This week on the Friday 15, we’ve surveyed B2B practitioners about their priorities for next year, and we wanted to share the results with you…

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Brian Beck: Andy, this is our last Friday 15 of 2024. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar in my partner in the Master B2B Community Thought Leadership Series, wrapping up this year. Welcome everyone to Friday 15. Got an exciting topic today, I want to talk about. But before we do that, let’s talk about our breaking news. You can see this – 87% of Millennial Gen Z buyers report dissatisfaction in at least one area of their B2B buying experience. This is brand new research from Forrester, or your former employer and place of doing research. This was released last week, mid December. And it’s telling, it really sets the stage, I think, well for what we’re going to talk about today. But yeah, they even used our name of our business in the title of the report here. It could be a play on words here, to master B2B buying mayhem, providers must prioritize our buyers’ needs. But they found that 87% are, and particularly amongst younger buyers, dissatisfied.

Andy Hoar: Well, my quick comment on this is, I’ve seen too many B2C companies do it too, but B2B companies are prime offenders, where they retrofit the process. So they don’t think new, like, hey, you know what, this world’s changed. Why don’t we start over? Let’s think about a whole new process. No, they just take the existing process and they try and extract away from it. And what ends up happening is a lot of those business processes don’t work. They just don’t work. Oh, somebody runs into a problem. Have them call customer service. Well, no wait a minute, we’re already online. They don’t want to call something on the phone. So if they change that process to be more like an intelligent chatbot, but they don’t do that because they’re like, well, we have a call center. So that’s where these things happen. That’s where these pitfalls occur.

Brian: Yeah, no question. Well, it sets the stage well for our topic today, which is what are B2B executives top strategic priorities for 2025? And one of the fortunate things we have access to here at Master B2B is direct feedback from thousands of practitioners that are part of our community here. And so we’re able to survey and ask questions and things of that nature. And that’s exactly what we did. But let’s set the stage a little bit. Number one, we found in our own research, our state of B2B, e-commerce this year that 83 percent of executives reported they were going to spend more money on digital this year. The same research also showed though that ROI expectations are now much higher compared to three years ago. We asked this question in our state of B2B e-commerce survey. Compared to three years ago, the timeframe in which I need to show an ROI on B2B e-commerce these days has, guess what, 65% said “sped up.”

Andy: This is a reality. I think it was due to the overspending during the pandemic where people were just plowing money into digital. And then some CFOs said, “Wait a minute, we spent X amount of money on this. What do we get for it?” Well, at the time, you’re putting a fire out. You’re not going to worry about how much water you’re using. But now they’re looking back on it and saying, “Maybe we overspent, maybe we didn’t underspend, we don’t know, but we’ve got to figure this out.” There’s just one big problem with this. When it comes to spending on technology, these are investments. They take time to produce value. And you can’t just decide as a CFO that when we buy a new platform, we need to get an ROI within six months. That’s not how platforms work. It takes time because it’s an investment. These are five -to-ten year time horizons. And over the course of that timeframe, an effective investment will produce a high return. And if you measure it after the first six months, you’re not going to be there. I think about guys like Noah Lyles, he’s the fastest man in the world. He wins the 100 meter dash. But in the first 20 meters, he’s usually in the last place. By the end, he wins. So if you said, “Well, after 20 meters, he’s a loser.” Well, after 60 meters, he’s winning after 80, he’s beat everybody else. So you get at the right time horizon here.

Brian: I think it also depends on the type of investment that you’re making, but for the most part, I agree with you that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But it raises the question. And after we did this research, we said, “Gosh, we really have to ask our practitioners, how and where are they spending money, given these pressures, and given the fact that this ROI must be demonstrated, where should they spend the money?” So we asked the question. So we did 10 roundtables this fall, with several hundred people participating in our roundtables across the United States, L.A. and New York and everywhere in between – Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Dallas and Atlanta. And we asked the questions of these practitioners, how do you prioritize? Which, because there are so many possible priorities – everything from improving how you’re using existing technology to purchasing new technologies like PIM, eCommerce, hiring talent to improving the business case and gaining better alignment to implementing change management, resolving tunnel conflict, launching marketplace and Amazon programs. There are so many places that traditional B2B companies can place their bets. How do they prioritize all these different areas? So we surveyed them, but before we reveal what all these several hundred people told us, which is the theme of today’s Friday 15, we asked our LinkedIn audience what they thought. In other words, what do you think the top priorities are? And this is how they voted. So this was just a poll we put up this week. We asked our LinkedIn community, which do you think is the number one strategic priority for B2B eCommerce executives in 2025? Well, guess what? Number one, was “improve the customer experience.” Number two, “improve ROI cases for digital.” A distant third, “improve analytics and reporting” and even more distant fourth “fix product data problems,” the data problem we often talk about. So our audience is a LinkedIn community at large. Now we could take that now and contrast that to what we heard from the roundtable audience in person when we polled them. We asked them to fill out a survey as they were sitting in our roundtables. And again, several hundred people. Now, who was the winner? Drumroll, please. I don’t have a drumroll sound effect. I need that. Let’s get this in. Our budget ran out. We didn’t have funds for that sound effect. Okay. So here we go. Here are the winners. Number one, analytics and reporting. Number two, improving the ROI case for digital investments. Number three, was customer experience improvements. Now we had some others that came in pretty high too. But those were the three clear winners again across several hundred roundtable participants across those markets. So we wanted to dive in a little bit on each of these. But any of the surprise you Andy?

