Forrester forecasts that 1 million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service eCommerce by the year 2020. B2B buyers now favor do-it-yourself online options for researching and buying products and services, and they are demanding that B2B sellers fully enable those digital paths to purchase.

Yet too many of today’s B2B companies still insist that B2B buyers interact with sales reps in order to complete a purchase. For a minority of customers who are buying complex and expensive products and services, talking to a sales rep can be a value-added experience.  But for the majority of B2B buyers who are self-educating online about products and services, or who already know what they want, the diversion is inconvenient and unwelcome.

B2B companies that want to stay ahead of the curve must reshape their channel sales strategies and fundamentally rethink the role of their salespeople by:

  • Expanding the role of self-service eCommerce.  The evidence is clear.  Nearly 75% of B2B buyers now say that buying from a website is more convenient than buying from a sales representative.  Further, 93% say that they prefer buying online rather than from a salesperson when they’ve decided what to buy.  B2B companies that wait too long to create self-serve eCommerce websites risk losing share to pure plays and omnichannel competitors.
  • Pairing specific buyer archetypes with certain sales archetypes. Forrester believes that today’s B2B buyers fall into four distinct quadrants based on a combination of the complexity of the product or service they are seeking and the complexity of the buying environment within which they operate.  B2B companies must pair the appropriate B2B seller “archetype” with each quadrant’s B2B buyer type. For certain common scenarios now, self-service eCommerce websites can serve B2B buyers more effectively than salespeople can.
  • Delivering a digitally enabled B2B selling model.   Digital channels are here to stay, and both B2B buyers and company-internal sales professionals are using them to complete transactions.  B2B eBusiness and channel strategy professionals and their ecosystem partners must create websites that network B2B buyers researching online with call centers, inside sales agents, field sales professionals, and their own internal websites.