Key Factors for B2B E-Commerce to Drive Scalability
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 3:55 am
Many sales analysts in early 2021 attributed the emerging demand for B2B eCommerce to Coronavirus regulations and the resulting supply chain disruptions. While it’s important to note what started the industry-wide changes and forced businesses to re-evaluate their KPIs for long-term sustainability, it’s far more important to understand ‘ why ’ this became the solution to the wholesale problems that arise. It’s only natural that all forms of sales cycles continue to evolve to reach the most user-friendly endpoint possible. Your role as a decision-maker for your business is to understand which features limit the buyer’s incentive and which serve to continue driving interactions.
Is your wholesale business model scalable?
What does it mean to be “scalable” as a distributor or manufacturer? Sales mail marketing to doctors email list data reports may show positive revenue, with sales orders steadily increasing, a larger team to fulfill those requests, and perhaps even an expanding inventory, but those factors alone don’t paint an accurate picture for scalable growth. It’s natural to get carried away and form an anchoring bias (reliance on the first information received to inform decisions) when operations are busier after initial observations of revenue, but only gross profit is able to reflect growth at scale. Estimates already assume increased size and workflow, and don’t innately point to a successful model.
To be scalable, your business must:
Be able to adapt to changing market demands.
Increase profit margins as customer demand and orders grow.
Moving towards automation and shorter processes
E-commerce Product Catalog Demo
Streamlining operations at a smaller level simply to reduce expenses is not sufficient for a long-term growth plan. Beyond minimizing wasted costs and overhead, it is essential for businesses to first set their priorities around customer needs. Customer loyalty is harder to build and measure than straightforward operations accounting, making this a more complex metric to track that requires a proactive and consistent response.
Customer value and also customer success are the two primary goals that every company should set, and the distance from the goalpost will rapidly increase the longer the market offers the features that your company lacks. Customer value describes the implicit benefits of your brand, while customer success visualizes your roadmap to the desired outcome through your brand. As outlined in Gartner’s study on implications on the B2B buying journey , your sales team only gets 17% of the time companies spend on purchases to make an impact – the other 83% of their opinion will have already been made. Decision makers who are already embedded in the sales cycle may also be at risk, as 77% reported complications with their last order, creating huge opportunities for companies that serve that need.
With this in mind, how many parts of the purchasing process are geared towards shopper convenience? They may be ‘able’ to shop online, but is it a one-stop experience that allows for some form of seamless response? This is why, despite being an intangible metric, ‘adaptability’ remains one of the most vital indicators for the continued success of retailers and manufacturers moving into the globalised markets of 2022.
Common mistakes in B2B sales
Despite the wide model variations between manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, there are always common elements present when it comes to sales models. If your business has been brisk with sales these past few quarters that aren't reflected in increasing profit margins or innovative new investments, consider whether any of the following might apply:
Too many manual processes are required. Frameworks and technology used at the beginning of a company’s growth usually need to be phased out when demands and numbers increase beyond a certain point. Over time, a company’s goal should always be to make its sales cycle simpler and more cost-effective, which usually means moving to a streamlined degree of automation. Typically, companies that are unwilling to invest in a more automated cycle with fewer steps will reach a point where profits stagnate or decline, or worse, they are unable to accept new orders due to a limit on order processing.
A weak sales conversion cycle. When a prospective buyer is interested in your product, they expect a clear, concise funnel that directs them through a structured customer journey. While it’s more common with smaller wholesalers, if the introduction to a purchase requires filling out a contact form with product information that will be sent to a sales rep, you’re creating untrackable churn potential and wasting reps’ time with unnecessary steps. Interactions in the conversion cycle should always generate more customer data to work with, as well as minimizing rep activity only at stages after buyer intent is established.
Lack of competitive value proposition. When B2B buyers compare prices, their only concern is choosing an option that emphasizes the benefits to their business. This is where your competitors will spend most of their time adapting and growing, always looking for new incentives to show value. If competitors are creating value through features you lack, it will be nearly impossible to challenge them. Staying up to date on market trends and popular features is the only way to continue growing with competitors in a changing industry.