Andy: What surprised me was how consistent it was. And what we would do,at every one of our roundtables and almost without fail, it was those three. And we gave them several options. A lot of options. Those three were always number one in pretty much in that order, which is fascinating. Analytics and reporting pretty consistently ranked number one. It was very close at times. We’ve translated that in our heads. We think what they’re really talking about is getting developing insights about customers. That’s what analysis and reporting stands for. It’s not just looking at a dashboard to see conversion rates, although that matters. Obviously, it’s more about what types of behavior are people demonstrating? Can we sell them more? What’s profit optimizing? What are their cross-sells and upsells? What are we missing here? How can we expand lines of business? That’s all driven by analytics and reporting. And frankly, if you do that really well, then the other two sort of take care of themselves, right?

Brian: You know what did surprise me about this is that channel conflict was so low. It was the lowest one of all the 12 or 15 choices we gave people. And because resolving channel conflict, it’s something that’s often cited in my, you know, when I do work through my Enciba company with Amazon, it’s like the number one reason people don’t sell on Amazon is because they’re worried about channel conflict. But as you talk about eCommerce, it’s interesting that it came in so low because we asked about marketplace, direct eCommerce, but it was the lowest one. So anyway, it’s just surprising.

Andy: Yeah, the channel conflict thing was kind of interesting, especially compared to prior years. When it comes to Amazon, that is 100% the Amazon problem is channel conflict. So that’s why you’re probably pretty steeped in that when it comes to Amazon. But something from Amazon, I think there are two reasons why channel conflict is falling so dramatically. One is people can’t resolve it and they just give up on it and like, well, I can’t, there’s no way I’ll have to get beyond it. Or they have resolved it because it’s been a few years. So to me, it’s kind of bifurcated. So it’s either they’ve resolved it and they don’t care, they can’t resolve it and they don’t care. But either way, they don’t care.

Brian: Let’s dive in on these. So the first one or top one, again, is analytics and insights. And I kind of think about it as an iceberg, eCommerce has been measured independently from an analytical perspective for years. I was an eCom VP for 17 years. And during that time we lived and died by our analytics, but that was all one channel analytics. You’ve got this whole piece under the iceberg – you see only the tip of the iceberg and underneath it is the impact digital has across the business. We can’t just look at the top because eCommerce metrics don’t tell the full story. Here’s some data that shows across different B2B industry categories, that two thirds of purchases across industrial machinery, industrial supplies, packing, shipping materials- two thirds of purchases were significantly influenced by digital. And those are happening mostly off-line. Digital and eCommerce work together. And we have this gap where companies don’t, fully align their channels and align their data analytics. In fact, Accenture did a study recently, Andy, that shows poorly coordinated and misaligned digital strategies can cost companies as much as 10% of their annual revenue. We’re talking about tens of millions for some of these big B2B organizations. So this is a real problem and it’s one that needs to be addressed. And I think B2B now is waking up to saying, “Hey, I’ve got to look at things omnichannel here. What are my most meaningful metrics across the organization?” And companies have, as we found in some of our earlier Friday 15s and polls, as executives don’t necessarily have enough information or they have too much, they don’t know what to do with it.

Andy: I’d love to see how Accenture actually calculated that because when I read that, I think to myself ONLY 10% of the annual revenue? I think this is just about messed up projects. A bad strategy, which I think is a super set of this, is going to cost you a lot more than 10%. And I see a lot of that, I’m sure you do as well.

