Firms reluctant to make the shift to digital selling are finding that their hands are being forced as social distancing makes traditional interactions between suppliers and customers impossible.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the ways suppliers and customers interact with remarkable suddenness and scale.  B2B companies that rely on large sales forces, networks of intermediaries, call centers, and visits from technical support teams are particularly vulnerable to having their customer relationships interrupted. Making a shift to digital selling is an important way to sustain supplier-customer relationships throughout the pandemic and to exit it with capabilities to accelerate revenue-building once customer demand improves.

B2B companies that have successfully made the shift to digital selling – organizations such as integrated logistics giant Maersk and the commercial arm of ING bank – have reoriented themselves and are now using data and digital tools to acquire new customers; sustain and grow share of wallet among established customers; expand the number of buying centers within existing customer organizations.

“Making a shift to digital selling is an important way to sustain supplier-customer relationships throughout the pandemic.”

These companies have taken advantage of recent B2B advances in digital targeting, personalization, outreach, content creation, account-based marketing (ABM) and always-on marketing, to position themselves well in today’s uncertain times. A digital selling shift involves moving to a selling approach that relies extensively on digital marketing and data-driven selling. It integrates sales and marketing in a tightly linked partnership that is data-driven, digitally powered, and foregoes the need for person-to-person contact.

During a digital selling shift in the current environment, B2B leaders pursue revenue-generating paths to address the parts of the sales funnel that at immediate risk and provide the greatest growth opportunity once recovery begins. The risks and the opportunities will vary by company and industry. For established leaders in mature industries, the greatest risks and opportunities will often occur in the parts of the funnel dealing with renewal, cross-sell and supporting existing relationships. For insurgent companies or rapidly growing sectors, the opportunities and risk may reside primarily at the top of the funnel in acquiring new customers and encouraging them to make an initial or trial purchase.

Our study of successful digital transformation in B2B has uncovered several paths leaders can take to reduce their risks of selling disruption and boost their opportunities to build demand as economies begin to recover:

Demand Generation to accelerate customer acquisition

The explosion of data and a rapidly expanding set of vehicles for reaching B2B decision-makers is making it possible to create direct relationships with end customers without cutting out their sales representatives, channel partners, distributors, advisors, or other middlemen. These channel and content alternatives are enabling established sellers to generate leads for their sales as well as for their intermediaries. Engaging in demand generation provides an added benefit: it creates a direct relationship with the customer that enables suppliers to learn from users and buyers, test alternatives, and more effectively probe for new opportunities. This path may be particularly important to insurgent companies or companies in rapidly growing sectors.

Digital Sales Enablement to accelerate cross-selling and boost value

Here, companies use digital tools and digitally collected data to sell more effectively. Sales engagement and relationship management platforms, including those of Salesforce.com, Oracle, and SAP are so well established that Gartner reports that the market reached $48.5 billion in 2018 and represents a quarter of all corporate purchases of enterprise software. Sales enablement platforms, networks, and apps help individual salespeople achieve more and help sales teams work more effectively together. In the past few years, these platforms have shifted from individual customer relationship management to helping the sales teams engage more fully with their customer’s entire decision-making team. The payoff is immediate: better equipped and coordinated sales teams perform better. They generate more revenues, strengthen customer relationships, and stay with companies longer. This path may be particularly relevant to leaders in mature industries.

Digital Relationship-Building

New, more targeted vehicles, such as LinkedIn advertising, along with compelling content (such as video and virtual reality) have paved the way for Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is more personalized and tailored to the needs of individual decision-makers than traditional push email and digital advertising campaigns. As an integrated approach, it combines salesperson interactions and digital engagement for maximum efficiency and impact. Its digital components extend engagement into an anytime, anywhere experience through the 24/7 advantage of online and mobile vehicles. This path is likely to be relevant to all companies with sales teams whether they are leaders or insurgents.

Digital Customer Support

Companies are also using digital technologies to shift more of the routine chores online. B2B companies are now using advanced AI bots in combination with live person-to-person chat to enable customers to easily order parts and accessories and get problems resolved online. Companies are also shifting their technical support and client-learning functions to digital formats. These new tools boost team efficiency and effectiveness through improved resource deployment and enable customer 24/7 customer support. This path is helpful in any industry where technical support or customer training is an important part of the supplier value proposition.

Direct Digital Commerce to accelerate acquisition and cross-selling

One of the biggest opportunities digital has created for customers is allowing them to make purchases directly from suppliers and bypass intermediaries. As more customers demand 24/7 access, intermediaries’ have become increasingly open to allowing suppliers to directly engage with customer segments that are hard to access, fulfill offers that are costly to serve, or supply information directly that enhances the customer experience. Direct commerce can be valuable at renewal, upgrade or cross sell occasions in addition to initial purchase. It’s important that suppliers determine how they will integrate direct digital commerce solutions with their intermediary relationships or their own salespeople. This path has broad relevance for both incumbents and insurgents but the scope of bypassing the intermediaries will vary based on the power of the intermediaries and the willingness of the supplier to challenge them.

