“The future is today” is a quote generally associated with the famous Sir William Osler, baronet, physician, and “father of modern medicine” — one of the founders of the prestigious Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Sir William hit the nail on the head: The future is indeed a matter of urgency. The future is happening today, now, at all times.
B2B companies need to be aware of this fact. There is no other sector in which there is as much competition, but also no other sector in which there are as many opportunities as in B2B. B2B companies are inherently operating in a smaller market with robust competitors who are masters of their trade and always hungry for more. Therefore, wholesalers need to be efficient, but at the same time pass this efficiency on — as much as possible — to their B2C customers to ensure their own profitability.
In addition, B2B companies need to educate their customers on how to use, purchase and get the most out of products and services, and how to pass this information from the B2C merchant to the end customer. That's why, to help you safely navigate the B2B waters, we've launched B2B Frontrunners!
B2B Frontrunners is a community focused on empowerment and inspiration. We are committed to creating a think tank, a global archive of ideas, knowledge, and technical tools, based on free exchange and collective optimization. There is no better way to kickstart this community than by addressing one of the biggest issues of our time — a topic that for many is part of the "future" we are talking about here, namely the future that is already happening today: data-driven intelligence.
Data-driven intelligence: A tool ahead of its time
Intershop hosted the first B2B Frontrunners community meeting — of which you can find the full video session here — to take a closer look at the topic of data-driven intelligence for B2B companies. This session provided exclusive industry insights that help B2B companies optimize their business. That's why, today, we want to share with you the most important takeaways from the first B2B Frontrunners deep-dive session on data-driven intelligence. The panel of experts included Nils Breitmann (Enterprise Architect at Intershop Communications AG), Arjen Bonsing (Founding partner of Customer Journey Experts), Frank Beke and Martijn Hazelhorst from De Nieuwe Zaak and André Herbst (IT Manager at Soennecken).
Thanks to them, the first session showed the main reasons why we should use data-driven intelligence and why it is an excellent tool for B2B Frontrunners. In addition, several use cases were presented to better highlight the key benefits of data-driven intelligence. With this in mind, we would now like to share with you a compilation of the most important takeaways from this first session. Let's get started!
Empowering growth with data-driven intelligence and the B2B/B2C evolution
Over the last 50 years, retail has undergone an enormous evolution. Arjen Bonsing from Customer Journey Experts summed it up: We have jumped from direct contact with the milkman or baker straight to our hyper-virtual/hyper-digital world, in which we can go without any human contact while shopping online. No other technology has contributed as decisively to this evolution as mobile devices such as smartphones.
Thus, B2B and B2C moved from the age of face-to-face contact, where we interacted directly with other people, to the age of individualism, where our interactions are determined by the channels we use to communicate with a company or brand: Social media, e-commerce, mobile shopping, etc.
That's why data-driven intelligence is essential in our hyper-connected world. By leveraging these mobile devices and multiple channels, we create a constant flow of information that B2B companies can use to accurately predict purchasing patterns, define customer expectations, and create personalized customer journeys to match future customers' preferences and ensure a seamless shopping experience.
Arjen Bonsing presented an excellent example of how these personalization options work during the first session. He used an evolutionary timeline to show how AI-powered intelligence — based on data-driven technologies — can create a more personalized shopping experience.
This timeline shows how we started with click-based websites and then moved on to chatbot-based conversations that offer a higher level of personalization. Then, we moved on to conversational agents, such as AI virtual assistants, that can create a tailored customer journey based on data from previous customer interactions.
An excellent example of this is Huisman Equipment's approach to a B2B e-commerce solution — based on Intershop — that will be able to capture, process and predict possible future repairs on all current customers' machines. The respective customers are informed about these potential preventive maintenance services and can discuss them and ask questions. This provides a tailor-made service for each machine, each customer and even each individual use of the machine operators. All this is combined in an automated chat and email system.
A key element to achieving the same or even higher level of personalization using data-driven intelligence, as Arjen Bonsing explained, would be the use of ChatGPT and other similar technologies. Until now, chatbots on websites and in e-commerce have been used more as FAQ databases, able to answer a given pool of frequently asked questions. But by using ChatGPT neural models, the reality will look very different.
New chatbots using ChatGPT-like technologies can act more like assistants to the customer, even taking on tedious tasks that the prospect previously had to do themselves. For example, these types of chatbots, combined with data-driven profiles of the customers they serve, can create compatibility lists for regular customers looking for spare parts or who want to buy a machine part, product or component.
The ability to present a prospective customer with a carefully selected list of products that meet their needs is quickly becoming an industry standard; many companies already struggle to match the level of personalization that industry leaders can offer today. But chatbot personalization using tools like ChatGPT and other AI technologies cannot provide a complete solution. In fact, personalization using chat solutions represents only 30% of the real personalization capabilities that a fully data-driven intelligence-based B2B commerce can offer.
Another important aspect of the data-driven intelligence approach for B2B is the ability to create an autonomous cycle. This includes information gathering, decision-making, and evaluation of the results of those decisions — as well as the associated adjustments to enable improvement and growth.
