Docmation’s Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start Packages

 

The B2C monopoly on ecommerce is on the wane ever since B2B took to online business. B2B is fast catching up, thanks to B2B ecommerce solutions.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B has been instrumental in introducing business-to-business commerce to digital transformation and putting it on the pedestal of eCommerce.

For many businesses, Salesforce B2B eCommerce and other Commerce Cloud Services were still a distant dream. Even if Salesforce B2B Commerce is affordable, expert service is required.

Docmation’s Quick Start Package for Salesforce B2B Commerce offers businesses of all shapes and sizes expertise to implement Salesforce.

From website launch to customer management, Salesforce QuickStart ensures speedy scalability of your business.

Shortest to say, in a matter of weeks, businesses can set up, launch, meet customer expectations, and scale their business using Docmation’s Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start Packages.

Salesforce B2B Commerce: A Gateway to Robust Customer Experience

From an outsider’s point of view, leveraging Salesforce Commerce Cloud must cost a hefty sum. The truth, however, is contrary. Salesforce isn’t meant to burn a hole in your pocket or take months for implementation.

Choosing Docmation’s Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start Package won’t only reduce costs but will also decrease deployment time. In short, at meager costs, you can take advantage of B2B ecommerce platform features to advance customer experience at par with B2C.

Why is Salesforce the best?

Salesforce is good for many reasons, firstly for being a cloud-based CRM software, secondly for being integrated CRM solution working in tandem with other clouds including Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, etc.

Salesforce as a tool, platform, or service, you name it, has been responsible for increased sales, offering personalized marketing service, customer retention, etc.

Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions at a Glance

1. Quick ecommerce website launch.

For a business looking for a quick ecommerce launch, ecommerce services are offered by Salesforce suffice. Salesforce offers all-in-one B2B solutions under one roof.

2. Reach markets in weeks, not months.

Right after launch, take your B2B commerce store to the market in a week’s time. You can avail your Salesforce commerce toolkit to start fulfilling orders right away.

3. Start selling right after lunch.

With Salesforce Sales Essentials, taking the business online is easy, fast, and seamless. Its tools empower businesses to start selling products and services right away.

4. Scale your business securely and quickly.

Growth of B2B eCommerce is of utmost concern for a business. Unlike in the past, with Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions, businesses can scale real quick.

What are some of the essential features of Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions, which facilitate business to launch B2B commerce and start fulfilling customer orders in such a short span of time?

• Reach out to your potential shoppers online by developing a unique ecommerce presence with Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions.
• Give the necessary boost to your brand loyalty by understanding customer behavior with the help of timely insights offered by Salesforce.
• Take the control of your brand experience in your own hands with Salesforce as it allows you to manage and customize your brand identity in your unique way.
• Benefit from the connected customer experience where every moment of a customer’s journey from contact to final checkout is tracked and available for unified viewing.
• Offer customers convenient and safe online ordering in a user-friendly manner. At the same time, offer multi-purchase options and a scalable cart.

It’s evident how B2C and B2B are different from one another and have more dissimilarities than similarities between them. Yet, B2B is in constant pursuit to imitate much of the B2C buying experience.

In fact, customers expect from B2B organizations a buying experience similar to the one experienced by B2C customers, one that is seamless, quick, and personalized.

As a result, manufacturers and retailers have no choice but to customize their user interface to bring it closer to a B2C interface. Doing so might appear daunting, but leveraging Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions is quick ad easy.

Why Salesforce B2B Commerce?

Salesforce B2B Commerce transformed the way B2B ecommerce functions. Fairly so, the advent of Salesforce Commerce saw enablement of functions such as re-orders, quick orders, automated pricing, quote generation, order routing, configuration, and account hierarchies in B2B commerce.

Salesforce’s configurable settings allow customizing functionalities of Salesforce without resorting to coding.

