[Music] [Ed Kennedy] Hi there. It's Ed Kennedy here from Adobe Commerce. I'm so excited that you joined this virtual session at Adobe Summit. I'm going to be walking you through today, how you can power your B2B e-commerce growth by implementing the three rules of B2B commerce. I've worked on the Adobe Commerce Product Marketing team for several years now, and I've spent over a decade implementing e-commerce platforms for different manufacturers and distributors and consumer brands. So I'm excited to share with you some of the lessons I've learned in my journey along the way. Let's take a look at what we're going to cover today. I'm going to talk about the current state of B2B e-commerce, both from an online revenue standpoint and from some of Adobe's own internal data from our customers that are powering their e-commerce platforms using Adobe Commerce. And I'll talk about the 3 rules, the Golden Rule, the 80/20 Rule, and the Rule of Thirds and how they apply to your B2B e-commerce strategy as you move through the rest of this year. So let's dive right in. Let's talk about the current state of B2B e-commerce. According to EMARKETER, B2B e-commerce will reach $2.5 trillion in the US by 2026, which is 13% of all B2B sales. So all of the ways that we're transacting online as consumers has shifted into business purchasing as well. What's interesting to look at is to understand the differences between EDI, eProcurement, and e-commerce sales. So the combination of all of those three is the electronic sales that we count in this dataset. So roughly, we're moving to 50/50 model where half of B2B sales are being sent through a sales rep or sent via email. But then the other half is now coming through electronic data interchange, through eProcurement, or through B2B e-commerce. And theB2B e-commerce portion is growing at the fastest rates, it's growing at 11% compared to just 5% for EDI and eProcurement offline sales is growing at 3%. So it's the fastest growing revenue channel and that's why lots of companies are investing in B2B e-commerce to capture the opportunity to deliver great shopping experiences for B2B customers. Now what does it look like for Adobe Commerce in the last year on our platform? If you look at all of the customers that we can track through our cloud solution, they captured $38 billion in gross merchandise value. That includes B2C brands that you might be familiar with and a whopping $12.3 billion of that 38 is coming from just 67 B2B e-commerce customers that use our platform. So B2B e-commerce has started take up a bigger and bigger share of what revenue is going through Adobe and through most e-commerce systems, B2B e-commerce is a big contributor of how companies are growing. And this cohort of customers that I tracked has had some pretty stellar results. Their revenue is up 44% compared to last year in 2022, and their average order value is up 84% compared to 2022. So the full year dataset that we have available comparing 2022 to 2023 just shows a very healthy upward swing where customers are onboarding more and more of their revenue onto their e-commerce platform. Manufacturers, distributors, software companies, healthcare companies, all types of industries are now starting to move their B2B business from a sales rep to from an email to a fax to a digital self-service portal. So I'm going to walk you through the three rules that apply to implementing B2B e-commerce here throughout today's session. Now you may think about your own B2B e-commerce journey and how much revenue you're capturing through your channels online and want to know how it compares to others. We did capture this data in a previous study, 50% of B2B e-commerce businesses expect to generate half of their total revenue or more through e-commerce by 2026. So today, represented by the blue bars, you can see that most, over 50%, are capturing one out of every $4 online through B2B e-commerce. There are many others that are above that. The other 50% is distributed. Very few customers capture 100% of their total revenue through e-commerce. But the projection for B2B e-commerce businesses just shift to the right. So for most merchants, manufacturers, and distributors that are starting, you know, sub 25%, some are doing less than 10% of their total revenue online. The expectation is to pivot all of the way to the right. So in the future, we're expecting to see over half of all businesses generate one out of every $2 through their B2B e-commerce channel. So that channel shift is continuing to happen, reaching new customers in new ways using B2B e-commerce. Now I mentioned earlier, EDI, eProcurement, e-commerce. We can look at also the overall revenue channels that businesses are using. So most B2B businesses have a B2B e-commerce channel. They have EDI, and they have eProcurement. Those make up the lion's share of how companies are transacting online to reach their customers. 25%, 1 out of 4, are selling through a third party marketplace like an Amazon or an industry-specific marketplace. And some of the B2C ways that we buy online, like social commerce or native mobile apps aren't as common for B2B businesses. Most of the core purchasing channels that your customers expect is a self-service B2B e-commerce portal or some technical integration to do EDI or eProcurement through some, sort of, procurement platform. Those are really the three main channels that most manufacturers and distributors are reaching their customers electronically through. Now let's talk about these three rules. I'm going to go through each one, one by one and talk about how you can think about a strategy for understanding and using each of these rules. The first is the golden rule, which we all know is really about treating others how you would like to be treated. And when it comes to e-commerce, there's some specific ways of understanding how that applies to B2B e-commerce. B2B merchants, for the most part, in their maturity cycle, are focused on fundamental best practice, and that's really what the golden rule is all about is giving customers the best practice experience that they expect when interacting with your business. Now we asked customers through one of our surveys, what are the strategies that have helped you grow your business the most? And B2B merchants typically say redesigning their website, better digital marketing, improved collaboration with internal teams like the marketing organization, or sales, or IT, or the fulfillment teams those round out the top three and in addition to that, adding new products to the site or replacing their e-commerce platform with a solution like Adobe. If you compare that to the B2C cohort that we surveyed, though, it's very interesting to see that most of the B2C companies we spoke to had already internalized these types of strategies. So most B2B businesses are still focused on best practices, and if that's the case for you, that's fine. You just want to make sure you prioritize what is actually going to drive success for your business. So the golden rule in B2B e-commerce is to treat your B2B customers like consumers. Or is it? Is that really what we should be focused on? We talk about the consumerization of e-commerce, and I would say that treating your B2B customers like consumers is not necessarily good enough for a best-in-class B2B e-commerce experience. Really, what we're looking for is giving your B2B customers the experience they expect. That's really the golden rule of B2B e-commerce. Yes, you and I bring our consumer experiences when buying from business suppliers, but that's not necessarily sufficient for us to engage with the business and buy more. So if you think about all the things that you could provide on your B2B e-commerce website, one-click checkout, being able to contact sales, pay an invoice, create a repeat order. Some of these apply to only B2B scenarios. I created a simple table here on this following slide that, sort of, gives you the illustrative example that, yes, mobile friendly is definitely going to be important for a lot of B2B companies, certainly for consumers, but it may not be the end-all be-all if your customer actually places their purchase from a desktop or a laptop, while sitting at their desk from 9:00 to 5:00. So I've seen companies get very obsessed with mobile experience, but they haven't necessarily validated who's buying from them on their B2B e-commerce website and does it need to be the 100% focus of their B2B e-commerce strategy. Same with other things like product browse and discovery, maybe organic discovery of new products is important in a B2C context, but most B2B buyers know what they're looking for, perhaps want suggested products or optimized search results, but they might not really be in a relaxed browsing mode trying to look for a new purchase. They're really coming with a task in mind that they want to complete. So I think this is something to take into consideration and reference this chart as you're considering your redesigns of your B2B e-commerce channels. What is it that the B2B customer actually expects from this channel, not necessarily what is just given because it's a consumer experience? And that's really where Adobe Commerce starts with our implementations, with our customers. At minimum, the customers that you're selling to expect a portal, to be able to place orders, check inventory, and contact the sales team. So they need to have their customer-specific pricing. You want to be able to target content and promotions to them. You want them to be able to negotiate with you through a quoting process, be able to send triggered messages to them as they abandon a session or abandon a car, be able to pull them back into the buying portal and complete the order, and give your sales teams the ability to conduct tasks on their behalf and give them things like purchase approvals where they can approve orders. These, you can think of, kind of, your map of best practices for a starting B2B e-commerce channel if you're, kind of, respecting that golden rule, giving the customer what they expect from a B2B e-commerce channel. The second rule in B2B e-commerce is the 80/20 rule. And that basically is summarized that 80% of your revenue is coming from 20% of your customer base, and the other 20% of your revenue is coming from that long tail, that 80% of your customers. And thinking about your B2B e-commerce strategy, either combining these two together or serving them differently can be very effective. Are you building this B2B e-commerce channel to target the long tail of customers, the core segment of customers that your sales team is focused on engaging and growing, or both? So I'll walk through each one and give you some examples of how you can think about the 80/20 rule and applying it to your B2B e-commerce channels. The first is that big segment. The 80% of your revenue that's coming from 20% of your customers. Typically, businesses have a sales team that's associated to these accounts. And really, the goal is to be sales led and digitally assisted. What that can mean is actually giving your sales reps the, kind of, digital tools that your B2B customers is expect when they're buying online. So no longer can you just think about the B2B buyer who's your customer placing orders on the website. You actually need to think of how your sales team adopts, evangelizes, and uses this system to complete their own tasks, engage with customers, process orders. So that's really another fundamental piece. I think of these as the one, two step of B2B e-commerce best practices. The portal for the buyer and the sales tool for your field and inside sales team that can enter orders on the customer's behalf, negotiate on the other side with the customer, get notifications if the customer logs in, and provide other types of experiences like rep assisted commerce where someone might get a certain part of the way through the purchase process but need some help to assist. So these are all fundamental capabilities of respecting that 80/20 rule. If you're targeting your top accounts, you want to give them self-service for the orders they want to do self-service, but you also need to make sure their sales team can use this system to drive growth for you as well. So if that's one piece of it is the digital selling tools, like, digital catalogs, being able to place orders on behalf of the customer, a really white-glove first-class service that you're giving to your biggest customers, what about that long tail that you're trying to grow that maybe you can't put an account team on? That's where request for quotes come in as a huge part of your B2B e-commerce strategy. Quoting solutions are great to be able to take customers that get a certain way through the process, but still need to go through a sales rep. They can search for their products, they can browse, they can create accounts, they can add users, set up purchase approval rules. There's so many tools that you can give to your buyers to manage their relationship with you, but what happens when they want to get a price check on an order? Can they submit a quote? Can