5 minutes
Today, a potential B2B customer expects to find answers to many of their questions before they are ready to speak to a salesperson. They want to understand the offering, compare alternatives and evaluate suppliers on their own before taking the next step.
And it’s rarely just about the product. Customers need to feel confident in both the supplier and the long-term partnership – including areas such as production, quality, delivery capabilities, sustainability, expertise and what happens after the purchase.
This places higher demands on a company’s digital presence. But having a good website, a modern CMS or a wide range of digital initiatives isn’t enough. What matters is how all the pieces fit together.
Strategy is about creating direction
Strategy defines where you are going, how you will create value and which customers you want to win. Digital opportunities are part of how you bring the strategy to life, not a separate track.
The question then becomes how digital development can contribute to the business and help customers move towards a decision. This also changes the questions that need to be asked.
- What does the customer need to understand to choose us?
- Where in the customer journey can we create the most value?
- What do marketing and sales need to do better together?
- Which digital investments actually help us achieve our business goals?
Strategy creates a shared basis for deciding what to prioritise. Without that direction, it’s easy to assess each initiative on its own. A new feature can be useful. A new campaign can be useful. A new content area can be useful. A new technical solution can be useful.
But a collection of good initiatives doesn’t automatically create a good customer journey.
When every part is optimised separately
We often meet organisations where different parts of the business have good reasons to want to develop the digital presence based on their own needs.
Marketing wants to improve communication. Sales wants better leads. The product organisation wants to highlight new products. IT wants to modernise the platform. Management wants to grow the digital business.
The problem arises when there is no shared understanding of how all these parts should contribute to the same goals.
Marketing and sales may have different ideas about what the website should achieve. The company may have invested in an advanced platform without making full use of its capabilities. Different parts of the organisation may each own a part of the customer journey without anyone truly owning the whole.
Every new solution doesn’t just need to be developed. It also needs to be maintained, populated with content, used and made to work with everything else. Without clear priorities, digital complexity can therefore grow faster than the value it creates.
Technology should enable the strategy – not define it.
Customers buy more than the product
For many companies, this becomes particularly clear. At the core, they have a strong offering. They have invested in products, production and quality and want more potential customers to discover them.
But customers don’t make decisions based on the product alone. When a potential customer is considering a new supplier, they often need to understand much more:
- Is the product right for our business?
- Can the supplier deliver the quality we need?
- What does their production and delivery capability look like?
- Is the company a stable, long-term partner?
- How do they approach sustainability?
- What expertise and experience do they have?
- How do support and service work?
If the digital presence primarily describes the products, a large part of the decision-making process is left for the customer to figure out on their own – or for the salesperson to explain later.
A good customer journey shouldn’t just make it easy to find a product. It should help the customer understand why they can feel confident choosing the company behind it.
Sales starts before the customer gets in touch
As customers do more of the information-gathering themselves, the relationship between marketing and sales also changes.
The goal of digital marketing isn’t just to generate more leads. For a complex B2B company, it’s at least as important that the customer is better prepared when they do get in touch.
A potential customer who already understands the offering, has compared alternatives and found answers to their basic questions can provide a much stronger starting point for the salesperson.
This means the website and its content need to do more than generate a contact. They need to help the customer move further through their decision-making process.
That’s why the customer journey needs to be connected to sales, product, customer service and what the company is actually trying to achieve.
The customer journey starts long before the customer contacts sales.
Technology can’t solve a lack of direction
It’s easy to believe that the next platform, a new CMS or a new digital feature will solve the problem.
But even a well-functioning technical platform can support a digital presence that no longer reflects the company’s current offering. It’s entirely possible to have the right technology but the wrong priorities.
If the business has changed but the content and customer journey haven’t, it doesn’t help that the platform can do more.
Insights for digital leaders
Start with the customer journey – not the next digital project
Start by understanding where the customer needs more support. Where are the uncertainties? Where does the customer lose momentum? What information is missing? Where are the gaps between marketing and sales? And which parts of the digital presence actually contribute to the business?
From there, it becomes easier to prioritise what needs to be developed, simplified or removed.
Because at its core, strategy is just as much about deciding what not to do as it is about deciding what to do.
Andreas Ronder
Digital strategist and business developer with experience in digital initiatives and product development. He connects business, users, and technology to create solutions with measurable impact.
