Making Sense of Omni-Channel in Enterprise Sales

This paper explores so-called ‘omni-channel’ approaches to customer engagement, and their relevance outside of retail, particularly in relation to enterprise sales relationships for technology vendors.

Omni-What?

What is omni-channel? John Bowden, senior vice president at Time Warner Cable said in an interview with MyCustomer that omni-channel “anticipates that customers may start in one channel and move to another as they progress to a resolution.” It’s a concept that has been around in retail for some time. Visit store, read review on cell phone, go home and order on PC. Best Buy, the US electronics retailer, is jokingly referred to as an “Amazon showroom”. But Best Buy itself is changing, with all of its recent sales growth coming from on line, not from stores. (1)

The Best Buy Story

Many people associate the emergence of omni-channel with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. But it’s perhaps more tied into the history of Best Buy than it is with the history of Apple. Back around 2004 Walmart was hurting Best Buy, and a new approach was needed. Best Buy realized they could not beat Walmart on price, so they started to focus on customer engagement. And electronics was a great category to do that. The Best.Buy.com site was starting to show potential, and it was becoming clear that electronics was a category in which customers would move freely from store to online, and back. Best Buy saw a customer-centric future, where customers selected or “assembled” their own solution on line, or in store, and where the customer could buy on line or in store also. They called it “assembled commerce”.

Highly Relevant

All of the above tells you two things. Best Buy saw an omni-channel future more than ten years ago. And as Nikki Baird from RSR puts it, they realised that “at the heart of omni-channel is customer centricity, you can’t do one without the other.” (2)

Nowadays omni-channel is so engrained in the retail experience that we hardly notice we’re doing it. I recently asked a Best Buy assistant in store about the specification of a printer. She helped me find the product using my cell phone on BestBuy.com, where it explained all I wanted.

So what does all this tell us about the business to business customer experience, and what you might call ‘omni-channel for enterprise sales’? Relevant or not? Answer: relevant. In fact, make that: highly relevant.

Consumer Expectations at Work

A significant fallout from the revolution in the retail experience over the last ten years is that we now take our consumer expectations to work. Here’s how that has happened.

• Today you use the same hardware at work and at home. You take your cell phone and notebook home with you. Ten years ago you didn’t. Remember seeing colleagues lock up their notebook in the desk drawer on a Friday night? Not anymore.

• Today you have the same customer experience expectations when you spend a lot, as you do when you spend a little. Ten years ago you expected excellent service with a good dinner, but car dealerships were “boring, confrontational and bureaucratic”. Not anymore. (3)

What this adds up to is that business customers, particularly the younger millennial generation, are expecting the same buying experience at work as they get at home, and for any size purchase. They buy a TV from Amazon at the weekend, and they expect the same customer experience when they buy a server for the business on Monday morning. They are most likely using the same tablet to research both purchases. Around half of all corporate buying decisions are now researched on a mobile or tablet device. (4)

Hold the Application Developers

For large and sophisticated technology vendors selling into similarly large and sophisticated enterprise customers omni-channel seems like a mighty leap. Suddenly the guy managing data centre infrastructure for BMW wants to buy on line using a cell phone? Not so much, no.

The key to this is in “customer-centricity”. You can’t have omni-channel without it, remember?

What enterprise sales organisations need to ask themselves is not ‘How do I get to be omni-channel?’ but ‘How do my customers really want to buy?’ So let’s put those mobile application developers on hold for just a moment.

New Demands

Let’s explode a myth. Enterprise customers are not all suddenly looking to buy direct, and channel intermediaries are not suddenly irrelevant. Sure, some enterprise customers want to buy direct from the vendor, but that’s nothing new. Much more interesting is how the enterprise customer decides what to buy, and how service and support is delivered.

The people responsible for technology inside any business of pretty much any size are confronted with the same demands from inside their business that we have read about above. Their internal customers want a highly-integrated technology experience, they want it always on, and they want it easy to use.

That places new demands on technology buyers, wherever they are located in the organisation, and the role of third party specialists and advisers becomes more critical than ever. Forrester estimates that today’s B2B buyer “will find three pieces of content about a technology vendor for every one piece that the vendor can deliver.” (5) That puts a lot of specialists and advisers in play.

Five Must Do

That gets us down to the five bChannels omni-channel ‘must do’ for large technology vendors selling into business customers.

1. Spend on Customer Insight

Look at how much you spend on structured research into understanding end customer buying behaviour. If this represents less than 25% of your marketing budget get worried. You’re not doing enough to understand your own problem. Data and insight is key.

2. Engage Influencers

Build a program that engages and rewards influencers of all types, as these are the new channel intermediaries. If you have no influencer program in place today then you are at risk tomorrow. There are proven models out there. Get to know them and learn.

3. Share Customer Data

Manage the end customer experience, working with channel partners. Work with influencers, developers and service specialists to share customer interaction data. “I see you spoke with a third-party consultant last week, are you calling to place an order or to find out more?”

4. Invest in Collaborative Partners

Invest in channel partners based on their ability to share customer data, and based on their commitment to managing customer experience with you collaboratively as a vendor. No data sharing, no collaboration, then no investment.

5. Help Partners Market with You, not for You

Help channel partners understand the demands of omni-channel, and give them the tools to engage customers with you, not for you. This is not just about helping partners towards digital marketing and social platforms, thought that is a part of it. It’s about complete integration of the partner’s customer engagement model, and your model as a vendor.

This is challenging stuff, for partners and for vendors. It’s all about building a fully integrated customer engagement model. And that means sharing customer information. Simply helping channel partners use LinkedIn or Twitter to run marketing campaigns is no where close to enough. And it misses the point. Omni-channel in Best Buy is not all about BestBuy.com, it’s about customer mobility from one channel to another during the buying process. Same applies in enterprise sales.

• https://www.internetretailer.com/2015/11/19/web-sales-drive-all-growth-best-buy

• http://www.rsrresearch.com/research/the-history-of-omni-channel-part-one

• http://www.economist.com/news/business/21661656-no-one-much-likes-car-dealers-changing-system-will-be-hard-death-car-salesman

• https://www.accenture.com/t20150624T211502__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Industries_15/Accenture-B2B-Procurement-Study.pdf

• http://blogs.forrester.com/lori_wizdo/12-10-04-buyer_behavior_helps_b2b_marketers_guide_the_buyers_journey

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