“Today’s youth, tomorrow’s future” – this saying holds true when it comes to the B2B online business model. Younger buyers are highly capable of making or breaking your B2B online business. The buyers of this segment are smart, fearless, instinctive, precise, and the list goes on. To put it simply, a younger buyer knows exactly what he’s looking for and he won’t settle for anything less.
There are several factors that can make a huge difference in convincing the modern buyer. We are going to look at how B2B companies can make a significant impact on the minds of their younger online buyers.
Product Data and Search Experience
Creating a digital B2B experience that appeals to today’s new breed of B2B buyers starts with rich product content and real-time capability. Lack of content and specifications can hinder your site search, making it harder for buyers to find the right product to meet their needs. It can also prompt them to jump to a competitor’s site.
84% of B2B buyers say product content has stopped them from completing a purchase with a supplier. Specifically, 46% of B2B buyers say a lack of product content is the leading contributor to not finding the products they need.
Order Status
Buyers want access to detailed and up-to-date information about their order at any given time. This includes details like change in price, shipping details, or tracking details. In the case of B2B buyers, the most painful part is their inability to access vital information about their order’s movement at any given point of time due to unavailability of options.
Though younger buyers are smart, they still are impatient, and like most B2B buyers, being unable to track their order status puts them in a state of needless helplessness.
Convenient Ordering Options
This is one area that evolves pretty frequently. However, there still are certain mandatory features that a B2B younger buyer looks for when he or she decides on placing an order.
Repeat orders (on-demand or automated)
In B2B commerce, placing the same order time and again is a very common practice and adding this extensively used option in your online portal can make a significant change. It could be left up to the user to either choose as needed or to choose for an automated feature that places the order automatically every ‘Nth’ day/month.
*N here is the number of days in which the customer wants the order to be placed automatically.
Import Orders
B2B buyers are generally known to manage their requirements in excel sheets or other similar formatted documents. To replicate the same requirement, which is usually very large, can be an uphill task for the buyer. Providing an option in the B2B ecommerce platform to import already-created files and getting orders placed based on said files will make the transition smooth and relevant for the buyer.
Custom Order Template
Every B2B buyer has his own set of requirements and buying patterns. Providing customizable templates can enhance the overall buying experience as the customer can make any number of changes any number of times in the template, and simply submit it to place an order.
Inventory Guarantees
B2B businesses deal with bulk ordering and in this case, maintaining stock inventory is of utmost importance. When a repeated buyer wants to place an order, he should never see the “out of stock” warning on the screen.
When the demand is high, there’s a lot of money and reputation at stake and not meeting demand can cause a loss to the buyer. Therefore, your online inventory must guarantee availability.
24/7 Customer Service
Though B2B buyers do not require as frequent customer service as B2C buyers, it still makes a lot of sense to have a 24/7 customer service team to provide relevant services. Invest significantly on this because it can be a determining factor to the future of your business.
We have seen so many excellent B2B businesses sabotage themselves by not having a proper customer service team. Especially when dealing with online buyers, the need for having 24/7 customer service grows exponentially.
Conclusion
Staying relevant is the key to success, and all the factors explained above will help you in coming one step closer to the exact need of hour. Buyers want the latest information about their order at any given time, whether it is a pricing change, back-order status, what portion of their order has been fulfilled, or when the entire order will ship.
For B2B buyers, pain is not being able to access the data they need to stay informed about their order every step of the way. Providing more self-service features online can free sales representatives to be more consultative. It all circles back to providing a digital experience the buyers want while understanding their needs and expectations.
Source: B2B Companies
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