Oracle Helps Organizations Tackle B2B Omnichannel Sales and Commerce Challenges

By Katrina Gosek, vice president of product portfolio strategy, Oracle CX Sales & Commerce

Sales and digital commerce leaders from across industries are not just asking how to better connect sales and purchasing processes in the current environment – they are also asking about how new approaches can give them a long-term competitive advantage.

The need to rethink existing approaches was underlined in our recent study with Denis Pombriant, a well-known CRM analyst. The study, “Getting Past the Breaking Point,” found that traditional CRM systems are simply not working and are seen more like a burden than a resource. And with findings such as 66% of sellers would rather clean the bathroom or stand in line at the DMV than updating their CRM system; it’s no wonder something is broken.

The problems with traditional CRM systems are only one component of today’s complex sales and commerce challenges, but the results do point to the need for a more connected omnichannel sales relationship for businesses. At the heart of this approach lies the need to bring front-office channels and back-office applications together on a unified platform that can provide one view of the customer and business. This not only helps direct sales teams move the right opportunities forward and close deals faster but also helps connect buyers more closely to the sales experience online.

With this in mind, we have introduced a number of new sales and commerce innovations within Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience to improve the virtual selling and buying experience.

Improved Virtual Selling Experience

  • Predictive Lead Scoring: Helps sellers focus their efforts on the strongest opportunities and where they will have the most impact. It does this by using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a probability score that shows a seller how likely a lead will close based on first-party and historic lead data such as past interactions, product purchases, and account profile data.
  • New User Experience: Helps sellers improve efficiency and accelerate sales cycles with a new user experience that adapts to the seller’s role and gives action-driven prompts to focus the seller and remove the guesswork. The new CX Sales Mobile application showcases Oracle’s Redwood UX design philosophy for natural, intelligent interactions on-to-go.
  • Streamlined Sales Processes: A new integration between Microsoft Teams and Oracle CX Sales lets sellers work in familiar collaboration tools without worrying about data loss or duplication. In addition, we continue to build on the integration between CX Sales and Oracle CPQ to give sellers the ability to start, search for, and finish quotes and proposals within the Oracle CX Sales user interface.
  • Advanced Sales Forecasting: A new sales planning dashboard helps sellers make better decisions with views of evolving forecast trends and complete revenue models. The dashboard helps provide a level of accuracy and predictability to the sales planning and forecasting with data sourced from ERP actuals and real-time CRM pipeline.

Improved Virtual Buying Experience

  • New Customer Intelligence Capabilities: New integrations between CX Commerce and Unity, our Customer Data Platform, help businesses leverage online purchasing behavior and data through the rest of the customer journey with other types of data (demographic, IoT, 3rd party enrichment). CX Commerce also now connects natively to Oracle’s Customer Data Management system linking online sales to a customer’s master record for automated data profiling and enrichment across channels. Finally, new AI capabilities within Oracle CX Commerce improve the customer buying experience with optimized and embedded recommendations and search.
  • Streamlined Configuration Management Capabilities: Help businesses make even the most complex goods and services available for online purchasing giving B2B buyers the ability to configure their own packages and services online. In addition, proposals started online can be seamlessly passed to direct sellers if ahigh-touch engagement is required.
  • New Subscription Management Capabilities: Help businesses quickly and easily launch subscription business models and make revenue more predictable by bringing together Oracle CX Commerce, CPQ, and Subscription Management.

New Commerce and Content Capabilities: A new integration between Oracle CX Commerce and Oracle CX Content gives buyers the product content and information they need to guide and enrich self-service purchasing decisions.

B2B Ecommerce Platform Znode Launches the Sales Enablement Console

The Sales Enablement Console provides sales people with ecommerce purchase data to better manage the customer relationship. This product release also updates the native B2B theme for ADA Compliance.

