The B2B e-commerce journey is quite complex, and today’s B2B buyer is no longer an archetype in a glass box. Gone are the days of long, drawn-out decision-making and seemingly endless processes. Digitalization has already eroded many of these barriers across industries. The B2B customer of today expects the same speed, convenience, flexibility, and transparency as consumer platforms. You need to anticipate their needs, join them in their channel of choice and offer tailored solutions and services. Are you already on the path of B2B digital acceleration?
Digital Commerce is the Next Normal for B2B
The rise in digital interactions in B2B is already breaking traditional sales models. The Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report predicts that by 2025, 80% of interactions between suppliers and buyers in B2B will occur via digital channels. You need to engage, interact and transact with your customers wherever they are. To meet customers’ new buying preferences and succeed at B2B digital commerce, you must adopt a digital mindset and accelerate your shift to digital channels.
For over a decade, Mindcurv has designed and implemented advanced transactional digital solutions for B2B companies. We also build and operate highly scalable cloud infrastructures that enable the rapid growth of digital businesses. In fact, in 2020, our platforms generated over €3B in revenue for our clients. But to truly maximize the impact of digital commerce for our customers and enable B2B digital acceleration, we need to digitalize to the left and right of our current offerings in the B2B e-commerce journey.
Digitalizing the Entire B2B E-commerce Journey and Beyond
Mindcurv’s top-down and bottom-up approach – where we study the existing customer segments and define the B2B e-commerce journeys, design the platform and tooling, develop the infrastructure, and take over platform management – is the cornerstone of many growth stories. To truly digitalize B2B, we have grown our expertise, blending evaluation, marketing, sales, and customer success and retention.
Awareness, Consideration, and Advocacy through Salesforce
B2B sellers need digital tools to build engagement with their customers’ decision-makers. These are necessary to align large groups of internal stakeholders virtually and asynchronously. Personalization and the overall experience play significant roles in the purchase decision and loyalty, within the B2B e-commerce journey.
Salesforce is one of the most widely used CRM tools across the world and enables an enriching customer relationship experience. It can be easily integrated with existing business systems like e-commerce, ERP, finance, supply chain, and operations, to consolidate disparate data into a unified view. With Salesforce integration, productivity increases, manual error decreases and your business develops a strong foundation for customer support and long-term customer relationships. With the acquisition of Cloud Consulting Group, one of Germany’s top Salesforce Partners, the Mindcurv Group can now seamlessly digitalize marketing, sales, and service operations across the entire B2B e-commerce customer experience lifecycle.
Purchase and Retention
Nailing down the platform experience is crucial to scaling your business and maintaining customer trust and loyalty. You need to understand your technical debt on the application and infrastructure levels and develop a plan to improve performance and customer experience. Mindcurv has deep expertise in digital platforms and cloud solutions. With the acquisition of igniti, we have more depth and breadth in our portfolio, especially in PHP, Shopware, Magento 2, Spryker, and cross-platform development using C++ and the Qt framework.
Enriched User Experience Across the B2B E-commerce Journey
User experience is becoming the clincher in B2B, with business buyers expecting an experience similar to B2C platforms. They want easy site navigation, on-site search, easy checkout, merchandising and compelling product presentation, and more. Additionally, your B2B e-commerce platform needs to understand the buyer’s intent and needs, accommodate B2B workflows, and provide B2B specific features like customer-specific pricing, custom catalogs, and so on. With the acquisition of wysiwyg*, the Mindcurv Group further strengthened their portfolio with regards to UX, both in engagement and as a product studio.
The experts at wysiwyg* have delivered projects for global brands including 3M Germany, BRABUS, ESPRIT, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Schweppes, Sony Europe, Siemens Electrogeräte, Vodafone, and more. With them on board, we now have enhanced capabilities to deliver engagement-focused UX and interactive applications across the entire B2B e-commerce journey.
R/evolutionary Experiences Across Every Digital Touchpoint
Achieving rapid ROI with B2B e-commerce doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. With our joint capabilities, the Mindcurv Group now has more to offer in digitalizing the B2B customer journey. We are specialized in large-scale B2B e-commerce and our different platforms manage millions of connected devices across different AWS regions, advanced transactional robotic-IoT, B2B and B2C marketplaces, 3D visualization, AR and VR, and more.
With these recent acquisitions, we’ve strengthened our capabilities in focus areas like digitalizing how businesses interact with their customers end-2-end, additional capabilities in digital commerce, and design that drives conversion. We have big plans for the future. Soon, we’ll embed analytics into core commercial processes to drive strategy, experience, margins, and sales and go beyond B2B e-commerce. Our ambition is to empower organizations to r/evolutionize the experiences of their customers and their own companies across every digital touchpoint.
Author
Simon Fernley
Client Strategist
