There has never been a better time to be a consumer. When making a purchase, consumers can both widen their consideration set and be more specific in their targeted buys, thanks to agentic discovery capabilities and new digital self-service workflows. The result: better purchasing decisions.

The digital experiences we have in our personal lives bleed into expectations for our professional lives. The top B2B brands have taken note and are prioritizing investments in the global commerce space to decrease friction for doing business with channel partners and suppliers. They’re proactively building workflows and experiences for their suppliers and partners that mirror the buying habits and patterns of consumers.

By cross-referencing the B2B Superpower Index from dentsu and IT investments from high-performing global B2B brands, we identified several themes that companies should understand and embrace: 

Digital commerce and self-service capabilities are table stakes

Consumers are willing to pay a 7-16% pricing premium if the company provides a good customer experience. We should expect the same from B2B – and for many B2B customers, the ability to use flexible, convenient self-service and digital commerce options is a must-have for a good, seamless experience. A frictionless commerce capability alone doesn’t guarantee increased revenue, but it positions an organization to be successful. Investments in these areas have direct implications on CSAT and “stickiness” with customers over the duration of the life cycle.

Thankfully, enterprise commerce platforms have addressed nearly every barrier to entry for building commerce or self-service capabilities at scale. Shopify has been championing this concept with their Unified Commerce approach for B2C customers and especially B2B customers, meaning that customers should be able to easily transact with brands whether they’re doing it online, in-store, on the mobile app, or through social media. Brands can create a consistent experience that’s tailored to the environment where the customer is engaging with the brand.

In an environment where macro-economic trends and high competition create immense pressure on brands, every buyer interaction counts. B2B brands that unlock net-new revenue from frictionless, self-service commerce capabilities can win not just in the near term, but in the long term as well. These investments will only get more valuable as capabilities like agentic AI become more commonplace. B2B companies who create a foundation now will be positioned to take advantage of evolving technology.

Social commerce is here and growing fast

What was once considered a bleeding-edge capability is quickly becoming a viable method to engage and conduct business, even for B2B brands. DHL reported this year that 70% of global consumers expect to shop primarily through social media by 2030. It’s never been easier for a shopper or consumer to engage with their favorite brand or influencer on social media. 

When it comes to social commerce, B2B brands must align their content and commerce strategy to how their customers prefer to spend their time online. In certain regions or generational audiences, social commerce is an opportunity to reach customers in new, relevant ways. Enterprise organizations can use AI marketing solutions like Merkle’s GenCX to better understand customer interactions, behaviors, and sentiment through data assets and large knowledge models. At the end of the day, social commerce – just like every other aspect of B2B marketing – is all about relationship building. Reaching customers in their preferred channels contributes to an easy relationship that demonstrates audience understanding.

Agentic commerce and conversational commerce are fully in play 

DHL also reported that 7 in 10 shoppers want AI-driven shopping tools to guide their purchasing decisions. Currently, shoppers mainly use AI to distill large swaths of information to a specific group of parameters so they can quickly find items that fit their most important requirements (i.e., pricing, shipping, return policy, variations, etc). 

Agentic commerce takes shopping ease to the next level, with independent AI agents acting on behalf of their users or organization to facilitate a buying experience and take action. Amazon recently announced that it is testing this capability, which would allow AI agents to purchase items on behalf of Prime users on other websites while staying within the Amazon app. Most B2B brands have various repetitive activities that can be handled by agentic AI. This would benefit both brand and supplier and opens up a new potential capability of autonomous commerce at scale.