Manufacturers and distributors are focused on efficiency and are looking to digital solutions to help.
What does efficiency look like? It can mean doing more with what you have or doing the same with less. In digital, that can look like taking full advantage of your technology platforms to use them to their full potential, or it could mean identifying systems you could do without or switch to a less-expensive competitor. It could also be automating a tedious, time-consuming process in order to free up your team to work on more important tasks. Or it could be empowering your customers with self-service solutions that allow them to easily find, purchase, and reorder the products they need.
Identify Opportunities for Efficiency
With the right analytics programs in place, it’s much easier to identify those low-hanging fruit opportunities for efficiency. You can use the data to find where you should focus your efforts and where you should scale back.
For example, our digital growth services team has helped our clients find opportunities to optimize their digital marketing campaigns and ecommerce sites for conversion with the least amount of investment.
- Identify the top 200 most popular products in order to focus SEO and product data enrichment. Instead of tackling the total catalog of thousands of products, this strategy allowed the company to focus their efforts on the products that would have the biggest impact. It required no additional financial investment and a relatively small investment of time and resources.
- Using on-site search analytics, our team identified a list of products that the company’s customers were searching for on its site but that were not currently a part of its online catalog. These products were already offered by the company offline, so it was simply a matter of adding those products to the site.
- One of our clients has a complex process for onboarding new customers, so our team decided not to make sales the main goal of its digital marketing campaigns. Instead, the team focused on requests for quote (RFQ), which were much more likely to end in sales based on the data. They focused all digital marketing efforts on the audience that was most likely to fill out an RFQ, allowing the company to be much more efficient with its digital marketing budget.
Evaluate Your AI Strategy
There has been a lot of buzz and excitement around AI over the last few years, so it’s easy to spend a lot of time and money finding ways to implement AI into your systems and processes. Like any other digital solution, AI is a tool. So, the question shouldn’t be “How can we use AI?”, but rather, “We have this problem to solve; can AI offer a solution?”
When you have a business goal, you evaluate the issues that might prevent you from achieving that goal. You evaluate ways to address those issues, and you may look to digital solutions – including AI. It may be a built-in AI solution in one of your technology platforms. It may be a separate AI tool. You may consider a custom AI-powered solution if your use case is unique or particularly complex. But you’ll also evaluate non-AI solutions to ensure you find the right fit for your unique use case.
There are a number of AI-powered solutions already helping B2B organizations operate more efficiently. We are implementing AI agents that help our clients' customers find the products they need. Customers can ask specific, technical questions, upload videos and pictures, and evaluate various products. The AI agents can walk customers through every step of the process. These agents help provide a seamless, innovative experience for customers but can also free up sales representatives to focus on higher-value initiatives.
Focus on Self-Service Solutions
If you goal is to be more efficient, your organization must focus on implementing self-service tools for your customers. You need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to work with you at every step of the process – including research, purchase, shipping, billing, and replenishment. When your customers can easily manage or even automate their work with your company, its more efficient for them and your internal teams.
Identify Opportunities for Efficiency with a Free Assessment
When it comes to finding those opportunities for efficiency, it can be difficult to know where to start. There are countless digital solutions available, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to figure out which may be a good fit for you. Xngage offers a free ecommerce assessment during which our team of experts will evaluate your tech stack, analytics, and unique goals and challenges. We will provide custom recommendations for how your organization could be more efficient and which digital solutions may be the best fit.