you send a quote to them proactively? That's really been a core area of investment for Adobe Commerce is the ability to receive quotes, negotiate, respond, and convert them quickly into orders. That's the digital led, but sales assisted motion that we see with a lot of our customers now. They're giving the buying portal to the end user, but they're also giving the sales rep that tool so they can address that long tail effectively. Now the last one here is the rule of thirds, which is a great fundamental takeaway from this virtual session today, is that your B2B buyer engages in all of these channels. There are three basic types of channels that your customers are likely engaging in. Digital self-service like the website or your B2B e-commerce channel, traditional interactions with a sales rep, either on the phone, or on a Zoom, or Teams meeting, or at a trade show, or a customer site visit, and then there's all of the remote human interactions where you're getting emails, and phone calls, video conferences. So those three channels combined is how your customer's actually moving through the funnel and placing orders and building their relationship with you. So really, the key to all of this is unifying this under one set of data about your customers. If each one of these pies only has a piece of the customer data, then you're going to have a disjointed journey as they choose to switch from calling their sales rep, to seeing you at a customer visit, to logging into the portal. You have to unify all of that data and then personalize the experience as they switch from one channel to another. So traditional human interactions, digital self-service, and remote human interactions all need to come together inside of your B2B e-commerce channel. You can't just think about digital self-service, you have to think about how everything's going to come together in your strategy. Now we asked customers in our survey that I was referencing earlier, what are their plans for personalization? And most customers that we surveyed that use Adobe Commerce are looking at using product recommendations, promotions, and sale prices, the sort order of product pages, abandon cart emails, and on-site banners as their way of generating personalized content. And a lot of them want to start doing more in the future. B2B customers and merchants are looking to do email campaign personalization, more customer-specific pricing, and really drive even more personalization across all of the channels they have control over, web, email, SMS, B2B buying portal, the sales team, all of them need to be unified under one personalization strategy. And that's really the part of the rule of thirds that you have to really look into is, can I get all of the customer data, the clicks on the buying portal, their engagement with the sales team, and can I funnel that into a single customer data platform? And the answer with Adobe is that you can. You can bring all of those buyer signals from the portal, you can take all of the data from email marketing, and all of the content that you're personalizing on other channels. You could siphon all that together and then personalize in the channel that's going to convert. Now email is the most common that B2B customers are looking to personalize. When we asked customers, what are you personalizing today? Our B2B cohort was very much focused on email, and I think this is the key prize. For B2C, it's been a long-standing implementation to personalize your email campaigns with your e-commerce channel, and B2B manufacturers and distributors are just reaching that best practice and finding success and results. Obviously, customers want to personalize their customer-specific pricing for their end buyers. But email, I think, is a key use case here that I think you can take away and really look into, how am I personalizing the experiences from my B2B buying portal to my email campaigns. In addition to all of the other things, all of the capabilities you're seeing here are features that Adobe Commerce supports in our B2B e-commerce solution and with our integrations to Adobe Experience Platform, which is really the key takeaway from respecting the rule of thirds if you're an Adobe user is how you're getting the data from Adobe Commerce into all of the other Adobe Experience Platform solutions that you may be using. So what's great is that we've built an out-of-the-box connector from Adobe Commerce that tracks all of the clicks on the frontend and server side data like order status and other database records and we send that to Adobe Experience Platform so it can be used in email personalization like Adobe Journey Optimizer. That's what I'm most excited about in using the rule of thirds is getting all of the data from Adobe Commerce and getting it over into these other platforms. What's also great is the other part on this slide is the audience activation. We can take records from these systems and use them as personalization segments in Adobe Commerce. So that's super exciting for a lot of e-commerce merchants is being able to take the audiences from CDP and then load them into Adobe Commerce to create related rules, personalized banners, and activate those audiences throughout the commerce journey. So it's a symbiotic relationship. We're sending data to the platform to enrich all of the other apps that you may be using, and we can take that data back into Adobe Commerce and use it to personalize the B2B buying journey directly within Adobe Commerce. So in summary, B2B e-commerce is growing. It's a huge part of everyone's business moving forward. In the US, it's going to reach $2.5 trillion. The golden rule is that you have to give your B2B customers the experience they expect. Don't just settle for a consumer like experience. You have to go beyond that and look at what is unique to B2B e-commerce. And if you respect the 80/20 rule, you can give your sales team the digital tools like digital catalogs that they need to do their jobs, but you can also support buyers that are moving through the buying journey with assisted selling tools like quoting. And the rule of thirds, personalizing across email, web, mobile, SMS, and other channels unites the three channels that your customers are engaging in. I hope this has been of help to you and your journey across Adobe Summit. This has been Ed Kennedy from the Adobe Commerce Product Marketing team. I look forward to seeing you on a virtual or in-person session here later in the year. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your Summit. Bye. [Music]