Siloed sales and digital commerce processes and technology in B2B organizations can severely hinder growth and innovation. Learn in this article how Emporix empowers commerce leaders to master hybrid selling and deliver superior omnichannel experiences.
In many (or even most) B2B organizations, we observe a huge disconnect between the sales and digital commerce (aka ecommerce) teams. This gap hinders a consistent and integrated buying experience across all channels, limiting growth.
Imagine a world where sales and digital commerce work together, sharing data, processes and technology to create a seamless experience for shoppers. As a result, growth would be faster, customer satisfaction higher and efficiency maximized. For many companies, however, this opportunity remains untapped due to siloed processes and technologies.
B2B companies often struggle with siloed sales and digital commerce processes within their organizations. Unaligned workflows can lead to significant inefficiencies, fragmented buying experiences and, as a consequence, missed opportunities. Without a unified strategy for hybrid selling, organizations face inconsistent pricing, order fulfillment issues and delays, and other negative effects that annoy buyers. Orchestrating processes across multiple teams is critical to ensuring smooth operations and maintaining a competitive advantage.
Many B2B businesses still rely on legacy systems that lack the flexibility and scalability to keep up with the speed of digitization. These systems have typically been highly customized over time, making development and maintenance complex and costly. As a result, each adjustment and even each necessary update becomes a major project. Releasing innovations can take very long. Not to mention the risks that come with any change to a system packed with poor code and technical debt. We call this the customization trap.
Today's B2B buyers expect seamless interactions across multiple channels – in-person, customer portals, voice assistant, and even social media. However, integrating all relevant touchpoints can be challenging for businesses, leading to fragmented and inconsistent buying experiences. Implementing a hybrid selling strategy ensures seamless transactions and a unified view of the customer journey by centrally orchestrating processes, data and technologies for an outstanding omnichannel commerce.
Unlike the consumer business, B2B sales still relies heavily on person-to-person interaction. At the same time, the proportion of B2B businesses seeking to gather information and buy online is growing. However, buyers still expect to have a human point of contact. The concept of Hybrid Selling combines offline and online commerce into a unified buying experience.
Hybrid selling requires a flexible blend of digital and in-person interactions to meet various buying needs across different stages of the buyer's journey. Sales and digital commerce teams have to align various digital touchpoints such as the online shop, app or social platforms with traditional in-person contacts. This agility ensures a seamless customer experience and fosters deeper relationships and trust, while also meeting the growing demand for convenience and 24/7 accessibility throughout the buying process.
Hybrid sales teams require real-time data to track customer behavior, predict trends and identify opportunities across various sales channels. Integrated data analytics provides valuable insights across all sales channels, enabling centralized control and orchestration of the hybrid buying experience. Process intelligence sets the stage for making informed decisions, personalizing interactions and taking action to increase sales. This not only boosts efficiency and speed, but also strengthens competitive advantage in fast-pace markets.
Advanced, composable technologies and capabilities that support tailored orchestration, scalability and innovation make up the backbone of hybrid selling. By investing in adaptable tech stacks, businesses can quickly realign their sales tactics, streamline processes and stay ahead of customer expectations. The orchestration of commerce processes and AI capabilities, e.g. for data analytics and highly personalized shopping experiences, is a game-changer. This is where Emporix’ AI-driven Commerce Orchestration Platform comes into play.
Hybrid selling requires full integration of processes, technologies and data from both worlds, field sales and digital commerce. The Emporix Commerce Orchestration Platform enables B2B businesses to dynamically optimize and personalize customer interactions based on real-time process intelligence - without having to build or customize software services.
Emporix provides a next-generation commerce platform that empowers businesses to go beyond composability and is designed to meet specific B2B commerce requirements. It enables companies not only to orchestrate technologies and capabilities across business units and sales channels, but also to flexibly adapt hybrid selling processes along the entire buyer journey to rapidly changing requirements. In this way, the Emporix platform lays the foundation for future-proof composable commerce that grows and changes with new challenges and opportunities.
The heart of the Emporix Commerce Orchestration Platform is the AI-driven Orchestration Engine (OE). It is the first technology that can capture and automate the many processes that are critical to managing B2B commerce operations with one agile, code-free solution. Using the Emporix Orchestration Engine, processes can be customized where the requirements are best understood - within the business teams - and each process can be created straight out so that even smaller projects and test scenarios can be implemented with minimum effort. This level of agility pleases both customers and business teams in commerce and IT.
Emporix features all technology principles that B2B businesses expect from a fully fledged, MACH-compliant composable commerce platform: microservices, API-first, cloud-ready and headless. However, Emporix goes one step further with its unique Orchestration Engine, providing radical flexibility for innovation at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This is achieved by taking processes out of the custom code trap that many commerce platforms face and giving these processes a purpose-built, no-code layer with limitless flexibility.
B2B buyers' expectations for streamlined omnichannel experiences that they are used to as private consumers are constantly growing. At the same time, increasing competition is forcing B2B businesses to go the extra mile. The agility to respond flexibly to market shifts and new opportunities is becoming vital. In this scenario, commerce orchestration is a must.
The benefits Emporix offers are as manifold as the new opportunities and capabilities this unique next-generation commerce platform provides. B2B businesses are well advised to keep Emporix in mind when planning to take their digital commerce to the next level.