Selling to the eCommerce Industry? Here’s How to Close More Deals

If you’re selling to eCommerce companies, you need a different playbook.

Competition is intense. And not just from other companies like yours. eCommerce business owners work with tons of technology partners just to keep their business operating.

The result? High competition for a piece of the budget.

If you want to win leads, you’ll need to take a strategic approach and sell smarter.

Breaking into the eCommerce industry demands a unique set of sales tactics.

You need to know even more about your potential customers. Understanding their goals, budget, and the likelihood they’ll become a long-term client, isn’t enough. You’ll also want to cover the following four areas:

1. See eCommerce challenges and be the solution
2. Know your competition (it’s not what you think)
3. Zero in on your dream leads
4. Craft the perfect pitch with Sales Intelligence

We’ll cover each of these points in the post below. Now, let’s dive in:

See eCommerce challenges and be the solution

Did you buy online lately? You’re not alone. Coronavirus dramatically shifted consumer behavior.

eCommerce companies had to adapt quickly. Demand jumped as storefronts closed and customer bases radically changed.

Within the first 90 days of the pandemic, the eCommerce industry vaulted forward 10 years in consumer and business digital adoption, according to McKinsey.

eCommerce giants like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify saw sales skyrocket.

But new customers bring new pressures. The key challenges eCommerce businesses face now: meeting high expectations from their customer base. Shoppers are looking for convenience, fast results, and a better shopping experience.

eCommerce companies need to be agile, lean, and prepared for anything from an operational standpoint.

This means completely overhauling their business strategy, supply chain, and operating model. Change creates opportunities for sales teams like yours to land new customers.

We’ve already seen thousands of new technology partnerships formed to support optimization efforts in eCommerce.

While eCommerce companies are usually eager to boost their functionality with a strong tech stack, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to seal the deal.

Countless other businesses are also fighting for a slice of the eCommerce budget.

If anything, the competition is more intense than ever. You may be wondering how to sell to eCommerce most effectively.

To crack the eCommerce industry, you need to analyze each potential customer. Find out their priorities, challenges, and goals within this new reality.

Once you have this information, your job is to demonstrate the unique value you offer and why it’s cost-effective.

Know your competition (it’s not what you think)

Whether it’s an eCommerce platform or an eCommerce store, your potential customer requires a broad range of technology partners to keep their conversion rate high and business running.

The general tech stack includes:

• Payment systems — Once a customer fills their virtual shopping cart and is ready to checkout, online stores need payment systems. This is where shoppers complete transactions electronically. Companies usually work with multiple payment systems to appeal to different preferences. In addition to systems that process credit and debit cards, eCommerce stores often allow payments from electronic wallets, Paypal, installment payment providers, and even cryptocurrencies.
• Security — Because of all of the financial and personal data eCommerce sites process, they are prime targets for cyberattacks. That makes it crucial to have strong security solutions in place to prevent a breach. eCommerce companies work with security providers to protect shoppers’ credit card information, personal data, privacy, and ensure compliance with security standards.
• Supply chain management — One of the biggest lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is the need for a lean and adaptable supply chain. Online stores require a variety of systems to manage the entire supply chain. This includes freight and transportation management, warehouse management, inventory management, and fulfillment.
• Logistics — Today’s customers demand immediacy and convenience. To meet their rising standards, online stores are racing for partnerships with delivery carriers and dropshipping services that promise rapid — if not same-day — delivery.
• AdTech — eCommerce sites and marketplaces serve as prime real estate for advertisements. By partnering with ad networks, and eCommerce publishers can reap bigger ad revenues while advertisers boost key performance metrics.

Within each technology category, hundreds or even thousands of sales teams are competing for a share of an eCommerce businesses’ budget.

That means, your potential customers will approach every deal with a great deal of discernment, and will only choose providers that offer the best value, quality of service, and pricing.

This means that you, the seller, must be equally discerning.

With fierce competition for eCommerce customers, it’s crucial to use your time and resources to pursue the right leads.

Zero in on your dream leads

Breaking into the eCommerce industry requires more strategic lead qualification.

With an effective lead qualification process, you will narrow down your list of eCommerce prospects and avoid wasting time and resources reaching out to eCommerce businesses that have no intention of becoming customers.

So, what does a “strategic” approach to lead qualification entail?

Here are four pillars of strategic lead qualification to help you close more deals in the eCommerce industry.

1. Create your Ideal Customer Profile

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the perfect customer for your company based on what your product or service solves. It is represented by an imaginary company that meets all of the criteria your sales team has set for vetting leads.

