eCommerce and CRM, ideal pair to increase the sales of your business

All companies have a common denominator, the challenge of how to sell more, clearly the holy grail of any commercial strategy. 

It is clear that achieving increased sales or reaching the sales target is a great challenge under the traditional sales model is very difficult, as this depends on a "system" with a limited capacity, it is tied to the sellers, therefore, to their capacity and time, which in the best case is 6 days a week from 8am to 6pm, where therefore to increase that capacity requires more people, which represents an increase in costs. 

Now, let's suppose that the company is willing to take the gamble of hiring more salespeople to try to meet the demand, even then we will not be able to provide the attention and experience that customers demand, among other reasons: 

• We do not have the capacity to be available 24/7, as an example, what happens to a hotel customer who on Saturday at 10pm who was left without a product, what happens to the supermarket in Tamarindo that in high season at 9pm needs to order, etc... There are many customers who work hours that do not fit our schedules and therefore we are losing sales. 
• The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital platforms for transactions, according to ADOBE commerce data 75% of B2B customers want to be able to carry out transactions virtually. 

But then what can I do? you may ask... 

From our experience after many years working alongside companies that seek to optimize their digital architectures and clearly with the challenges we have faced in the last year and a half, we have come up with what in our opinion is the ideal pair that will allow companies to achieve their goals of increasing sales, it is the ideal pair: eCommerce and CRM. 

Next, we will describe the main characteristics of eCommerce, the challenges it brings, and finally we will talk about the ideal complement, CRM. 

If your business is focused on the enterprise sector, it is clear that you need a B2B eCommerce platform. 

Nowadays, businesses are trying to provide a digital experience like that of end consumers. So, if your business is focused on the enterprise sector, it is vital to have a B2B e-commerce platform. 

Today, more than ever, it is necessary to adapt to new market demands, also in the business sector. You have probably seen the power of digital channels to generate new customers and build customer loyalty. 

In recent years, the rise of mobility has led to a huge growth in B2B eCommerce. In fact, according to Forrester, B2B eCommerce transactions will exceed 15% of all B2B sales by the end of 2021 in the United States. 

Therefore, this allows us to see that technology is becoming a crucial element to digitize any B2B business. 

Advantages of B2B eCommerce 

More revenue, lower costs. 

B2B eCommerce has great advantages, it expands the channels for revenue and improves processes, which in turn helps to reduce costs. For example, you can carry out price segmentation and promotions autonomously and without having to rely on the IT department. In addition, you can integrate the back end (customers, orders, prices, stock, invoices, etc.). At the same time, different payment methods and logistics options can be enabled. 

However, like everything else in life, this brings with it great challenges, among which we can highlight: 

• Customer tracking. 

• Abandoned carts. 
• Customer autonomy or freedom. 
• 24/7 customer service. 
• Management history. 
• Customise the strategy. 

How to address these challenges? 

Clearly, these challenges are not easy to solve, but it is vital to be able to do so if we want to have a successful commercial strategy and to achieve this, we need the ideal complement for eCommerce: a CRM. 

The concept of CRM is customer relationship management, which goes beyond software or tools that allow us to record customer activity and information. We are talking about a model made up of several strategies that focus on getting to know your prospects and customers in detail. 

The term CRM has become widespread due to the development of these software’s that facilitate the work. However, the essential concept is the ability to be able to manage the commercial strategy according to the characteristics of the client, so that we can maximize the profitability of the relationship with the business client. 

After mentioning eCommerce and CRM, we must indicate that at platform level the best option is Adobe Commerce and as an ideal complement the best CRM is HubSpot, this because there is an integration between both platforms, which allows us to give traceability to all the management of eCommerce within the CRM, therefore, we will be able to solve the aforementioned remains, how? 

• Customer follow-up: each opportunity that is generated within eCommerce, must be generated in the same way within a sales pipeline that allows each seller to have mapped all the orders that a customer has made, as well as opportunities that were left open to manage them and try to close additional sales. 

• Abandoned carts: each order initiated and not completed, should be followed up with the customer, so that these sales can be recovered, according to eCommerce statistics, it is said that of all abandoned orders, if they are managed correctly can be recovered between 15% to 20%, this monitoring can be done automatically from the CRM, in other words we can recover sales without the need for the interaction of sellers. 

• Customer autonomy or freedom: the key factor of eCommerce is that it operates 24/7 and therefore allows customers to place their orders whenever they need to, but clearly this freedom needs to generate the necessary notifications internally every time a customer makes a transaction, so that we can follow it up. 

• 24/7 customer service: eCommerce works 24/7, something that the sales team clearly cannot do, but equally, this means that if a customer enters to make a transaction at 10pm, they may require some kind of support or help, in this case the CRM is the solution, as it allows us to activate a chat bot, where we can program frequently asked questions and general help, but in the event that it cannot solve the situation for the customer, it can generate a record that will be notified to the sales team, so that the next day first thing can be attended to personally. 

• Management history: B2B sales are much more complex than B2C sales, based on building a relationship with customers, so it is necessary to have a complete history where we can review and verify any detail of the management with each one. 

• Personalize the strategy: a CRM helps us to know our customers and with this information we can personalize the strategy so that we are more effective in conversion and purchase recurrence. 

Since the most important complement to eCommerce is CRM, it is vital to be able to evaluate CRM platforms to identify the one that best complements your commercial strategy, we invite you to download this CRMs evaluation. 

Likewise, in case you want to evaluate eCommerce platforms, we invite you to use this platform evaluation.