WHITEPAPER
Get Buy-In For Your B2B Portal
Understand the needs of stakeholders so you can pitch accordingly
Though B2B portals are essential for manufacturers, it’s challenging to get buy-in. Here are the pain points of each stakeholder and the value that a portal offers each of them.
WHITEPAPER
Understand the needs of stakeholders so you can pitch accordingly
Though B2B portals are essential for manufacturers, it’s challenging to get buy-in. Here are the pain points of each stakeholder and the value that a portal offers each of them.
Depending on your role, you may need multiple stakeholders to sign off on your Corevist B2B portal. Due to organizational politics and competing priorities, this can be challenging! However, it doesn’t have to be hard. The secret is 1) to understand the concerns of your stakeholders, and 2) to explain how a B2B portal solves specific problems that they care about. This is much easier than it sounds. In this whitepaper, we’ll help you understand the concerns of each stakeholder in your organization. But first off, let’s answer a critical question about your organization.
Is your organization independent, or do you have a parent company?
Your strategy for building consensus will look different depending on your organizational structure. If you don’t have a parent company, you’ll have more control over your own destiny. You can make strategic investments without seeking consensus outside your company. If you do have a parent company, your proposal strategy needs to take into account the concerns of the parent company. Otherwise, you may not get approval for the strategic investment that you need. Let’s look at your strategy for each group of stakeholders. Click to jump:
1. Stakeholders Within Your Organization
2. Parent Company Stakeholders
3. The Takeaway
1. Stakeholders Within Your Organization
Whether you have a parent company, or you control your own strategic investments, it’s essential to get buy-in from leaders in your organization. You’ll want to understand each stakeholder’s perspective and how a B2B portal solves some of their problems. Here are the stakeholders you’ll need to get on board (and what matters to each one).
CEO pain points
Whether they’re new, or they’ve been with you for years, your CEO likely has a change mandate. Your company is facing new challenges in the digital age, and the CEO is tasked with delivering profitability in the midst of rapidly-shifting market conditions. Whatever the situation, your CEO is looking to increase profit, reduce cost, and offer the digital experiences that customers demand.
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| The company’s customer experience is lagging behind the competition, and customers are leaving. | You can launch the portal your customers need in 30 days, then grow with additional functionality. |
| CEO has a transformation mandate, but your company doesn’t have the resources for “big bang” IT projects. | Corevist transforms customer experience in 30 days at a competitive price point, with minimal internal resources needed to support. |
| Digital transformation projects don’t always increase profitability. | Corevist B2B portals reduce customer service workload without increasing IT workload, and these cost savings can be turned back into profit. In the Scale package, Corevist’s online ordering and merchandising capabilities give marketers the ability to grow revenue from new and existing accounts. |
| Your DSO (days sales outstanding) metric doesn’t look great. You’re stuck with paper-based processes for A/R, and this waste is affecting profitability. | With a payments add-on to any Corevist package, you can empower your customers to pay off invoices online through self-service. |
COO or VP of customer service
The VP of operations will see a direct benefit from the B2B portal. Customer satisfaction increases with self-service, which helps prevent customer churn. The portal also reduces the burden that reps face from mundane inquiries. This empowers reps to pivot to higher-value tasks and achieve a better work/life balance.
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| Support processes and systems are too complex. | Your customers get one destination (the self-service portal) for post-order care. Meanwhile, our SAP ERP integration requirements help you clean up business processes for good in SAP. |
| Customer service reps are overworked, focused on your biggest accounts, and struggling to serve low-revenue accounts. | Corevist B2B portals put routine customer service back in the hands of customers, regardless of account size. |
| Routine inquiries keep customer service reps from working on higher-value tasks. | With customers self-serving for all routine inquiries, your reps can focus on value-added activities. |
CIO or VP of IT
The VP of IT wants to make sure your company doesn’t bite off more than it can chew in terms of technology. They’ll be most concerned about ERP integration, data integrity, security, and support requirements. They may also have a mandate to show ROI from business systems.
