Boosting B2B Sales by 21.2% With Next-Generation Digital Merchandising
The advent of B2B ecommerce has helped streamline wholesale purchasing, but the process is still hindered by outdated approaches to product sales and merchandising. When it comes to wholesale product merchandising, many manufacturers and retailers are dropping offline to use printed sales catalogs, outdated sales presentations, and manual order placement. Reliance on these traditional sales methods creates a significant drag on potential sales and limits revenue growth.
By transitioning to Elastic Suite’s digital B2B merchandising solutions, both buyers and sellers can benefit from an incremental boost in sales revenue through:
By adopting the Elastic platform and introducing these elements into their B2B sales process, manufacturers can boost their revenue by a combined average of 21.2%. To achieve this potential lift in sales revenue it requires complete, 100% adoption of the Elastic technology and fully implementing each of these improvements for maximum ROI. To do so also requires strong organizational leadership to implement the needed sales process changes associated with making these improvements.
Digital Merchandising Technology
Next generation digital sales and merchandising technology creates a much more flexible and immersive purchasing interface between buyers and suppliers when compared to traditional printed sales materials. Providing more than just static digital catalogs this technology is designed to help both manufacturers and retailers maximize the sale of complex and diverse product lines through interactive purchasing features.
An advanced 100% digital merchandising platform can generate incremental B2B sales lift by making retailer mass product purchases much more strategic and better aligned with consumer preferences. Retailers may develop less conservative purchasing habits and buy more product when using the technology as they can more strategically calculate the optimum quantity of products needed for a particular consumer trend, brand, line or sales season. This enhancement also improves product speed-to-market while providing considerably more time to strategically manage product lines and expand the sales season. These sales process improvements together create an average potential sales lift of 5.5% when measured across the Elastic client base.
Transition to Digital Merchandising
Process Results in
%
potential increase in B2B sales revenue
Assortment Planning Tools
One of the central features of B2B digital merchandising is the ability to move beyond the limitations of static digital catalogs. Providing buyers with features such as full assortment building, line showing functions and sell-in tools create a more compelling and better user experience more aligned with retailers’ needs. Dynamic data features include the ability to notate and rate products, account for real-time product color/style changes and stay informed of pricing fluctuations while creating a more strategic product mix. The impact of using comprehensive assortment planning tools results in an average 3.9% potential lift in sales volume.
The sales lift when using comprehensive assortment planning tools is an average of 3.9%
Sales Promotion Capability
As retailer needs shift in response marketplace trends or consumer demands, manufacturers can respond with flexible B2B sales promotions tailored for the needs of their retail partners. Promotions can include recommended buys based on real-time consumer purchasing data. This ability helps manufacturers capitalize on new or emerging opportunities for increased sales and profits. Manufacturers can also more accurately monitor over-supply conditions in specific product lines to create customized sales pitches for those overstocked items. The Elastic platform helps to automate these sales promotions and fully integrates with manufacturer-to-retailer communications to generate timely product promotion messaging and email campaigns. Elastic clients average an estimated 3.2% increase in sales revenue when utilizing the platform’s sales promotion functionality.
Strategic Sales Planning
Greater visibility into real-time B2B sales data provides for more strategic sales monitoring, planning and forecasting. The sales performance of individual products or lines becomes more easily analyzed and aids in the strategic sales planning process. A B2B merchandising platform allows for final sales planning to take place later and much closer to the actual start of the retail sales season. This allows for more timely adjustments in planning to maximize sales for both manufacturers and retailers. This ability to conduct a higher level of strategic sales planning lifts revenue on average by 2.5% among Elastic clients.
Complex Pricing Incentives
The ability to incentivize buyers with customized pricing programs tailored to the needs of specific retailers can help lift sales. Complex pricing incentives can be more easily created, implemented and managed through the Elastic platform with clients experiencing measurable results. Greater automation of these programs can help boost sales while requiring less manual input and time-consuming processes. Clients are seeing an average estimated sales lift of 1.7% when using pricing incentives.
History-Driven Selling
Improved access to sales data and greater visibility into retailer-specific purchasing history can be a powerful tool for manufacturers. In combination with strategic sales planning, history-driven selling based on analysis of historical and current sales data can help create effective approaches to maximize sales growth. This type of sales data helps to more effectively manage product lines and more quickly adjust to shifting consumer preferences or marketplace trends. The result is an average 1.3% potential lift in B2B sales revenue.
Segmented Sales
Greater transparency into sales data provides the necessary visibility into the performance of product lines to better monitor and predict buyer preferences, both at the wholesale and retail levels. This translates into the ability to create effective and profitable segmentation strategies designed to maximize the sales potential with defined consumer and lifestyle marketplace segments. An effective sales segmentation approach creates an average estimated sales increase of 1.2% among Elastic clients.
Enhanced Sales Presentations
Empowering sales reps with next-generation digital merchandising technology helps them create much more compelling and persuasive sales presentations designed for specific wholesale buyers. Enhanced sales presentations create a more collaborative purchasing experience that can result in higher close ratios and overall sales volumes. Elastic clients experience an average potential sales increase of 1.1% resulting from this improvement.
Client Acquisition + Retention
The enhanced user experience among buyers and the establishment of retailer/dealer purchasing applications helps attract new clients and cement existing clients. Retailers are beginning to make the use of B2B digital merchandising technology a preferred standard and business prerequisite for suppliers. A satisfaction rate of nearly 100% among Elastic platform users means that manufacturers are better able to attract the retain their wholesale customers with an overall average estimated increase in sales of 0.8%.
Sales Lift + Cost Savings
The combined impact of all nine of these B2B sales lift factors associated with the Elastic digital merchandising platform represents a total potential increase in commercial sales volume of 21.2%. In addition to sales lift, the Elastic platform also provides efficiency-driven cost savings that can reduce manufacturers’ combined sales, marketing and customer service budgets by 10.3%. These cost saving benefits are detailed in a separate whitepaper, and along with these nine sales lift factors, are included in an Elastic ROI calculator that can accurately assess the platform’s total potential positive financial impact.
If you want to experience how Elastic can help boost your B2B sales:
If you want to learn best practices for virtual selling and assortment planning:
If you’re a partner brand and want to share your sales lift story: