Intelligence in eCommerce, Marketing & Sales-Led Channels

B2B companies must personalize and ensure consistency in the customer experience across digital channels such as eCommerce and marketing automation systems. They should also extend this to their direct sales channels. Discover how revenue operations and intelligence software can transform eCommerce and marketing systems into effective sales channels, resulting in increased revenue.

Multi-Channel Selling Meets Revenue Intelligence

“Customers want an always-on, personalized, omnichannel experience. The world's best sellers are giving it to them,” states the McKinsey.com article, "The new B2B growth equation."

Revenue operations and intelligence solutions can mitigate the revenue and margin impacts caused by the broken supply chain, enable sales reps to sell excess and stockout inventory, and keep agreements priced to target and customers on track to hit volume commitments. They can also seamlessly integrate revenue-driving actions into eCommerce and marketing automation systems.

B2B companies want to provide a digital experience like Amazon and use automated marketing in a personalized way. However, it's difficult to make this happen while keeping the customer experience consistent across digital and sales team channels. B2B companies often provide the same product recommendations to all customers. This is because they have limited capabilities.

Learn more: Top 4 Tips for B2B eCommerce

Revenue operations and intelligence solutions utilize data to automatically send personalized actions to digital channels. This process helps to create consistent eCommerce and account-based marketing experiences.

Read More: What is Revenue Operations and Intelligence?

Let's take a closer look at some common eCommerce and account-based marketing sales challenges.

What Are Some Common Multi-Channel Selling Challenges?

Many companies have eCommerce systems that can display personalized product recommendations based on a set of logic and rules. Companies commonly use marketing automation tools to drive revenue through product promotions.

However, orchestrating these promotions in a coordinated and specific manner is rare. Further, measuring the revenue impact of these efforts is elusive. Let's examine why achieving a more intelligent and coordinated approach to eCommerce and marketing remains so challenging.

Lack of Personalization

Most eCommerce platforms serve up the same offerings to each customer, whether or not those promotions make sense for them. This approach fails to address the complexity inherent in large enterprises.

For example, a B2B distributor may have tens of thousands of products and thousands of customers it serves. Providing personalized product recommendations is important to increase sales, recover lost customers, promote suitable alternatives, and sell excess inventory.

Companies miss opportunities to grow their average order value with only static tools.

Lack of Consistency

To reach business goals, you need to make the most of every interaction with customers. Customers desire customized prices and products that hold significance to them. They want to feel valued and understood by the company they are dealing with.

A consistent customer experience between online and sales-led channels is critical to achieving this experience. Sales, digital, and marketing channels suggest different things to customers without a centralized revenue operations and intelligence system. A better approach ensures that the customer's online experience, conversations with sales representatives, and email correspondence are consistent.

Watch: Getting Closer to the Customer in the Digital Age

Limiting Manual Processes

The tool sets available to operations and analytics teams are limited. They are likely wrestling with enormous data sets and using spreadsheets to determine which items to offer customers.

Companies match these items without considering the specific preferences of customers. Manual tools and processes lack urgency and cannot keep pace with today's real-time, always-on digital landscape. Manual tools also do not offer the necessary specificity to improve the customer experience in digital channels.

For example, a company's product manager uploads spreadsheets to serve up relevant products based on broad segments or promotions in the eCommerce portal. They spent a significant amount of time pulling data from various systems, analyzing and determining the desired strategy.

However, this approach fails to address the complexity of most B2B enterprises. This completely misses the personalization mark.

The product manager can use revenue operations and intelligence software to provide personalized product recommendations for each account. They can also update these recommendations quickly as conditions change. Additionally, they can create a customized eCommerce experience for each customer. We do this based on data science and the latest available data on customer interactions.

Read More: Distributor Moves Inventory & Converts Lost Quotes with Sales IQ™ & Campaign Manager™

How Does Revenue Operations & Intelligence Software Benefit Customer Experience?

Revenue operations and intelligence software transforms eCommerce and marketing automation tools into active selling tools. We generate actionable guidance using customer transaction data, market dynamics, online buying patterns and more.

