It’s no secret that the modern business world requires companies to be able to easily trade with their partners. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. That’s because business customers and trading partners are just as busy as everyone, and they often do not have enough time, money, or patience to wait to get onboarded and integrated into a system.
One of the first things a company can do to improve its ease of doing business is to ensure an easy, efficient, and fast trading partner onboarding process. Because that enables business workers to connect with customers or partners sooner and deliver the value they’ve been promised. Such happy customers are more likely to invest in other products or services offered by the company, streamlining upselling and revenue growth.
In other words, if any B2B trading partner or customer describes your trading partner onboarding process as slow or complicated, odds are your chances to easily do business and accelerate revenue growth are minimal. Let us find out how.
B2B Trading Partner Onboarding in a Nutshell
A typical B2B trading partner onboarding process is a series of steps that a company takes to establish connections with business partners, such as customers, suppliers, vendors, etc. The smoother a trading partner onboarding process is, the better the relationship will be. And when a company forms sustained, enriching relationships with its partners, its ability to expand and grow revenue increases by leaps and bounds.
Importance of B2B Trading Partner Onboarding
When it comes to onboarding, every single trading partner has a different set of requirements. And when a company fails to meet those requirements on time, it witnesses a sharp decline in sales and revenue. Ergo, a slow, or inefficient trading partner onboarding is one of the main reasons companies fail to drive value. Besides jeopardizing sales opportunities and costing revenue, it can put the existing partner relationships at risk.
On the other hand, a fast, efficient B2B trading onboarding process ensures solid partnerships with customers and opens new revenue streams for the company. Apparently, it differentiates outstanding organizations from good ones. It reinforces their brand, delights customers, and kickstarts revenue growth.
Challenges of B2B Trading Partner Onboarding
Most companies find it difficult to run their B2B trading partner onboarding flows, especially when they rely on manual workflows.
A business that does not have proper B2B integration solutions in place will experience onboarding delays. In most cases, IT integrators take weeks or months to onboard a new business customer. Meanwhile, the customer waits to connect with the business and receive the promised value.
And as a business ecosystem grows, that company will have to resort more to custom code to implement those new connections, which, in turn, takes more time and effort. The resulting lack of standardization and complex onboarding leads to a hodgepodge of workflows for every new business partner.
Take a Self-service Integration Approach
When a company takes a self-service integration approach, it onboards new business customers or partners by up to 80 percent faster, from months to minutes. Mainly, it empowers non-technical business users to create onboarding connections, which means IT teams no longer have to juggle between creating onboarding connections and managing other high-priority business projects.
By leveraging a self-service integration approach, companies can empower non-technical users to accelerate trading partner onboarding and make it much less complicated. Meanwhile, IT teams can take up the governance role and focus on more strategic tasks.