In the B2B market, sales through traditional retail channels experienced slow growth over the last five years, with often low operational margin. Established players are at risk of massive disruption due to changing customer expectations and rising competition from digital-first disruptors. The exponential growth of online sales through direct-to-consumer, social media channels and marketplaces has challenged multinational corporations when trying to adapt and create consistent customer experiences across all sales channels and in all markets.
Established players should build to scale where it matters and compete through increased digital investment. This means digitizing go-to-market strategies and creating commercial excellence with a strong data ecosystem. However, large global corporations tend to make technology decisions in silos, with different teams in different countries, divisions, brands or regions implementing their own software solutions. This results in duplicative applications performing the same tasks across the organization – something that could be streamlined on a global level to improve efficiency and streamline customer experience across markets.