Six building blocks for revitalized B2B marketing and sales

Photograph If you’re a B2B company leader, you know how important face time is. Sales visits, trade shows, and demonstrations present opportunities to engage with customers and highlight your knowledge, experience, and ability to solve problems at scale — key differentiating factors that can make or break your growth curve. But COVID-19 has brought these sorts of interactions to a screeching halt. To respond effectively, you’ll need to accelerate your digital investments in always-on, virtual models for engaging customers and evolve your operating model to realize the full potential of those investments.

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Some investments can add value quickly, without too much difficulty, and others will require more time. Launching or bolstering e-commerce, virtual trade shows and innovation center demonstrations, and digital configuration tools can be done in a matter of months. For example, the time frame for standing up e-commerce channels has collapsed from 20-plus weeks to less than 10 weeks due to advances in available technology platforms, combined with the ability to design and build new customer experiences via agile ways of work. Investments, too, can be rolled out in a series of sprints, starting with a minimum viable product.

By focusing on these sorts of quick wins first, you’ll be able to make progress on driving value in parallel with your slower moving, multiyear technology investments, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, or content management systems, which often take a year and a half to three years to deliver returns. For example, real-time supply chain visibility is likely to come later on the road map, given how complex it is to implement.

To realize the full benefit of any of these changes, though, and to do so rapidly, you’ll need to reconfigure your operating model, and you can do that Apply design thinking to meet the needs of specific customer personas. Find out what’s working and what’s not for the procurement managers, design engineers, production planners, and other types of customer you’re trying to engage along the path to purchase. At the same time, think about the needs of your own internal personas, such as sales representatives, service operations personnel, or solution engineers. By seeking understanding and challenging assumptions, you can determine which specific experience elements will drive the most value with the least reliance on heroic efforts to

overcome back-end limitations or inefficient business processes.

Drive the automation of work activities Leverage more flexible and modular infrastructure, digital tools, and ways of working. Low-code platforms such as Salesforce and Mendix can be used to develop new digital experiences, including e-commerce storefronts, collaboration portals, and virtual trade shows, in far less time and at a lower cost than via existing approaches. And breaking your digital engagement road map into a set of short sprints helps to speed the time to value, driving adoption Consider changes to the sales and distribution chain to better leverage digitization, respond to omnichannel models, and differentiate your customer experience. To do this, you’ll need to ask yourself several questions: What is the role of channel partners as online sales increase as a proportion of all sales? How can value be created and delivered using various channels? What pricing policies can deliver the intended strategy? Your answers will provoke many changes that will take time to implement, especially if they require contractual alterations and negotiations, but some can nevertheless be put in place within weeks and months.