Digital transformation will be in full-blown overdrive. And guess who’s driving it? Younger corporate buyers who want it all: seamless omnichannel experiences, diverse offerings, and a smooth, pain-free process. But here’s the kicker: 96% of them are pissed off with something in their buying journey—whether it’s clunky tech or a lack of diversity in your approach. Digital marketing pro Justin Racine drops the truth on how B2B marketers can stop ignoring the obvious, listen to buyer demands, and actually get it right before they lose the sale—and their reputation.
Welcome to of B2B No Bull! Hosts Liz Brohan, Mary Olivieri, and Mark Brohan are joined by Justin Racine - Principal, Unified Commerce Strategy at Perficient—for a dynamic conversation about how to adapt marketing to attract and retain the Millinnium buyer.
Justin explains how his interest in customer experiences started at a young age working at that golf course where he learned a whole bunch about customer experience. It taught him what consumers in general look for and what they want and different personas and behaviors and actions.
Justin describes the roots of learning about customers: It’s rooted in consumer psychology and the behaviors that drive people to make decisions and, and why things like cognitive dissonance are what marketers use to create opportunities for folks to buy.
One of his examples from the medical product space: create moments of interaction that are empathetic but also useful to that consumer.
How has that evolved? You need to truly understand what your consumers and customers want at their core, and then find ways to leverage digital technologies and solutions to deliver on them.
How would you describe your focus? Build experiences that surprise and delight consumers based on their needs, but also drive revenue.
What is the main purpose? To convert in a way that aligns to who consumers are, and that really is what drives people to come back for repeat purchases.
Mark describes a sea change in B2B purchasing: 70% of all B2B buyers that are driven by millennials are not happy with the experience they get on a B2B website.
Justin clarifies purchasing data: You know, a B2B buyer likely buys under an account number. They probably purchase through POS, they may not order with credit cards, but have you captured other demographic information around that buyer? Do you know what age group that they're in? Do you know what previous products they've purchased? You know what channel they shop in? Do they shop online or through the app or through customer service?
Justin describes another starting point for data collection: A B2B brand should start to collect that data, and start to understand the average age of a person if they can, and start to pull all that information in. Because while a lot of B2B buyers want similar things, each business-to-business brand is unique and different. There are different pricing formulas, there's different ordering workflows, there's different order approvals, collaborative buying environments, all these things come into play. Digging pretty deep on demographic data is needed.
Can you speak a little bit to the buyer's journey? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is really understanding each B2B use case. :
Justin give another medical products example: a lot of organizations are going to buy vinyl gloves or buy hand sanitizer on a week in, week out basis that doesn't necessarily need a lot of high touch from a sales person or a lot of personalization. It's really just. Rinse and repeat orders.
Now in the future world, a personal shopping assistant agnostically, can order that for someone without them having to log into the website.
Justin explains how to align with the customer journey. The customer journey is when you pull in all the different touch points and the behavioristic elements that a customer is telling you about including what they're interested in.
Justin provides an example: Let's say a hospital needs to order 50 new hospital beds, um, they might mention to their salles rep that in three months we're going to need to put out a bid for 50 hospital beds, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justin describes how to leverage that information: That sales rep should then take that information and enter it into the CRM that they have. And in the world of connected unified commerce that CRM should now guide future experiences. When Joe authenticates on that B2B portal to start showing him banners on hospital beds.
And emails should have similar product content along with capturing all of his behaviors that he has on that site, on that portal. This should be going back to the sales rep so he can see what products he's looking at, what brand he might have an affinity towards, and then that sales rep can help guide them on the journey that, that that person has in an omnichannel way.
What are B2B marketers doing wrong right now? I think a lot of B2B organizations don't dig in super deep on consumer behavior. They're focused on other elements. Also I think a lot of B2B organizations have elements or experience design that are legacy and they're not updated. Justin speaks to the need to update sites and systems.
Justin mentions technology to consider: Using things like live chat agents or personal shopping agents and the world of personalization. This will facilitate a lot of upsell and cross sells.