Reaching new audiences is becoming increasingly expensive — up to 5 to 10 times more expensive than selling to repeat customers. That's why having a B2B commerce that can process massive data streams to help you and your team understand that information and make decisions, or even go so far as to make autonomous decisions based on that information according to predefined criteria. This is the true future of a data-driven approach and e-commerce in the B2B sector.
We're talking about an online platform that can predict, pre-deliver and adjust in real time what the market wants or might want, based on the customer data we've collected so far. But to do that, we need to build a data-driven culture within our company. It's quite a challenge considering that currently, only 34% of B2B organizations define themselves as "data-driven," as Arjen Bonsing explained during his insightful post, which you can watch here.
“Advanced personalization and use of data is not the domain of UX designers or marketing departments. It is actually necessary that it becomes part of your organization's DNA.”
Arjen Bonsing - Founding Partner at Customer Journey Experts
Jarola: Growth thanks to data
During the session, Frank Beke and Martijn Hazelhorst from De Nieuwe Zaak, explained the case of Jarola and showed why data-driven intelligence has proven essential for the company's growth.
This case was explained in three phases:
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Phase 1: AB testing
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Phase 2: Search and merchandising
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Phase 3: Personalization
The case of Jarola was explained using Wildkamp as a prime example of data-driven growth. Wildkamp is one of Jarola's core brands and provides engineered products and solutions for agriculture, irrigation, certification and maintenance, construction and roofing, piping and pressure fittings, and electricity and lighting, as well as a variety of related industries.
The company is one of the leading brands in the Netherlands and currently has a network of 50 physical stores. However, it now aims to set up a powerful e-commerce hub to provide support to all its B2B customers through a single source of information. The hub can also handle customer requests autonomously and personally through different channels. Wildkamp's e-commerce platform is based on Intershop.
In Wildkamp's case, the goal of using data is to improve the customer experience, especially in the medium to long term. This is because many of the products Wildkamp sells are expensive machines that customers do not buy regularly.
The data is used to ensure that the customer journey runs as smoothly as possible. The different levels of knowledge that customers have about the respective product are also taken into account. In fact, by using data-driven intelligence in Wildkamp's Intershop-based online retail, different customer categories were identified, from skilled workers to technicians. They all go through a personalized customer journey that is tailored to their different sales arguments, topics and interests.
To achieve this, however, Wildkamp had to create company-wide framework conditions for a data-driven B2B business and introduce, modify and manage appropriate measures.
As Frank Beke and Martijn Hazelhorst from De Nieuwe Zaak made clear during the session, teamwork is always necessary to transform a company and prepare it for using data-driven intelligence.
This requires growth in several areas simultaneously.
This means that you must take the following measures:
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Find the right employees and train them.
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Use the right tools.
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Build appropriate corporate structures to support the teams within the company.
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Ensure efficient processes so that the full potential of data-driven intelligence can be exploited.
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Create exciting and powerful marketing content to communicate with your potential customers through the right channels.
By combining all these measures, Wildkamp succeeds in identifying customers and consumers and providing them with a personalized and automated customer journey.
This allows you to provide insights and information about the products being searched for and other matching products. It also increases cross-sales and up-sales by creating bundles of “frequently purchased products and components” through identifying the types of projects customers are buying for, and generally provides significantly improved support to every visitor to your e-commerce.
This is all possible thanks to data-driven intelligence, which involves the efficient collection, processing, and use of big data.
Some key takeaways from the Jarola-Wildkamp case are:
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In order to embed data-driven intelligence in the company, growth in various areas is necessary.
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In addition to analytics, data also helps with automation.
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To improve the customer experience, it is important to select best-in-class tools.
If you want to learn more about Wildkamp's step-by-step introduction to data-driven intelligence and are interested in details about the apps, solutions and tools used to achieve this, watch the full session here!
Soennecken: A long road to data-driven intelligence
During this first session, we heard another powerful story about the transformative power of data-driven intelligence: the story of Soennecken.
As the largest owner-managed purchasing and marketing company in the office supplies industry in Europe, Soennecken had a lot on the table when it decided to adopt a data-driven strategy.
Soennecken has over 500 cooperative members who are medium-sized specialized retailers that are among the largest leading suppliers of office supplies in Europe. And with over 300 shops with more than 25 years of industry experience, the company is a prime example of how data-driven intelligence is indeed becoming the norm among the leading B2B companies.
André Herbst, IT Manager at Soennecken, explains remarkably vividly the company's entire thought process as well as the complex challenges that had to be overcome due to the special cooperative structure in combination with the more traditional business.