Besides that, the unified viewing experience renders customer data generated as a result of his/her activity accessible at the same time to Salesforce Service, Sales, and Commerce Clouds.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter where your staff is located in the Salesforce CRM; the ability to access customer data anytime anywhere enables any employee of your organization to offer your customer personalized support service.

Brace Yourselves Up for Salesforce QuickStart!

At Docmation, our Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start Packages help businesses big and small implement Salesforce to maximize revenue, improve customer experience, and automate recurring processes.

Furthermore, in a span of a few weeks, we help clients develop a robust, shop-ready online storefront for their B2B businesses. Docmation prepares clients and their customers for a fully-featured ecommerce experience worth the buck.

Docmation’s Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start Packages are tailored to meet the needs of your business. For years, our B2B commerce implementations have led to significant improvements in key eCommerce parameters, including conversion rate, ROI, cart conversion, revenue, and more.

“Why Docmation?” you might ask! Docmation is fully equipped with technical expertise and practical experience in the field of Salesforce implementation. Our years of experience in Salesforce Commerce help us create a B2C-stimulated experience on B2B platforms for seamless customer experience. This means a robust B2B buying experience, better ROI, and more customer acquisition.

Source: quick start package

Salesforce vs SAP: A CPQ Software Comparison

 

Every company requires a set of products and tools to conduct its business online smoothly, whether they operate in the B2C or B2B e-commerce market. For example, you need software services for CRM, marketing, sales, analytics, accounting, and more.

Anything to do with the management of client-side operations of ERP is usually delegated to third-party solutions from software providers.

If you are wondering why business-side operations are not explicitly mentioned here, it is because many companies prefer to build in-house, native solutions for their core activities that encompass the most crucial aspects of the working of the company. This is especially true for organizations with very unique needs.

However, for customer-side operations, it is easier to use familiar platforms, especially since a lot of lower-level employees and representatives would be working on them and it would be easier to train and onboard them.

Although CPQ or configure, price, quote is basically a different terrain than CRM or customer relationship management, a lot of CRM vendors are now offering many different ERP sectorized products.

The reasoning behind this is that ever since self-service started becoming popular in the B2B e-commerce marketplace, a lot of CPQ has started overlapping with CRM on B2B e-commerce platforms.

Major CRM application software vendors include Oracle, SAP, and, which also have CPQ solutions for B2B e-commerce sales bodies.

Why Is CPQ Software Essential?

CPQ software is a crucial part of all big and small business e-commerce solutions. Just like missteps in CRM, any errors in CPQ can cause major losses to the customer base of B2B e-commerce companies.

Because B2B concerns deal with large quantities of products and therefore large amounts of money, a mistake in a single digit can cause extreme inaccuracies in the invoice.

The client will lose faith in you and, in all probability, churn, no matter how much compensation you provide or discounts you promise. And this is only in the case of a miscalculation.

There are many other scenarios that can jeopardize your business in the billing process. An optimized CPQ software can help avoid these situations easily. Some of its advantages include:

• A CPQ software will help you streamline and hasten the quoting and invoicing process for clients.
• It makes it easy for your sales representatives to navigate the catalog and inventory to provide the right configuration of products to the clients, especially if your product definitions are complex.
• CPQ solutions simplify the process of upselling and cross-selling without seeming too pushy or crafty.
• They assist sales teams in adhering to company policies, rules, and constraints when configuring products for their clients.
• CPQ dashes can provide quick access to customer data and analytics so that sales reps can make informed suggestions to the clients based on what they might be looking for.
• CPQ software can make product configurations and quotes uniform across the sales team so that a client does not think they have been duped if and when they are transferred to another representative.
• It will also make it easier to decentralize the client database and make information accessible to the entire sales team so that no one is in the dark about what business is being conducted.
• It also helps eliminate errors in quotes and prices since most calculations and processing are done by the software itself and not humans.
• It provides a platform with all the tools necessary to optimize every step of the process, thus allowing your sales team to focus on more important tasks and taking over only when necessary.
• When connected with the B2B e-commerce portal, it allows clients to take advantage of self-service and machine-guided processes to order and re-order easily and by themselves.
• If the software utilizes AI, machine learning, and Big Data analytics, they can be harnessed to assist the sales representatives as well as the clients in the configuration, quoting, and billing process.

