B2B Ecommerce Playbook

©2016 CloudCraze Software LLC. All Rights Reserved. 866-217-3210 www.cloudcraze.comPAGE 2
any B2B companies pride themselves on building personal relationships
with their customers. But as one global leader in specialized environmental
services has discovered, relationship building in the B2B space is shifting rapidly.
For decades, this company’s salespeople fanned out each day to visit customers
and ask them what they needed. And for just as long, their brand of exceptional
customer service kept the orders flowing. But a few years ago, things began to change.
As the people making buying decisions got younger, their appetite for personal visits
declined. Conditioned by Amazon and the B2C revolution, they’d increasingly grown
used to the ease of doing business online. The customer relationship was no less
crucial, but the kind of relationship the customer wanted was evolving. The company
quickly realized that if it wanted to retain its leadership position, it would have to
evolve, too.
This sort of “ah-ha” moment is becoming increasingly common across the B2B
landscape. At $1 trillion, the global B2B market is four times the size of the B2C market
overall. Yet in its Wave™ B2B Commerce Suites Q2 2015, Forrester reports that most
B2B companies lag their B2C counterparts in terms of digital maturity and quality of
customer experience.¹ For every company advancing down the digital learning curve
there are many more still taking orders by fax or struggling with an outmoded version
1.0 eCommerce platform. B2B eCommerce represents less than 10 percent of total B2B
spending, which is not surprising given that B2B companies accounted for only 20% of
the total spend on eCommerce technology as recently as 2013.
But B2B companies are rapidly getting on board. Forrester projects that over the next
five years B2B eCommerce in the US alone will grow 7.7 percent annually and is on
pace to reach $1.13 trillion by the year 2020. Almost 60 percent of all purchases will
be made online, versus just one-third today3
. One reason for the growth is that cloud-based
SaaS solutions like CloudCraze make it much easier and more affordable to get an
eCommerce system up and running in months, not years. There’s also a network effect:
The more customers that do business on their desktops, smart phones and tablets,
the more valuable those channels become.
Most leadership teams recognize the opportunity to boost sales and cement customer
relationships by building better online and mobile experiences. But when faced with
a variety of options and a growing sense of urgency, just getting started can be a
challenge. An important first step is to recognize that developing the right eCommerce
platform is no different than building any other key capability. More than anything,
it requires a strategic foundation and strong execution. Whether starting from scratch
or replacing an aging legacy platform, we find the most effective implementations
follow six key principles:
M
“At $1 trillion, the global
B2B market is four times
the size of the B2C market
overall. Yet in its Wave™ B2B
Commerce Suites Q2 2015,
Forrester reports that most
B2B companies lag their
B2C counterparts in terms of
digital maturity and quality of
customer experience.”

©2016 CloudCraze Software LLC. All Rights Reserved. 866-217-3210 www.cloudcraze.com PAGE 3
Every software implementation begins with a clear ambition for how it can
enhance the company’s strategy. But companies are too often tempted to include
every feature imaginable, which creates interminable delays, massive budgets
and inevitably causes the effort to collapse under its own weight. An effective
eCommerce implementation centers on a candid assessment of how the system can
improve or extend a company’s core business. It should support your ability to deliver
on that mission, not distract from it.
The best way to stay on plan is to focus on three critical priorities:
• What do our customers really want and how can we improve their experience?
• How can we deliver with a phased, “aim, fire, aim” approach that allows us to
guide and adjust the implementation based on real-time market information?
• How can we demonstrate early wins and start the ROI payback period as quickly
as possible?
As a SaaS eCommerce solution built on Salesforce, CloudCraze is designed to help
companies answer those questions. It provides a full suite of tools to manage and
improve the customer experience at every touch point, which results in larger order
sizes, reduced order costs and dramatically higher order compliance and accuracy.
Because it is a true cloud solution, companies can easily implement it in phases,
avoiding the heavy up-front cost of an on-premise solution. Most critically, a typical
CloudCraze implementation begins to generate orders within six to 12 weeks, versus
at least 18 months for an ERP-based on-premise system like SAP hybris or Oracle.
CloudCraze, in other words, begins paying for itself even as you hone and optimize your
solution based on real customer data and analysis.
1
DON’T BOIL
THE OCEAN
“An effective eCommerce implementation
centers on a candid assessment of how the
system can improve or extend a company’s
core business. It should support your ability to
deliver on that mission, not distract from it.”

