Why having a B2B eCommerce strategy isn’t enough

Let’s cut right to the chase; having a B2B eCommerce strategy and business case isn’t enough for most companies.
I mean that with all sincerity.
A business case is a must-have for IT resources. Odds are your IT team is overworked  – they are everywhere – and have a backlog of prioritized projects that need to get done. I worked for a certain tech-titan where the backlog for reviewing projects submitted to IT was 9 months. That’s 9 months just to have your project reviewed.
The fact of the matter is, without a good business case and numbers behind the effort, IT can’t pragmatically take on your project before others.
Let’s assume you have a clear business case outlined.
Now for the go-to-market strategy. Even in a B2B scenario, where you might simply be migrating users from one process to the next, you need a clearly-defined GTM.
Let’s also assume you have one of these, but let’s take it a step further.
I’m talking about onboarding.
The problem with most B2B strategies is that they don’t actually account for execution or adoption of their platform. It’s almost entirely focused on cost, timelines, architecture, design, who, how, and what. From an adoption perspective, it’s a “if you build it, they will come” mentality for a lot of companies.
This is very common. But, not too surprising when you think about it. B2B business units at enterprise companies are mostly tasked with making things easier, solving a problem, or making an improvement at the request of one of their stakeholders.
Unfortunately, B2B solutions tend to be far more complicated than B2C, in both design and use, with less than half of the onboarding and training provided to the end-users. Talk about throwing money out of a window.
As a consultant, I saw this all the time. Companies would spend millions of dollars to either create or re-platform their B2B eCommerce site, but give little thought on how their end-user might adopt the new solution.
They’d roll it out, with a big congratulations from the marketing executives, only to find that the user-experience is sub-par and only 40% of their end-users are actually using the product. All that money they wanted to save from a customer-service perspective, gone. But hey, the new eCommerce platform was “generating” revenue.
Proof is in the pudding here. Young SaaS companies like Pendo and WalkMe have seen explosive growth because companies realize they needed a better onboarding/tutorial plan.
And If your business objective is to move from phone and fax orders to a more efficient, B2B platform, the risks of poor adoption are even higher than if you were simply re-platforming.
Don’t get caught with a great idea, but poor plan of execution.
At Corevist, we understand that. And as a trusted partner, we want to help improve the efficiency of your ecommerce platform rollout.
Interested in learning more about our experience and how we can be a trusted advisor to you? Check out our SAP eCommerce page.

A little about me:
Before joining the Corevist team, I worked for a successful consulting firm in the ecommerce space. Before that, I worked on the B2B ecommerce store at Cisco, and before that I worked for a B2B SaaS company. I’ve had my fair share of B2B work, and am fortunate enough to have seen and worked with so many great companies in the space.