Recent research by McKinsey & Company has confirmed that Omnichannel is the leading approach to B2B sales and its effectiveness has significantly jumped to 83%. The research has also confirmed that hybrid sellers are expected to be the most common role across the sales team by the end of the year 2024.

Omnichannel is a multichannel approach to sales that focus on providing seamless customer experience whether the client is shopping online from a mobile device, a laptop or in a brick-and-mortar store. Omnichannel gives your B2B customers a unified experience no matter what digital device or platform they are using. It follows that as B2B buyers have become accustomed to Omnichannel e-commerce in B2C, they also want and expect a seamless and consistent B2B experience, the demand is there.

McKinsey reports that the average B2B customer uses six different channels throughout a decision-making journey, and suppliers must learn to embrace that. It’s something that B2B sales operations will need to get used to: over time, B2B customers will expect an Omnichannel experience that gives them the same flexibility and CX as B2C gives them. Using Omnichannel, B2B companies have the range of interaction apps and tools to enable ongoing conversations with customers, just as B2C suppliers do.

“ 73% of all customers use multiple channels during their purchase journey. Only when a customer has gathered ample information from a variety of sources to support their purchase decisions will they ever buy.”

— Harvard Business Review

The pandemic significantly aroused the belief of marketers in the effectiveness of the Omnichannel sales model. The trust of people in the omnichannel sales model has surged from 54% at the start of the pandemic to 83% in February 2021. Certain regions across the world have seen a greater surge in the acceptance of an omnichannel strategy as a marketing model than others.

The adoption of omnichannel accelerated at the onset of the pandemic and has become a predominant path for B2B sales. Even as in-person engagement reemerged as an option, buyers made clear they prefer a cross-channel mix, choosing in-person, remote, and digital self-serve interactions in equal measure.

The equilibrium is no accident. As B2B buyers flexed to remote and digital ways of engaging, they found much to like. The use and preference for e-commerce—self-serve, for example—has grown since August 2020. Buyers also moved easily between in-person and remote sales as quarantine restrictions shifted, with the choice of channel coming down to practicality and timing more than efficacy.

There are regional nuances around the heightened effectiveness for net new customers and upselling strategies. When it came to the ability to support upselling to existing customers, 72 percent of sales representatives in South Korea, 69 percent in Brazil, and 67 percent in China found the model to be more effective than before, compared to their counterparts in Japan (46 percent), Germany (46 percent), and France (39 percent).

The drive to Omnichannel commerce triggered a restructuring in the sales team. Many moved with admirable speed, adapting processes on the fly in order to respond and adapt alongside their customer base With Omnichannel now established as the new buying norm, 85 percent of B2B organizations expect the hybrid rep to be the most common sales role in their organization in the next three years (2024).

With Omnichannel established as the new buying norm, Hybrid sales reps will soon become the most common sales role.

Hybrid sellers are typically defined as reps that were previously ‘in-person by default’ but now sell with a fairly even mix of remote—mostly via video—and in-person, supplemented by phone or email as needed, of the nearly 3,500 respondents to McKinsey’s February 2021 B2B Pulse survey, 28 percent said their organizations had hybrid reps in place, and 77 percent of those introduced this specifically to address the surge in video/virtual selling due to COVID-19, the expectation is that this will be the number-one sales role very soon.

McKinsey found that just under one third of buyers prefer in-person meetings with sales reps—even now that the country is opening up again. That figure is consistent across all stages of the buying process: identifying and researching new suppliers, considering and evaluating new suppliers, ordering and reordering.

Slightly more buyers favor what McKinsey calls “remote human interactions,” including video and phone calls, emails and texts. And digital self-serve was nearly as popular. In fact, when it came to reordering, it was the most popular option, with 36 percent of buyers preferring it, compared with 34 percent favoring remote human interactions and only 30 percent opting for in-person meetings.

Transitioning a B2B sales organization from the traditional in-person model to a hybrid model has its challenges, of course. Two-thirds of the B2B respondents said their sales teams have experienced channel conflicts—for instance, sales reps losing commissions because customers are purchasing via the website. Organizations should consider a way to figure out a role for sales reps to play in advocating e-commerce and incentivize them for that role.

One example could be to pay reps a percentage commission on e-commerce sales for customers in their territory, compared to a slightly higher commission they may earn for traditional sales. Also, organizations should work closely with reps to ensure they play a role in follow-up services—delivery, onboarding, service check-ins—as it is incredibly rare that 100 percent of B2B customer needs can be handled via digital alone.

Finally, organizations should provide guidance to reps on where they can and should add value—for example, advising where reps should be involved in certain types of customer interactions and which types should go to self-serve.

Is your business ready to be introduced to Omnichannel commerce? Ready or not, after reading this blog post you can feel confident to use the O-word…