How To Prepare for the Launch of Your B2B eCommerce Platform by Four51

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HOW TO PREPARE FOR THE LAUNCH OF YOUR B2B ECOMMERCE PLATFORM

Identifying your stakeholders, overcoming technical challenges and communicating your vision

OF 21 Four51, Inc.

CongratulationsBy diving into this eBook, you’re taking the first step toward being the Digital Leader within your organization. As a Digital Leader, you’re dedicated to

• Ensuring your company shares a common vision of how the business should change through digital technologies.

• Communicating the digital transformation vision across internal divisions or departments.

• Believing in radical change’s ability to improve the way they have done business in the past.

Throughout this eBook, use your leadership abilities to help outline a vision and plan for moving your organization towards B2B eCommerce.

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Agenda

1. Introduction

2. Develop Your Business Case and Communicate Your Vision

3. Overcome Technical Challenges

4. Identify Key Stakeholders

5. Measure Results

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IntroductionPreparing for the launch of your B2B eCommerce platform is important in ensuring the success of the project. While thinking about the technology implementation and integration process is vital to the success of the platform, communicating your vision for the platform and managing the change across the organization is just as important.

In this eBook, we’ll outline three big steps you’ll want to take in preparing to launch your B2B e-Commerce platform.

1. Develop a business case that clearly defines your vision

2. Create a plan for getting 5 key organizational stakeholders on-board

3. Follow a simple integration process to overcome technical challenges

Section 1

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Section 2THE CASE FOR B2B eCOMMERCEForrester reports that nearly 75% of B2B buyers say buying from an e-commerce site is more convenient than buying from a sales rep, and 93% say they prefer buying online when they’ve already decided what to buy. It makes sense then that the B2B eCommerce industry is worth roughly $1 trillion in the U.S. alone.

Despite these facts, figures and research, we know that many of your stakeholders can’t see past their current, traditional order entry methods via phone, fax and email. Any kind of change causes nerves as the future becomes unknown. As the industry grows at nearly 4 times the rate of B2C eCommerce

as manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers respond, only 25% of B2B companies today actively sell online, clearly demonstrating this resistance to change from high levels within companies.

In an effort to get your stakeholders on your side, it’s important to clearly communicate your vision for the organization and how you see your new B2B eCommerce platform leading you towards that finish line. In this section we’ll cover the key messages to get across to your stakeholders in making the case for B2B eCommerce.

B2B ECOMMERCE IS BECOMING PERVASIVE. BUT WE DIDN’T HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT!

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$6.7Growth of e-marketplace is helping to drive global B2B online sales to $6.7 trillion by 2020.

As manufacturers and wholesale face more pressure to sell online, worldwide B2B e-commerce sales will hit $6.7 trillion by 2020. This will occur as companies rely less on EDI and more on e-marketplaces like Alibaba.com and AmazonSupply.com Source: Front & Sullivan.

B2B online sales are surging ahead worldwide(B2B e-commerce sales in trillions of dollars, by 2020)

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1. B2B eCommerce Increases Operational Efficiency and Reduce Costs

Four51 Customers found that, before they moved to e-Commerce, most of their ordering processes were taking place over the phone via call centers and, when they spent time analyzing this process, they found that these call centers were actually costing them more than they knew.

We’ve seen organizations go from a $60 per order cost to a $1 per order cost when they move their operations to eCommerce. That is some cost savings your executives can get behind! eCommerce also helps reduce order errors, improves order status and confirmation, thus improving customer service and the overarching customer experience.

• Improve efficiency and reduce costs by automating previously manual, labor intensive processes and providing customer self-service options.

• Reduce staff needed for back-office support, thus lowering costs and growing revenue without adding headcount. Through this process, you’ll be able to refocus your current workers to higher value-adding activities, as they’ll spend less time manually placing phone and fax orders.

• Minimize order errors through an automated system, further eliminating the need for rework after the errors are realized.

FOUR51 CUSTOMERS GO FROM A $60 PER ORDER COST TO A $1 PER ORDER COST

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PER ORDER

CALL CENTER

$1

$60

B2B E-COMMERCE

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2. B2B eCommerce Helps Improve Customer Retention

It’s your job to educate your executives around the New B2B Buyer. Focus on who your users are, how they order, where they spend their time, and report on issues or challenges with your current system that your buyers are facing.