A long-term plan is an essential part of developing the right eCommerce solution. But so
is flexibility. Waiting two years for an on-premise eCommerce solution to go live is not only
massively expensive, but risks significant yield loss. By the time you start selling, the market
may have changed and many of the features included in the original plan may be out of
date. Defining short-term objectives that are both affordable and manageable allows the
company to go live, demonstrate success and start the payback period early, which helps
fund the next round of development.
Consider the environmental company discussed earlier. Its first attempt at
eCommerce was an IBM WebSphere implementation that did not meet the
company’s business model, was out of date, and presented infrastructure
complications the company wasn’t staffed for. After becoming a Salesforce customer,
the company switched to CloudCraze and laid out a four-phase, long-term plan that
included all the functionality it wanted. Its implementation strategy, however, was
to start small, putting just one division’s products online and building a simple
storefront to take new orders. Two weeks in, the launch was going so well that other
divisions started asking to be included.
It didn’t take long for the flexibility to pay dividends. The company knew from the
beginning that it wanted to add e-procurement, or punch-out functionality, which enables
online customers to transfer their carts and orders into their own ERP-based procurement
system. But it had intentionally pushed that feature into a later phase so as not to distract
from building more essential functionality early on. When a large customer asked for
e-procurement, however, the company shifted gears to deliver it sooner. “B2B eBusiness
professionals must move quickly to catch up to their B2C counterparts that set the high bar
for the eCommerce experience²,” wrote Forrester principal analyst Andy Hoar.
2
MAKE A
LONG-TERM PLAN
WITH CLEAR,
SHORT-TERM
OBJECTIVES
“Defining short-term objectives that are both
affordable and manageable allows the
company to go live, demonstrate success and
start the payback period early, which helps
fund the next round of development.”

3
TALK WITH
CUSTOMERS
B2C companies take it for granted that asking customers what they really want from
an eCommerce system is critical to creating a winning customer experience. B2B
companies? Not so much. Because so many aging on-premise systems evolve out of a
company’s back-office ERP system, B2B transactions tend to be dominated by process,
which makes the online experience a bit like a visit to the Post Office. Too often, B2B
companies also pile on the features they think customers want with no real data to back
up those assumptions.
The only way to make good decisions on behalf of your customers is to put yourself in
their shoes. If you are updating an old system, analyze user data and survey customers
to find out what they like and don’t like. If you are building from scratch, show your key
customers your blueprint and sample wireframes. The insights gained not only improve
functionality but also speed up implementation. Understanding what matters most to
customers helps companies identify and focus on the right priorities.
Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) in the
Netherlands is a good example. The first
thing the bottler did after deciding to
launch a state-of-the-art eCommerce system was to survey a number of small retailers
who had been faxing and calling in orders for years. The Coke officials showed them
plans for the new storefront and told them they wanted to better understand how they
might use it. What they learned is that customers placed their orders at certain times
based on previous order information and other key data. CloudCraze worked with CCE
to build a user interface that linked historical order information and business rules to
templates that allowed customers to order in the way that made the most sense to them.
The company also built a mobile experience that lets customers walk their stock rooms,
set up orders and complete the transaction either on a mobile device or desktop.
“Understanding what matters
most to customers helps
companies identify and focus
on the right priorities.”

One of the key benefits of implementing an eCommerce platform in manageable stages
is that it allows the company to gather insights on the fly and use them to make better
decisions. If asking customers what they want helps plan for a better experience, creating
tight feedback loops to gather and analyze sales data helps companies understand
what’s working or not, so features can be tweaked, built up -- or abandoned.
That was the experience of another large consumer products company based in the
US. For years, this company had run a fully staffed call center to take orders from
small retail accounts. The leadership team knew that adding a new eCommerce
system would automate part of the process and cut costs, making the small-account
sales operation more profitable. But as company leaders analyzed sales using
CloudCraze and Salesforce, they also began to see that revenue per customer
was increasing steadily. It turned out that customers liked being able to order what
they wanted without talking to anybody live and they responded more readily
to automated cross-selling messaging than they did to the call-center reps. That
feedback gave the company confidence to invest in enhancements to its landing
page and build more sophisticated cross-sell and up-sell capability.
4
ALLOW FOR
ITERATION BASED
ON A FEEDBACK
LOOP
“If asking customers what they
want helps plan for a better
experience, creating tight
feedback loops to gather
and analyze sales data
helps companies understand
what’s working or not, so
features can be tweaked,
built up -- or abandoned.”

