Our Top-5 takeaways from Magento’s 2018 B2B Experience here in Chicago:

1. Millenials Driving Near Future B2B
2. B2B Features and Enhancements
3. Creating Great B2B Sites
4. Adobe Acquisition and Magento
5. Experience Driven Design

Millenials Driving Near Future B2B

An interesting and important fact provided by Forrester to take into consideration when planning your next B2B build: “Millennials will be 44% of B2B workforce by 2025” (Forrester). This matters because of the paradigm shift this new workforce presents. So, how exactly are Millennials different?

• They typically research a lot more than other customer groups via online vehicles:
  • Vendor websites
  • Product Demos
  • Peer Reviews
• They are more willing to switch vendors
• They seem to be more difficult to satisfy (NPS)
• Millennials do not ignore Social Media

B2B Features and Enhancements

While the majority of the day was spent talking more holistically around B2B, there was one session dedicated to a few B2B features worth your consideration.

• Re-order capabilities (easy and low-friction)
• Fast order pages (for complex or configurable products), an example: LabSource B2B Website
• Quotes (to also include requested delivery date)
• Post Purchase activities
  • Quick and accurate delivery tracking
  • Customer Support
  • Product Support
• User Generated Content (UGC)

Remember: B2B customers buy experiences, not just products.

Creating Great B2B Sites

The B2B landscape is changing–minimally, customers are now expecting a B2C-type of experience, but fully expect that experience to better enable them during their shopping experiences. Asking the question of how customers want to interact with the site is fundamental–to base decisions on data. One interesting tidbit: “Today’s business buyers are increasingly self-directed: 60% prefer not to interact with a sales rep as the primary source of information; 68% prefer to research on their own, online…” (Forrester)

A few more obvious nuggets worth repeating:

• Site is never complete, always need improvements
• Data is King!
• Engage the teams, change management is important
• Be all inclusive with stakeholders
• Feed the backlog based on actionable insights (to achieve KPIs)

Adobe Acquisition and Magento

Magento is now fully ingrained into Adobe–a lot of the content was more around UX than B2B Functionality. On that note, Adobe was excited to share a number of their products. But, these four seemed to continue to percolate to the top:

• Experience Manager: Content Management Solution
• Target: Personalization Engine and Testing tool (a la A/B testing)
• Analytics: Formerly known as Omniture, Deep view into customer tracking
• Audience Manager: Data Management tool to assist in building profiles / segments

As Adobe has certainly invested heavily in SaaS, expect that hosting with Magento Cloud will allow one to more easily integrate with these tools versus hosting “on Prem”. In fact, it was alluded to that some products may not even be available to those who don’t host with Magento.

The Ultimate Takeaway

The most prevalent concept of “Experience Driven Commerce” is really central to the Adobe acquisition of Magento. This was embodied in four success factors:

1. Extreme Ownership
2. Customer Obsessions
3. Frictionless Experiences
4. Innovative Models, like Augmented Reality (AR)

This should be clear enough; but, everyone has their own journey based on any number of factors. Build B2B sites as if viewing through the lens of the customer.

Wrap-up

It’s always great to catch-up with everyone that we talk to daily, weekly or infrequently–that we normally don’t see face to face.