Factors To Consider When Choosing Your CPQ Software

Before you invest in any CPQ software to work in conjunction with your B2B e-commerce business, make sure it meets the following criteria:

• It should meet your needs and solve the sales and billing problems you were facing.
• The software should complement the B2B e-commerce features you provide your customers. For example, if you have a subscription business model, the CPQ software should have features to enable billing for that.
• It should be compatible at the code level with the rest of your B2B e-commerce software.
• It should be scalable and flexible enough to grow with your business. In fact, it should include features that help you in encouraging B2B e-commerce growth by helping you identify key areas where you can increase profit and generate revenue.
• The CPQ engine should easily incorporate rules and constraints to automate the quoting and billing process as much as possible.
• It should have the performance level to match the size of your business, now and in the future. For example, if your average customer orders 600 products, a software solution that allows only 500 line items will not do.
• It should be able to connect with all information sources and analytics software to better assist the sales representative to provide a tailored proposal to the client. Nowadays, many CPQ solutions plug in AI to make this possible quickly. Some even use NLP when allowing self-service.
• There should be a level of customizability so that it provides features that fit your type and niche of business perfectly.
• This brings us to CPQ tools being able to be made accessible to customers in case self-service is a mode of purchase in your B2B e-commerce
• It should allow collaboration among the sales team as well as any other employee if necessary.
• The training and onboarding process should be simple and easy.
• There should be security measures in place so that the data and information of the business are secure at all times.
• The software vendors should provide regular updates so that it does not become a legacy system.
• The providers should also have sufficient documentation and appreciable customer support, with the least downtime in case of problems.
• The price should be reasonable in terms of its features and how it fares in the above points.

For a closer look at how your CPQ software should make your business easier, check out the top CPQ Trends of 2020 that it should cater to.

Salesforce Vs SAP: Which CPQ Solution To Choose

When looking for the most suitable CPQ software, Salesforce and SAP are both top choices. Salesforce CPQ was developed in-house while SAP acquired CallidusCloud CPQ to provide its own CPQ solution.

Some fundamental differences between the Salesforce and SAP software solutions mean that you must judge the features wisely before making a choice. Given below is a point-wise comparison of the Salesforce software and the SAP software for CPQ:

1. For Salesforce, software as a service was always the norm while SAP recently moved to a cloud-based model. Therefore, in terms of performance and management, SAP software as a service is yet to reach the level Salesforce is in.
2. SAP software solutions for CPQ incorporate e-commerce while for CPQ of Salesforce, you must connect the Commerce Cloud to utilize e-commerce features.
3. CPQ software of SAP allows price optimization and margin protection, which are either absent or weak in the Salesforce quoting software.
4. Salesforce.com software allows renewal management and subscription services for recurring revenue business models. This is not present in the SAP business software.
5. Salesforce is supported not only on the cloud but also on iOS and Android platforms. But SAP is available only on the cloud right now. Thus, in terms of connectivity and portability, Salesforce does a better job.
6. Salesforce provides training in-person as well as live online, besides having extensive documentation and community support. For SAP, you will get training in-person and via webinars and documentation.
7. Salesforce provides customer support during business hours and online while SAP provides 24/7 live support besides online customer service. Therefore, SAP provides better customer support than Salesforce.
8. Salesforce pricing has 4 options. The CPQ solution is 75 USD and the CPQ Plus option is 150 USD, both per user per month, billed annually. It has two enterprise solutions, CPQ & Billing Growth and CPQ & Billing Plus, in which pricing is negotiated. However, SAP enterprise software is the only pricing method, hence, there is no information regarding its cost. SAP software pricing is done in two modes, the standard edition, and the professional edition, both with custom pricing.

So, Which Is Better?