As we’ve noted, rapid deployment means an early start of the payback period, which
is often a critical element of the business case for developing a new eCommerce
system. The faster you begin selling, the sooner the system starts paying for itself.
But if the full organization isn’t aligned around the business case or strategy, the
project can stall in midstream. A smooth implementation requires determining who
has decision rights -- IT, marketing, finance, etc. -- and including them from the very
beginning of the project. Trade-offs between features, cost and speed inevitably crop
up in the planning process. It is critical that everyone contributes to these decisions, so
a consensus emerges around the overall rationale for the project. Anything less than
full alignment is a threat to success.
This can be a particular problem when replacing an old legacy implementation.
Very often those systems have every feature under the sun -- which is why they take
two years to deploy and have such a high cost structure. The advantage of a cloud-
based system is that it allows you to deploy a set of the most essential features now
and add more as quickly as warranted. A SaaS implementation also eliminates the
need to build “a software-company-within-a company” to manage on-premise servers
and software. The economics are compelling -- deploy storefronts quickly, generate
revenue in weeks, scale easily for growth. But if IT has bought into a vision for a more
streamlined approach while marketing clamors for a pixel-by-pixel replacement of the
old system, the project will break down. Early alignment is the best way to avoid the
kind of internal disputes that can quickly erode a project’s business case.
5
ALIGN YOUR
TEAM, DEPLOY
FAST AND
MEASURE ROI
“The advantage of a cloud-based system is
that it allows you to deploy a set of the most
essential features now and add more as
quickly as warranted.

One reason B2C companies are so far ahead when it comes to building a winning
customer experience is that retail is part of their DNA. There’s no doubt that translating
those skills and capabilities for a digital world has been a challenge. But they also had
a head start. They know how to merchandise their products. They were weaned on
cross selling. Their culture is steeped in making individual transactions as smooth and
frictionless as possible.
The sales culture for a typical B2B company has historically focused on making calls and
filling quotas -- not devising easier ways for customers to interact with the company’s
brand. As more and more B2B buyers gravitate toward online and mobile solutions, the
winning vendors will be those who can best meet customers on their own terms. In a
developing country, where most small business owners tap the Internet via smart phone,
that may mean focusing primarily on mobile solutions. In other markets, a broader mix
of functionality may take precedence. What’s critical is getting an easy-to-implement,
easy-to-adopt tool into the hands of customers quickly so they can begin using it.
That allows you to study their behavior, scale what works and continue to adjust as
necessary.
Often the hardest part of deploying technology is simply getting over the hype.
What’s critical is to recognize that the only solutions worth investing in are those that
enhance your ability to serve your core customer. Increasingly, that means speed
to market, manageable costs, superior flexibility and the ability to scale. The one
certainty is that your market and customers will evolve. Your eCommerce system
should allow you to evolve along with them.
6
DEVELOP A
CULTURE OF
COMMERCE
“As more and more B2B buyers gravitate
toward online and mobile solutions, the
winning vendors will be those who can best
meet customers on their own terms.”
About CloudCraze CloudCraze delivers robust B2B and B2C eCommerce native on Salesforce. CloudCraze enables clients to deploy mobile storefronts quickly,
generate online revenue in weeks, and easily scale for growth. In a single Salesforce instance, CloudCraze shares data and processes with existing Salesforce Sales,
Service, Marketing, and Community Cloud deployments and it’s all easily managed through the point-and-click Salesforce interface. CloudCraze powers eCommerce for
Coca-Cola, Avid, ABInBev, Barry-Callebaut, Ecolab, GE, L’Oreal, Kellogg’s and more. Contact sales@cloudcraze.com for more information.
1
, 2
,3
“The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q2 2015”, Forrester Research, Inc.

B2B Ecommerce Playbook

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