If 2023 was marked by the struggles of B2B organizations to invest in digital initiatives due to tight budgets, macroeconomic uncertainty, insufficient C-suite support and technical limitations, 2024 heralds a major shift in digital commerce investments. The report Accelerating Your Digital Vision: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level by Master B2B in partnership with commercetools reveals that B2B practitioners finally have the budget and executive sponsorship they need to propel digital maturity initiatives forward.
Let’s explore the main highlights of the report, the trends in digital investment and recommendations from leading B2B businesses for successful execution.
Since the introduction of the industry’s first B2B-specific digital maturity assessment last year, hundreds of B2B practitioners have had the opportunity to evaluate their baselines and the digital evolution of their businesses and define the steps to advance across digitization stages. Manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers that assessed their capabilities across four dimensions (Digital Tools, Team Culture, Customer Experience and Data & Insights) were not only able to identify their strengths and weaknesses but also leverage those insights as a roadmap for their eCommerce ambitions.
However, B2B practitioners still faced scores of macroeconomic obstacles that hindered the progress of digital initiatives. As a result, B2B organizations suffered from a chronic lack of investment last year, with slashed eCommerce budgets and reduced experts to drive digital initiatives.
How times have changed! According to the 2024 executive survey and report, Accelerating Your Digital Vision: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level, “2024 is a new era” for digital maturity initiatives as CEOs have provided the buy-in and budget to accelerate the digital vision that the B2B sector needs. Here, we’ve gathered the survey’s most powerful findings into a single infographic that reinforces that the future is full of potential.
As investment in digital maturity becomes imperative across the entire B2B sector, organizations find themselves at varying levels of advancement: For instance, companies that remain a digitization “starter” usually represent digital newcomers in the early stages of eCommerce initiatives. On the other side of the spectrum, the organizations that have achieved “advanced” stages across several dimensions are executing a customer-first digital strategy supported by real-time data, flexible infrastructure and backing from C-suite executives.
Practitioners, with a tailwind of CEO buy-in and the budget they've been asking for, now face the pressure of getting it all done while asking how they can show progress in the short-term as they’re executing against a long-term strategy.
Naturally, numerous businesses find themselves between “starter” and “advanced” across the four dimensions, which signify an established digital presence but with plenty of room for improvement.
To help B2B organizations calibrate their next steps in digital maturity, the new report provides an overview of the digital maturity dimensions with examples of initiatives, ideas and experiences from leading businesses such as ACE Southern, Zoro USA, Schneider Electric, MSC Industrial Supply, and more. Let’s take a look at the highlights.
Digital Tools
What is it: This dimension evaluates how the organization takes advantage of the technology available to streamline operations and improve the customer experience.
Stage overview: Companies in the “starter” phase typically lack online ordering capabilities or have a rudimentary website with a limited product selection. On the other hand, an “advanced” stage in this dimension means that companies operate with a flexible, scalable tech architecture that's seamlessly integrated with critical systems of record (e.g., ERP) and execute a customer-first digital strategy.
Companies that need to evolve in this dimension need flexibility to ensure that digital tooling can adapt to the constantly changing needs of your organization, while also speeding up the time to get new functionality and products live on the site. A great example of a B2B organization that invested in Digital Tools is ACE Southern, a dental surgical manufacturer and distributor.
The company migrated to a composable commerce platform to accelerate website updates requested by business teams. Working previously with a legacy system, small changes took three to four weeks to be implemented. Thanks to the flexibility of composable, ACE Southern can get and update product information on the website faster, which translates into accelerated revenue generation and the enablement of hybrid sales flows. Furthermore, the solution also enabled the manufacturer to accelerate the time to market for new features and improvements.
I’m the only full-time employee working on this (I’m a coder), and we work with an outsourced team as well. On any given day, we’ve got 5 people working on the website and each is limited to 10 hours a week at most. The infrastructure we have makes it easier to work with a smaller team.
