act faster and from a more informed position. You’ll benefit from enhanced decision-making, streamlined operations, and improved customer satisfaction.
6. Regulatory Compliance and Security
B2B transactions are typically governed by strict regulatory requirements. This includes robust security measures, transparent privacy policies, and other safeguards to protect sensitive business information.
Globally, there are many different regulatory frameworks, like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and others. In today’s global economy, that means that you often need to balance multiple standards at the same time.
Also, if you fall victim to a cybersecurity attack and it’s found that you’re non-compliant, it could result in double the punishment through additional fines and legal costs.
According to the Ponemon Institute, non-compliance costs businesses upwards of $14 million in fines and penalties. That’s not even taking into account losses due to a damaged reputation, which can be far more significant in the long-term.
Businesses must implement the necessary security measures and mechanisms to ensure ongoing compliance to mitigate these risks. These may include regular audits, employee training, and deploying advanced security technologies.
What’s the solution?
TMG addresses these concerns by helping you implement robust security measures and compliance controls in our solutions. Put the safeguards in place so that you can focus on your core business with peace of mind.
Our team has the necessary expertise in various regulatory statutes to help ensure that your B2B commerce practices are both secure and compliant. This will help you minimize risk to your own company, as well as foster trust among your stakeholders and clients.
There are enough threats out there today; don’t let your business be a target of fines, legal challenges, and the erosion of trust.
Conclusion
If you’re facing one or more of these issues, you’re not alone. Many businesses in the B2B space struggle with these pain points due to the inherently more complex nature of their sales and customer needs.
More and more, businesses in the B2B space are turning to digital transformation to help them get better outcomes.
TMG is a full-service digital experience and engineering firm focusing on helping commerce and B2B businesses. We go beyond offering you off-the-shelf solutions to resolve these pain points yourself. We partner with you and guide you on your journey to becoming more streamlined, adaptable, and profitable.
