It’s Official - Omnichannel is the Leading Approach to B2B Sales
Recent research by McKinsey & Company has confirmed that omnichannel is the leading approach to B2B sales and its effectiveness has significantly jumped to 83%. The research has also confirmed that hybrid sellers are expected to be the most common role across the sales team by the end of the year 2024.
McKinsey & Company on the 14th of March 2021 published their 2021 B2B Pulse survey in which they figured out that eight in ten B2B decision-makers believe that omnichannel sales are as much or more effective than traditional marketing methods.
What is an Omnichannel Sales Model?
The omnichannel sales model is a multichannel approach to sales that focuses on providing a seamless customer experience to clients whether they are shopping across the digital or physical channels.
According to Harvard Business Review, 73% of all customers use multiple channels during their purchase journey. Only when a customer has gathered ample information from a variety of sources to support their purchase decisions will they ever buy.
The pandemic significantly aroused the belief of marketers in the effectiveness of the omnichannel sales model. The trust of people in the omnichannel sales model has surged from 54% at the start of the pandemic to 83% in February 2021. Certain regions across the world have seen a greater surge in the acceptance of an omnichannel strategy as a marketing model than others.
B2B decision-makers in Brazil (74%), China (73%), and India (68%) believe the omnichannel sales model to be more effective than other sales models. Their contemporaries in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany are not far behind at 42%, 45%, and 46% respectively.
The adoption of omnichannel accelerated at the onset of the pandemic and has become a predominant path for B2B sales. Now let’s focus on some of the benefits of the omnichannel sales model which have led to its increased popularity and adoption rate.
Benefits of an Omnichannel Sales Model
The omnichannel sales model has several advantages including allowing marketers to achieve more availability, drive sales and traffic, and integrate multiple touchpoints for designing omnichannel experiences for customers. With an omnichannel sales model, customer experiences get optimized and more channels are available for customer purchase – on several device platforms, web as well as in stores.
Here’s a look at some of the prime benefits of an omnichannel sales model:
- Better customer experience - According to a report by UC Today, 9 out of 10 customers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods.
As the number of touchpoints increases so does the need for seamless integration from one touchpoint to another. As omnichannel marketing empowers customers to integrate multiple touchpoints, therefore, the need for seamless integration from one touchpoint to another becomes vital.
Whether it’s a social ad, an email newsletter, a mobile push notification, or a conversion goal, omnichannel marketing allows customers to integrate multiple touchpoints for optimized customer experiences. As customers are empowered to interact with a company in a way that feels natural to them, their experiences across omnichannel are optimized and this leads to the optimized customer experience indexes.
- Optimized Sales & Traffic - An Omnichannel sales model is worth your time and money as it leads to an increase in sales and overall website traffic.
According to research by Harvard Business Review involving 46,000 shoppers, omnichannel customers spend more money than mono-channel customers. In fact, omnichannel customers on average spend 4% more money in-store and 10% more money online.
Customers using 4+ channels spent an average of 9% more in-store as compared to customers who went for mono channel shopping.
- Customer Loyalty is Boosted – Omnichannel strategy helps in the development of a loyal audience base.
The study by Harvard Business Review also reveals that within 6 months of an omnichannel shopping experience, customers had registered 23% more repeat purchases from the physical inventories.
Also, when provided with seamless experiences across omnichannel, the customers are more likely to turn into brand evangelists and spread positive word-of-mouth about the brand across omnichannel. This optimizes customer loyalty.
- Assists Data Collection – An omnichannel approach allows marketers to comprehend how to create content and offers that would engage their customers and would optimize the personalized experiences for them.
Businesses amass enough data to perform the psychographic analysis of their target audience group as well as have ample data to analyze the buying behaviors of the customers across omnichannel and take actions to optimize the customers’ experiences with the help of big data.
Personalization has to be scaled-up to the level of individualization for the target audience groups. Customers need to be satisfied by providing them with hyper-targeted content at each stage of their respective buying cycles which gets possible with the help of the data amassed from multiple channels which can be analyzed with the help of several MarTech tools that harness the power of AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning (ML).
Omnichannel Sales Models Trigger the Restructuring of the Sales Team
The research by Mckinsey & Company establishes that the role of hybrid representatives will be predominant in sales by 2024 as is believed by 85% of the marketers. To effectively drive their omnichannel sales models marketers will need to move with commendable speed and would need to adapt processes in order to adapt alongside their target customer base.
As omnichannel has evolved as a big trend in 2021, 85% of organizations expect hybrid representatives to perform the most common sales role in their organization within the next 3 years. At present, only 28% of organizations have hybrid sales roles. Hybrid sellers comprise a team of field and inside sellers that sell mostly via video conferencing and rarely visit the customers in-person.
Wrapping Things Up
Creating an omnichannel strategy might be beneficial for your organization in more ways than one. A mono-channel strategy, be it web-only or store only is getting outpaced at an accelerated rate as marketers are realizing the importance of the omnichannel sales model.
Orchestrating an omnichannel marketing strategy might not be simple but it’s worth all the time, effort, and resources. After a bit of introspection about market positioning, and SWOT analysis marketers can delineate the path of omnichannel orchestration that works the best for their brands.
Marketers first need to formulate a strategy to learn about their customers and select the right channels that will fetch them quality traffic and drive the conversions. Also, by selecting the right channels, capturing customers’ intentions becomes simpler. All the channels need to be constantly tested and optimized for their effectiveness as marketing channels.
The multiple touch points need to be documented so that the experiences of customers can be optimized by exposing them to a full range of possibilities from the offline and online world. The omnichannel sales model helps in optimizing the customer retention rates, optimizing the business turnover, and optimizing the customers’ satisfaction rates.
92% of customers who have received optimized experiences across omnichannel are likely to recommend the marketing and advertising solutions from a particular brand to friends and family depicts in a study by Nielsen.
The omnichannel sales model has arrived and is here to stay. With the improved collection of customers’ data, companies can monitor customers across omnichannel. This allows them to understand customers and their preferences better. With data, customized communication with customers across omnichannel is possible, which leads to better efficiency and improved collection of customers’ data.
By interconnecting the online and offline customer interactions, brands can improve their relationships with their clients and can optimize their sales cycles in a way that leads to a greater probability of potential customers getting converted to the customers.