Brian: Absolutely. So that’s number one. And so we’re going to see next year when we look at it, and we didn’t include the data here today, but we also have data around what people are investing in in 2025. So what specific tools, technologies, and approaches. And I think we’re going to see that analytics is right up there at the top. So our number two, and it’s tied very closely with the first one, is the ROI of digital investments. Adobe did a study about a year and a half ago that found that 38% of B2B companies report challenges in securing adequate budget for eCommerce and for many, providing ROI of these investments remains the main hurdle. So you’re getting the number one reason we’ve seen this repeatedly in multiple studies, Andy, where executives are not fully bought in, and it leads to a lack of budget. Now we’ve found that companies are getting more from our earlier study and it’s that statistic we showed. But this is a persistent issue. And we hear it anecdotally in our roundtables from people, they are still struggling to build the business case and what it comes down to is really an omnichannel story. And that’s where I think it becomes challenging and it has something to do with your datapoint earlier on time horizons – Some of these things take a long time to develop and to implement and then to realize ROI, but the ROI comes from revenue lift. It comes from profit enhancement across the organization, doing things more efficiently, dropping the cost to serve. And not just eCommerce shift. What we’re talking about across the company, digital tools and then efficiency, driving a lot of efficiency and all of us together driving higher enterprise valuation, there’s a formula for this, but it’s difficult for eCommerce leaders to quantify it in some cases. I think about things like PIM systems, long-term investments.

Andy: Two quick points. One is I’m finding that B2B eCommerce people are being held to a higher standard. I’ve talked about this at length. So that’s a challenge here. They’ll go to the eCommerce team and say you have to demonstrate down to the penny, let’s say, jokingly, what the ROI is of those digital investments. Meanwhile, they’ll go spend an order of magnitude more on a trade show. And THAT team doesn’t have to justify the ROI. They say, “Oh, that’s what we’ve always done.” And that produces psychic benefits. I’m like, wait a minute. So one group is going to be perfectly measured. The other one can be very imperfectly measured? Why don’t you apply the same standard to both those groups? That’s one issue. The other thing is that the way in which they measure the ROI is oftentimes interesting because digital is now spreading across the organization. And it’s starting to cannibalize other areas. So you mentioned data. Well, they already had a data group. But when digital comes along and says, hey, we need access to this data to be able to produce better cross-sells and upsells and recommendations, etc. Then all of a sudden they’re like, well, what’s the ROI on that? Wait a minute. What’s the ROI on what you’re doing right now? So digital is now spreading. And it’s starting to compete for dollars for other budgets. And that’s getting pushback.

Brian: Exactly. This is going to be one of our key talking points during our events next year – how to help practitioners better document and create these business cases. And I think it helps a lot as we see continued evolution of the C-suite as we see more digital experience in the C-suite. And we’re seeing that particularly in some of the larger companies, and we’ve documented that in the past. As that senior level becomes more sophisticated as it relates to digital, I think we’ll see that they’re more open to an understanding of how these kinds of investments will pay out over time. I think in 2024 we made the prediction that this is all becoming more existential versus incremental in terms of how you tell the story. In other words, companies will realize that, hey, we’ve got to make these investments in order to stay relevant to our customers. Regardless of a 12 month payback period or something. So anyhow, we’re going to see how this evolves. Our third is customer experience, number three. And so customer experience, as it relates to things like UI/UX, personalization, site search, relevancy, just the experience. And we saw that data at the, in the breaking news from Forrester, or that 87% of younger buyers are disappointed. Well, younger buyers who now make up 75% of B2B buyers say, I will not use the app or website that is hard to navigate. 62% of them said that. And I will not use an app or website that is too slow to load. 60, 60% said that this is a study from Uniquely. If you’re not delivering a digital experience, customer experience, that meets expectations, you’re going to be missing the boat because B2B buyers will consider switching. If you’re not consistent across your channels, 80% will consider switching. If prices aren’t available, 80% will consider switching. If it’s not easy to place an order via mobile, 73%. This is all data from McKinsey.

Andy: The standard keeps rising and the nature of the buyer keeps changing because these younger buyers oftentimes aren’t as knowledgeable as older buyers. So take a person who’s a plumber, for example, and a plumber in their 20s, maybe just out of an apprenticeship and this person needs to buy a replacement part. Well, the old guy, the mentor, would know exactly what the part was because he’d been doing it for years. The younger person may not. So the younger person has to use a mobile app and say, I’m looking for a replacement part for this. Imagine being a search engine that says, oh, sorry, with the part number, we only know how to track for part numbers. In fact, we talked to Peter Curran from Coveo the other day about that. And he says, we tried everybody to do very specific searches. And there’s nothing wrong with specific searches. But if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s part of that discovery path. In which case, you need to understand natural language search, etc. And people in the search engines are capable of doing that. But B2B companies have not implemented that. They aren’t able to do it. So they’ve got basically, in this case, a search solution that works for a mature user. Somebody who’s very knowledgeable and has a lot of domain expertise, but they don’t have a search solution for somebody who isn’t that.

Brian: Search is so important, particularly for very large catalogs, big distributors, etc. And so that’s one element, right? But it’s really across the board. And the consistency thing is the same theme I think we’re hearing through all these priorities. Where buyers don’t just look at you in channels. They don’t look at you as an eCom or as an inside sales discussion or an email exchange. They’re looking for a consistent experience from you. And that’s where I think a lot of the gap is still in B2B.