Modern B2B buyers expect seamless experiences across web, mobile, marketplaces, and partner portals. In fact, 84% of B2B buyers say it is important for suppliers to operate across multiple online and offline channels.*
Turn transformation strategies into action through a coordinated set of services and guidance for every stage of your journey
To meet these expectations, organizations must move beyond siloed commerce channels toward a connected autonomous CX model that integrates commerce, order sourcing, fulfilment, and customer support across the full customer journey.
The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience supports this shift by accelerating omnichannel capability build-out through outcome-based governance. It helps organizations move from fragmented execution to coordinated operations—enabling consistent cross-channel experiences, aligning commerce with sales and service execution, and improving conversion and repeat purchase through end-to-end alignment.
Reality of B2B buying
B2B buying is rarely linear anymore. Buyers often switch between digital channels, sales teams, and service touchpoints before deciding. Research from McKinsey’s B2B Pulse highlights that buyers typically engage across multiple interaction channels before making a decision.**
This reflects how digital commerce has become a core part of the buying process, with 58% of global B2B retailers selling on at least three e-commerce platforms.†
At the same time, expectations have shifted. Consistency across channels is assumed, digital self-service is often the starting point, and speed and transparency are baseline requirements.
That creates a dual challenge for organizations: improving customer experience while also managing increasing operational complexity behind the scenes.
Convergence of commerce, sales, and service
B2B environments combine complex operations with tightly connected customer journeys. Organizations must manage customer-specific pricing and contracts, large and dynamic product catalogs, multi-step approvals, distributed fulfilment models, and integrations across commerce, ERP, sales, and service systems. Customers, however, do not see this complexity. They experience a single journey, from discovery to purchase, fulfilment, and support, and expect it to feel seamless.
A typical journey may include discovering products online, aligning pricing with sales, placing orders through self-service channels, and resolving issues via service interactions. Expectations for real-time visibility, fast issue resolution, and consistent engagement continue to rise, as highlighted in research such as DHL’s B2B E-Commerce Trends. The same DHL report also shows that 78% of B2B retailers expect website sales to grow over the next three to five years, which reinforces how central digital channels have become.†
Yet many organizations still operate in silos. The result is often inconsistent data, limited visibility across interactions, slower issue resolution, and disconnected customer experiences. This is why omnichannel transformation is not about adding channels, but about connecting commerce, sales, and service into a unified operating flow.
Process excellence as a foundation
As complexity increases, end-to-end process alignment becomes critical. Customers experience outcomes, not systems, and those outcomes depend on how well processes are connected across commerce, sales, service, and fulfilment.
Breakdowns typically occur when sales agreements are not reflected in commerce systems, fulfilment is not aligned with order promises, service teams lack customer context, or data differs across channels. These are not isolated system issues, but symptoms of disconnected processes.
In practice, that can mean a customer sees one price in the portal, a different one in the quote, and another one in the order confirmation. It can also mean service teams have to ask customers to repeat information that already exists elsewhere in the organization. Even when the underlying technology is in place, the experience still feels broken if the process is not connected.
Organizations that invest in process excellence are better positioned to deliver consistent experiences, reduce friction, improve operational efficiency, and scale complex B2B models. Process alignment also makes it easier to respond to change, because teams can adapt faster when the underlying journey is not held together by disconnected handoffs.
Why omnichannel matters
Omnichannel in B2B is not just about offering more ways to buy. It is about making those ways work together. When the customer starts on one channel and finishes on another, the handoff needs to feel natural. If not, the customer experience becomes fragmented very quickly.
That matters because B2B buyers are increasingly comparing their business purchasing experience to the consumer experiences they already know. They expect simple navigation, transparent pricing, reliable order updates, and a service team that understands the full context of the account. In other words, they want the convenience of digital commerce without losing the support and complexity that B2B purchasing often requires.
This is also where many companies struggle. They may have a strong storefront, but weak back-end coordination. Or they may have good sales support, but poor visibility once the order has been placed. Omnichannel transformation closes that gap by connecting the customer-facing experience with the operational processes behind it.
Accelerating outcomes with the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience
The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience helps organizations accelerate omnichannel capability build-out through outcome-based governance and alignment between strategy and execution.
Rather than focusing only on implementation, the emphasis is on measurable outcomes across the full customer journey. This includes enabling consistent omnichannel experiences, aligning SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales and Service Cloud, and fulfilment processes, managing catalog and contract complexity at scale, improving order sourcing and fulfilment coordination, and strengthening end-to-end process alignment.
The goal is to ensure all capabilities operate as one connected system rather than separate functions.
That becomes especially important in B2B environments where a single transaction can involve multiple stakeholders, custom pricing rules, approval steps, and several systems working together at once. Without clear governance and alignment, even well-designed digital tools can create confusion instead of clarity.
With the right operating model, however, organizations can turn complexity into a strength. They can reduce friction for customers, improve efficiency internally, and create a more reliable buying experience across every channel.
The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience includes access to Business Process Best Practices which helps customers understand the end-to-end process flow and best practices for executing business processes across SAP Sales and Service. This service showcases reference processes and bridges the gaps that can occur during rapid implementations of solutions in complex landscapes or when implementation of multiple solutions creates fragmented processes without taking into consideration unique end-to-end view.
Conclusion
Omnichannel commerce and B2B digital transformation are reshaping how organizations engage customers and deliver value. Success depends on connecting commerce, sales, service, and fulfilment into a unified operating model supported by strong end-to-end processes.
Organizations that focus on process excellence and outcome-based governance are better positioned to scale effectively and meet rising customer expectations. The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience enables this by connecting strategy to execution and supporting consistent outcomes across the customer journey.
For B2B companies, the real shift is not just digital adoption. It is building a model where channels, processes, and teams work together in a way that feels simple to the customer, even when the operation behind it is complex.
Nikola Stojanovski is a product manager for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.
Tara Tracey is global product owner for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.
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*Digital Commerce 360, 2025
**McKinsey, 2021
†DHL, 2025
