On Tuesday 22 September we walked around the World of Technology & Science trade show. Beforehand we had put together a list of 70 interesting exhibitors. By the end of the day we had a dozen qualified leads and about twenty written off. The lesson is in the why (and we learned that working through 70 leads in a single day is impossible).
Wear parts are the dividing line
The most common rejection was not "we don't want a customer portal", but "we have no wear parts". Safety switches last twenty years. Mass flow meters are fully custom. Tanks have no stock items. None of that fits in a catalogue.
A customer portal runs on repeat purchases, not on machines. For machine builders, the only question that counts: how many lines does an existing customer order from you after the installation?
"We already have a customer portal" is not a no
Of the companies that already had a B2B platform, only one was truly happy. The rest are on a generic platform that shows products but can't handle customer-specific price agreements from the ERP. They have already had the internal discussion and know what they are missing. This is where we can add value with our B2B Suite, which already covers many of these standard modules.
Enthusiasm is not a mandate
Several Dutch branches of foreign groups were genuinely interested, while the decision sits in Germany or Sweden. That is not a lead but an introduction. The rule of thumb: if the company sets its own price list, the portal decision sits with it too.
Punchout decides whether it gets used
With one lab supplier the conversation went to punchout on its own. Their customers buy through their own procurement system. If you can't step in from there, your portal won't be used. We can connect these procurement systems, such as ERPs or procurement packages, straight to our B2B Suite via punchout.
What we build
Where the catalogue, the problem and the mandate are there, the conversation is not about usefulness but about execution. We build B2B customer portals on Magento with Hyvä: price agreements and stock live from Exact, AFAS or Dynamics, order history and repeat orders, company accounts with approval steps, and punchout via OCI or cXML. Secure, sovereign and fast, because a portal gets used on a phone in a warehouse.
Are you on a platform that can't handle your price agreements? We do that migration work more often than new builds. Give us a call.