What else should marketers focus on? Affinity products that make the most sense. I'd say those are the biggest areas I see people not spending as much time on. But a lot of the clients I've worked with recently are really focusing on the direct-to-consumer path.
Justin explains the pros and cons. The pros are that you have new revenue streams coming in direct with consumers, and in theory you can cut out distribution which in theory could be much higher profitability for the organization. The cons are that the core group distributors who are your customers too and that you've built your business on will feel threatened and they'll say, well, what do you mean you're selling direct to my customer? That's my customer. That's not yours.
And how can you do that effectively? A couple of different ways. One. You can only offer certain products direct to consumer. Maybe it's new products you're launching, maybe you're testing them out and you want to see what they do in the market. So new product innovations could go direct to consumer before it goes to your broader audience.
Justin provide insights on how to tell the distributors: Here's how you can message to the current customers: Hey, you're still our customer. We're just testing products out in the space. These are new items that we're, we want to see how they do, and that's going to help us improve the product development lifecycle so that when we give it to you, Mr. And Mrs. Distributor, we know what the right price point is for MSRP or map pricing that you can recommend to your customer. Um, so that's one way of being transparent and breaking silos down. Another way is that you can go direct to consumer if your pricing strategy is in lockstep as well too.
If I sell something to a distributor for $10 a case, then maybe I sell it to the end user consumer at. $15 a case, right? So you can ensure that your pricing strategy, you're not undercutting your distribution partners or your retail partners, that if someone wants to buy it direct, you know they can, but it's going to be at a higher price.
Justin gives examples: What I will say though, is that if you follow the historical mindset of big retail brands of where they're at today, like Nike as an example. Nike used to sell through retail and now there's Nike stores on every corner, and now there's a Nike website that you can buy directly. You can still buy Nike in Finish Line or you know these other stores?
So. there's a point that comes where the manufacturer says, okay, our end user customers are telling us they want to have conversations directly with our brand. We got to give them that.
Is there still life for retailers or distributors in the middle? Yeah, probably because people are still going to go there especially if there are loyalty points or other incenttives. There's enough market share to spread around.
So it has to be done very delicately. I spend all my day talking to manufacturers and distributors on the B2B side. And the user experience is top of mind. and the millennial buyer is not a solo individual. It's a team. That team is 3.5 to seven members and they're cross-functional with the organization.
So, why are B2B sellers not giving these millennial buyers the experience they want? Because they don't realize the buying power or the buying persuasion that millennial buyers want. You know, price isn't king. It's experience.
Justin explains experience economics. Consumers will spend more on an experience than they will on a cup of coffee. We complain about egg price and coffee prices, but why don't we ever complain when we want to take our family to a trip to Europe or Disney World that costs thousands of dollars? In fact, we're happy to shell the money out.
Why is that? What's the psychology behind that? The psychology is that we as consumers, like experiences. So if you're a B2B organization. You want to create stickiness with customers and you don't want them to leave. Price is important. Sure. But if you create an experience that makes it easy for them to do the things that they want to do.
As an example, Justin uses: A personal shopping agent that agnostically is a AI agent that will place an order for you. You don't have to log in and do it, it just sends you a text and you reply with like, yes, looks good. That makes it easy. Those are the types of things B2B organizations need to be looking at to introduce.
Justin gives other insights into the B2B buyer: I also think that some of the things that the B2B buyer is looking for are ways to help them take information to their executive team or to their leadership, or even just their boss. And are there ways that they can take some of the things that you've just told us about and make it an important step that their organization has to take?
How do they sell that in? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we try to focus on at Proficient and, and just in general is showing the ROI of it, right? So like, if you want to leverage, like, Hey, we're gonna use an AI personal shopping agent to place orders, you know, that's gonna save me five hours or 10 hours a week, that I'm gonna be able to focus in on these other things that you, you know, Mr.
And Mrs. Boss told me as a priority. Oh, by the way, like placing an order through that AI agent is also going to help us purchase smartly, so we're not overstocking our stock shelves and we're buying products that you know are in stock. Like, hey, you typically order these vinyl gloves, but unfortunately they're on allocation this week.
If you place your order, you're not going to have them in time. However, I found another replacement product that is similar. It's slightly more expensive, but you'll have vinyl gloves this week. Would you like to purchase it? Yeah, absolutely I would. So showing the value of what additional tools can do is going to be huge.
Justin describes collaborative working environments: B2B portals shouldn't be just an order taking engine. It should be a place where different stakeholders within that B2B organization can come in and digest different pieces of content.
Jusin give examples of other portal capabilities: Maybe I’m one level of a B2B buyer and I want to share a new product that was released and a content sell sheet on that directly with my boss, I should be able to email it or send it directly right out of that B2B buying portal, and I should be notified when they read it. You know, all of these different interactions can be baked in so that you know that traditional B2B portal isn't used for just ordering. It's used for collaboration and conversation that that's the future. That's where B2B organizations can create stickiness and loyalty among the buyers that they have.
What about the trust factor though? If you look at the hierarchy of where buyers on the B2B side want, trust is number two or number three. Mm-hmm. Yet we're talking about the millennial buying team at a B2B organization that is not as trustful and they're quick to jump ship if they don't find anything they like.
How do you build as a B2B selling organizational the trust factor with that millennial buying team out there who has very set demands and you're not meeting them. Yeah. Uh, three simple letters.
CAB, customer advisory board. Uh, make your biggest detractors or biggest, you know, um, uh, customers that are struggling into advocates. Pull them into the organization. Talk through the product roadmap of what you're looking to develop and build in new enhancements within that buying portal and say, you know, Hey, Mr.
And Mrs. Customer, you know. What do you think about this? What problems do you have? We, as millennials love to create and be creative, right? We like new things, make 'em part of the process. Pick out some core key customers that you know are vitally important to your business and bring them into the fold of what you're looking to build.
Hey, what new features would you like? What features don't you like? How can we make this experience better? If you pull them in and make 'em part of the process, you'll build trust with them, but you'll also allow them to feel like they're actually building something, which they are, and they're providing input.
And once you've done that, you have a customer for life. In fact, you'll have way more suggestions than you have time to build or implement. But that's good. That's what you want. You want your customers engaged on more than just buying, but actually being involved in the digital commerce experience because.
Commerce is a living, breathing thing. It's an entity, it's an idea. It's a progressional, forward moving, um, living, breathing thing that's constantly evolving and it should have input from customers going forward and it should always be changing.
Justin makes a point of needing a top down and bottom up alignment of the account in doing internal account reviews. Each one of those personas cares about different things.
But the B2B organization should be appealing to what each of them cares about individualistically, but ties up to a higher, bigger goal so that when they, the customer get in a in a board meeting, all of the needs are met regardless of what side of the table. That they're on in a big way that I, I write a lot about.
That's on the consumer side that's starting to make its way to the B2B side is this idea of anthropomorphism, where we as consumers assign human-like characteristics to non-human entities. A good example is like our pets. We talk to our dogs, we talk to our cats. We ask if they want to go for a walk.
They're not human. They can't respond, but we assign human-like characteristics to them. My dog, Jack, he's happy today. He's sad today. Maybe he's a dog, but brands and B2B organizations have the opportunity to anthropomorphize with their customers.
You're starting to see more B2B organizations go out to Instagram, go out to TikTok, and create fun accounts in there. Why? Because they know that millennials are up and coming and they know that they're on there and they know that they're would engage with their content.
And if the content is humanistic content and it's anthropomorphism to the degree where like, Hey, this is a fun B2B organization, they're kind of cheeky. They make buying easy, but they always have like funny Instagram or TikTok, you know, content coming out. That appeals to that millennial buyer and they start to see this organization, not just as someone they buy from for their job, but they see it as with human-like characteristics.
You know, if you can make 'em laugh, don't be afraid of that. You know, be relatable, but be authentic to the brand. You know, we all know those rules.
That's the secret sauce that B2B organizations.
A huge thank-you to Justine Racine along with The Motion Agency and Embas Consulting for making this episode possible.
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