With the release of the report Accelerating Your Digital Vision: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level by Master B2B in collaboration with commercetools, thought leaders convened to discuss how their organizations advanced digital maturity to create differentiating customer experiences for B2B buyers. Discover the key insights of this lively discussion here.
Digital maturity has been a top priority for B2B practitioners this year, so much so that the latest Master B2B survey unveiled that 83% of companies plan to increase their digital spending compared to 2023. For manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers, getting the inside scoop from leading businesses that have successfully accelerated their digital vision helps drive their initiatives forward.
Led by Andy Hoar and Brian Beck from Master B2B, with special guest Julia Rabkin, Senior Product Marketing Manager at commercetools, the Accelerating Your Digital Vision webcast featured an impressive lineup of panelists who shared strategies and tips on how they advanced their businesses’ digital maturity across team culture, digital tools and customer experience dimensions, as outlined in the original Digital Maturity Assessment framework.
Getting team culture up to digital speed
After an initial poll revealed that 41% of participants believe that “team culture” is the most important dimension of digital maturity, panelist Theresa Kuske, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Chamfr, agreed that “team culture is number one” and that “it does start with the CEO.”
Theresa shared that accelerating digital maturity requires effective change management, involving constant “training, education and continuous discussions.” This is especially true for businesses that didn’t grow up in an online world such as her previous company, Ergodyne, a safety gear supplier with over 40 years in the market. A change in the mindset, Theresa emphasized, “doesn’t happen overnight; it does take time and it’s something you have to work on.”
Ensuring that teams collaborate is crucial to enabling a digital-first organization, and creating cross-functional teams is an effective way to achieve this goal. At Ergodyne, she established an AI cross-functional team to understand the long-term business impact of generative AI, regularly meeting with senior leadership.
A final tip shared by Theresa is to truly leverage the Master B2B Digital Maturity Assessment. She converted the assessment into a spreadsheet that was completed by several people in the organization, a process that sparked conversations about the current status of digital, identified gaps and helped create a roadmap to accelerate the company’s digital maturity over time.
Actionable insights to power up your digital-first team culture
Enabling business strategy with digital tools
While team culture plays a key role in the success of distributor Zoro.com, with teams empowered to make decisions that simplify customers’ lives, the company is also known for behaving like a technology company. “When I say it’s kind of wired into DNA, that’s just the way Zoro is built: Digital-native, cloud-native,” said Andy Goodfellow, CTO at Zoro.com
Andy shared that, as a distributor, Zoro.com has “really good data about their customers,” which, combined with technology, enables the company to excel in customer experiences. For instance, the company leverages GenAI to accurately predict when a package will be delivered to a customer (even when shipping from a manufacturer), so they can provide better delivery estimates. “We can leverage the technologies to really help those business problems get solved,” said Andy.
Actionable insights to make the most of digital tools
Customer experience as the Northstar
With customer experience guiding every aspect of business strategy, it’s clear that B2B organizations today must prioritize CX. This becomes even more crucial as digital-native generations — millennials and Gen Z — take on increasingly influential roles as decision-makers in B2B purchasing. According to Steve Baruch, former CMO at MSC Industrial Supply, this demographic shift should keep B2B practitioners “up at night.”
For Steve, achieving a great customer experience at MSC was their guiding metric, and the company used “every available voice of the customer” tool to obtain an objective third-party reading into what their customers were actually experiencing.
In fact, MSC “democratized that data across the organization so everyone could understand how they were impacting the customer experience,” which helped make the case that a customer-first strategy is a mindset that aligns everyone within the business. Moreover, Steve shared a mantra about how customer satisfaction impacts the bottom line: “If you can create a link between NPS (a score that measures customer loyalty by looking at their likelihood of recommending a given business) and EPS (an indicator of how much money a company makes for each share of its stock), you’ll have success.”
When it comes to customer ownership, Steve mentioned how crucial it is to have one single individual own it. After all, “If you have more than one owner, you don’t have an owner.”
Lastly, Steve emphasized how short-term, low-hanging fruit investments can significantly impact ROI, especially when concentrating on activities lower in the sales funnel. “Focus closer to the last click than the first,” he advised as a starting point. Plus, the iterative process of “test/learn/show the results” is a great way to bring short-term success, which can also facilitate efforts to “climb back up the funnel.”
Actionable insights to take customer experiences to the next level
Live poll: How B2B organizations are faring in digital maturity
In addition to the invaluable practitioner insights shared during the session, Master B2B took the pulse of the audience with instant polls to gauge organizations’ progress in digital maturity.
While a significant portion of B2B practitioners described their companies as a “starter” in terms of team culture, digital tools and customer experience, it’s evident that “intermediate” is the stage where most B2B organizations currently stand. Achieving “advanced” status remains a milestone attained by only a select few. This shows that the real chasm to cross in all 4 dimensions of the digital maturity framework is between Stage 2 and Stage 3.
It’s evident that the B2B sector is continuing to evolve in terms of digital maturity, an ongoing initiative that requires continuous time and effort. Whether you’re just beginning or striving to advance from intermediate to advanced stages, all these dimensions (team culture, digital tools, customer experience, data and insights) should operate harmoniously and, crucially, remain adaptable and flexible to navigate unpredictability and new market conditions.
Accelerating your digital vision demands flexible, adaptable technology in conjunction with all other dimensions of digital maturity. Julia emphasized the importance of setting up your business to maintain flexibility and pivot as needed, whether in response to future pandemics or evolving preferences among Gen Z. “That’s where the composable approach comes into play — to help you cross the chasm, no matter what point you’re starting from,” she concluded.
To get all the insights and strategies unveiled by B2B practitioners, watch the Accelerating Your Digital Vision on-demand webinar.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.