Common criteria for defining your eCommerce ICP include:

• Company size: Is your perfect customer a large firm, a startup, or a small business?
• Revenue: How much money does your ideal potential customer bring in each month, quarter, or year?
• Type of company: In the eCommerce sphere, there are many types of online businesses that offer products and services to online shoppers. Is your ideal customer a brand, retailer, marketplace, or DTC company?
• Budget: What is the lowest price threshold that a potential customer could pay for your product or service?
• Vertical: Within the industry, is your ideal customer a fashion, jewelry, electronics, furniture, home decor company, or something else?
• Geography: Does your ideal customer serve shoppers globally, or do they operate within a specific region?

Once you answer these questions, you will have a clear picture of what your ideal potential customer looks like. Then, you can compare every lead to your ICP and determine if they are worth pursuing.

Developing a clearly defined ICP is essential for effective lead qualification. It’s especially valuable to sales teams that practice account-based marketing. In ABM, sales reps proactively contact individuals who they believe would be an ideal customer. Without an ICP, outbound marketing would be impossible.

2. Kickstart lead enrichment

Lead enrichment is the process of gathering more data about your leads to enhance lead qualification efforts.

With lead enrichment tools, you can fill in the gaps of information that commonly occur in your CRM to help determine whether or not to pursue a lead.

Demographic data, including a lead’s name, phone number, email address, and job title, are often not too difficult to piece together. But “firmographic” information, such as a company’s software usage, number of users/customers, and revenue might be harder to come by.

Lead enrichment tools fill in all of this data without demanding extra manual work on behalf of your sales reps. With this information in your arsenal, you’ll know which leads to pursue and how to communicate with them.

3. Score more leads

Lead scoring is the process of ranking the leads in your CRM according to specific criteria.

Once you’ve collected your leads and enriched them with additional data points, it’s time to use lead scoring solutions to automatically classify them.

With this insight, your sales and marketing teams can pinpoint the leads that are most likely to become customers and prioritize their outreach efforts.

4. Use a sales intelligence solution

Conventional lead enrichment and scoring solutions help sales teams improve efficiency. But they are limited. They can typically only access basic data points.

That’s why the most strategic sales organizations have also adopted a Sales Intelligence solution. With a Sales Intelligence solution such as Similarweb, your team will access more insightful information so you can more accurately evaluate and rank leads.

Craft the perfect pitch with Sales Intelligence

Sales Intelligence solutions unlock access to invaluable data that would be difficult and time-consuming to find on your own.

When evaluating which eCommerce companies to pursue, you need far more information than simply the size of the company, where it’s located, its vertical, and other basic demographics.

You need to hone in on the parameters that matter most. For example:

• Traffic volumes
• Where traffic originates (email marketing, social media)
• On-site engagement metrics (number of pages visited, average time on page, bounce rate)
• Average order value
• Number of sales per day, week, or month
• What other technology the company is currently using

Gaining insight into these data points makes lead qualification more accurate.

In a highly competitive industry, a Sales Intelligence solution gives you a leg up: It steers you directly to your ideal targets.

How DHL is driving sales with Similarweb

DHL Express, a premier international courier, parcel, and express delivery services provider, can attest to the value of Sales Intelligence.

The challenge

From a business perspective, DHL Express needed to grow its global customer base by finding new online businesses. However, the conventional approach to identifying, evaluating, and classifying leads is highly resource-intensive and was straining its sales division.

The solution

After implementing Similarweb’s Sales Intelligence Solution, DHL Express quickly and easily identified eCommerce websites that matched its Ideal Customer Persona.

In particular, DHL looked for eCommerce businesses receiving a certain percentage of website traffic from countries they didn’t deliver to yet.

Search engines and trending social media posts are boosting demand across borders. And many eCommerce stores are not set up to sell products to all the locations with demand.

DHL offered a solution. The DHL Express sales team reached out to eCommerce stores to help them expand into new markets if a country they received traffic from became large enough.

DHL Express was also able to motivate eCommerce prospects to close deals by showing them how competitor traffic could be increasing as a result of shipping internationally and expanding their target audience.

The results

Using Similarweb’s Sales Intelligence solution, DHL Express experienced a significant uplift in revenue, resulting in a 506% annual return on investment.

Similarweb’s Sales Intelligence Solution enabled DHL Express to pinpoint the companies that meet their specific criteria and gave DHL the information they needed to pitch leads with a high degree of personalization and accuracy.

Ready to close more eCommerce sales? Preparation is key

Doing your homework before approaching your eCommerce leads has a big impact.

To start, you need to understand industry-wide challenges. Whether it’s an eCommerce giant like Amazon or a small startup, the entire industry felt the impact of coronavirus.

Knowing what other companies are competing for a piece of your leads’ budget, and focusing on getting the right data during sales qualification is key.

Not only is this data crucial for finding your ideal client persona, but it will also give you insight into what specific value you can offer their business.

Once you have data, you can start compelling conversations with prospective leads and close more sales. Similarweb’s Sales Intelligence tools can give you the insights you need to get started. Get free access now!

Further reading:eCommerce Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide