The future of digital sales in manufacturing.

Digitizing the sales process in the B2B industry is quickly becoming mandatory for manufacturers. The disruptions of the pandemic and the influx of new digital-savvy buyers mean that there isn’t time for companies to wait and see anymore. You will be left behind if you don’t bring your sales processes online.

The sales process for manufacturing organizations is very complex. With its traditional customer touchpoints, numerous stakeholders and customized products, this complexity has been why many B2B and manufacturing companies have delayed starting a digital transformation of their sales processes.

Looking at this infographic from InMindCloud, we see just how many touchpoints and stakeholders there are involved in the process from beginning to end of the selling process. It starts with product education and marketing to the after-sales follow-up and support required to fulfill customers’ desires for an exceptional overall experience.

At each and every step of this process, there is potential to digitize and refine the journey, meeting the buyer’s desire to have less face-to-face interaction and creating new efficiencies in the outdated traditional sales processes.

Why manufacturers should move to digital sales

• Innovate to stay competitive – Digital allows manufacturers to adopt an agile mindset. It helps them adapt quickly to new products and services with ever-changing customer demands.
• Easy access to business knowledge – Provide new or existing customers direct access to your ERP's real-time information. Help your customers discover your innovations faster. 
• Achieve operational excellence – Harness operational data to derive actionable insights into customer behaviour. Use it to understand and execute on customer preferences or anticipate opportunities.
• Increase revenue from aftermarket sales – Enhance aftermarket sales as a revenue generator for the business by giving install-base customers instant access to the spare parts and consumables they need.
• Standardization and modularization - Besides making sales more efficient when dealing with customers' individualized needs, you also unlock mass customization capabilities — which often leads to substantial cost savings.
• Cross-border business scalability – Digitalize critical manufacturing knowledge to build a robust global operations infrastructure. It helps your growing international sales force speed quickly and reliably.

What does ecommerce for manufacturing look like?

Since there are so many touchpoints in a traditional sales process for manufacturing and B2B, we thought we would look at a few options for building digital-first processes that can improve sales and future-proof your pipeline.

Research online, purchase offline

Not every selling model for manufacturers will translate into a pure digital sale. In fact, most complex product sales will require online research by the customer and offline purchasing with a sales rep. Where the leading-edge manufacturers will win a competitive advantage is in creating an online platform rich with product data, easy purchasing functions and full customer support (either through a call center or chatbots) to replicate the best-in-class ecommerce offerings customers now experience in other sectors such as consumer products and financial services.

Encouraging this type of research online/purchase offline (Ro/Po) activity will enable B2B manufacturers to engage with their clients more efficiently and shorten the sales process, freeing up resources to hunt for new prospects.

Digital commerce for complex products

We hear it all the time: our product configuration is too complex to sell online. And, it may be.

But what if, just maybe, it wasn’t? Beyond the Ro/Po option mentioned above, once a manufacturer has shipped a first-time custom order, the specs should all be in a system of record. What if you could use that data to aid in reorders and replacement parts? Let’s explore one way to do that for customers through custom portals and order confirmations with a detailed summary.

Email order & inquiry confirmations

One of the biggest bottlenecks in manufacturing sales is the administrative process. A comprehensive digital commerce platform will help remove that roadblock. Order confirmation emails can be sent directly to clients instantly notifying them when their orders or inquiries have gone through. As a bonus, you could add functionality that includes a PDF summary of the order and invoicing to download for their admin team. 

Once all that data is available in the commerce platform and integrated systems, it then makes it possible to take that data and build custom portals where clients can log in to place reorders or get replacement parts and supplies depending on the product.

Custom portals preconfigured with personalized product information

Imagine a customer logging into their account on your site and seeing all of their past orders, customized products and parts in one central and easy-to-understand layout. That’s the kind of user experience that builds customer loyalty. From there, add suggested products chosen by your sales reps to fit the client’s exact needs, with the option to checkout immediately or send it to sales to initiate an inquiry. Further options for guided selling, like side-by-side comparisons and related product information, have a personalized user journey designed to increase sales and improve customer lifetime value.

