Know thy customer
Manufacturers often don’t know who their end users are until it’s an RMA (return material authorization) request. Then they get a message along the lines of “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m a customer. This is broken. Fix it.” And that’s the not-great beginning of the customer journey.
What’s needed is capturing end-user data earlier in the purchase and sales processes so you can build a relationship based on something more solid than “I don’t like the results of your RMA evaluation.” Tying these things together on a common front-end platform for the customer experience as opposed to a back-end system—that’s when you have the makings of much better marketing. You can approach the customer with confidence, knowing the last ten products they purchased, and the next three, four, or five in the customer lifecycle that makes sense.
Software subscriptions in the manufacturing space are very hot—and for a good reason. Everybody wants to disaggregate the hardware and the software and turn software into a subscription. The highly successful model mastered by Adobe, Tableau, and Salesforce is creeping into the non-software industry.
Subscriptions in manufacturing can take a wide variety of forms. In addition to software, there are subscriptions to data, service plans, warranties, physical goods, and training offerings. Data subscriptions can go beyond broad physical asset IoT (internet of things) information to more targeted data to manage maintenance activity to near zero. There’s the bundling of multiple subscriptions into a comprehensive package. Anything that can be parsed as a repeatable purchase unit can be a subscription.
But let’s get back to that piece we mentioned earlier, the phenomenon of knowing (or not) who, exactly, the B2B customer is. That goes beyond the inherent complexity of B2B products and the chain of re-selling that expands your circle of customers to include your customers’ customers. It’s about data, data infrastructure, and plugging into the emerging capabilities of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning).
But volume is key. If you turn your AI and ML capabilities loose on a database of 20,000 records, you might not get a lot in return. AI needs millions of records to have any meaningful impact. There’s also the issue of data that is—for want of a better term—garbage. Without plentiful, consistent data, AI is not going to do much for you.
Once you get clean data at scale, then you can start to look at things like order history patterns and use that data to project different messages in both your outbound campaigns, as well as on landing pages on your commerce site. So the recommended product, the related product, which banner to show—all of those types of things can be very finely tuned based on high-quality data.
We’ve mentioned subscriptions, customer 360, and using a combination of AI and ML to power customer 360 and targeted marketing. That’s only the start of a long list for B2B companies looking to modernize their capabilities—including supply chain automation, security, and much more—collectively often referred to as digital transformation.
Some companies are more mature than others on this score, but it can be daunting for any company. We’ve found that Salesforce lights the way here—for both companies that are new to it and those that are already using it in some capacity. The reason Salesforce has become so dominant is that their a la carte offerings can so easily be rolled up into an all-in-one solution that works seamlessly across business functions.
Say you already have sales and service up and running on Salesforce. When you add commerce on top of that, it’s a straight line to a full 360 of a customer view of leads, opportunities, invoices, orders, carts, and products that are purchased versus products that are abandoned. All that becomes part of one ecosystem that superpowers every aspect of your business, not just commerce. We encourage our clients to think big. Modernizing your B2B commerce can be the perfect time to modernize everything else as well.
Your competitors are certainly doing that. The competitive landscape requires that commerce be integrated into your marketing execution, your marketing function, and your selling function.
Marketing, sales, and service: there’s a layer of commerce that supports all three of those things with Salesforce. If you’re using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can slide that into your brand-new storefront. If you’re already doing customer service with Salesforce Service Cloud, you can easily spin up chatbots.
If a customer on your customer storefront has a challenge, that can tie in with your customer service interaction. Commerce can no longer be siloed. It has to be integrated into your entire business, end to end. It’s now something that should be closer to 20% of your business rather than the 2% or so that it used to be.
Salesforce offers an integrated customer experience platform. And they have the tools to let you do marketing, sales, commerce, service, etc., where others can offer only part of an ecosystem—digital assets but no service, CRM but no commerce engine, or pure commerce with no sales management. So, you can have four tools from four vendors, none of which talk to each other, or you can have Salesforce.
Let’s take an example. Say you send a marketing e-mail to a potential customer, and convince them to go to your commerce site. They search products, check out some specs, and check out some prices. They don’t love the prices and contact a customer sales rep. The rep kicks it back with a new offer, and the customer makes the purchase. It ships, but there’s something wrong with it, so the customer goes back online for customer service, which ultimately is able to resolve the issue.
If you have the multi-vendor model of managing your commerce, good luck capturing that entire complex journey in one view. You’ll need approximately one army of developers and a whole bunch of tools to do that. The service person who’s using the service application also needs to log in to a commerce system that’s completely separate. And you have to copy and update your product data in four places. With Salesforce, all those processes, from marketing and service to emerging AI solutions, sit in one platform. There is absolute integration with your customers at the core, and unification of your product price information, subscriber model, and billing models.