As the younger generation of buyers rises to the ranks, even B2B companies are finding they need to adjust their product marketing strategies to appease the B2C-like shopping behaviors of these buyers. According to Internet Retailer, 83% of B2B survey respondents in reported seeing a supplier’s web site as the most popular channel for conducting research before a purchase.

Don’t forget mobile! In most cases, B2B companies find that their users (in fact, 56% of them) are spending most of their day on their mobile device and are demanding that all of their shopping experiences, including B2B, be accessible via that device. If your company doesn’t respond to this shift in buyer behavior soon, you’re going to lose those mobile buyers (56% of your buyers!).

Describe your business’ buyer (how do they do their work, how do they communicate with colleagues, when are they placing orders?):

• Make it easier for your B2B buyers to do business with you. There are 95 million millennials who are about to take over the American economy1. They’ve grown up with their phones being an extension of their thumbs, and they are going to assume that business is done in the same way.

• Create personalized buying experiences based on each buyers’ buying needs. Streamline purchasing, payment and inventory processes while providing unique product assortment, pricing and business flows that match approval rules and product preferences per user group.

• Improve your responsiveness and meet the demands of your customer base with the ability to do business 24/7.

HELP YOUR EXECUTIVES GET TO KNOW TODAY’S BUYER

1.The Forum: the Research Arm of the Business Marketing Association

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3. Grow the Business and Create New Revenue Generating Opportunities

What is your vision for the organization that B2B eCommerce will help achieve?

• Automating orders allows for your speed-to-market for new products to increase. Orders are captured faster, processed sooner and shipped or handled real-time.

• Reduce risks and costs of entering new markets by creating a scalable process and platform for replication.

• Implementing your B2B eCommerce platform now, helps to ensure your business has the ability to grow and scale later. With the right B2B eCommerce platform, you will be able to support multi-channel architecture. Being boxed in by a platform that isn’t agile or flexible can put you in a bad place for the future of your business.

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Section 3

OVERCOME TECHNICAL CHALLENGESTo realize the value of your eCommerce system, it needs to be integrated with the way your company transacts business and the systems it uses to operate. eCommerce can create problems rather than solve them if the entire order-to-cash and delivery processes aren’t streamlined from front to back. Be sure to work closely with your IT and business systems stakeholders to choose a system that can be tightly integrated with your sales, distribution and accounting systems.

In order to ensure a seamless integration process, follow this step-by-step methodology so that technological challenges that traditionally get in the way of a fast go-to-market strategy are eliminated. A good integration process will allow for efficient project governance and quality management so that you can achieve transparency of value delivery through carefully thought-out and executed communication planning. Here is the 7 step integration process.

“Almost 44% of B2B firms find that integrating with back-office systems has been the primary barrier in effectively implementing new technology.”

-Forrester Consulting (November, 2014).

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The 7 Step Integration Process1. Discovery

Provide initial planning and preparation for the project.

2. AnalysisDocument the integration process requirements, including functional requirements and data needs, source system data inventory and existing integration interfaces, and a gap analysis to indicate interfaces and data points that aren’t already in existence.

3. Architecture and Design Create a solution for completing the integration process including data mapping and transformation, interface transaction design and rapid prototype creation.

4. Development Complete any development related to translating and transforming data within each integration process. Add new data elements and business objects on the eCommerce platform and customer system. Update existing interfaces and create new ones.

5. Quality Testing Ensure seamless and quality integration through in depth code review, system testing, functional testing, regression testing and performance testing.

6. Deployment Go live with an in-depth plan for important key activities and communication amongst key stakeholders and users.

7. Documentation and TransitionGather support documentation and training to ensure a seamless transition to a “run the business” mentality.

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Section 4

IDENTIFY YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL STAKEHOLDERSChange is hard. And it’s even harder when you’re working to change a large, multi to multi-hundred million dollar organization filled with hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of employees, and employees with decades of experiences that has jaded their perspective and energy.

The first step in making change happen is to get people on your team. Leaders and executives within your organization that serve as “champions” for your project, can help you manage the change, communicate the change, and raise excitement and confidence around the change across all levels of the organization.

To identify the champions within your organization, look to the following 5 departments:

“70% of all corporate change initiatives fail.”