Our 4 Step Approach

By examining case studies in successful transformation by B2B companies we’ve identified a step by step approach to following each path and generating measurable impact:

1. Choose where to play by understanding where in the sales funnel to sustain or grow customer demand and by understanding the barriers customers face in achieving their goals.
2. Determine how to win by building a compelling digital strategy based on clarifying the target, capturing the target’s attention, cultivating their interest, and converting them to buy, buy more, or recommend to others.
3. Accelerate what to do by using scrum agile methods to conduct a series of sprints to pilot new digital selling approaches, scale previously piloted approaches, or build capabilities required for digital selling.
4. Ensure you have who is needed by setting up and enabling a customer data team with the resources they need to put in place a system to undertake the shift and maintain progress through continuous customer-driven improvement.

In 2004, Dove provocatively widened the definition of beauty through its landmark Real Beauty campaign, challenging airbrushed stereotypes established by the personal care industry and rallying around the “real beauty” of women everywhere.  Originally positioned as a functional soap brand, Dove’s campaign leveraged digital marketing to provide a new opportunity for social discourse and community building, elevating the brand beyond the product line. Dove didn’t just sell beauty, but self-esteem and acceptance, becoming a brand grounded more in social and emotional benefits than functional ones.

How Far Dove Real Beauty Has Come

A primary reason for the success and resonance of the Real Beauty message was its deep rooting in digital activation at a time before digital marketing was commonplace.  For example, Dove used compelling and provocative videos to provide energy around the campaign, including its 2006 “Evolution” video – one of the earliest viral brand videos on YouTube. Its “Real Beauty Sketches” video also became one of the most-watched videos of all time.  It also launched the Dove Self Esteem Project, a web portal intended to improve the self-esteem of young people by engaging viewers in forums, workshops, articles and videos that educate on topics like body positivity and bullying.

“Digital engagement has become table stakes, audience touchpoints and expectations are changing in profound ways”

Now, nearly 15 years after the initial Real Beauty effort, Dove exists in a digital world that looks very different from the original.  Digital engagement has become table stakes, audience touchpoints and expectations are changing in profound ways and the “cause marketing” space has become increasingly crowded and noisy.  It would have been fair to question whether Dove’s brand message was at risk of fatigue.  However, Dove has continued to maintain energy around its brand and sustain relevance as we enter 2020 – using digital to continue to power its message and positioning.

Improving Brand Relevance Through Digital Transformation

The numbers back this up.  In the Prophet Brand Relevance Index® (BRI), Dove remains the most relevant brand in the Household & Personal category – a position it’s held since reclaiming the top spot from Crest in 2017.  Additionally, the gap between Dove and its category is growing, with a 2019 Brand Relevance score that is 35 percent higher than the category average, compared to 32 percent higher in 2016.  Dove’s score for “Customer Obsession” puts it in the top 10 percent of all brands and above noted customer-obsessed stalwarts such as Chick-fil-A and Southwest Airlines, validating the continued strength of the brand’s emotional connection with its audience.  The brand has also seen a steady increase in purchase consideration from 2014 to 2019¹, and as more and more brands position themselves more explicitly around a cause, Dove has managed to stand out, with the highest association with a social cause among all brands².

Examining the moves Dove has made the last few years, it’s clear that it has accomplished this in part by investing in unique, thoughtful and more sophisticated digital marketing strategies.  These digital marketing campaigns – which range from stunt marketing to larger content creation strategies and partnerships – continue to reinforce Dove’s brand positioning, while leveraging more digital touchpoints that audiences interact with.  The approach allows the brand to build off of its earlier momentum by broadening and deepening its exposure with audiences.

Some of Dove’s Best Digital Marketing Strategies

• In 2015, Dove partnered with Twitter to identify negative tweets about beauty and body image, and then respond to these tweets in real-time as part of the #SpeakBeautiful campaign. This was coupled with a creative advertisement about the ramifications of body shaming during the Academy Awards pre-show.
• In 2017, Dove teamed up with award-winning photographers to take striking pictures of “real women” – pictures that spotlighted women’s strength, grit and talent. Through a digital back door, these pictures were uploaded to Shutterstock with a search tag of “beautiful” that flooded results for a search term that historically had yielded photoshopped, airbrushed pictures.  Dove then encouraged other photographers and brands to join the cause, and in turn, created a host of informal ambassadors for the Dove message.
• In 2018, Dove introduced its “No Digital Distortion” mark – a symbol indicating that a picture hasn’t been digitally altered. This symbol runs across all branded content – digital advertisements, social media content and print – and serves as a consistent reminder of the Dove message across both digital and non-digital channels.
• In the same year, Dove announced a two-year partnership with the Cartoon Network series “Steven Universe” to educate young people on body confidence and speak to the next generation of consumers.
• In 2019, in partnership with Getty Images, Dove collected over 5,000 images on the Getty website that featured 179 different women, all of which were women from a variety of underrepresented backgrounds. These images were made available for public use, and like the Shutterstock stunt marketing campaign from 2017, created a sense of ambassadorship for users of the pictures.

¹ YouGov

² Do Something Strategic: A Social Impact Consultancy