The 3 challenges of B2B companies in their digitization

The wave of digital disruption has reached B2B and it is time for this field, which has traditionally relied on face-to-face channels or word of mouth to generate demand, to make the definitive leap into the digital galaxy. In this new paradigm in which the B2B consumer has transformed towards a more digital and autonomous profile that demands the same quality standards as in B2C, ISDI, a leading business school in digital transformation, presented yesterday together with Good Rebels, the study “The digitization of B2B” that aims to shed light on the evolution of the industry and delve into the challenges that companies must face in this process.

Reasons to digitize B2B businesses

What happens when you can’t visit the client? A reality that the COVID-19 pandemic brought and that has forced us to be connected in another way. In this sense, the paper explains that the key to success lies in connecting with these consumers –consumers and non-customers–, adapting to their habits and finding them in the channels they use. For this reason, making the leap to the digital universe becomes a priority and presents great opportunities that will become a competitive advantage for those companies that know how to take advantage of them, such as improving efficiency, achieving stronger relationships or using data will multiply the value of relationships, will facilitate commercial work and will be able to explore new possibilities and forms of business.

Paco Soler, Director of ISDI’s Corporate Training area, has underlined the importance of seeing “how we can use the tools that digitization makes available to us to maintain relationships with customers, but also be more efficient and, above all, achieve places we normally don’t go. All this with the idea of ​​helping B2B function and improve the buyer’s experience”.

The challenges of the future for B2B companies

In this B2B business digitization workshop, it has been explained how to prepare brands for this wave of changes while boosting business results. To do this, they must face three challenges:

• Adopt digital tools and strategies to understand and approach the B2B buyer. It is necessary to understand the strength of the brand, enhance the benefits of its products compared to those of the competition, work on content quality, have the right digital ecosystem, develop digital assets and have and increase the company’s reputation in the industry. generating value.

• Address the training of teams and bet on continuous training in the digital field of marketing, sales and commercial professionals. This is a key aspect, since to achieve digital transformation it is vital to achieve a real transformation of the company’s culture and the way of working. Those companies capable of understanding the strength and competitiveness generated by having professionals with the ability to adapt and quickly learn new knowledge or skills will be on the road to success.

• Have a data orientation. To take advantage of them, the integration of technology will be key. The CRM is the heart of the marketing and sales team, which is necessary to add value to the commercial teams; who must be taught to work by integrating procedures and changing processes, help them use automation tools to be more efficient and productive, and build a dashboard that allows them to see in real time which channels are working and which are not.

In this sense, Salvador Suárez, co-founding partner of Good Rebels, has highlighted that “in this cultural transformation towards digitization, a different way of working is beginning to be understood, integrating areas, using technology to connect data and people and they are going to achieve much stronger relationships because comparators are used to buying in this new environment. We have to start working with data if we want to understand what is working, which channels are most effective and what type of content generates value. Likewise, this technology makes it possible to offer new forms of personalization service and other elements that the market is beginning to demand.”

It is necessary to adopt digital tools and strategies to understand and approach the B2B buyer

During the round table of experts, José Juan Domínguez, Head of Marketing, Sales and Communications, Southern Europe at Siemens Healthineers; and Manuel Martos, General Manager at Grupo Nextil, have reflected on these challenges, their company’s business models and their transformation, as well as change management.

Martos has commented that “digitization is the only path we have. The integration of customer needs in a fluid and natural way with our systems, both for product development and production, is essential. And at the digital marketing level, we have experienced a spectacular change from how customers see us now to how they saw us a year and a half ago. We are going to go further and there will be a lot of training”.

For his part, Domínguez added that, from his experience, culture is the most important part of digitization in B2B: “I think it is the most appropriate tool for seeking value in our activity with clients. From there, education, training and outside talent that can inspire and guide the sales forces, which are not going to disappear. Digitization and digital marketing is a wonderful addition that allows us to add value to our activity but that has to learn to coexist”.