-Cracking the Code of Change, Harvard Business Review

1. Finance

2. IT

3. Marketing

4. Sales

5. Operations

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1. FinanceUsually an organization’s finance department is involved in buying decisions for the organization like the purchase and implementation of a B2B eCommerce platform. Getting your key stakeholders within finance on board with the financial impact will be important in creating a successful launch. You’ll want to be prepared for a discussion on the following:

Potential cost associated with the platform, for example:

• Licensing fees

• Subscription fees

• Implementation fees

• UI fees

• Set-up costs

• Other fees and set-up costs

Expected and/or required ROI:

• Costs recovered from reduced order error rates; reduced costs of reshipping after order errors are made; elimination of time spent entering orders

• Productivity gains that allow sales reps to spend time growing the opportunity base, for example

• The growth in sales without the addition of new, full-time employees

Who in your finance department could help champion your efforts?

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2. ITYour IT department can offer consultative help in the implementation and integration of your B2B eCommerce platform. In general, this group will want to understand the benefits of and vision for this new platform as it relates to the information infrastructure of the organization.

This group will likely be involved in one of two ways:

Build the platformUsually this will be in the form of premise-hosted software that may require an internal build.

Buy the platform With the purchase of a cloud-based platform, IT will likely provide consultative help in implementation and integration.

Who in your IT department could help champion your efforts?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER: CLOUD-BASED VS. PREMISE-BASED B2B ECOMMERCE

When considering buying versus building, and cloud-based versus premise-based, make sure you ask yourself the following questions regarding resources, hosting and timing:

Do you want to host the server internally? If you want full control over the server and the ability to host, for example, it down the hall from your office, a premise-based software is probably the way to go.

Can your internal IT resources handle what it takes to host the server? If your IT resources cannot handle the work it would take to maintain the server, a cloud-based platform generally allows you to cut down on internal resources. Make sure you consider additional costs associated with hiring resources needed with the skill-set you are hiring for if you do go the premise-based route.

Can your timeline accommodate a longer implementation and adoption time? Often times a cloud-based platform allows for shorter time to implementation with better access to an efficient distribution model. If you have a tight timeline and a desire to get things off the ground faster, make sure you fully access which direction will allow you to get your company on board faster.

How do your internal standards in regards to security and disaster recovery stack up compared to the vendor’s? For example, what uptime standards do you hold yourself to, and how do those standards compare to that which your vendor offers?

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3. Marketing

With the rise of content marketing and the importance of having your end user’s behavior at the forefront of your strategy, marketing departments are becoming an increasingly important part of every companies’ B2B eCommerce development strategies. A company’s marketing department will want to be involved in everything from its implementation to the strategy around what products should be sold on the site, where, to whom, and how.

Make sure your marketing department is engaged around the development of a consistent customer experience for your B2B buyers and the creation and deployment of an effective communication strategy as the platform is launched.

Who in your marketing department could help champion your efforts?

AS-A-SERVICE APPS DRIVE A DEMAND FOR INNOVATION IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Because of the as-a-service mentality, innovation is happening exponentially and many of us are not even aware that we are participating in it. B2C as-a-service apps like Uber, Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify have taken full advantage of as-a-service innovation. They simplify the lives of users, and their platforms’ great user experiences allow for easy use, again and again. It’s our job to create this same kind of consistent user experience for B2B buyers that they too will want to experience again and again.

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4. Sales

Because B2B eCommerce will likely change the role of your sales reps, you’ll want to generate excitement around this change and paint a picture of the value that it will add to the organization.

With B2B eCommerce eliminating the need for sales reps to place orders manually, Sales reps will now be able to focus on key initiatives of the organization including:

• Modernizing the sales process: With a B2B eCommerce platform, integrated online, mobile and social channels will enable sales reps to interact with customers virtually. Not only this, but sales reps will now be able to offer more real time changes to orders, preferences or pricing. If, for example, a customer changes a product specification, a sales rep can help ensure automatic reflection for the customer online.

• A more consultative approach to selling: Instead of having to manage the manual process of ordering and purchasing for your B2B buyers, sales reps will now be able to spend more time understanding individual customer preferences, offering a more consultative approach to the customer buying experience. Sales reps will be excited about the ability to offer more customized pricing, the opportunity to receive incentives around up-selling initiatives and the knowledge that they are playing a bigger role in ensuring a strong experience for customers.

