Image originally published in “Is your B2B Sales Experience Frictionless? (hint: It should be).”

Checklist: 5 Steps to Frictionless B2B Sales

If you feel like it’s become harder to meet your revenue goals, you’re not alone. The lines between B2C and B2B commerce have been blurred, and most B2B businesses are not prepared for this new digital economy.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. If you can shift your sales approach and provide quality digital experiences for your partners and customers, there is great opportunity to not only achieve your goals, but to become a true leader in B2B sales.

“The Digital Renaissance is here, and the B2B businesses that will succeed realize that it is the customer experience of their sales process – sometimes even more than the products they sell – that is most important. These businesses are enriching their operations and offerings with cloud-based solutions that improve customer experience.” – Howard Moore, CEO at ArganoKeste

We know this is easier said than done, so we developed a five-point checklist to help you assess your organization’s digital competency and identify the areas you need to address to improve your B2B sales processes and maximize revenue.

After the assessment, watch to see how a B2B manufacturer checked off all five boxes to drive their sales to exponential growth. Now it’s time to see how your business stacks up:

1. Can your third-party resellers, distributors, and channel partners optimally sell products without contacting customer support?

Your channel partner experience should be just as important as the end-customer experience. If you’re running your partner sales model on manual, customer service-based processes, you are not providing the right tools or the speed necessary to enable them to grow your business – in fact, you may even be causing roadblocks to their success.

Having a dynamic partner sales model is the key to scale, but the market is extremely competitive. You must be “easy to do business with” to enable partners to sell your products and services quickly – a win-win for both you and your partners. Cloud-based B2B commerce solutions make it possible to provide them with B2C-like eCommerce experiences – even for the most complex orders – so they can sell your offerings faster with no cap on sales.

2. Can you provide custom products and services?

Gone are the days where customers are content with picking items out of a catalog. They are requiring custom products or packages, and if you can’t deliver, 76% say it’s easier to take their business elsewhere to meet their specific needs.

If you’re struggling to shift from a mass production-based business model to offering customization at scale, configure, price quote (CPQ) solutions give you the ability to offer the custom products and services that are desired. CPQ seamlessly connects customer and pricing data from your ERP system with your CRM to showcase 2D, 3D or even AR configurations – giving your partners and customers confidence in their purchases and more trust in your business.

3. Can you deliver real-time quotes for custom orders?

It’s extremely difficult to deliver a quote quickly when you have hundreds of thousands of products, tiered pricing models, and account-based discounts and promotions. Even typing all of this is a mouthful. But as mentioned before, CPQ not only automates configurations, it also provides accurate pricing based on all of these data points in real-time. Through CPQ, the entire quoting process is automated and enables your sales team to deliver more quotes, faster – boosting revenue opportunities.

4. Can you introduce new products on the fly?

Speed to market is the competitive advantage in today’s digital economy. You cannot afford to wait months – or longer – to introduce new products or services. With carefully crafted cloud-based solutions and architecture, you can accelerate your go-to-market strategy and reduce it to mere days or weeks.

5. Are your sales operations fully connected to the rest of your organization?

It’s been a theme over an over – speed is everything. The only way to truly accelerate your sales cycle and provide a fast and accurate customer experience is to have a unified business process from lead generation all the way through payment and delivery.

To accomplish this, your business processes and technologies need to be seamlessly integrated to move your data down the supply chain – empowering efficiency each step of the way. If you only focus on improving your sales processes and there are flaws in the rest of the buyer’s journey, you’re opening your business up for errors and missing a huge piece of the customer experience.

Isn’t it an upset when your Amazon Prime purchase comes late or is wrong? The ‘ideal Amazon experience’ is what your customers are looking for, and you don’t want to disappoint them.

Checking All 5 Boxes

The essence of this checklist is to ensure your business has speed, customization and connectivity to innovate at the pace of demand.

See the impact, and watch how a B2B luxury furniture manufacturer completed the checklist to achieve a B2C-like eCommerce experience with hundreds of customizable product offerings through ArganoKeste’s multi-cloud solution.