More generally, today's business-to-business marketers are using a wide range of digital and social marketing approaches from websites, blogs, and smartphone apps to mainstream social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter to reach business customers and manage customer relationships anywhere, anytime. Digital and social marketing has rapidly become the new space for engaging business customers. Business-to-business e-procurement yields many benefits. First, shaves transaction costs and results in more efficient purchasing for both buyers and suppliers. Eprocurement reduces the time between order and delivery. And a Web-powered purchasing program eliminates the paperwork associated with traditional requisition and ordering procedures and helps an organization keep better track of all purchases. Finally, beyond the cost and time savings, eprocurement frees purchasing people from a lot of drudgery and paperwork. In turn, it frees them to focus on more strategic issues, such as finding better supply sources and working with suppliers to reduce costs and develop new products. The rapidly expanding use of e-procurement, however, also presents some problems. For example, at the same time that the Internet makes it possible for suppliers and customers to share business data and even collaborate on product design, it can also erode decades-old customer-supplier relationships. Many buyers now use the power of the Internet to pit suppliers against one another and search out better deals, products, and turnaround times on a purchase-by-purchase basis. E-procurement can also create potential security concerns. Although home shopping transactions can be protected through basic encryption, the secure environment that businesses need to carry out confidential interactions is sometimes still lacking.
What is the current strategy of business to business managers?
