Succeeding at B2B ecommerce requires companies to view commerce in how it drives the customer experience through the buying journey, Forrester Research says. A report it issued recently lays out a way to assess how well companies online meet four “core competencies” needed to win over customers through digital commerce.

Joe Cicman, senior analyst for e-business, Forrester Research

The report, “Gauge Your B2B E-Commerce Digital Maturity,” by Joe Cicman, senior analyst for e-business, along with other Forrester analysts, defines the four competencies as culture, technology, people and measurement. It also addresses how companies handle such areas as staff support, digital marketing, sales and service.

“Being a digital B2B seller is about much more than ecommerce; digital means leveraging new models for direct and channel selling with a 360-degree view of the customer journey,” Forrester says in the report, adding: “Forrester’s B2B ecommerce digital maturity model continues to evolve. The questions in our assessment reflect our latest perspectives to help companies evaluate the core capabilities, attitudes, and competencies that define a mature B2B digital operation.”

Forrester also points to critical aspects of the four core competencies, including:

• Culture: “A company’s approach to customer-obsessed, digitally driven innovation and how it empowers employees with digital technology. Culture is one of the biggest hurdles to digital transformation because cultures that instill the wrong behaviors and values slow it down.”
• Technology: “A company’s use and adoption of emerging technology to support core commerce and broader digital experience. Deploying effective services across an enterprise requires a tailored blend of APIs and cloud, off-the-shelf and homegrown applications.”
• People: “Create cross-functional teams and focus them on serving a single customer segment, journey or desire. The best teams we’ve seen have fewer than 10 core members with a mix of design, development, operations and analytics skills.”
• Measurement: “Leaders have found success when they measure everything and use the measurements to create a closed-loop process to optimize every customer engagement and every facet of their business. Democratize the data so that you help your people align against bigger objectives—like acquisition or incremental revenue, regardless of cannel.”

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