To ensure a smooth customer journey and to serve all the company's different customer types, the company structure was previously divided into the following solutions:
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SoProcure: E-procurement platform for large companies
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SoCommerce: E-procurement platform for small and medium-sized enterprises
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Shopware: Shop for private customers
But these three different platforms had to merge into a single solution: a single data source. This would increase Soennecken's success on all levels. The new solution, called YourCommerce , is based on Intershop and has a single goal: To create a multi-level B2X procurement and purchasing platform.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Soennecken's journey to a data-driven business strategy is that they had to start from scratch. From asking cooperative members to sign contracts for the use of data, to introducing a multidisciplinary, cross-functional team to manage the new model, including the transition from print to online offerings and the implementation of a new pricing model suitable for dealing with B2B, B2C and B2X, to implementing the entire operational phase, Soennecken designed a complete data-driven approach from scratch.
Changes at the technical, employee and company level were pushed forward simultaneously in order to create a suitable framework that complies with current EU legislation and enables the collection, processing and use of data from cooperative members, customers and even employees.
And how did Soennecken envision using this data? Well, they wanted to get straight to the core and create personalized customer journeys and product recommendations.
“We had to change the way we had of dealing with these systems, we had to change the teams, and we had to change our entire approach. As it was explained in the presentation before said, it is 30% IT and 70% change.”
André Herbst, IT Manager Soennecken
To truly capitalize on data-driven intelligence, Soennecken had to completely restructure the way it handled customer relationships, the data center, and even the way it presented product data.
The Soennecken case confirms the core idea that to successfully establish data-driven intelligence in the company, it is fundamental to adapt and develop the entire company using data-driven tools, concepts and criteria. It is not just about technical tools, but also about the mindset of the entire team.
Intershop: The core of autonomous commerce
Finally, Nils, Enterprise Architect at Intershop Communications AG, and Chi, co-founder of SPARQUE.AI, explained why data-driven intelligence is essential to enable autonomous commerce. Autonomous commerce is the next step in the evolution of e-commerce and one of Intershop's core philosophies to provide companies and organizations with the innovation they need to stay ahead of the competition.
During the session, Nils also presented a very interesting presentation of the degrees and variants of AI, from artificial intelligence to generative artificial intelligence. He also presented some impressive case studies, so that the power behind data-driven intelligence was truly accessible to everyone.
With this in mind, Nils explained in detail how leveraging data-driven intelligence can help companies pursuing autonomous commerce achieve “autonomous decision-making.” For example, an autonomous commerce solution can automatically introduce new prices based on inventory levels or competitors’ prices, keeping your brand and products at the forefront of the global market.
He also highlighted the essential building blocks needed to embed data-driven intelligence in a company: a BI & AI data hub, an AI data model and a personalization tool: SPARQUE.AI.
SPARQUE.AI is an AI technology part of Intershop. This tool is currently considered the market leader in personalized search and AI-based product recommendations for B2C and B2B commerce scenarios. SPARQUE.AI offers AI-powered custom algorithms that are ready for use within a few days.
These algorithms are fed with data from different sources, such as your ERP, e-commerce platform, PIM and Google Analytics, but also contextual information such as page views and real-time data such as location and weather. The main advantage of these applications is that they are fast and scalable and can be tailored to any type of business.
To highlight SPARQUE.AI's capabilities, Chi gave insightful examples of how it is used in data-driven intelligence implementation strategies. In this first session, the audience benefited from a real-life case to learn how this technology can be implemented in their own e-commerce.
The first case presented by Chi was about InTronics Business and how the company uses the tool — setting up an API connection with ChatGPT services validated by SPARQUE.AI — an intelligent search engine keyword recommendation tool within e-commerce.
This also enabled customers to receive recommendations on other keywords related to their original search on InTronics' e-commerce website. This allows for more efficient up-scaling and cross-selling and saves the customer time by allowing them to search for products similar to the product they originally wanted to buy, according to the data obtained thanks to ChatGPT.
The second case that demonstrated SPARQUE.AI's capabilities was Warmteservice, a well-known brand whose data collected over the years allowed SPARQUE.AI to leverage customized product package solutions to help the company increase sales at all levels.
Chi explained how the company was able to create customized packages, packages optimized for cross-selling, or even industry-specific packages — always depending on the specific project for which the customer needs the products.
One might think that this level of personalization would be a complex feat, but when asked about it during the session, Chi aptly pointed out that it was simply “applying common sense.”
Chi then explained that companies that want to stay ahead of the game need to train their employees to become experts in handling and understanding data. They also need to build a data-driven culture within their team so that employees don't fight the data, but instead free themselves of any biases and look at the data — and the behavior suggested by the data —with complete objectivity. A perfect combination of AI and human acumen!
Finally, the session concluded with a clear overview of all the key topics presented, such as the fact that storing all data in one place — preferably in a cloud-based solution — is essential for building a tailored customer experience. In addition, we learned that data-driven solutions can only be applied if the entire company adopts a data-driven culture at all levels, especially at the leadership level.
Then the case of Jarola and its brand Wildkamp made it clear how data-driven growth is possible, while the case of Soennecken highlighted how important it is for B2B companies to establish a culture across the company that supports data-driven approaches if these companies want to succeed in the future.
Afterward, we heard Nils and Chi talk about the evolution of AI technologies and current case studies of how this technology — such as SPARQUE.AI — can be used to add value to your company.
Overall, this first session was amazing! And you can watch it again here.