Tracking the wrong metrics (or none at all). One of the tenets of growth is benchmarking progress. This means having a tangible understanding of where you’ve succeeded and where you’ve failed. This is how we refine a sales formula over time to prioritize growth and avoid costly mistakes. One of the biggest reasons B2B sales fail is because of going after the wrong market, and if a sales rep can’t properly convey the need for a product, there’s no reliable way to find the “right market.”
Is your wholesale business model scalable?
What does it mean to be “scalable” as a distributor or manufacturer? Sales mail marketing to doctors email list data reports may show positive revenue, with sales orders steadily increasing, a larger team to fulfill those requests, and perhaps even an expanding inventory, but those factors alone don’t paint an accurate picture for scalable growth. It’s natural to get carried away and form an anchoring bias (reliance on the first information received to inform decisions) when operations are busier after initial observations of revenue, but only gross profit is able to reflect growth at scale. Estimates already assume increased size and workflow, and don’t innately point to a successful model.
To be scalable, your business must:
Be able to adapt to changing market demands.
Increase profit margins as customer demand and orders grow.
Moving towards automation and shorter processes
E-commerce Product Catalog Demo
Streamlining operations at a smaller level simply to reduce expenses is not sufficient for a long-term growth plan. Beyond minimizing wasted costs and overhead, it is essential for businesses to first set their priorities around customer needs. Customer loyalty is harder to build and measure than straightforward operations accounting, making this a more complex metric to track that requires a proactive and consistent response.
Customer value and also customer success are the two primary goals that every company should set, and the distance from the goalpost will rapidly increase the longer the market offers the features that your company lacks. Customer value describes the implicit benefits of your brand, while customer success visualizes your roadmap to the desired outcome through your brand. As outlined in Gartner’s study on implications on the B2B buying journey , your sales team only gets 17% of the time companies spend on purchases to make an impact – the other 83% of their opinion will have already been made. Decision makers who are already embedded in the sales cycle may also be at risk, as 77% reported complications with their last order, creating huge opportunities for companies that serve that need.
With this in mind, how many parts of the purchasing process are geared towards shopper convenience? They may be ‘able’ to shop online, but is it a one-stop experience that allows for some form of seamless response? This is why, despite being an intangible metric, ‘adaptability’ remains one of the most vital indicators for the continued success of retailers and manufacturers moving into the globalised markets of 2022.
Common mistakes in B2B sales
Despite the wide model variations between manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, there are always common elements present when it comes to sales models. If your business has been brisk with sales these past few quarters that aren't reflected in increasing profit margins or innovative new investments, consider whether any of the following might apply:
Too many manual processes are required. Frameworks and technology used at the beginning of a company’s growth usually need to be phased out when demands and numbers increase beyond a certain point. Over time, a company’s goal should always be to make its sales cycle simpler and more cost-effective, which usually means moving to a streamlined degree of automation. Typically, companies that are unwilling to invest in a more automated cycle with fewer steps will reach a point where profits stagnate or decline, or worse, they are unable to accept new orders due to a limit on order processing.
A weak sales conversion cycle. When a prospective buyer is interested in your product, they expect a clear, concise funnel that directs them through a structured customer journey. While it’s more common with smaller wholesalers, if the introduction to a purchase requires filling out a contact form with product information that will be sent to a sales rep, you’re creating untrackable churn potential and wasting reps’ time with unnecessary steps. Interactions in the conversion cycle should always generate more customer data to work with, as well as minimizing rep activity only at stages after buyer intent is established.
Lack of competitive value proposition. When B2B buyers compare prices, their only concern is choosing an option that emphasizes the benefits to their business. This is where your competitors will spend most of their time adapting and growing, always looking for new incentives to show value. If competitors are creating value through features you lack, it will be nearly impossible to challenge them. Staying up to date on market trends and popular features is the only way to continue growing with competitors in a changing industry.
Tracking the wrong metrics (or none at all). One of the tenets of growth is benchmarking progress. This means having a tangible understanding of where you’ve succeeded and where you’ve failed. This is how we refine a sales formula over time to prioritize growth and avoid costly mistakes. One of the biggest reasons B2B sales fail is because of going after the wrong market, and if a sales rep can’t properly convey the need for a product, there’s no reliable way to find the “right market.”