“Nike said in the last quarter, 30% of their revenue was direct, direct-to-consumer digital. That was their 2023 goal.” (Invest Like the Best, 2020).
Can your (any?) business continue to ignore an entire channel?
B2B e-commerce now accounts for over 30% of B2B revenue. It was estimated that it could take up to 10 years for it to reach that level, prior to COVID-19. But then… COVID-19! I continue to be asked if it makes sense for office technology and print resellers to invest in e-commerce, and can I guarantee it will be successful?
Here's my response.
No. I cannot guarantee your business will be successful with e-commerce. What I can guarantee is that if you do not open up a store online, you are choosing to operate in the remaining 70% of a market. Is that enough, when even much of that remaining 70% is in such chaos? Look around.
- Amazon sales have doubled since COVID.
- Shopify has now displaced eBay as the second-largest online platform.
Car manufacturers have gone online. Nike now attributes 30% of its revenue to online sales. While people have slowly begun to return to retail stores, they have yet to return to offices. Major companies like Google and Facebook have announced that all employees that can work from home should plan to do so TO THE END OF 2021.
It is time to be ruthless with your business. You’ve laid off field service staff because our industry has reported an overall reduction in field service calls by ⅔ since March. Print hardware manufacturers quarterly numbers are impossibly low, which indicates a massive decline in sales. So, your business needs a hard pivot to e-commerce. Get a team together today to adapt to the new reality. Put together a budget. Write down a sales goal you need to hit in three months. Hire some smart young digital sales representatives.
Business as usual will not return to the imaging channel. Your business still has hundreds or thousands of customers. They still have employees that require office technology. Stop listening to people that are delusional, telling you that things will return back to normal, but be “a little smaller.” They 100% will not return to normal for businesses that continue to think that face-to-face sales are where it's at.
My business has doubled since the beginning of COVID-19 because more technology businesses have jumped online than ever before. I can get you up and running in 30 days. Let’s do this.
