Automation of B2B Sales: How to Accelerate Business Growth

Wholesale and e-commerce are a perfect match. For online platform owners, the B2B sector means potentially more profitable clients who are inclined to long-term cooperation. Online wholesale is highly promising and is set to grow at an explosive rate in the coming years.

Today, leading brands are launching their B2B platforms that allow bulk purchases in just a few clicks on a smartphone. Among them are WebMedia, Swarovski, Gucci, Armani. Even industrial giants like Boeing are adopting this practice.

However, not all suppliers keep pace with the digital transition. Digitalization is often implemented sporadically or without proper expertise. Some companies still operate in outdated ways: sales managers call customers, manually send out price lists, and collect orders.

This will change in the coming years. The B2B market is transforming, and wholesale buyers have new needs. In the digital world, the very logic of contacts and procurement is changing. Those who ignore the advantages of new technologies will eventually yield to more advanced competitors.

At first glance, B2B sales processes are easily automatable. Let’s examine them in detail.

Automating B2B Sales: Where to Start

Digitalization of wholesale lags significantly behind retail. In retail, competition is always high, and sellers continuously adapt to clients' needs, but in B2B, innovations come slowly.

Managers still perform many tasks manually: finding customer contacts, sending emails, processing orders. This does not have to be the case.

Sales Pipeline Management

A sales pipeline is a data array on the movement of customer orders through the stages of a sales funnel. Analyzing this data is crucial for businesses as it helps identify weaknesses in company processes and boosts sales. Of course, manually maintaining customer data is a daunting task even for relatively small businesses.

Today, the sales process and data maintenance can be automated using CRM systems. There are many ready-made solutions on the market, but for some unique tasks, a custom product is necessary.

CRM systems are easy to integrate with the site's admin panel and the company's digital services. This helps automate customer search and mailing, simplifying data work for analytics.

Contact Search and Lead Generation

Modern solutions free managers from independently searching for contacts, often showing remarkable ingenuity in verifying data.

There are tools that can automatically gather information from social media profiles and validate it (e.g., Phantombuster on LinkedIn). Some services even analyze potential leads for maturity, highlighting those more likely to cooperate.

Cold calls are also automatable. Today, voice bot services perform this task as well as humans. NLU technologies enable them to understand human speech and maintain a conversation. A robot can call several dozen people in 10 minutes and effectively segment customers. A manager would need several hours to do the same.

Building Customer Relationships

This area seems to require maximum human involvement. However, AI-based solutions can already handle part of the customer work.

Such a “robot” can automatically conduct personalized mailings to a vast database of contacts. It can even select the preferred tone of letters for a particular client.

Integration with CRM data opens up tremendous opportunities. The algorithm can analyze the pipeline for each client and generate personalized offers for everyone.

Purchase Process

Finally, the buyer can place an order and complete the purchase through the B2B platform, bypassing the manager. Nowadays, wholesalers want to make large business purchases as simply as buying sneakers from their favorite online store.

It is crucial that the online wholesale platform fully meets the following expectations: it is available on any device, provides a flexible personal account, electronic document management capabilities, quick access to order history, and essential information.

The buying process should be simple and user-friendly, even when purchasing industrial equipment or chemicals.

How Digitalization Boosts B2B Sales

Digitalization solves many problems in wholesale: it relieves managers, provides new opportunities for lead generation, analytics, and conversion. But most importantly, IT helps avoid obvious mistakes and human error.

Combining customer databases from accounting software, CRM, and spreadsheets saves managers time and speeds up order processing.

CRM eliminates situations where managers get confused with order numbers, miss deadlines, or forget to call clients. The system can automatically handle typical tasks such as generating invoices or sending service letters.

Finally, automated mailing and dialing services offer productivity levels that a human can only dream of. The robot not only makes more calls but also segments the customer base much faster and more efficiently than a live employee. Simple statistics come into play here – the more leads, the more profit.

Challenges in B2B Sales

In the online wholesale business, things are not as smooth as we would like. According to a Sana Commerce survey, 37% of B2B consumers regularly face problems with online ordering (at least once a week).

The most common problems are errors in tracking and delivering orders, complex communication with the supplier, insufficient visibility of product characteristics and payment terms on the platform, and overall complexity of ordering. Half of B2B e-commerce sites do not fully meet audience expectations.

This means that wholesale suppliers have room to grow in terms of organizing online sales: introducing better tools, refining processes, and eliminating logistics shortcomings.

Despite the challenges, B2B e-commerce is growing at a tremendous pace. More than half of the companies in the Sana Commerce survey said they frequently use online platforms. In 2019, only 28% of such companies existed.

The advantages of online trading are evident, although this segment is still in its infancy. Vendors that tackle digitalization faster than others can outrun competitors by several years.