Both SAP and Salesforce are top contenders in the CPQ category for B2B commerce. While some features are stronger in SAP CPQ, especially in the configuration category, Salesforce automation is smoother.

Since free trials are available for both, it is recommended that you try them out to understand which suits your business better. If you do choose Salesforce, Docmation has some of the best Salesforce developers who can help you set up your Salesforce storefront in no time and get you started on your online B2B business journey.

Source: SAP and Salesforce integration

How to Build Target Personas for Your B2B Ecommerce Business

 

Your customers are more than an entry in your database. Your customer is someone you should know like you know your friends. So when you approach buyers, they shouldn’t go “Well, that’s just another marketing gimmick” but instead think “Wow, these guys got me!”

This is precisely why your B2B e-commerce business can benefit from developing a buyer persona. If you want to extend the reach of your business, buyer personas are the right way to go about ensuring that your marketing efforts reach the right people at the right time and the right place. 

Creating Buyer Personas

Buyer personas help create effective messages, winning products, and compelling customer journeys. The point is to emphasize and remember that it is the journey that is important, and not the destination.

A B2B buyer persona is a comprehensive representation of the type of consumers you want to target or are currently targeting. The identification of a buyer persona not only lets you find customers but it will also help you identify and create collaterals so they find you.

Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to creating buyer persons for your B2B e-commerce business.

Step 1: Identify Questions to Ask

To get started, you can start by asking these questions:

1. Getting information: How do the consumers locate information that is required?
2. Decision making: Who makes the final decisions?
3. Challenges: What is preventing consumers from reaching their goals?
4. Problem: What is the problem guiding their purchase decision and how does your product or service solve it?
5. Who are they and what they like: What makes them happy and how do they finalize purchase decisions?

These data points can be synchronized for creating synthesized portraits of your ideal customers; each customer segment shares psychographic, demographic, and behavioral traits.

Your primary goal should be for your business to know its target audience inside and out. Also, your buyer persona must clearly, precisely, and completely communicate to others how you can solve a problem they are facing with your product or service, how you can get them better or cheaper or quicker than your competitors, and what your unique selling proposition is.

Step 2: Learn From Competition

Have a look at competitor pages and try to gather as much information as possible on the people who leave feedback, comments, and testimonials on social media pages and blogs. You can easily adopt a similar strategy by using tools like Quantcast, SimilarWeb, and Compete.com to gain and explore valuable insights into the kind of audience that is already visiting competitor stores and social media accounts.

Step 3: Demographics and Firmographics

This intricate aspect helps in transforming a profile into a person who can be trusted, respected, and admired. At the minimum, B2B marketers should include core characteristics like location, age, and gender along with information like education, family composition, total household income, company type, and industry. This can help you focus your marketing efforts by gaining a complete understanding of your consumers. Naturally, this will result in much more qualified leads, thanks to targeted content appealing to the right audience.

Step 4: Reach Out to Both “Good” and “Bad” Customers

Before you start filling out your business persona, it is important to talk to both “good” and “bad” customers. Wondering why? Customers who are presently unhappy with your products/services will help you identify problem areas that good customers have failed to. Moreover, there is a possibility that these “bad” customers may find it a bit difficult to use or the documentation (provided by you) including instructions on how to use your products may be too technical for them. In both cases, you get the opportunity to learn something new about your product along with a possible scope to simplify or improve your product. A win-win situation! 

Step 5: Keep an Eye on the Goal

What is your biggest objective behind creating a persona? Are you about to introduce a product that solves a problem of the target audience? Remember, most persona goals should ideally be the end goals. Moreover, experience goals should communicate how users will feel when using your product, for example, feeling relaxed or having fun. For instance, an individual on an online banking site wants to feel assured that all transactions are safe and encrypted.

It is important not to get carried away when creating your business persona. Remember, you have to relate to the customer and convince them that your B2B brand is the answer to their problems.

