Distributors are chasing similar e-commerce outcomes – to deliver a buying experience that makes it easier for customers to do business with them. To keep customers satisfied and increase profitable growth on this lower-cost sales channel, you simply must offer a sophisticated, personalized online experience.

This requires delivering real-time upsell and cross-sell recommendations, complementary item suggestions, and market-aligned prices. Equally important: ensuring the prices and products customers are shown online are consistent with the conversations they have with reps. Both goals are impossible when armed with manual tools and inconsistency across channels can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction.

Traditionally, prices are vetted and tweaked by sales reps before being presented to customers. In an eCommerce channel, prices are fully transparent, removing that necessary human touch. The implications of publishing prices online that are not rationally aligned to the many unique factors that drive price are huge: you run the risk of losing business when prices are too high and leaving money on the table when they are too low.

Enabling intelligent cross-sell, upsell, and complementary product recommendations is just as mission critical to increase order value and drive customer loyalty. Large distributors are operating at such a complex scale that category managers or BI tools can only provide recommendations for the top items, and once they do so those recommendations have already become stale.

In fact, an AI-driven analysis of more than 1 billion B2B distributor transactions revealed that a staggering amount of profit goes uncaptured on an annual basis. A portion of this opportunity can be captured with an AI-driven technology that quickly delivers omnichannel pricing and sales guidance that is consistent, relevant and delivers profitable growth.