Team Culture
What is it: This dimension evaluates how the company embraces digital from an organizational perspective, including the number of digitally-focused team members as well as the digital engagement of the sales team.
Stage overview: Companies that haven’t recognized the opportunity digital represents and lack digital expertise are in the “starter” phase. When organizations count on C-level support, have an established digital-first mindset, and business users can leverage low/no-code tools, they’ve achieved an “advanced” status in this dimension.
Achieving digital maturity is more than plugging and playing with new tools: Businesses need the organizational design and digital-first mindset to unleash the power of digitization. For organizations to evolve across the four stages of digital maturity, they must create cross-functional teams to evangelize and embed digital thinking across the business.
Securing executive buy-in is crucial, and equally important is recruiting digital experts who align with your corporate culture and possess the skills necessary to persuade even the most skeptical colleagues to come on board.
Customer Experience
What is it: This dimension evaluates the company’s ability to meet buyer expectations.
Stage overview: Companies that struggle to provide digital experiences typically find themselves in the “starter” phase in this dimension. On the other hand, when organizations can provide omnichannel experiences, with real-time data powering personalized customer engagement and anticipating buying preferences, they’ve achieved an “advanced” stage.
Providing outstanding customer experiences is the holy grail that any company can hope to achieve. While Master B2B’s executive survey uncovered that 68% of B2B practitioners believe they provide a “better” or “much better” experience than the experience provided by competitors, only 31% of them put customer satisfaction measures (CSAT, NPS, etc.) in their top five goals. This reveals a disconnect between what customer experience is and, as a consequence, how B2B organizations can truly accomplish it.
The first step on the way to creating customer experiences that really matter for your buyers is to agree on a common definition that makes sense for your business. That’s why, before undertaking a digital transformation, the Master B2B report suggests that organizations perform a “fresh customer assessment and segmentation analysis because different segments of customers require different approaches to meeting their needs.”
Data & Insights
What is it: This dimension evaluates how the organization makes clean, usable data available for business users to make data-driven decisions.
Stage overview: When companies view data solely as a cost center rather than as a catalyst for innovation and growth, they typically find themselves in the “starter” phase. Conversely, organizations that possess clean, real-time accessible data for personalization and engagement initiatives have reached the “advanced” stage.
While businesses have made significant strides in data hygiene, it’s evident that the majority of B2B companies continue to grapple with the incredibly complex process of cleaning product data. The survey unveiled that only 44% of respondents agreed that their product data was clean and ready for syndication, and 47% said their companies had successfully made product data available to teams across the organization.
A pivotal strategy for businesses involves harnessing AI not only for data cleansing but also across a myriad of use cases. An exemplary case is Dawn Foods, an American supplier of bakery goods and ingredients, which employs AI for demand planning, forecasting and product recommendations.
We’re using AI models to recommend what products someone will want when they visit the website. Those needs can change from visit to visit, so how do you make sure that session-to-session you’re not recommending the same items because their needs have changed?
Importantly, organizations must create customer feedback loops to ensure that the data they’re getting from customers informs critical product and other investment decisions.
We’ve also built out a feedback loop. It includes qualitative and quantitative voice of customer feedback. We have a robust “voice of customer” program and a great insights team; we’re always listening to our internal and external customers
Conclusion: “There’s no more room for excuses. It’s time to execute”
The shift in digital investments for the B2B sector is loud and clear: Practitioners have secured the necessary budget and gained support from their executive teams to accelerate their digital vision. By combining the digital maturity assessment with real-life insights gathered in this report, B2B organizations can accelerate the time to value of their digital commerce investments, regardless of the digitization stage companies find themselves in.
To expand your digital maturity knowledge and get all the insights from leading B2B businesses such as Schneider Electric, Zoro USA, Ingredion, and more, download the report Accelerating Your Digital Vision: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level.
Julia is a Senior B2B Product Expert at commercetools. With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams in the tech world, she is an expert at creating innovative, customer-first strategies, and excelling in cross-functional growth & GTM initiatives.