Accelerating sales growth through B2B Digital Commerce

And the headline for our research that we've seen for this B2B commerce was the uh top maturity companies. They were actually growing at 110% of what the lagards were. — I mean having been in and around the space for a long time both on the B2B and the B TOC side, the B the B2B side has been probably the most misunderstood. It's always been a bit more lagardy, so to speak, and just for a myriad of reasons that I'm sure we'll get into and unpack, but far more complicated use cases. Uh, far less publicly digestible. So, I think like the average person, whether they're in the space or not, always views the world through the lens of them themselves as a consumer. — What is it that the suppliers are really struggling with right now? What did you find? The number one thing was people fighting for budgets, but the number two challenge and very close behind is customers dying for a digital experience. — Yeah, absolutely. — The companies that were behind, they actually lost 13% of sales because of bad experiences. — Wow. — So, it's all about reducing all the friction points. — A lot of people or history is like in B2B we want B2C kind of experiences, right? Which I think is good. you need to remove the friction points, but people forget that the people who are coming on B2B sites. They are trying to get something done quickly, right? I'm here to get my order in quickly. I mean, it's a real balancing act. Travis, what are you seeing when you talk to clients? — It's kind of a tale of two cities of just kind of maybe think of it as a spectrum as it relates to maturity. Certainly, the more mature organizations, you've got kind of two probably cohorts there. those that embrace it know they need to be there and these are sort of the leading um organizations out there that are actually driving innovation at a much faster pace. They're baking this into budget. There's also large organizations that know they need to get there but can't get there for a myriad of reasons. They don't know how to get out of their own way. The challenge is kind of authority and ownership. So you're having to navigate this very kind of choppy often times matrixed organization. AI is going to allow people to catch up very quickly if applied in the right ways. And I think it's a super exciting time. — I think one of the things that I found very fascinating is like how the suppliers rate themselves when it comes to the maturity the digital maturity they have versus what for the same suppliers what the buyers treat them. Right? — So when the suppliers we asked them what do you think about your sales processes? 72% said we're good. But when we talk to the buyers, they're like, "Not so much, only about 47%. " So that perception gap is also leading to, you know, why some of those companies aren't moving ahead because they just don't know — what's causing this perception gap. Again, going back to the same question, are the suppliers not really aware or they don't even understand like what does maturity really mean when it comes to B2B? There's a disconnect there is whereas in B TOC you're seeing immediate signal like if there's friction in that process there's been tools and processes and frameworks in place for years and years and agencies and entities specifically set up to maximize that obviously and mitigate that risk and remove the friction from the process you're going to see that impact immediately in B2B you tend to see it later and the impact often tends to be wider in the organization so it's not as simple fix even something as simple as data enrichment and standardization just with you know AI a lot of what's leading that obviously is on the data side with scale and with frictionless experiences if the data isn't clean you're going to have a giant delta there in the first place — I think the key thing there was to break it down into smaller chunks do something quick show the value and then add more on top of it the research identified like three specific areas where the high maturity organizations are pulling away can you walk us through You know, the first thing is they've adopted much more channels and what we saw across the board was initially there was about 3. 4 channels used and they've moved to 4. 7 which is a pretty big jump in 2 years. The other thing that we heard from as part of the channel optimization is that 92% of suppliers that said that use EDI, they're going to migrate some parts off. Now EDI is not going away. Everybody knows that. — Great. But there's a huge push to start to migrate pieces of that. Then the last thing which is kind of you know kind of more important and what we'll see the growth only 24% of the companies have adopted aentic AI in their sales process. Now I I'm sure this is going to be moving quickly, but historically B2B has been behind and but what we've seen is the ones that are uh in the more mature are five times more likely to have used agentic and commerce.

commerce. — Those are important opportunities and it shows how the digitally mature organizations like think and behave differently. And when you talk to clients, where do you see AI and agentic AI really adding value versus where it is a hype? — We're going to start exploring these other channels. And with that comes other nuances and opportunities. And to the second point, right, you're also seeing this embracement of agentic and technology um in ways where again I think the data standardization is key. Your longtail customers may be searching for you publicly on LLM. that data needs to be optimized, enriched, and surfaced to those LLMs or you're invisible. By and far, Agentic is more of an efficiency case, which plays right into B2B. How do you make things easier for your customers? How do you remove friction? How do you automate processes to allow not for people to go away, but make sales reps more uh effective? Have them focused on more value added sort of skill sets and engagements. There is so much manual process that goes on behind the scenes that can be completely eliminated by AI. Not to get rid of roles, go redeploy those roles into more strategic capacities that drive either greater efficiencies or more importantly growth. — If a B2B leader is right now looking at us, hearing us, what would be one thing you would tell them to do in 2026 so that they don't get left behind? I think the number one thing is close the perception gap and part of that is to get outside view in to look at where your friction points are. — Embrace the data readiness and optimization. I think data is the new storefront independent of platform. If your data is not enriched and optimized to the schema and the surface by which you want to show up on or drive the value, the rest of this stuff is not going to matter nearly as much. And that's one of the easier, faster things organizations can do.