The Hid­den Costs of Inaction

It’s hard to solve a prob­lem you can’t see
 

The Inter­net loves acronyms, and there are so many fear-inspired catchy ones for your amuse­ment for a rea­son: Fear is one of the most pow­er­ful dri­vers in a deci­sion process. 

And yet, para­phras­ing the old and wise one, fear is the path to the dark side of Ecom­merce growth. 

Some­times, it fos­ters bad deci­sions. A lot of times it leads to sim­ply doing noth­ing. The num­bers are shock­ing: 40 – 60% of the buy­ing cycles in B2B end up with no deci­sion. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

Is it the result of a thought­ful deci­sion?
Or a symp­tom that there’s not enough data to make an informed, con­fi­dent choice?

Inac­tion is an invis­i­ble ele­phant that can cost time and mon­ey. It’s para­mount to make sure we can tell the difference.

“40 – 60% of B2B Oppor­tu­ni­ties end in no deci­sion and involve ~11 cus­tomer stakeholders”

Jen Allen-Knuth (Demand­Jen)

That’s you, too

This hap­pens to all of us, as ven­dors and as buyers.

Not decid­ing is sim­pler: less inter­nal pol­i­tics, few­er risks, bud­get plans, and learn­ing curves, and above all, no dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions to nego­ti­ate stake­hold­er alignment.

We have a handy frame­work of ques­tions to help you avoid analy­sis paral­y­sis and run a seri­ous dis­cus­sion on whether or not you need to shake things on your B2B Ecom­merce, and if so, how much.

Why do *any­thing*?

Per­haps you meet a bril­liant sales­per­son that shows you the next big piece of soft­ware. 
Or you start get­ting com­plaints from cus­tomers who have a poor online expe­ri­ence. 
Per­haps your growth plans seem hard to achieve on your cur­rent tech struc­ture. 
Or you’ve been dis­ap­point­ed by a cer­tain provider and just want to start clean. 

What­ev­er it is, it trig­gers (some­times pas­sion­ate) opin­ions on which way to go for­ward, and cre­ates an itch that soon drains time, mon­ey, and every­one’s energy. 

To get the right answers we need some sec­ond order think­ing.
To for­mu­late the right ques­tions, just fol­low this list. 😉

Ques­tions to dri­ve the conversation

Ask your gut first

1. How often are we in trouble?

We love this one. It often leads to very dif­fer­ent answers. Your cus­tomer care team prob­a­bly has a strong opin­ion about it. Cer­tain issues are mar­gin­al — only a frac­tion of your cus­tomers expe­ri­ence them — but they feel unac­cept­able. Oth­er bugs or incon­ve­niences are sub­tle, but real­ly get under your skin.

Open up the con­ver­sa­tion and see what lead­er­ship, team, part­ners or cus­tomers have to say about your web­site. How many prob­lems can you list? How often are they annoy­ing enough that you feel like start­ing over?

2. Do we actu­al­ly have a dig­i­tal problem?

First, make a thor­ough list of every­thing men­tioned in the first ques­tion. 
Then, look for sen­ti­ment and fram­ing. ​“Some­times I have issues at check­out” is not as bad as ​“I lost a big order before Black Fri­day”. List all the words that feel par­tic­u­lar­ly strong.

Final­ly, dig deep­er into the answers and run a root cause analy­sis back­wards. Just keep ask­ing why until you reach a cul­prit (the Fish­bone dia­gram can pro­vide a help­ful struc­ture for this). 

As you go through this process, pat­terns will clear­ly emerge. Do we real­ly have a prob­lem with tech­nol­o­gy or user expe­ri­ence? Or is it a mat­ter of inter­nal process­es, mar­ket, shared expec­ta­tions, nar­ra­tive, train­ing, or some­thing else?

3. Is it worth solving?

If you con­clude there is indeed a prob­lem, fig­ure out if you’re real­ly deter­mined to solve it. The cost of keep­ing the sta­tus quo is not always quan­tifi­able, so focus on the answer pure­ly from a sub­jec­tive, per­ceived van­tage point (we’ll talk about num­bers later). 

How much is the pain of same worth com­pared to the idea of the pain of change?

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

G.K. Chester­ton

4. How did I get here? 🤔

Now that you know whether the per­cep­tion of the issue is strong enough, and have iden­ti­fied the under­ly­ing prob­lems (tech, expe­ri­ence, oper­a­tions, etc), let’s see why there’s a fence in the first place.

What are the key past actions (or inac­tions) that led to this? 

Under­stand­ing the forces that shaped the cur­rent out­come lets you look for a new solu­tion that tack­les these prob­lems ear­ly and strong­ly, and avoids repeat­ing the same patterns.

Then, ask the numbers

This is the easy part. Num­bers nev­er show the full pic­ture, but they rarely lie. The three-step objec­tive research goes like this:

1. Are we los­ing money?

This is actu­al­ly quan­tifi­able. Tools like Noibu can gath­er data from your web­site and return a pret­ty accu­rate fig­ure of how much rev­enue you’re los­ing for miss­ing the mark on per­for­mance, user expe­ri­ence, bug fix­ing and more. Agen­cies like ours can pro­vide use­ful indus­try bench­marks so you can draw com­par­isons. Find the tool and wait for the cold results.

2. Do we have the bud­get? Scratch that. Do we have a bud­get?

Defin­ing what you’re will­ing to invest to change the way things are for the bet­ter gives you the right bound­aries to look for solu­tions that make sense, and dis­card bad fits. Projects with­in bud­get with clear expec­ta­tions are 1642% less stress­ful (we made up the math but we’re sure it’s some­where in the area).

3. What’s our total cost of own­er­ship?
 

TCO is the sum of every­thing you need to run your Ecom­merce busi­ness. Cal­cu­lat­ing this essen­tial met­ric is a must to ana­lyze whether or not your cur­rent archi­tec­ture makes sense, and whether there are bet­ter options out there. It includes:

• Ini­tial costs or cap­i­tal expen­di­tures (devel­op­ment, inte­gra­tions, third-par­ty tools, one-time set­up or license fees)
• Ongo­ing costs (ongo­ing licens­es and renewals, trans­ac­tion fees, host­ing, mar­ket­ing, agency fees, maintenance)
• Unex­pect­ed costs. All you had to spend when things didn’t work

For the sake of sim­plic­i­ty, avoid any oth­er oper­a­tional, logis­ti­cal or prod­uct relat­ed costs. We’re strict­ly talk­ing about any costs direct­ly tied to the activ­i­ty of sell­ing your cat­a­log online.

The stan­dard TCO cal­cu­la­tion sug­gests going back five years to do the math. We sug­gest three. Ecom­merce is way too dynam­ic, and adding more time will make the process more com­pli­cat­ed and the con­clu­sions misleading.

Syn­the­size: Why do any­thing? Why now?

Lay every­thing on the table: gut feel­ings, moti­va­tions, a yearn­ing for change, mon­ey, cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, plans for the future. From the inter­sec­tion of these ingre­di­ents mixed with the gath­ered data and met­rics a deci­sion will emerge, one your team can stand behind to over­come fear-dri­ven inaction.

If, at the end of this process, you can’t clear­ly artic­u­late an answer to these ques­tions, it’s sim­ply because what you have works. Sure, there’s always room for improve­ment, but it’s per­fect­ly safe to con­clude you don’t need a ​“road to Dam­as­cus” moment. 

Just remem­ber: a pure­ly objec­tive deci­sion is not pos­si­ble; an informed one is mandatory.