It’s a relatively new concept for many companies in B2B.
The idea of personalization – customizing your site experiences to the shopping habits of your customers – has grown steadily in the B2C world over the last few years. But it hasn’t caught on in the B2B space quite as quickly.
As more and more B2B companies realize the effects personalization can have on their business (as well as how much money Amazon is making in B2B with strategies like personalization), however, personalization is quickly becoming a key initiative for many B2B companies in 2021.
But what is B2B personalization, and how can it be used to increase your business KPIs and give your users unrivaled experiences?
B2B Personalization: The Basics (And Why It’s Needed)
Like we previously mentioned, personalization in the context of this article is the strategy of customizing your on-site experiences (search, browse, recommendations, etc.) to the unique preferences and shopping habits of your individual customers and accounts.
It’s a well-known fact: your accounts – and the individual buyers within those accounts – care for and shop for different things. You often can’t even sell the same set of products to different accounts (especially when they’re in different countries).
In a recent article on B2B personalization, Four51 gave a great breakdown of the various B2B customer types and their needs:
- Inside Sales Reps or CSRs (Customer Service Reps) who take orders from customers over the phone and need to enter those orders, quickly and easily, on the customers’ behalf.
- Field Sales Reps who need great product content and visuals to use as sales and education material when out in the field talking with prospects and customers.
- Engineers who are making changes to product details and collections, and need to update and manage the product catalog.
- Procurement or Vendor Managers who manage the supply side of the experience, and need to be able to implement product, pricing, shipping and process changes for the suppliers they manage.
- Consumers who need to be able to find your product information via search and do their research before becoming a customer.
Top B2B eCommerce companies are using personalization to customize their entire experiences to fit the exact needs of their customer types, all automatically, and without having to build separate applications or do any manual customizations.
But personalization can do more than just give your individual customers a customized experience:
Personalization makes pricing a breeze.
As a B2B business, it’s likely that each of your customers have prices that vary from other accounts. Displaying the right prices for each of your accounts within your product discovery experience is crucial, and personalization can allow you to do just that.
Personalization gives your customers confidence.
The competition in eCommerce is ever-growing. To gain, keep, and wow your customers, they have to have a deep trust that you understand their pain points and are ready to help them solve their problems, exactly when they need them solved. With personalization, you have the power to get each of your customers to the products that best suit their needs and preferences as quickly as possible.
How is personalization most commonly used in B2B?
We’ve mentioned a few ways personalization can be used in the context of B2B, but to recap:
Catalog Personalization on The Account Level
Personalization gives you the power to tailor your on-site experiences and the products each of your accounts see and have available to them down to the smallest detail. Whether through search, browse, or elsewhere, it gives you the power to customize exactly how you want your accounts to interact with your product discovery experience.
Personalized Products for Key Buyers Within Each Account
Your accounts likely have many buyers within them. With a personalized experience, each of those individual’s wants and needs can be met automatically.
Personalized Pricing Per Account
Your different accounts likely have different requirements on pricing. One customer may have preferred pricing for a particular vendor, product, and so on. Personalization allows you to customize these prices for each account automatically.
