Omnichannel, AI and the future of B2B sales

9th January 2025 |   Nick de Cent

How are B2B buyer expectations changing and where is B2B sales headed?

In the previous edition of the Journal, we ran a story on McKinsey’s ninth global B2B Pulse report (released 12 September), which questioned 4,000 B2B decision-makers across eight major industries. This identified how B2B suppliers are responding to “consumer-like” purchasing demands from buyers. Here we talk to the report’s authors – Jennifer Stanley, a partner in the consultancy’s London office, and Candace Lun Plotkin, a partner in Boston – about changing buyer behaviours, the importance of omnichannel, the future with AI, and implications for key account management.

iJoST: What were the key takeaways for sales organisations from the survey?

Jennifer Stanley: What I was most intrigued to see and what I’m also hearing from client executives is this notion of increased willingness to switch suppliers as a result of failure to offer an exceptional omnichannel experience. There has been a long-held belief in many industries – particularly in industrials and professional services where you often have contracts that may be five, seven or even ten years long – that switching costs are high and therefore stickiness of customers is high. So you can get away with having subpar servicing experiences and subpar omnichannel ecosystems. What we’re seeing now in the data is that customers are saying “No, I will start to switch my behaviour to get a better omnichannel buying and interaction experience, so don’t think that switching costs are so high that I won’t do that.” Over 50% of decision-makers told us they either had switched or were looking to switch suppliers because of bad experiences from an omnichannel perspective.

Candace Lun Plotkin: When I look at the trends around willingness to complete a single transaction, the sums are quite large. The data indicates you’ve got 20% of people saying, “I’ll do a single transaction (remote or self-serve) of between one and ten million dollars.” To me that really busts open the myth that e-commerce or remote interactions are for the long tail, for the small transactional things, for small customers or small purchases.

The implication for companies is that it really ups the ante on a) the quality of information and customisation and whatever the customers might need if it’s very complex, and b) also the orchestration across all of the channels. This ties back to Jennifer’s point: how do I go from one channel to the next? How do I make sure that the company knows what I was looking at and can serve up the right content? If I need a complex way of looking at specifications, how can they serve that up so that I can compare and contrast and make a decision?

Then additionally, there is also the question of what is the safety net if the buyer ever needs to talk to somebody: how can they do that for something important?

iJoST: In relation to big-ticket items, does this willingness to buy via e-commerce extend to first-time purchases or is it likely just for a repeat purchases? Typically, how would you organize delivery schedules and all the other contractual elements?

Candace Lun Plotkin: A surprising new development is that we see this both for repeat purchases and new. When we began doing this survey – when we started to see increased willingness to buy at lower price points – initially, it was repeat purchases and small transactional items. We’re now seeing an evolution towards willingness to buy large-ticket items and something that’s quite complex if the buyer can get the required high-quality information when they need it.

Jennifer Stanley: I think the other thing is there are now so many more digital applications to enable remote contracting and sharing of that high-quality information. The trustworthiness to engage in guided digital self-serve and even remote but still human-enabled transactions has increased substantially in the last couple of years.

iJoST: You’re saying that you could actually rely on e-commerce when buying a wind turbine that needs to connect to the National Grid. Is that possible?

Jennifer Stanley: Yes, the nuance here is the data is really focused on remote and self-service interactions. So, bear in mind what I said about the ability to call somebody or to interact with them remotely, whether by video or another channel. You do not necessarily need to have a salesperson visit you in person.

iJoST: What are the key aspects around trust in relation to buying big-ticket items remotely?

Candace Lun Plotkin: There are many elements to trust. I think you have to take a step back and look at the overall brand of the company you’re interacting with. That is important. When you’re talking about e-commerce specifically, there are important questions around how accurate is the information that I’m getting? How quickly am I getting it?

To me that really busts open the myth that ecommerce or remote interactions are for the long tail, for the small transactional things, for small customers or small purchases.

Then there is also an element around personalization. How well does this company know me? When I log in, and I’m looking at content that’s relevant to me and I’m asking questions, do they know my previous transactions and are they aware of any previous questions I’ve had. Regardless of how I interacted in the past, that’s an important part because, if you know me and you demonstrate that you know me in the same way that my face-to-face salesperson does, and you know what my face-to-face salesperson was doing with me, then I have much greater trust that this is a relationship.

However, if people are buying something more on the consumer end, they may look for trust in different ways.

Jennifer Stanley: I think Candace is on to something here with this point on the consumer piece, because there is a similarity between what we experience as consumers and what the decision-makers are telling us. There is this notion of how well a company uses the information I have already given them and then plays it back to me. As a consumer, when you are asked to provide your information multiple times, it’s super frustrating. That’s trust eroding. However, when the opposite occurs and they build on the information you’ve already provided to offer you a new stream of conversation, that’s trust building because it tells the consumer, “You can trust me with your information; I know what to do with it.” It works the same in the B2B space.

Across the entire omnichannel ecosystem you have a lot of information and data, and if you think about it, an individual customer at the typical B2B player is not usually one person. It’s a bunch of decision-makers and influencers. So, if a supplier has the ability to play back information on a number of different influencers and decision-makers, a bunch of past purchases potentially, and a lot of different interactions in a very orchestrated way, that does a lot to build trust. It says, “I’m taking that information and doing something responsible with it, and I’m playing it back to you in a way that is useful to you and doesn’t waste your time. That is actually quite similar to what consumers expect, but amplified because you’ve just got so many more touch points.

