Driving Digital Transformation in B2B: Mindset, Language & Commitment

When you’re a B2B company in a traditional industry and you don’t sell the world’s most intriguing products, the very idea of selling online is often met with resistance.

In many cases, internal stakeholders don’t believe customers even want to buy from them online, so the time, expense, and complexity of launching an ecommerce site can seem both daunting and a waste of resources.

But none of that is true.

B2B buyers want to make work purchases in much the same way they’ve become accustomed to making purchases in their personal life.

They want a B2C-like online shopping experience, and B2B businesses who ignore this fact are going to get left behind.

And the time? The cost? The resources to get it done?

All will be well spent when the orders start flowing in and revenue increases.

But before that can happen, you must get buy-in from internal stakeholders in your company, and in this blog post, I’m going to show you how to do it.

As the chief marketing officer for GE Industrial Solutions, I’m going to share my experience launching the company’s ecommerce site and discuss two approaches you can use to help reduce the friction around selling online and create fusion when it comes to innovating within a traditional industry.

Let’s dive in.

Innovation Leads to Growth

Language plays an important role in this process, and one of the words I’d like you to keep in mind is “innovation.”

GE’s electrification business is 130 years old, and you don’t get to be 130 if you don’t innovate in some way, shape, or form along the way.

I’d like to think that GE’s story—from both a product and ecommerce perspective—can be summed up by an unrelenting focus on innovation.

Our business’ ecommerce journey began about 18 years ago.

There was a recognition that the way people bought B2B products was changing.

We had the traditional brick-and-mortar distributors that our salespeople visited to sell our products, but we also created a closed, authenticated ecommerce platform that distributors could use to buy products.

It was very innovative at the time, and we started flowing thousands of orders through the site. It was very successful.

But we got complacent.

Over the course of the next 15 years, we didn’t put a lot of investment into the platform.

Meanwhile, our competitors got up to speed with B2B online selling and started building their own ecommerce sites.

We weren’t innovating from a functionality perspective, and our competition was outpacing us with new features that distributors were using to buy from them.

We knew we needed to update the platform if we were going to compete.

We may have had the name recognition, but others were providing similar products to distributors using the online tools they were looking for—and that’s all that matters.

We knew our new platform needed to be upgraded, responsive, and it had to have a B2C user experience.

Ultimately, we knew we needed to take an omnichannel approach.

After presenting our plan, we got initial buy-in from the leadership team and the investment we needed to upgrade the site, but we still encountered challenges from many areas of the organization.

We had a lot of work to do to convince people across many different departments that rebuilding our ecommerce site was a business imperative.