B2B Purchase Experience: Digital offerings as a success factor.

Here we explain why speed, accuracy, and the best possible digital offering are so important in B2B commerce.

Offers are the central issue in B2B whether individual products, specific delivery requirements, or customer requests for the best terms the decision is always made on the basis of an offer.

The days when customers would forgive or become accustomed to certain things are over. The uniqueness of your product or service could be a deciding factor. In return, new skills have become more important. It's precisely how you create offers digitally with and for customers that makes the decisive difference!

"The offer alone can make or break any new or existing customer relationship: reason enough to perfect it."

Three decisive factors:

• The right offer: the importance of a commercially sound offer that takes all aspects into account—from terms and conditions to general discounts.

• A quick offer: the relevance of speed, because comparisons between several requested suppliers are taking place in ever shorter time frames.

• The path to the offer: the need to remove obstacles for customers and make the offer easy to find and well presented, as well as making inquiries and orders as convenient as possible. Also referred to as customer experience.

1. Accuracy in Quotation Submission

Key accounts, field sales, and internal sales were responsible for creating individual price lists, general and specific product discounts, separate contract provisions, and a variety of product configurations in order to make compelling offers to customers and take special features of the customer relationship into account.

Digitally enabling this complexity immediately, without manual adjustments, is challenging for the provider. While customers may sense the complexity, they have no real interest in or understanding of it.

Therefore, a new core capability is mapping this process digitally to ensure correct and reliable offers as the basis for orders.

In the process, other requirements, such as the purchaser's approval in buying centers, can also be improved to ensure additional customer satisfaction.

2. Getting a Quote fast

The internet and digitalization are speeding up all processes and decisions. In a competitive environment, the ability to deliver a quote quickly is becoming just as essential as the quality of the product or service being offered. Long wait times for a qualified quote are increasingly becoming a deal breaker and are growing exponentially with every alternative quote available.

According to a study by McKinsey, slowness in preparing and submitting a quote is now the biggest pain point in procurement.

Being able to deliver a quote quickly and efficiently is also the first indicator and outlook for the future business relationship.

Digitization and automation contribute directly to business success and closing deals. This applies equally to the processing of new customers and the handling of existing customers.

The time windows for making ordering decisions are becoming shorter across all industries and borders. Only the integration of systems, automation, and workflows enable this speed.

3. The Experience of Purchasing

The importance of simple and intuitive use (user experience) cannot be overemphasized.

The advantages or even uniqueness of your own product or service are no longer enough to close a deal. Customers and buyers expect the same level of service as they get from Amazon & Co. Long loading times, missing information, and poor processes or information lead to abandoned purchases – and a comparable product with better procurement conditions is almost always available.

Expanding and constantly improving your digital offerings — from findability and product information to fast, tailored offers, transparent delivery, and answering questions at every step — is necessary.

Old collaboration models are becoming irrelevant; growth now comes only from digital offerings. Over 40% of B2B buyers no longer want personal contact. This increases the demand for digital capabilities that can satisfactorily answer all customer questions.

The three topics of speed, accuracy, and purchase experience are closely related and combine in the common requirement for modern software solutions as a central part of corporate strategy and infrastructure.

A study by Supply Chain Quarterly shows that 90% of all B2B buyers will switch suppliers if they fail to keep pace with the development of IT capabilities.

We believe that the opportunities outweigh the risks and that the B2B purchasing experience must become a fundamental part of every B2B company.

In addition to the necessary budgets, the mindset is particularly important. Only those who recognize this opportunity and do not cling to past or existing processes can be successful.

As a digital partner, we help to identify these opportunities and then implement them in a sustainable manner.