Читать книгу A new era of Value Selling - Thomas Menthe - Страница 9

 53% of the B2B buyers Forrester surveyed in 2015 preferred to gather information on their own, as opposed to interacting with a sales rep. Today, that figure has grown to 68%. B2B buyers want to do their own product research

 The survey found that upskilled inside sales will play an even greater role in all phases of SMB and enterprise sales than initially predicted in 2015.

 Shifting from offline to online sales is both cost- and customer-effective. Companies such as Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss reported that shifting its B2B customers to a self-serve portal increased their revenue by 10%.

As an example, German based software start-up foxbase.de has started to develop a solution for digital B2B sales. Likewise, in a professional sales conversation, customer and sales staff of a selling company can easily find the best product from a wide range of product portfolio online. Henkel Adhesives B2B has engaged with foxbase and launched multilingual digital product selectors (DPS) for different industrial adhesives categories. Customers provide their individual needs and, based on this information, the DPS searches for the best suitable product through filters, and recommends up to three products. Prices could be made visible based on stipulated volume agreements between the supplier and the customer. The DPS is directly linked with the supplier’s lead management system and search behavior, combined with different information coming from the user, can be used for conversion and optimized product recommendation through machine learning. Data from DPS is stored, analyzed and visualized in sophisticated dashboards and reports to validate customer requirements and identify trends.