Digital commerce architecture with multi-system integration

From our point of view, integrating your essential sales tools is one of the most beneficial aspects of digitizing sales for manufacturers. With an API-led digital commerce architecture, manufacturers can streamline and connect all essential sales-related assets, digitizing end-to-end sales:

• CPQ – Configure-price-quote technology makes online sales possible for complex products, enables quoting efficiency and shortens the sales cycle. CPQ applications work in sync with CRM platforms, ERP programs, and other technologies to ensure integrated data, inventory accuracy and order integrity.
• CRM – Manufacturing CRM software is used by most medium to enterprise companies to build a database of customer account details, like contact details, phone numbers, roles, demographics and pain points. Integrating these types of systems with commerce, CPQ and ERP platforms gives sales teams the ability to understand customers better, identify opportunities, and close sales more quickly.
• ERP – ERP integration connects and synchronizes ERP software to other applications and data sources. ERP software integration gives you a unified view of information from different systems in real-time, whether the data originates in the ERP or other operational systems.
• Commerce – This is the last piece of the puzzle that manufacturers are now putting into place. An online storefront enables customers, partners and dealers 24/7 access to your business, lessening the impact of disruption. With full end-to-end integration with your ERP, CRM, and CPQ, eliminate channel conflicts and errors and guarantee the best buying experience.

Digitizing sales processes improves overall business outcomes

Improves operational efficiency while combatting labour shortages.

In manufacturing, engineering talent is in short supply. Each engineer you have is a precious resource. When their knowledge is digitized, you can reduce their involvement in the sales process and channel their efforts to where they are needed more. The same goes for manufacturing sales talent. When you reduce the quotation process to a day, your sales team becomes more efficient (more and bigger deals in the same amount of time) and focused. You can also extend this benefit to external sales channels like partners, dealers, and distributors, who are empowered to start selling immediately with the full support of your digitized knowledge repository. That’s money saved in terms of human resources.  

Exceed customer expectations with a complete interaction overview.

Focusing on customer experience and honouring the value of customer-centricity has already been proven as a huge differentiator in the retail landscape. The same will happen in the B2b and manufacturing sectors. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when. Companies that can dial in on every customer touchpoint and track each client, or prospect, will have the essential insight needed to serve those users better than the competition. That insight gives your internal and external sales teams a look into deal progress or customer buying behaviour, revealing opportunities early. This kind of data helps sales teams create customized offers, set better priorities and engage leads better, resulting in more sales.  

Optimize production planning and costs through sales digitalization.

Knowing what your customers buy, or want to buy, leads to better pipeline planning. You can forecast when to ramp up production to keep up with demand or wind it down to save on resources. With a connected digital commerce platform integrated with your business-critical systems, you can also define production activity periods by introducing promotions on the fly, effectively regulating stock and stamping out supply chain issues before they arise, just like B2C manufacturers do with Black Friday sales.

Enhance supply chain resilience through an optimized sales process.

When you give customers direct access to your business via an ecommerce portal, the opposite is also true. You get direct access to existing and potential customers — a massive competitive advantage. Innovations, promotions, or product updates, are instantly in front of customers to browse (or BUY) the moment you make them live in the online store. Not only does this help your business increase revenue, but exploring new markets becomes a distinct possibility when your entire manufacturing business is readily accessible to potential customers in other regions.

Digital sales in manufacturing allow for business growth

Digital sales transform your sales process and make buying significantly easier for your customers, it offers a network of inter-connected benefits that enrich every part of your business. You increase efficiency from sales to production, lowering costs across the board, and leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention. With the addition of a powerful new sales channel and a well-managed partner and distributor ecosystem, your business is set for future growth. 

The key to capturing real value in a digital transformation project of this kind is for manufacturers to fully understand that this is not an overnight or even a one-shot process. 

“Clearly, getting ecommerce right for industrials will take time. And, remember, not everything can be done at once. We see successful ecommerce programs carried out in incremental steps, with each adding incremental possibilities of value captured by both B2B and B2C initiatives.” - PwC, Manufacturing is ready for e-commerce. Seven things to consider before diving in.

Conclusion

Manufacturers are not strangers to the evolution of technology. Smart production, Industry 4.0, and ISO standards are prime examples of this. Digitizing the sales process is just another step in manufacturing evolution. Taking a proactive approach to moving your traditional sales processes online will increase efficiency, reduce sales cycle length and give you a competitive edge in customer experience.

If you are ready to talk about digitally transforming your manual, face-to-face sales processes, book a call with our team of experts and find out what it will take to get you there.