Source: personas Target for B2B Ecommerce Business

6 Key Factors for a Successful Omnichannel Business Strategy

 In 2019, adopting an omnichannel business strategy is critical. Now that buyers have experienced a unified ecommerce experience in B2C, they expect a similarly seamless and consistent experience in B2B. According to Sana Commerce’s 2019 B2B Buying Process Report, nearly one-third of B2B buyers expect to make 90% of their professional purchases online.

Yet, that is only one aspect. Why? Because buyers choose brands based on trust, not on channel options. A B2B buyer journey is not a straight line but rather passes through several touchpoints, and buyers will naturally expect their favorite brands to cater a personalized experience. Only an omnichannel strategy can fulfill the above buyer demands and therefore adopting one is non-negotiable.

Let’s take a look at the six key factors that ensure the success of an omnichannel business strategy.

1. Shunning the Cookie-cutter Approach

Providing personalized experiences to customers is powerful for two reasons: Practicality – the value a product or service brings to a customer will be better when tailored to meet their unique needs; and psychology – the joy a customer receives when they know that they’re treated as an individual and not as a number.

Customer engagement should be maximized using social media platforms where they are encouraged to share their physical experiences with one another. The collected information should be utilized to send personalized messages, product recommendations, and offers to customers.

2. Omni-channel Payment Methods

With more and more customers demanding multiple payment channels, businesses today are challenged to provide new and convenient payment methods that include three capabilities – online, offline, and through smartphones. Mobile wallets and other applications are gradually overtaking cash and credit cards.

In order to keep up with this trend, a lot of businesses offer multi-channel payment methods, but is that enough? Today’s average customer expects a unified ecommerce experience, which means businesses need to employ omnichannel payment methods.

The key difference is that omnichannel payment methods will fuse both offline and online channels in order to deliver a single ecommerce experience. Businesses can save time that is otherwise lost in managing duplicate systems while customers can enjoy a frictionless checkout.

3. In-store Technology

Employing advanced technologies should not be reserved for the online realm. Today’s customer wants the online features of convenience, ease of use, and personalization in their in-store experiences as well. A warm greeting by a reliable staff member and having someone remember preferences via past buying patterns can go a long way in personalizing the in-store experience.

4. Coordination Across Teams

Omnichannel strategies require a number of key teams extending throughout the organization. For strategies to be implemented in an effective manner, there must be proper coordination among all teams and their members.

Any division or miscommunication among any team will lead to disruption, thereby sabotaging the whole process. Therefore, appoint a single project manager to head all teams and monitor the omnichannel business process pipeline from start to finish.

5. Customer Feedback

For a business, customer feedback is a goldmine and therefore should not be considered an afterthought. A business can gain a better understanding of their customers’ demands through tracking their buying habits and patterns, and also through understanding social media channels.

The buying experience should be viewed from the customer’s eyes in order to ensure that it is frictionless and user-friendly. Retailers can make use of apps to scan a product’s barcode and view all customer reviews related to that product.

6. Cross-channel Security

With the advent of new customer engagement channels, new security measures also need to be adopted. Ensuring secure transactions (both card-present and card-not-present) is vital for a successful omnichannel strategy.

For card-present transactions, end-to-end encryption coupled with tokenization and EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) will ensure transaction security. For card-not-present transactions, a strong SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) with tokenization and a Hosted Payment Solution will provide protection against hackers.

Formulation of a strong B2B omnichannel strategy will allow a business to create one of its most important assets – customer loyalty. Therefore, creating a single ecommerce experience where customers can engage holistically is a must.

Source: Omnichannel Business Strategy

Solving the B2B E-commerce Checkout Experience

 

In the past decade, digitization has fueled immense growth in online revenue, both for B2C and B2B companies.

The B2C world has leveraged on artificial intelligence and automation to deliver increased customer convenience.

Due to this, buyer expectations for convenience have increased, pushing B2B companies to adapt selling strategies that suit the needs of their online consumers.

Customer and product nature, however, remains vastly different for B2B and B2C companies, making it impossible for the B2B industry to mirror web layouts of B2C giants like Amazon and Alibaba.

