Customers are increasingly interested in the speed and convenience of buying industrial products online. But there’s a reason why manufacturers and distributors of complex, configurable industrial systems have been slower to embrace e-commerce. If customers can’t navigate a web interface to find what they need, then it’s frustrating, not convenient. Digital commerce means putting the customer experience first and retaining a role for sales teams to help guide customers to the right solutions. The payoff is more revenue and a lower cost of selling. Fortunately, this isn’t so hard to do. Here are five things you’ll want to address.
Keep Configurability Easy
The biggest challenge with selling industrial systems online is navigating configurations. It’s not like buying shampoo on Amazon. OEM customers might even have their own proprietary designs or configurations. You need to present clear configuration options to the customer without overwhelming them. And it needs to be manageable for your own operations, too.
That starts with presenting a manageable number of base models rather than filling the screen with tiles of product variations that all look the same. Too many pre-configured models are a nightmare to set up and manage when variations change. It also forces the customer to click on several products to understand differences. Instead, sales configuration capabilities let the customer modify the base model. Increasingly, built-in AI assistants will let the customer use plain language to ensure they’re getting what they need. Once ordered, the system will trigger the sales order in your ERP system, creating one or more manufacturing orders for production. For most companies, this makes a multi-day process take minutes.
Fortunately, in my experience about 90% of your orders will come from about 10% of your configurations. You can give your customers standard options that cover 90% of scenarios in the interest of a simpler user experience and still give you and your customers 90% of the benefits of digital commerce. You can then enable online buyers to indicate they need some custom options too and request a quote. This still speeds the process and the sales team can handle the rest as they always have.
Support Flexible Pricing
Selling high volumes of stocked products makes pricing straightforward. Make to order? Not so much. Digital commerce should make complex pricing easy.
At a minimum, customers will expect quantity discount options. You will also want the ability to set customer-specific pricing and terms (which may be specified in a contract) that only employees of that company will see when they log in.
It’s also helpful to accommodate rapidly changing input costs. Anyone who tried to remodel their house during the pandemic witnessed in their own pocketbook how a spike in the price of lumber could double the cost of the project. Supply chain surprises seem here to stay. It should not only be easy to update pricing as needed but helpful to have the opportunity to have a mix of published prices and “quote only,” so a price quote can be provided via email instead. This gives you the flexibility to ensure you don’t inadvertently sell a product at a loss for products with unpredictable input costs or those that are infrequently sold. It’s also valuable for testing pricing for new products.
Keep Product Documentation a Click Away
Customers should be able to conveniently get detailed product information online as they consider their purchases in the e-commerce system. They should have everything they need to know about the product they’re buying, including technical specifications, details on performance characteristics, operational and maintenance information, and regulatory certifications.
Available also means accessible. You want to help customers find spare parts and part numbers so they can easily order them at any time without human order-takers. That mechanical seal in an industrial pump will need to be replaced on occasion. It costs a minimal amount but the pump can’t run well without it. Built-in-AI tools will automatically enable customers to simply click on a part in a PDF and go to an order screen. Automated for you and fast for them.
Accommodate the Buying Team
B2B purchases often involve buying teams. That means different individuals from the same customer company may play different roles. It’s common for an individual to only have authorization to place quotes, for instance, while a different individual is authorized to approve them. This means quotes need to be set at the customer organization level, just as you should be able to set pricing and even product options at the organization level.
It’s also smart in most cases for purchases above a certain amount to require internal review by a sales engineer because once an order goes to manufacturing, there’s no taking it back. It’s one of the ways that the sales team adds value in a digital commerce world — by validating whether the customer’s purchase makes sense for their needs.
Train Sales on a New Role
Buyers may believe that a fully digital process is best, but sales teams remain important for maximizing the value that both customer and manufacturer receive from digital commerce. In fact, according to Gartner’s B2B Buying Report, B2B buyers are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they engage with supplier-provided digital tools in partnership with a sales rep. Gartner also reports that buyer regret is lowest with this hybrid model.
But sales teams need training to learn how to evolve their roles in support of digital commerce. They’re too good to be order-takers, and with digital commerce, they don’t have to be. The sales job shifts away from facilitating the mechanics of transactions or communicating product details. That’s because customers should be able to largely self-service needs for technical product information, pricing configurations, validating payment terms, securing approvals and submitting and tracking orders.
Instead, salespeople are there to ensure that what the customer buys is really what they need. That means being able to help the customer think through their actual requirements, ensuring there are no unexpected roadblocks in the buying process, validating major purchases to avoid any expensive mistakes, and also checking in with existing customers to stay on top of new needs and how new or existing products can address them. This is the heart of value-based selling and a critical role for them in the era of digital commerce.
Digital commerce can accelerate your sales and make life easier for your customers too. It simply comes down to using a platform designed for the way your business runs and your customers buy, and then letting your team focus on higher value work.
Alex Sayyah is the CEO of Aleran Software.
