Selling online to your business partners is not just about sharing data, it’s about providing a simple and seamless sales experience. In other words: recognizing the difference between data interface and user interface is essential to a successful B2B implementation.
Let’s imagine you’re managing sales for a major corporation. Your mission is to sell a large volume of product to your major business partners. It’s a competitive environment and increasingly you need to sell your goods online. There are such obvious savings in time and overhead costs compared with the traditional ‘sales rep’ model.
Most often your company will have an existing in-house inventory management system. Typically this is a ‘legacy system’ you’ve had since forever - it may even predate the rise of the internet. Some businesses have been misled into thinking that all they have to do to sell online is integrate these existing supply chain management systems with their client relationship management systems, slap a web page on the front as a log-in interface – and they’re ‘good to go’. This is what IT consultants like to call Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) – the solution to all your data management worries.
But hold on! There’s a flaw in this approach. Simply opening your ‘in-house’ system to your sales partners and sharing your data with them doesn’t amount to a successful sales relationship. In fact, it shows a failure to understand your ‘audience’: the customers who you expect to actually use this sales channel.
Typically your inventory management system is used by a few employees; they’re well-trained in its use, and they use it all day, every day. Typically these interfaces (what you actually see on the screen) are ‘system-driven’. This means that they present all the product data in its rawest form, because the system users (‘your guys’) already know all the data and the products it describes. Furthermore, ‘your guys’ are paid to play, so there’s no incentive to make the system easy and convenient to use.
So sharing this with your customers is a recipe for disaster, isn’t it? Your B2B customers don’t know your products, they probably don’t want to understand your inventory systems, and they certainly don’t want to spend all day trying to place their orders. You can’t expect them to be willing to train to use your system, and you can’t assume they’re all the kind of geeks who are able to nut it out for fun.
A successful online B2B relationship is not just about transactions – it’s about managing your relationship with your client. The key to this is the same as in any other sales relationship - knowing your customers and understanding their needs. These people don’t work for you, in fact often they don’t even ‘have’ to do business with you. But they may choose to do so if the experience is easy and convenient.
And that’s the key right there – your customers’ experience of the ordering process. If they can’t understand the screen interface intuitively, if it involves apparently needless steps or screens, and if it fails to easily communicate all the information they need to make purchasing decisions: then it’s not fit for purpose.
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