There are plenty of benefits for a brand wanting to introduce B2B eCommerce to its business - laser-focussed targeting, access to a wider audience, and lots of valuable customer data, to name a few. But, to facilitate this change, and make it as successful as possible, there are a few factors to consider.

Your new platform will come with a variety of digital touchpoints that your customers will use to interact with your brand. But, building long-lasting relationships with customers can be challenging when they’re nurtured through online platforms alone. This is why it’s essential for your B2B sales teams to work collaboratively with your eCommerce platform. Your platform should be able to do all the heavy-lifting when it comes to managing orders, while your sales teams focus on providing that all-important human touch.

That’s why it’s essential to establish a solid change management plan. This plan should include clear objectives, strong leadership commitment with regular input from key stakeholders, a solid communication strategy, and information around training and development.

Having a change management plan in place will help things run smoothly, but it’s important to remember that introducing eCommerce into your business will still have a considerable impact on your teams and how they work. This is why you need to take the time to really think about the people involved in this process, and how their roles and responsibilities fit into your B2B eCommerce plans.

Establishing clear roles and responsibilities across your different teams, like marketing, customer service, and sales, will help you avoid any unnecessary confusion along the way, and ensure you’re making the most of the opportunities that B2B eCommerce can provide.

Let’s start with your sales reps. They often lead the charge with business development and client relationships, and traditionally, would be the single point of contact for a customer. Nowadays, there are many different touchpoints that B2B customers go through, so the role of a sales rep needs to become more collaborative. Working with other teams, like marketing and customer service representatives, and learning to make the most of eCommerce capabilities, will help your sales team improve sales and customer satisfaction across all of your online and offline channels.

This leads us onto your marketing specialists. B2B eCommerce unlocks a wealth of additional online marketing opportunities and touchpoints to engage with customers. Among them are onsite promotions, like banners on the home pages and category pages of your site, or cross and upsell features on product detail pages and at checkout.

These can also be delivered through third-party platforms like marketplaces or distributor websites. This is called digital retail media, and it’s on the rise in B2B as well as B2C eCommerce. So, your marketing specialists will be managing any of these new online marketing tactics and ensuring all runs smoothly.

For customer service, B2B eCommerce raises the bar in terms of expectations. B2B customers often share the same high expectations of customer service that B2C customers have. This means they’re likely to be looking for fast response times and more availability. But not to worry, there are many ways your brand can meet these growing expectations and maintain a great customer experience. For example, automation tools like chatbots are great for responding to everyday customer queries and can be available around the clock.

So, the three roles we’ve looked at so far will be collaborating quite a lot to make your B2B eCommerce a success. Before we move on to the other roles to consider, it’s important to note that your messaging and marketing calendars should be aligned across all of your digital touchpoints, which will require good collaboration between marketing, sales and customer service teams. You’ll want to make sure that your customers aren’t seeing one offer online, and then being given a different offer by a sales rep during an in-person visit.

Now, there are two key players that will be keeping a close eye on all of your eCommerce activity.

First, there’s the eCommerce manager. They’ll be concentrating on developing the eCommerce strategy and managing the eCommerce platform, including its experience and its performance. They’ll work closely with the other teams we’ve already covered to establish the best product assortment and online marketing, to deliver the most effective campaigns.

Finally, the general manager will be leading the charge. They’ll be looking after overall strategic planning, budgeting and decision-making. The general manager will also be responsible for ensuring the different teams work collaboratively towards your overall business objective.

We should also mention that when your business starts to integrate B2B eCommerce, your priorities and budgets will likely start to shift, too. This can cause frustrations across teams, so it’s important to recognize and reward the contributions of individuals during this process.

Recognizing individual achievements and rewarding teams for their hard work is key to incentivising and encouraging them during your transition to B2B eCommerce. This is why it’s essential that your business has a clear reward framework, aligned with your overall business objective. This framework should include compensation and recognition for performance or achievements, and needs to provide clear development paths to keep teams motivated.

As an example, you could reward sales reps for new leads and repeat orders by offering a bonus when they meet a specific target, while your marketing specialist might be rewarded for overall marketing effectiveness and the return-on-investment for campaigns.

When you’re putting together a reward framework, don’t be afraid to get your teams involved in the process. They probably have some suggestions of their own that could be quite valuable. After all, they’ll know which form of recognition would mean the most to them. And, having some input will help foster a sense of ownership towards their own contribution to your B2B eCommerce success.

Implementing B2B eCommerce

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