THE PILLARS OF B2B ECOMMERCE

How Ecommerce Shortens Sales Cycles

Jared Seitz and Nicole Donnelly dive into shortening the sales cycle for B2B businesses with ecommerce and the unintended benefit it has of improving customer experience by meeting the modern buyer experience. Watch this quick clip from their webinar called “10 Things We Love About B2B Ecommerce”.

Transcript of the video

Hey, it's Jared from Acro. Recently, I sat down with Nicole Donnelly for our “10 Things We Love About B2B Ecommerce” webinar. Here's part of our conversation:

Nicole: The sales cycle, you can reduce the sales cycle. I have seen this firsthand. Traditionally the sales cycle in B2B ecommerce is long. Sometimes it can be years traditionally, when you're bidding on these very complex pieces of large-scale industrial equipment. Even the parts that go into those, sometimes a sales cycle on those are so, so long. 

But what's great about ecommerce, B2B ecommerce. By having your product catalogue online, and having all of the specs and the details about your product, having the ability for people to get a quote online, being able to get instant shipping quotes, for example, and having a robust learning center full of articles, technical information, video content, demos, how-to videos, that you can have at your fingertips. It just educates the buyers on their terms and helps them kind of move through that process more quickly with fewer personal touch points. 

What do you think about that? 

Jared: Yeah, it's automation, yet it's deeply personal. I think Amazon has done such a great job of that; where you see Amazon, their logo is the smiling face.

We actually work the smiling face into the Mark Wilson video to drop that again. 

To go to log in, to be able to see your previous orders and account information, to just be connected and not feel like you're starting from scratch every time, that speeds things up so much.

And I think a lot of those things are intuitive now and we've had companies like Amazon kind of lay the groundwork. I think what you'll find is that once it's self-evident how much better it is to have that information at your fingertips or to just be able to log in and be connected to everything, it instantly becomes a status quo. 

And I think that's a bit of a double-edged sword, because for businesses, they have to keep up with the status quo, because your customer expects it.