2. Are your Employees
working for other companies part-time … ?!
… Or in other
words, exactly who is working for who during the
buying and selling process? Organisations need sales,
finance and administration functions as well as
development, manufacturing and marketing. Viewed
from outside the relationship, the sell/buy process
can be considered an overhead (cost) to both parties,
which diverts resources (money, time) from the core
purpose of the business of adding value. Terms such
as 'cost of sale', 'cost of acquisition', etc. reflect
how businesses are focused on measuring and minimising
these overheads.
A way of thinking about this
in a B2B context is;
During
a buying process, employees are partly working
for the supplier.
During a selling process, employees are partly
working for the customer.
Please note this does NOT
mean people working wholly or partly on these business
processes are not valuable – in fact quite
the opposite!
All three aspects of a business - buy, add value,
sell - are critical to success. Of course, without
ways of obtaining revenue and resources the business
will not function.
The point is
that a business must monitor very closely and
continuously its customer and supplier relationships.
Monitoring must be an integral part of the normal
daily ‘workflow’ of your employees
involved in B2B, not an occasional ‘add-on’
or emergency response.
B2B systems need
to help people work easier and more flexibly …
Although a large part of business-to-business
is about automating processes between partners,
it is important to remember that each aspect of
the business involves people, who are the ultimate
value-adding component.
A well-implemented
B2B strategy allows employees to focus on human
satisfaction aspects of their customers, suppliers
and co-workers. The idea is to let reliable, secure
automated systems handle the technical details as
much as possible.
