It’s a Whole New World…Again

Gone, long gone are the days when salespeople were vital because of scarcity and difficulty for the public ( or business) to know about the latest thing. This scarcity has been replaced, thankfully so by an almost ubiquitous amount of information and data on whatever the buyer is looking for.

Also gone is the need to go to the Trade Show to learn about what you are missing out on. Email subscriptions, notifications, streaming ads all can tell us the next thing we will need without a show or show representative telling us we need them.

Buying happens everywhere now for consumer sales and commercial sales. Brokers do not think you are exempt from this. You are not, we are not, no one is.

B2B marketplaces: What are they?

B2B buyers have quickly adopted to using e-commerce platforms that make it easier and faster to get detailed product information and to place orders. According to McKinsey, “Only about 20 percent of B2B buyers say they hope to return to in-person sales” – even in industries like pharmaceuticals that have traditionally relied heavily on a face-to-face sales model.

One model that many forward-looking B2B companies are pursuing is participating in – or even creating – highly specialized marketplaces.

Think of Amazon Business, only with a specific focus on a segment like metals, chemicals, or healthcare. In this scenario, a site such as debanked.com, which targets buyers and sellers of commercial funding, aims to win in the market by creating a dominant platform.

Key features of the site include global sourcing and availability of financial resources and support. But there isn’t a sales component per se – it’s all about connecting the right buyers with the right sellers.

Here’s what salespeople should know about B2B e-commerce marketplaces:

1. They disrupt the bonds of existing B2B sales relationships by empowering buyers to seek the lowest cost from any number of global providers.
2. They put a premium on the brokering of relationships between the right buyers and the right sellers.
3. They create pressure on B2B sellers to deliver value to buyers in new and innovative ways.

And the Next Thing? Adapt and evolve NOW

Next? The buy now pay later (BNPL) growth spurt over the last few years has been nothing short of amazing, and arguably doubly so when you consider the fact that the past 18 months of its growth occurred under the global cloud of COVID.

In less than five years, BNPL products have gone from being relatively unknown to being widely available in stores, online and seemingly everywhere, with new venues popping up each day and even major new players like Apple jumping into the space. BNPL’s massive strides in the consumer segment cannot be denied, but also worth watching going forward as there is still untapped potential in the B2B segment. In fact, interest in the segment among commercial customers is “extremely high” right now and issuers are looking for products to help their business customers due to the segment’s reputation for having challenging and friction-filled payment processes rather than being able to free up cash flow or introduce predictability into repayments. Can you also see that this will open up fantastic possibilities for companies to get what they need while keeping their capital “Freed-Up”? If your business competes with this model, get to thinking of how you can offer something similar, or find ways to add value to your offering beyond just “We are the best at what people used to do!!”

This will radically (again) change the role of the salesperson. Instead of expounding on the myriad features of a product, sales reps will need to help customers make better business decisions. By providing the right information at the right time, they can become trusted advisors on whom customers rely.

And Then…What’s Next?