• Create more opportunities and expand sales within your organization: By spending less time placing orders in your legacy system, you’ll see your sales reps producing more opportunities, and your B2B eCommerce platform attracting new opportunities because of the online ordering process available to them.

Who in your sales department could help champion your efforts?

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5. Operations

B2B eCommerce will allow your organization to create efficiencies in your operational processes across the board. An online ordering platform will enable you to:

• Shorten procurement cycles

• Cut costs through competitive bidding

• Reduce development cycles and accelerate time-to-market through product and process design, regardless of the location of the buyers

• Customize to your specific ordering workflows and purchasing rules

• Create the ability to grow and gain access to world-wide markets at a fraction of the traditional cost

• Ensure that product, marketing information and prices are always up to date

• Increase speed of communication with buyers

• Provide a quick and easy way of exchanging information about the company and its products both internally and externally

Who in your operations department could help champion your efforts?

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Section 5

MEASURE RESULTSOnce your platform has launched, it’s important to keep your key stakeholders engaged. Strong communication, effective test plans and proof of reduced costs and improved ROI will help your organization see the platform’s benefits.

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Track ROI

One way to continue to regain buy-in once your platform is live is by providing details on the return on your investment. You may be asked to provide a specific financial calculation to justify your eCommerce project. Here you’ll want to focus on tangible benefits like:

• Increased sales due to easier buying process, reduced order rates, and catalogs being accessed easier

• Reduced costs due to reduced number of errors

• Reduced costs associated with improved system reliability and less maintenance required for fewer problems to resolve

• Time saved, for example the increase in productivity you’ll see amongst sales reps, and the reduction in time to complete tasks

• Time and cost saved, from reduced length and number of customer service calls

It makes sense that your stakeholders are going to wonder how you’ll run this business with this new ordering platform and what sorts of data, analytics and insights they’ll gain. Intangible benefits can help fully explain the business case and provide further justification for your project. In addition to having better reporting capabilities in regards to your order volume, site traffic, costs and revenue associated with orders, once your B2B eCommerce platform is up and running you’ll be able to pay attention to and report on:

• A deeper look into customer satisfaction

• Ability to offer improved customer service and support

• Increased usability leading to increased sales

• Improved and automated business processes that the new system supports and enables

• Faster and more accurate information and access to buying data

• Better forecasting

Use data to inform stakeholders

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It’s time to start your journey!

B2B eCommerce is one of those big organizational changes that is hard for many companies to swallow. By following some of these best practices, your internal leadership team should feel more empowered and excited about the change in process, creating the opportunity for success across the organization.

After helping to manage change within thousands of big organizations, we have experience managing the worries and stresses of your team. If this is something we can help you prepare for, please email [email protected].

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Assess the B2B industry to remind yourself how quickly it’s growing

Preparing for the Launch Check-List

Here’s a check-list that summarizes many of the steps needed to get ready for the launch of your B2B eCommerce platform. Four51 works with businesses like yours to outline and execute platform launches. If you need help navigating this process or figuring out where to start, please reach out to us to get your questions answered.

Do a competitive audit to find out if you’re processes match or exceed those of your competitors

Review your internal order process and identify gaps or pain points

Calculate your current cost per order

Perform a customer/buyer survey to find out their perception of the current ordering process

Define the customer/buyer

Access current accounts/businesses and define workflows

Craft vision for the new way of ordering include improvements in productivity, reductions in cost, increases in customer satisfaction and sales growth

Define an implementation methodology

Design the desired user experience

Create an integration framework and get all necessary stakeholders on board

Outline internal resource inventory and identify external resources or partners needed

Identify key stakeholders

Communicate vision

Begin!

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CONTAC T US

At Four51, we connect people to products. We give B2B Enterprises the ability to connect and enable online ordering by all types of possible customers and trade partners, all while being faster, easier and better than our competition. Founded in 1999, Four51 offers a cloud-based B2B eCommerce solution called OrderCloud™. The platform allows businesses to grow, scale, improve processes and increase profits by improving their ordering system.

How To Prepare for the Launch of Your B2B eCommerce Platform by Four51

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