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| B2B eCommerce projects are usually a disaster because nobody knows how to integrate with SAP ERP. | Corevist is integrated to SAP on Day 1, right out of the box. This eliminates the biggest risk to the project. |
| IT staff have no capacity to support a net-new system. | Corevist is a managed B2B portal platform that includes SAP ERP integration. Most of our clients have no full-time resources dedicated to supporting Corevist. |
| Adding a new B2B portal platform, plus a third-party SAP connector, will increase technical debt. | Corevist is a managed cloud solution. We handle all maintenance, support, and upgrades for the entire stack, which means you don’t have to worry about technical debt. |
CFO
Selling Corevist to your finance leader is easy because of our prebuilt product and clear implementation windows. It’s easy to forecast costs and ROI, and our modular packaging lets you start small and grow when you’re ready.
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| B2B eCommerce projects force us to write blank checks to multiple vendors. It’s impossible to predict costs or a firm ROI timeline. | Corevist implementations offer clear cost forecasting, and you work with only one vendor. |
| Our DSO (days sales outstanding) metric doesn’t look great. We’re stuck with paper-based processes for A/R. | With a payments add-on to any Corevist package, you can empower your customers to pay off invoices online through self-service. This reduces DSO and speeds up your order-to-cash process. |
If you have a parent company, you need to know what they want to see in a B2B portal project. Will they find value in a platform that they can use globally, for all divisions? In that case, you’ll want to explain the economies of scale that Corevist offers. Our architecture makes it easy to launch one “flagship” B2B portal, then roll out numerous “spinoff” sites with minimal effort. Read more here: 6 Steps To Executing A Global B2B Portal Program. On the other hand, your parent company may take a different view. They may see a B2B portal for your division as an unwanted cost and risk. They may even push you toward a global program that they’re rolling out in all divisions—one that doesn’t meet your unique needs. If that’s the case, you’ll want to focus on two things in your pitch.
- The unique business need that your division faces.
- How Corevist meets that need quickly, with minimal investment (and no additional IT burden).
With that in mind, let’s look at the concerns of parent company stakeholders.
CIO
A parent company’s CIO has to look at the big picture. They’re under pressure to roll out large, multi-function suites across all divisions. While this approach seems to promise efficiency, it’s dangerous if your division just needs a B2B portal for existing dealers and distributors. That’s because most corporate-level B2B eCommerce programs will force your division to buy into a huge project—when all you need is a self-service portal.
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| We already have a plan to get every division onto our corporate B2B eCommerce platform in the next 3 years, so this isn’t the right move. | Corevist empowers you to get online in 30 days with no capital investment and no need to engage multiple vendors in a massive project. Corevist can serve as a temporary B2B portal solution while the corporate rollout ramps up—or we can coexist alongside the corporate platform. That platform may not be a good fit for dealers and distributors anyway. |
| You’re asking for a B2B portal that’s integrated to the corporate SAP ERP system, but I can’t possibly support that with existing staff. | Corevist is a managed, fully-integrated cloud solution. Most of our clients have no full-time resources dedicated to supporting Corevist. |
| I can’t allow a B2B portal to integrate with our corporate SAP ERP system. It’s a security risk. | [Reach out to us for detailed security documentation. This is rarely an issue once CIOs see our documentation.] |
CFO
| Pain point | Corevist value |
| Our global divisions are asking for B2B eCommerce, but each one has a unique proposal and their own set of preferred vendors. There’s no coordination, which means we can’t leverage economies of scale at the corporate level. It’s impossible to model this complexity from an ROI perspective. | Corevist implementations offer clear cost-forecasting, and you work with only one vendor. Because each divisional “spinoff” site is built from your first investment with Corevist, you get a clear path to ROI and transparency in cost. |
| Across our divisions, our DSO (days sales outstanding) metric doesn’t look great. We’re stuck with paper-based processes for A/R. | With a payments add-on to any Corevist package, you can empower your customers to pay off invoices online through self-service. You can implement payments in any division that has a Corevist B2B portal. |
B2B portal projects don’t have to be stressful. The key is to know what each stakeholder needs out of the portal—and to understand the value that Corevist delivers to them. When you show empathy for your stakeholders’ problems (and show how Corevist solves those problems), you’ll be in a great place to get the B2B portal you need. Use these pain points (and corresponding value points) to build your pitch for each stakeholder. Whether it’s a slideshow, informal conversation, written proposal, or all of the above, your internal pitching will go much better with this content included. With any luck, you’ll soon be signing that contract and starting the project.
Go deeper with supplemental content
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