When you’re overdue for your B2B eCommerce platform, you’ll know it. Potential customers will express surprise at your lack of online ordering and account management options, and even established, long-term customers will gradually cut down on their order frequency… until, one day, they stop ordering entirely.

We are pleased to introduce the first episode of our new podcast: CIMcast - The B2B Software Podcast. This episode covers what we call "the B2B dilemma", which addresses the fractured state of software solutions available to SMB companies that work in the B2B space.

CIMcloud CEO, Brian Seidel, joined the Enterprise Software Podcast as their guest for this week's episode titled "Citizenship and CIMcloud". The Enterprise Software Podcast is hosted by our good friends Darcy Boerio (DAB Partners), Bob McAdam (Dynamic Communities) and Todd McDaniel (Dynavistics), giving their audience an opportunity to hear valuable insights and information on various Enterprise Software topics.

We've all been in a situation where you are placing an order and think to yourself, "I'm not sure they're going to get my order right". Regardless of industry, customers now have more leverage than ever due to the amount of competition in the market and therefore won't settle for subpar experiences. When you mess up a customer order, or even leave them thinking you did, their perception of your organization will be changed and you may have lost a customer for life. 

Businesses, and particularly ones that sell B2B, need to do everything in their power to proactively remove any doubt customers may have about their ability to deliver on expectations. An easy way to accomplish this is to offer self-service alternatives (like a Customer Portal) that empower customers to order whenever they want and places responsibility for the actual input of the order in their hands, not your employees. Giving customers the ability to order online can be a massive differentiator for your organization and goes a long way towards protecting your business from the pitfalls of unavoidable human errors. 

Maintaining long-term relationships with customers is a challenge for B2B companies that has and always will exist, regardless of who your customers are or what you sell to them. 

Technological advances have allowed the emergence of solutions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), designed to provide employees with a tool to more efficiently keep and grow these relationships. While traditional CRM software has removed the need to track customer information on handwritten notes, it still falls short of the goal to "maintain and perfect customer relationships" for one key reason: It lacks integration with customer-specific data sources, like your ERP accounting system and other business applications. 

Empowering customers and employees with tools can be an invaluable asset for your business, enabling more effective and efficient customer interactions. An E-Commerce presence and CRM solutions are just two examples of the vast amount of “tools” designed to improve the way customers and companies interact, but what is really needed for these tools to be valuable: DATA.

Whether it’s the data used to power the application, or the resulting information from usage, these tools are only as valuable as the information displayed to and resulting from users. So whether it’s due to a poor integration or re-keying errors, if the applications used by your employees and customers display inaccurate data, what are they really accomplishing?

Every company uses CRM, right? Salesforce is everywhere these days, and the promise of CRM is great: providing data and tools for increased sales rep visibility to drive sales and customer relationships.

But does CRM deliver on that promise?

"You should put your products on the web."

"Why can’t I buy from you online?"

"Magento has been great for us - you should try it!"

If you own a business and don’t let your customers order online, you’ve probably heard one or more of these before, from your employees, your customers, your suppliers, or a fellow business owner.

As you begin reading this, stop and think about all the different business applications you use every single day just to do your job (if you opened this via email, that's one of them).

While email is a somewhat basic application, more complex solutions like marketing automation, CRM and B2C retail shopping carts are being utilized every day, and generating a massive amount of data each time they are used (all of which is valuable). But what happens to all this data?

If you aren't using a cloud data hub to move data back and forth between applications, then there's a good chance that all the information generated is long gone.