Nearly half of businesses are digital beginners. The other half are eating their lunch. Find out where you stand and what you need to do to defend yourself.

The B2B C-suite is demanding that you accelerate your digital transformation. This means that you face more pressure to show progress and benchmark your maturity. My newly released “Gauge Your B2B eCommerce Digital Maturity” report guides you through Forrester’s B2B eCommerce digital maturity assessment so you can gauge how well your organization performs the essential activities, discover which ones you need to strengthen, and learn how to do so.

Why Is This Important?

For one, because you need to invest and transform in increments and punching above your weight class brings untenable risk. The vendor landscape for eCommerce platforms is entirely different from the last time you replatformed, so there’s no easy choice. It’s well established where the puck is going to be, but the important question is what’s your next step in the journey?

Why Else?

eCommerce maturity is an important component of digital transformation. eCommerce is subordinate to your customer experience, and you need to think of it in that context. It’s not a one-and-done project that applies “industry best practices.” Instead, it’s about delivering what’s right for your customers, so you need to practice design thinking to guide your releases and road map. Building an organization that embraces customer obsession and has the competencies to sense and respond to customers is your goal.

Find Out Where You Are Now

The assessment allows you to gauge yourself at three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) along four competency dimensions (culture, technology, people, and measurement). While all four competencies are important, our research indicates that culture is the most commonly overlooked, causing otherwise great initiatives to derail and suffer delays.

  • Culture. You need top-level executive sponsorship of a specific culture. Shifting a culture takes time and requires reinforcement to nudge people toward new values and behaviors.
  • Technology. You need a tailored blend of APIs and cloud, off-the-shelf, and homegrown applications. When paired with Agile and DevOps techniques, your teams are able to deliver new solutions faster.
  • People. The vertically integrated business model is being replaced by firms that increasingly work with partners to serve their customers. You need to shift from optimizing for perfect to optimizing for fast.
  • Measurement. Leaders have found success when they democratize the data so that they help their people align against bigger objectives — like acquisition or incremental revenue regardless of channel.

Share the report’s assessment with your team members, have them each complete the survey, and then have a meaningful discussion about your results. Feel free to set up an inquiry with me to get my take on which eCommerce platforms are best fit for your next step.