B2B Shopping – Unique Features

Consumer relationships with business customers are complex and dynamic. For one, B2B consumers expect customization in everything from product specifications to delivery.

1. Pricing Variations

Incorporating complex pricing tiers for a single product is necessary for a successful B2B e-commerce website.

These tiers may be dependent on the specific customer, order bundling, and product group.

Individualized product and service configurations are critical to a successful B2B transaction.

1. Multiple Stakeholders

According to a recent CEB survey, an average of 5.4 people is involved in one B2B shopping experience.

This data indicates that different consumer teams (including product supervisors, procurement experts, and quality assurance managers) are included in addressing various features of the product they are shopping.

Product customization, therefore, extends beyond the adjustment of superficial features demanded by one team.

1. Personal Supplier-consumer Relationships

For decades, B2B consumer relationships have been highly personal. Built on human-trust that comes with sales representatives, these consumer relationships need individual attention.

B2B e-commerce must be conducive to such personalized business-consumer traits.

Ensuring hassle-free cross-geography delivery, pricing and quotation features, and dynamic customer-service systems is a necessity for successful B2B businesses.

A B2B vendor who wishes to see profits via e-commerce must incorporate all these features while maintaining an engaging website design and robust consumer service strategies.

Learn more about several optimization features that make the checkout process convenient and attractive for buyers and thereby help ensure B2B customer retention.

1. Clean Navigation Process

Due to the complexities involved in a B2B customer relationship, many companies have e-commerce websites filled with cumbersome navigation features.

B2B buyers know their exact needs and do not need excessive product recommendations or extensive searches to shop for their desired products.

If customers spend a lot of time searching for products through different navigation layers on your website, they are likely to become impatient even before the checkout process begins.

Ensure optimum clarity of product navigation and avoid internal navigation jargon to make the shopping processes friction-free for buyers.

Incorporate traditional B2B shopping workflows and custom catalogs for registered buyers to give conventional customers a sense of familiarity.

1. Streamlined Checkout

Modern B2B customers do not have the patience for a confusing checkout process involving multiple pricing details and a tiring registration process.

A transparent checkout process is less likely to result in cart abandonment. To avoid losing potential buyers, make your checkout portal compact, concise, and hassle-free.

Restrict checkout to a single page if possible and reduce distracting headers and footers. Offer both registration-based and guest purchasing options to avoid driving away consumers.

A significant way to boost customer engagement is by displaying checkout progress with interactive graphics. Delivery-related details, shipping costs, handling time, and “edit order” options are also recognizable features of the checkout page.

1. Payment Optimization

B2B purchasers look for payment methods that go beyond credit cards, debit cards, and cash. Ensure that your website offers price quotation forms and purchase order payments, displays bulk quantity discounts, and options for customized prices in addition to electronic and cash payment methods.

Above all, do not let payment details remain unprotected at any stage. Any breach of customer privacy will cause a loss of trust in your brand.

1. Avoid Redundancy

Many B2B e-commerce checkout portals require buyers to fill in shipping and billing details every time they shop for products. Modern customers hate such repetition.

Automation makes it possible to eliminate redundant checkout features. Ensure that your website’s checkout portal has auto-fill features for addresses and previous order details.

To further consumer convenience, make your ecommerce site a part of your omnichannel customer servicing strategy.

Keeping aside these primary attributes, industry specifications will dictate the ideal checkout experience for your B2B consumers. Manual B2B systems allow for personalization.

Ecommerce platforms must catch up with this need by incorporating enhanced purchasing information gateways, guided navigation techniques, product cataloging, and pricing segmentation.

Analyze operational data to understand the sales cycle lengths and consumer preferences better before choosing the perfect Salesforce solution for your B2B web checkout portal.

To make your website more buyer-friendly, borrow the best checkout page optimization practices from the B2C industry while keeping layered pricing and product customization features intact.

Source: B2B E-commerce Checkout