Zilliant's revenue operations and intelligence software, Sales IQ™ and Campaign Manager™, responds to inventory issues, supply chain challenges, and market volatility. Sales IQ™ and Campaign Manager™ combine to automatically funnel data-driven actions into any end-user system, including eCommerce and marketing automation. These actions work to create and foster a more personalized, consistent, and intelligent customer experience.

B2B companies can create a seamless customer experience with AI-driven recommendations. Cart IQ™ delivers highly relevant recommendations into eCommerce systems to increase average order size.

What is Sales IQ™?

Sales IQ™ uses advanced data science to identify incremental revenue opportunities for organic and net-new growth. Sales IQ™ determines what products and quantities customers should be buying based on the buying patterns of similar customers. As a result, Sales IQ™ customers typically see a 5 to 15 percent increase in same-customer sales.

What is Campaign Manager™?

Campaign Manager™ allows sales operations teams to scope, refine, prioritize, and publish campaigns based on intelligent insights. It delivers targeted action types including Growth, Recovery, Product Substitution, Inventory, Win-Back, Prospecting, Contract Compliance, and more.

What is Cart IQ™?

Cart IQ™serves up the products your customers want, need, and are most likely to purchase. It does this based on the items in their online shopping cart or on their order - increasing average order value.

Watch: Zilliant Sales Growth Solutions Overview

Read More: [EBOOK] Auto Parts Distributor Accelerates Sales

How Do Sales IQ™ and Campaign Manager™ Deliver Account-Specific Actions into eCommerce and Marketing Automation Tools?

Sales IQ™ insights become actionable guidance in Campaign Manager™. You can get those actions using APIs into CRM, email marketing programs, or customer eCommerce portals. This enables accurate campaign measurement. It also ensures a consistent experience for customers.

Additionally, it provides the capability to make specific changes for individual customers or items.

If a sales rep closes an action in the CRM, it automatically disappears from eCommerce and marketing automation workflows. Campaigns create a united sales front across all channels that improves with each customer interaction.

Read more: eCommerce as a Selling Tool

What's an Example of Using Product Substitution Actions in eCommerce & Marketing Automation?

This example details how to execute an eCommerce-led product substitution strategy, supported by marketing. It drives new sales rather than turning away business for lack of inventory.

In this use case, supply chain challenges have resulted in product availability issues. First, product managers identify the low-inventory and difficult-to-buy products along with their in-stock substitutes. Sales IQ™ identifies all customers that are currently buying the low stock items with sufficient frequency. Marketing then emails customers with the available substitutes.

Sales operations teams use Campaign Manager™ to create and refine an eCommerce campaign.

The director of sales operations sets a rule to find online customers who bought items in the last six months. Or have purchased the products a minimum of five times and at a volume of at least 2,000 units.

The online shopping system smoothly integrates the actions. The marketing team can send personalized emails to affected customers by delivering target accounts to the marketing automation system. This allows for easy communication with the most impacted individuals.

Customers see an available alternative when they add a product with low stock to their cart. Customers also receive a professional, on-brand email that offers a relevant substitute.

Finally, Campaign Manager™ measures the revenue impact of the action. Product managers use this to improve campaigns over time.

Watch: Zilliant Demo Series: Revenue Operations & Intelligence in B2B

Conclusion

Using data science to personalize and automate eCommerce and marketing is a game changer. Companies using outdated processes or tools are falling behind competitors and not meeting revenue goals. Meanwhile, B2B companies using revenue operations and intelligence tools increase same customer sales by 5 to 15%.

Zilliant Quick Start for Revenue Operations & Intelligence offers an faster path to grow revenue with intelligent customer-specific actions. Quick Start executes and measures the impact of account-specific revenue growth strategies across all go-to-market channels. It enables companies to begin using Zilliant Sales IQ™ and Campaign Manager™ in as few as three weeks.

Read More: Get a Quick Start on Revenue Operations & Intelligence

Reach out to a revenue operations and intelligence expert at Zilliant today to learn more and get started.