Znode, an enterprise B2B ecommerce platform and product of Amla Commerce, has released its 9.6.3 platform update. This update focuses on empowering salespeople with a new console for customer, quote and order data that brings insights to the fingertips of those directly engaging customers. The key features introduced in Znode 9.6.3 include:

Sales Enablement Console:
As more sales move through ecommerce and highly trained sales people are required to work remote, the demand for web-based sales enablement tools has grown. Znode now solves sales enablement for specific representative roles by territory and account assignment. Within the console sales representatives can see quotes, orders and user data associated with their user providing them with insights into customer shopping and ordering patterns and analysis opportunities to ensure customers are receiving the correct information therefore enabling sales people to play the role of consultant and assist in increasing sales transactions. Additional functionality sales representatives gain includes the ability to view and manage users, orders, quotes and returns as well as the ability to create orders and quotes within the console providing a deeper level of customer relationship management. The console is web-based and does not require the sales person to use a VPN for access ensuring a more productive sales team during remote work.

CardConnect Payment Gateway Integration:
An integration to CardConnect has been built as a punchout/iframe method. This integration path provides the opportunity to maintain a consistent user experience, opposed to an off-domain conversion point, as well as the ability to retain full user conversion analytics tracking. This integration is available natively with pre-built API endpoints for quick connection to customers looking to utilize CardConnect as their payment gateway. This payment gateway meets PCI Level 1 Compliance.

Additionally, the Znode 9.6.3 update enhanced a number of existing features including:

Native B2B Theme is now ADA Compliant:
The native B2B theme available in Znode is now Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level A, thus providing users with disabilities the ability to use a website built utilizing the theme. Complying at a certain level of accessibility is part of the implementation process and maintained after the store goes live.

Znode is a headless ecommerce platform allowing these updates to be consumed by customers without the need for an expensive upgrade process.

“We’re excited to release the Sales Enablement Console as it originated from customer feedback and was engineered into the Znode product in a matter of months,” says Rupesh Agrawal, President and CEO of Amla Commerce, parent company of Znode. “The speed at which the Znode team was able to design and release the new native Znode offering displays the flexibility of the API first architecture. Our customers should also benefit from the increased focus on compliance mandates with the ADA compliant B2B theme update and now PCI compliant CardConnect payment gateway integration.”

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Adapty Delivers First Ever Insite Online B2B Commerce

Adapty Inc., a leading digital commerce and customer experience company, today announced the successful roll-out of a B2B e-commerce solution for Carotek, USA. Adapty partnered with Insite, an Episerver company, and Digital DNA Marketing agency to implement InsiteOnline, an out-of-the-box commerce solution, for the process equipment distribution business of Carotek.

The shift to digital was imperative in the B2B (business to business) space and particularly now in the economic crisis caused by Covid19 pandemic it has gained more significance. Digital transformation in traditional manufacturing and distribution business has the potential to completely change how clients interact with brands and run their businesses.

Carotek a leading distributor of process equipment in the USA, partnered with Adapty to implement a responsive B2B platform. As part of the implementation, the corporate site and e-commerce portal were merged to give the customer a single site view thereby improving the user experience. The implementation delivered improved customer experience and reduced customer service dependency. This is the first ever InsiteOnline platform implementation for B2B business.

Comments on the News:

“Adapty implemented our new InsiteOnline website for Carotek.com. Because this was a new platform, the challenges were higher than normal. Adapty was extremely diligent at problem solving, and very thorough in the QA process. They were willing to go the extra mile to get things done correctly. They were patient with the learning necessary to complete implementation and very supportive during launch.” – Carotekxaa

Adapty besides having solid B2C e-commerce capability also specializes in providing B2B digital commerce solutions for manufacturing and distribution businesses worldwide.

Adapty Delivers First Ever Insite Online B2B Commerce Implementation

Adapty Inc., a leading digital commerce and customer experience company, today announced the successful roll-out of a B2B e-commerce solution for Carotek, USA. Adapty partnered with Insite, an Episerver company, and Digital DNA Marketing agency to implement InsiteOnline, an out-of-the-box commerce solution, for the process equipment distribution business of Carotek.

