Isomr Group’s digital strategy team routinely encounters unhealthy B2B digital commerce initiatives and failing CX projects. In many of these scenarios, the business has sidestepped the hard work of drafting a business case for digital and engaging the executive leadership team around that business case in a meaningful way.
Bottom line? These scenarios are incredibly common. And, they all ignore the true strength of digital within their business because they fail to deploy digital as a strategy linked to organizational objectives. Often they are doomed to fail from the outset because the business hasn’t taken a moment to articulate what “digital” means for its growth and survival.
It’s not uncommon for the business not to require a business case for digital tactics at their outset. But it absolutely needs to happen. Here’s why.
Scenario 1: Digital Commerce as Existential Imperative
In many cases, B2B organizations view digital experiences – and digital commerce in particular – as vital to their future. The executive leadership team has convinced itself that the business will perish without it. And therefore, the business becomes willing to bear virtually any cost to ensure its success. Several Isomr Group accounts – prior to partnering with our digital strategy team – had invested more than $3M in less than 2 years and were still struggling to launch a successful digital customer experience.
The insidious side of the “digital as existential imperative” is that oftentimes ecommerce directors think it’s fabulous – if only because it’s expedient. They’ll avoid forcing strategic discussions because it slows them down and it requires truly hard work (seemingly superfluous work) to convince executives of its importance. But the price paid for expediency is in long-term investment commitments and realizing tangible, impactful returns from digital. In these situations, performance indicators are never put in place because it’s unclear if and how digital truly relates to the underlying business. As a result, the digital tactics are often disconnected from the business’ priorities. Executives set the bar for “we’ve done digital” at an arbitrary, unspoken height. Once that waterline is reached, funding and attention mysteriously vanishes. They consider themselves to have saved the business by “doing digital,” but the lack of metrics makes that claim baseless. And that ecommerce director? They struggle to understand why these business leaders suddenly turned their backs on their “digital messiah,” and they start shopping their resume around.
One of the most shocking things to witness is when this scenario plays itself out under the watchful eye of an experienced consulting business. In this situation, hiring the external consulting organization was accomplishment enough for the executive who got it done. Ironically, what the consultant actually does is irrationally immaterial. A project or two later the scenario is the same.
Scenario 2: Digital Commerce as Virtual Retail Outlet
Ten years ago, lots of companies – vertically integrated brands in particular – launched ecommerce initiatives as retail outlet n+1. They viewed ecommerce as just another retail store through which customers could purchase product. Why? Retail stores were something they were familiar with and understood. Spinning up a “virtual store” didn’t require a strategy. And it didn’t require a business case.
The problem with this over simplified modeling of an ecommerce business is that it’s not a strategy. Not only is it altogether inappropriate in countless B2B scenarios, but it also fails to incorporate digital touch points into the customer journey where they could have even greater impact. It trivializes digital’s contribution to sales in other channels. And it looks past all the ways that digital can be a multiplier for the business at large.
Moreover, because the challenges of digital commerce differ greatly from those of physical retail, it’s difficult for ecommerce (which includes both D2C and B2B2C) to reach its full potential in this environment. Leadership can’t understand why ecommerce struggles with things that don’t resemble retail problems and won’t get behind the steps required to solve them.
Not surprisingly, the first brands to to start integrating digital experiences across the enterprise were aging catalog businesses trying to wean themselves off of print. These businesses understood that – similar to their successful catalog divisions – digital represented just one medium through which customers interacted with their business. Customers also expected to move seamlessly from print to phone to physical retail and be able to pick up right where they left off. Traditional catalog companies had grown adept at this over the course of 3 decades.
However, distinct from printed catalogs, customers approached digital with a different set of expectations and jobs to be done. Customers expected to initiate a return, request credit, purchase or redeem a gift card, pay an invoice, contact customer care, schedule a service appointment, reschedule a delivery, leave a positive or negative review, make a reservation, or be rewarded for ordering direct.
Nowhere is this framing of the buyer relationship more important than B2B. Digital is not another distribution center, and it is not strictly a channel. Digital is the alchemy of ephemeral customer interactions wherever customers are found (and at different stages of the buyer journey – which in B2B should be an enduring relationship). Put a different way – digital is being at your customer’s fingertips when your customer needs you.
Any distributor for whom “easy to do business with” appears in its mission or values should incorporate a healthy mix of digital into their strategy and support those interactions technically, organizationally and operationally. In no way does that somehow translate to “clickable catalog.” RIP, Flipbook.
Scenario 3: Digital Commerce as Independent Undertaking
The biggest fear of any business adopting digital strategies is that it comes at a cost. Few companies are willing (or can afford) for digital to be an incremental expense on top of an already successful, functioning business. And the tradeoffs are frequently against known, “worked-for-the-last-twenty-years” tactics for unknown, untested and untrusted digital gambits.
This made PIM a natural entry-point for traditional catalog and B2B businesses. PIM bore the promise of automating the printed catalog production whilst simultaneously providing a beachhead of content that digital experiences (both B2B2C and D2C) require. Not only would PIM collect product content into one, consolidated repository, but it would also drive down the cost of producing printed materials in order to fund digital. The results were mixed, and the net result was the same – digital was forced to bootstrap with extremely limited resources. It also set a bad precedent: digital could only grow if there was a measurable, financial return to justify a budget reallocation. Projects for which “return” was more difficult to quantify simply didn’t get done (such as NPS improvement, or an overall increase in CLV/loyalty spanning multiple channels).
This is just one example of companies who have attempted to run digital as a bootstrap operation, completely separate from but reliant on the rest of the organization. The resulting ecommerce business is underfunded, lacks the same sorts of enterprise view of the digital customer journey and is underrepresented at the leadership level. (This last one is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem.)
I Still Don't Get Why These Are Problems
The problem with each of these approaches is that they’re aren’t strategic.
Scenario 1 (“digital as imperative”) views digital as “something we must do” rather than a real opportunity for the business. The problem is not that digital (or digital commerce) is not an imperative – I think we can all agree that it is. Rather, the problem is that “digital” is undefined. “Digital experience” lays a foundation for your buyers to interact with your business in a whole new way. That can mean any number of things – digital commerce is just one way buyers can engage with you online.
Scenario 2 (“digital as retail store”) is eerily similar to Scenario 1 in that it doesn’t attempt to define digital in the context of the organization. It doesn’t explore ways in which digital customer experience might help the business retain some customers or acquire others. Rather, it jumps to a commerce conclusion, and then tries to implement commerce in the same way it implements retail stores. In some ways this is more dangerous than Scenario 1 because it will fail to measure up to customer expectations when interacting with that digital store. (For example, what will you do with the first customer who tries to return an online purchase to the store?)
Scenario 3 (“digital as independent undertaking”) is an attempt to ignore the problem altogether. Sure, digital is something we have to do. As long as it plays quietly in the corner, then we’ll allow it to function. But especially in the case of B2B, the most impactful opportunities will never see the light of day. And even the most basic of digital initiatives will struggle to interact with critical stakeholders (inventory, distribution, pricing) who don’t see a need to prioritize digital.
The hardest part in any of these three scenarios is getting the attention of the executive leadership team. In each of these scenarios it is possible for the ecommerce team to function without a business case. But without a business objective – without aligned common goals with the leadership team, digital will fail to reach its full potential (and may simply fail to take root at all).
Goal zero within any organization must be to define the role of digital in the context of the business. It doesn’t have to be a heavy, over-architected endeavor. But, it does need to happen, it does require meaningful executive participation, and it’s forcibly cross-functional.
