There is a common misconception among sales leaders that digital commerce will cannibalize their teams or even their jobs. In my two years at CloudCraze, working in and managing our business development team and processes, I’ve spoken with C-level executives daily at the world’s largest companies about their digital transformation strategies and becoming a change agent with B2B eCommerce. However, something that we hear quite frequently is the concept that sales teams fear they will be replaced by eCommerce – but this is truly a misconception. A fear not based in fact.

Although digital transformation may challenge your traditional sales function, it almost always makes your existing sales channels more effective and increases your organization’s bottom line. It is the most viable alternative to outdated sales processes like phone, fax and in-person order taking and paper catalogs, which surprisingly, many large B2B organizations without a strong digital transformation strategy use as their primary sales approach.

Digital Technology Enables Your Sales Team and Increases Your Bottom Line

Commerce technology frees your field sales and customer service reps from simple data entry to focus on doing more of what their titles imply: SELLING and servicing customers. There are several ways digital commerce supports your sales reps and makes their jobs easier, while increasing sales productivity and revenue within your organization:

1.    Gives a 360-Degree View of Customers: B2B eCommerce enables a new era of sales where reps have greater visibility into customer pricing, orders and history. This is especially true when your B2B commerce platform is built on your CRM system, Salesforce.

By using a solution built natively on Salesforce, your sales team can become closer to your customer than ever before. Your reps are already living in Salesforce. With CloudCraze, they can easily have customer data from the commerce experience at their fingertips – whether in the office or in the field. The powerful combination of CRM and eCommerce data gives your rep access to more accurate and complete customer data, which leads to better engagement with your customers. Your reps will gain a 360-degree view of customer activity and behavior across sales, call centers, marketing and commerce to help them along their buying journey and increase order size and frequency.

2.    Provides Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities: Imagine a scenario where your field sales rep is on site at your largest client and pulls out an iPad with a personalized website based on the customers’ unique product assortment and contract pricing. Instead of taking orders on paper and pen, or sending a boring assortment of product SKUs and lines through EDI, the sales rep can walk through the co-branded website and showcase products similar-to or often purchased with to encourage cross selling and upselling.

Senior leaders are always looking for new and creative ways to increase revenue and build their bottom lines. Enabling your sales organization to be experienced customer relationship managers who can provide their customers with powerful suggestive selling, this is a true opportunity for an organization to increase revenue. Commerce allows you to set up a proper and easy-to-manage method of encouraging your sales reps to help customers purchase products and offer suggestions around items or services they may have missed in the past.

3.    Expands Your Existing Customer Base: The ability for your customers to shop, buy and browse digitally will provide your business with the opportunity to service customers who you were unable to reach through your traditional sales models. Whether reaching these customers were geographically too far away or it was too cost-prohibitive to support them previously, commerce opens up doors to new customer bases and markets. This provides yet another opportunity to increase revenue through omni-channel digital engagement.

Today’s Winners Use Commerce to Enable Their Sales Teams

CloudCraze provides an impressive uptick in customer engagement. Customers like Coca-Cola, Adidas and Land O’ Lakes have seen growth in revenue and up to 85% in cost reduction versus with traditional sales models. The amount of time and actual dollars spent having customers buy through call centers and re-order processes is enormous. Many of the largest brands in the world are truly transforming their sales organizations with digital customer engagement.

So, let go of that old belief that commerce is an alternative to your sales reps. Today’s reality is that you can use commerce to complement your sales reps and make them more effective, deliver stronger results, and create more quality relationships with your customers –all which grow your bottom line.

For information around how to increase your sales team’s productivity with commerce, please contact sales@cloudcraze.com. Or check out our ROI Calculator to see how commerce may impact your bottom line.