The shift to digital was imperative in the B2B (business to business) space and particularly now in the economic crisis caused by Covid19 pandemic it has gained more significance. Digital transformation in traditional manufacturing and distribution business has the potential to completely change how clients interact with brands and run their businesses.

Carotek a leading distributor of process equipment in the USA, partnered with Adapty to implement a responsive B2B platform. As part of the implementation, the corporate site and e-commerce portal were merged to give the customer a single site view thereby improving the user experience. The implementation delivered improved customer experience and reduced customer service dependency. This is the first ever InsiteOnline platform implementation for B2B business.

Comments on the News:

“Adapty implemented our new InsiteOnline website for Carotek.com. Because this was a new platform, the challenges were higher than normal. Adapty was extremely diligent at problem solving, and very thorough in the QA process. They were willing to go the extra mile to get things done correctly. They were patient with the learning necessary to complete implementation and very supportive during launch.” – Carotek

Adapty besides having solid B2C e-commerce capability also specializes in providing B2B digital commerce solutions for manufacturing and distribution businesses worldwide.

Cognism Secures Innovative AI Patent to Enable B2B Organisations to Rapidly Identify New Revenue Opportunities

Cognism’s Revenue AI Engine Empowers B2B Organisations to Better Manage and Maintain Real-Time, Consistent and High-Quality Data

Cognism, the smart all-in-one B2B marketing and sales acceleration solution, has successfully secured a patent for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine to address the data challenges faced by sales and marketing teams in B2B organisations. The patent, referred to as the ‘System and method for computational disambiguation and prediction of dynamic datasets’, accelerates Cognism to the forefront of the B2B data industry.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a well-established approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential customers. However, traditional CRM platforms are also complicated software products, making it difficult to maintain information with any degree of accuracy. Data starts to go out of date the minute it hits the system, creating issues in identifying decision-makers and/or the appropriate profile to do business with – particularly within international sales environments. In the best case, this leads to lost sales opportunities; in the worst case, companies waste huge resources targeting the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong message. Improvements to the sales process must be supported by a completely different approach to data sourcing: static CRM is no longer good enough, B2B sales organisations need access to fresh, accurate, contextual and critically GDPR compliant data.

Also Read: TiVo Releases New Churn Analysis From Its Personalized Content Discovery Platform

Cognism has developed a Revenue AI engine that addresses these issues by tackling three distinct database flaws:

  • Removing ambiguity from – for example, job titles – by mapping common fields and creating a common language to allow businesses to more accurately identify desired user and business profiles
  • Enabling and enhancing the identification of international users and business profiles
  • Identifying and predicting frequently changing fields of user profiles to help ensure businesses are dealing with current and accurate CRM data

James Hodson, Chief Science Officer, Cognism, explains why such a system is essential for B2B organisations to adopt, “Not only does static CRM data rapidly lose its relevance, we know that in most cases it is contextually flawed at the outset, which means that organisations are missing out on both identifying and targeting their most valuable prospects. Through the Revenue AI engine, not only can companies identify the most relevant, timely revenue opportunities on an international scale, but a deep and accurate customer data resource can transform the accuracy of sales and marketing activity. Companies are not only prioritising outreach activity at the right time, but each prospect interaction is more focused and relevant to each persona.”

Also Read: SpringCM, a DocuSign Company, Named a Contract Lifecycle Management Leader in 2019 Report

It is evident that B2B organisations need a far better approach to identifying their key targets, approaching the best contacts and creating messages that resonate. As James Isilay, CEO, Cognism adds, that model has to be underpinned by real-time insight that encompasses both accurate, standard contact information as well as the key events, from funding rounds to staff hiring, that indicate a prospect’s readiness to buy, “With a constant feedback loop provided by our Revenue AI engine, our B2B clients are achieving real bottom line growth. This comes from using Revenue AI to better understand their core market, from purchase triggers to decision making personas. In today’s ever more discerning market, being able to deliver a personalised B2B sales message in the same way that people have become used to in a consumer environment will soon become a key to competitive advantage and profitable business growth.”

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