Manufacturers and Distributors Really Just Trying to Represent Their Business Accurately

The B2B world is in a race to digitize. Many companies in the mid-market are trying to digitize without feeling they need to opt into forever Salesforce agreements. The Salesforce CRM is most definitely needed to use the Lightning Salesforce B2B solution properly. Which, the solution will definitely work. No arguments here. How much cheaper can companies make it however?

While there is a lot you can do in Salesforce, it does come at a cost of lock-in - Salesforce (evenutually) everywhere. Salesforce keeps trying to go down-market, and they don't have the organization or product to match it.

With all that said, BigCommerce made a step in the right direction with a recent account hierarchy feature, but if you're not in the space it's not so obvious why you even need something like this. Digitizing old-school companies comes with issues, particularly in manufacturers and distributors where:

* Different buyer behavior patterns for different customer segments

* Different quoting, approval and service models for different business units, products, and approval workflows (do they go to sales? who? or do you funnel them to support?)

* The same customer may not have access to all my brands

* Different catalogs, pack sizes and pricing could be needed for different types of clients

* The company you bill to can be different than the company making the purchase, which may not have any clean relationship to the place any orders are shipped to.

To be clear, BigCommerce did not solve all these above issues with this update, but it did close another gap with Salesforce regarding the ability to nest companies in each other for a Client organization and how buyers within those organizations can take action across it.