Candace Lun Plotkin: We used to call this concept “know me before you see me” but the complexity that Jennifer described is what underlies that knowing before you say anything.

iJoST: Conversely, with the advent of AI, you can imagine elements of trust being lost if all of this information that they know about you is divulged inappropriately or it leaks somehow.

Candace Lun Plotkin: It’s two sides of the same coin. On one side, we have traditional AI (as distinct from generative AI), which has been in use for quite some time in selling organizations to provide sellers with ideas about what their customers may want. Think “next product to buy” or “next service to sell” algorithms – those are AI-backed analytics that get used to suggest to customers something that should be relevant and personalized to them. That can actually be trust building as well.

The other side of the coin relates to the fear that we were hearing in our decision-makers’ responses to questions around generative AI. What happens when you’re using information and it turns out to be bad information or the AI is hallucinating and it’s providing insights that aren’t that relevant, and then you act on them? You’re not getting the human kind of intelligence or the common sense injected into the process. I think that’s the nervousness here. However, you could also imagine it working out quite well if it’s used responsibly and appropriately.

iJoST: I was thinking about instances where you should perhaps have Chinese walls and safeguards within an organization to prevent information leaking across.

Candace Lun Plotkin: Totally.

iJoST: Where do you see AI heading in five years’ time? How do you see sales changing?

Candace Lun Plotkin: I think you will continue to see the evolution of human and digital interaction – whether it’s within a group of people doing sales within a company or whether it is from the customer end and how they’re interacting with suppliers. I think you’re going to continue to see, for face-to-face salespeople, a higher premium on capabilities that are more C-Suite relationship-focused. I think it’s going to be harder and harder and harder to be a great key account manager, for example. The role actually becomes more and more exciting because you have to have that overlay of the human relationship on top of any digital or generative AI tools that you’re using.

It’s going to be harder and harder and harder to be a great key account manager.

I also think we’re going to continue to see an evolution in the capabilities for folks who are doing things like digital selling and inside sales. I think those capabilities will change because they will continue on the march of being less transactional, more relationship-oriented, and the requirements for bringing this knowledge of customers to the table is going to increase.

The good news is salespeople will have many more inputs from AI and generative AI, but the ability to sort through that and synthesise that is going to be a really big thing. Overall, face-to-face salespeople are first and foremost orchestrators across the entire omnichannel ecosystem, and then I think the powers of synthesis of information at every level are going to increase.

Jennifer Stanley: I actually think, if I’m an average salesperson, I should be so excited about the ability to become a better salesperson, particularly because of generative AI. If I think about what all the really great salespeople do, it tends to be some of the things that the average and maybe not-so-average salespeople complain about – and generative AI can help with that. What do I mean? The really great salespeople tend to be excellent at account planning and the average and not-so-average complain about it because it takes time to do the research, to do the structuring, to do the organizing. Generative AI can help with that. The really great salespeople take the time to do meeting notes after they’ve seen customers and input that into the CRM. Even regular AI tools can help with that.

I think there’s a lot that AI can assist with if people are willing to use it, and use it well, and use it appropriately to take some of the admin load away from the seller for things that are not the most fun part of the job, but actually they still are part of the job. When you do these things well and do them consistently, they tend to make the difference between just being an average salesperson and being a great salesperson. I actually think that, if I were a salesperson wanting to stay in sales, I would get excited about that.

Candace Lun Plotkin: I do think that there’s going to be a higher premium on being able to interact with technology and to pull out the nuggets that you’re going to want to bring to customers to win them over and to kind of sustain the relationship.

iJoST: We potentially see a rise in key account management as sales continues to evolve. Is that fair or do you see a different future?

Jennifer Stanley: I would say that it’s a two-way street for key or strategic accounts. By that I mean the customer has to be willing to play ball too for it to make economic sense for a supplier to put the kind of resourcing and talent behind a key account programme and strategy. The customer conversely has to sign up to be a strategic customer or key customer. That means you’re maybe their number one or number two supplier, you’re providing base load volume or services or maybe you’re in a joint venture, doing innovation together – there’s something about it that makes it worthwhile for you to be called a key account and be treated as a key account. So, provided there’s a sufficient population for a company of customers who fit that mould, then I think the thesis would hold true.

If I’m an average salesperson, I should be so excited about the ability to become a better salesperson, particularly because of generative AI.

However, in a world where the number of those types of customers is quite limited, even though the value is quite high, I could imagine it being almost an 80:20 – where 80 moves to the more transactional end and 20 stays kind of concentrated (and I’m talking absolute numbers of customers) in the key and strategic accounts, but the value is flipped.

iJoST: As a key account manager, I’m guessing AI can assist in multiple ways, helping with all the behind-the-scenes work, liaising between different departments, the production side of things. Is that fair?

Candace Lun Plotkin: I think you can equally have access to that information for the smaller accounts too. You might even have the ability to treat those 80% a little bit more “white glove” in terms of knowing and understanding their intentions, their histories and perhaps thinking about what they may want, looking ahead. I also think that suppliers are going to have to think really hard about the special value propositions they’re going to develop and offer for the true key accounts.