The primary difference between Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer eCommerce is that B2C companies tend to view their customers as contacts, whereas B2B companies tend to manage their businesses as accounts. In effective B2B, accounts are essentially larger relationship units, where a back-end CRM system manages multiple contacts, contracts, projects, support cases, purchase history, special pricing, and all the sales and account intelligence that can be stored for effective account management.

There is a significant effort required to treat online customers as accounts rather than as contacts. Contact management is relatively straightforward, but account management requires a committed investment from both parties; the customer needs to trust the seller enough to register in the seller’s systems, and the seller needs to store much more than transactional information about a sale. But B2B companies reap significant rewards through account management: higher conversion, increased impulse buying, increased customer loyalty, and reduced support costs (especially through self-service online solutions).

Extremely successful B2C companies like eBay, NetFlix, and Amazon have implemented account-centric systems for the consumer, because the relationship is critical to their success: each consumer must become a repeat customer. But in order to increase consumer loyalty, B2C companies have also turned to social networking and communities to cement the bond.

Seeing the success that social networking has had in B2C eCommerce, B2B companies are now looking at social networking even in the enterprise, where command-and-control is giving way to participation and collaboration. Today, B2C companies are sponsoring online communities and opening up their doors (their blogs) to customers, resulting in open communications based on transparency and trust.

This movement has long been heralded by John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems:

“While first-generation Internet developments were driven by enterprises down into the consumer market, the reverse is now true, with consumer technologies such as social networking driving fundamental changes into the business market, Chambers said in an interview with CRN TV.” –“Chambers Advises Partners To Embrace Web 2.0” ChannelWeb Network, April 7 2007)

Crimson is seeing a rise in enterprise community systems among its clients. Hosting a venue for your community—often outsourced to collaboration vendors skilled in moderating and monitoring—comes with all the usual disclaimers and demonstrates, among other virtues, that the B2B enterprise is willing to be more open with its partners and customers.

As the voices of customers and partners begin to be heard alongside the company’s own marketing messages, we’ll see social networking become as important as brand loyalty in the fight to retain customers.