The move away from third-party data to first-party data means that enterprise B2B businesses are now enormously dependent on the data and intelligence that lives in their Q2C software. This is a huge organizational opportunity and shift.
Quote-to-cash (Q2C) has long been the revenue backbone in many business-to-business (B2B) organizations. New needs for digitization, privacy regulations, and provider policies are impacting how service providers work, what customers expect, and how organizations can market their business. This makes third-party data no longer a reliable tool for marketing programs and forces businesses to rely on their owned data.
This change means enterprise B2Bs are now enormously dependent on their quote-to-cash ecosystem (software, processes, and data) to drive acquisition, revenue, and care.
Moving forward, B2B leaders will be looking at three core areas:
Surprisingly, the solutions to these challenges live in the Quote-to-Cash systems. Your Q2C must be made up of:
As you can see, this is principally a data problem -- and it has a data solution.
Quote-to-cash (Q2C) is the process of businesses selling to other companies (B2B). The Q2C process can be described by the following ten steps:
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“We can now say that a ‘golden spike’ connects the once siloed quote-to-cash (Q2C) processes for B2B sales organizations, transforming those processes into a more integrated end-to-end solution. Q2C includes configuration, pricing, quoting, contract, order and billing management. These processes leverage applications that include configure, price and quote (CPQ), price optimization and management (PO&M), and contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms.”
The Q2C cycle rests within a broader business cycle that takes a client from Acquisition to Revenue to Care.
So why is Q2C now the key to solving Acquisition, Revenue, and Care? Three forces have converged to cause this monumental change:
COVID-19 forced many B2B organizations to ground their sales teams and quickly provide digital self-service. This made Q2C being digitized a top priority across every B2B organization.
Widespread legal changes began in 2018 when Europe enacted GDPR (a comprehensive set of regulations that allowed customers to choose if a site they were using could sell their data). California, the world’s 5th largest economy, followed by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act CPRA. As regulation and enforcement of data privacy increases, service providers are increasingly enacting their own controls.
In the last decade, individual web platforms have started blocking third-party cookies, with Safari blocking third-party cookies in 2017, and Firefox joining in 2019. Google Chrome, though still the market leader, announced it will block third-party cookies in 2023, though they later extended the deadline for deprecation of third-party cookie support into 2024.
The shifting regulations for third-party data have broad impacts on the B2B Q2C lifecycle. Enterprise B2B organizations who have relied on third-party data to drive acquisition will now have a new reliance on first-party data (see “organizations need to be able to optimize, access, and market to their first party data” for more information).
Q2C is where 90% of the digital signals needed to create first-party identity profiles live. This first party-data, drawn from your Q2C system, is the new center of the B2B universe.
Organizations that replatform to a revenue and data cloud to digitize Q2C now need to think through how their revenue and data cloud will:
The technologies that own quote-to-cash – or the business process by which B2B organizations sell their products – are fundamental to your business. And the data that’s compiled, synthesized, and utilized, is now more valuable than ever.
For complex businesses, it’s essential to choose Q2C solutions (CRM, CMS, CPQ, and Commerce) that service the entire lifecycle from acquisition to care.
Oracle is best positioned to deliver this comprehensive solution. The major components – CPQ, CMS, Commerce, Service, Sales, and Marketing – all reside on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Each solution is natively integrated to provide the most optimized Q2C solution on the market.
Importantly, Oracle launched Unity – a customer data platform (CDP) which enables all the signal data to be brought together in one place. This makes a powerful engine – with Oracle CRM, CPQ, CMS, and Commerce all working natively together – to deliver a world-class Q2C journey with the infrastructure to efficiently build out first-party data for acquisition, revenue, and care.
This powers the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) platform which offers a suite of applications connected by data (beyond a traditional CRM) to help you create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships.
This gets increasingly complex. According to a new report from McKinsey, B2B Businesses now work in 10 channels: in-person, procurement department, email, phone, website, mobile app, e-procurement portal, video conference, web chat, and web search.
Your business will need to service and support each of those channels. By connecting your business data across advertising, marketing, sales, commerce, and service, you can capture, analyze, and utilize every customer interaction. This builds a complete, owned, view of your customer – empowering your business to deliver exceptional customer experiences at every touchpoint.
In this new world, the solution is in your owned data – and your data’s depth, accuracy, and extractability. With steps that acquire consent and protect privacy, your business can utilize the data you’re capturing to drive acquisition, retention, and care programs – all driven by accurate and owned first-party data.
With Oracle’s focus and strength in data, it is uniquely positioned to drive a new era of B2B acquisition, revenue, and care.
Need help preparing your business for this shift? Reach out to the team of experts at Object Edge for a free consultation.
