To thrive in this omnichannel age, delivering differential buying experiences, business practices and products from the competition is absolutely critical. To drive sales success, automation of sales channels requires a combination of 10 digital commerce capabilities to further facilitate initiatives from personalization and pricing excellence to multi-tier partner networks.
Here are the top 10 key functional digital commerce capabilities to consider:
1. Catalog Management– Administer product data and relevant supporting content across multiple catalogs to enable content orchestration and change management. For example, the sharing of data and assets across lines of businesses and partner sites or the handling of new product introductions and product lifecycles can increase sales.
2. Guided Buying/Selling– Self-service models must effortlessly guide users towards products that match their unique requirements. Recommendation engines, at the heart of these models, offer product substitutions, upgrades, additional options and different bundles to create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, while machine-driven analytics produce recommendations based on customer data and activity history.
3. Product configuration– Configurators define and manage relationships, rules and constraints that drive unique combinations of products. These tools make differentiation manageable and scalable by allowing customer-facing staff to tailor solutions to the specific needs of their markets, as well as enabling users in self-service environments the ability to personalize their own solutions.
4. Pricing– Pricing automation facilitates efforts to develop, maintain, analyze and update pricing lists, policies and discounts for different channels, regions, partners or even corporate divisions. Innovation in pricing then becomes considerably easier, such as in instances of implementing attribute-based pricing, subscription-based pricing and value-based pricing.
5. Promotions and Rebates– A systematic approach to managing incentives is invaluable to marketing campaigns and channel strategies for building awareness, demand and loyalty. Tasks for defining, launching and retiring promotions and rebates should be automated and actual sales and orders must be diligently tracked to determine program effectiveness. Not to mention, payment processes need to be accurate and completely auditable.
6. Contract Management– Automation for accurately managing the terms and conditions that define commercial relationships can eliminate bottlenecks. Such capabilities also provide the basis for effectively growing subscriptions and recurring revenues by permitting easy access to existing contract terms. Functionalities span authoring, analysis of multiple contract types, redlining and tracking changes, approval workflows, electronic signatures, and support for third-party contracts of counterparties.
7. Ordering and Billing– Processes for generating orders must be fast yet seamless and it’s imperative that all fulfillment details are correctly captured. Smooth check-out processes and bulletproof payment methods are a must when it comes to online sales. In B2B commerce, quoting and proposal information should flow directly into orders and contracts to eliminate duplicate data entry and errors, with all details validated and passed on to billing systems.
8. Renewals– In conjunction with contract management, automated renewal capabilities underpin business models based on subscriptions and recurring revenues. Alerts and notifications can provide advanced notice on expirations while asset-based ordering gives visibility into what has been purchased.
9. Usability and Mobility– User-adoption is critical to any digital business. Ultimately, it is high-quality, intuitive user-experiences that will collapse learning curves, ensure the success of a system, and advance the online presence of a brand. Mobility is vital as well, with responsive UIs that ensure features and data are intuitively arranged and presented within any device, for any user, partner or end-customer.
10. Analytics– Understanding in real-time the trends in buying patterns and incoming business is a significant advantage. Predictive and prescriptive analytics help enterprises identify, assess and take proactive action on key indicators like sales cycle times, win rates, deal slippage and renewals. Analytics provide indispensable insight into the sales process and can highlight areas for change.
Digital commerce functionality for omnichannel selling should not be deployed piecemeal, but as part of a comprehensive platform strategy. The 10 capabilities discussed, positioned together with a stable and scalable platform, can vastly improve sales success while reducing total cost of ownership.
Kamal Ahluwalia is the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Apttus, the Silicon Valley-based company that defined the Quote-to-Cash space. Kamal is an established industry leader, and has a tremendous history of success developing long-term productive relationships with large global brands. Kamal was previously the CMO of Apttus.
