E-Commerce That Works for Distributors: PFERD’s Partner-First ApproachE-Commerce That Works for Distributors: PFERD’s Partner-First Approach

E-Commerce That Works for Distributors: PFERD’s Partner-First Approach Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast from manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great. I really hope that the blooper reel that just happened here ends up somehow making it live because I think, in addition to it being funny, it struck me more than normal how you really switched into radio voice once you started the announcing side of this.

You have the pronunciation down and everything already, Jeff? 

Jeff White: Oh, crap. I was gonna ask about that. Elizabeth, I have your name, but how do you say it? Is it “ferd”? 

Elizabeth McKusick: Okay, so it’s actually technically “fayred.” 

Jeff White: Okay. 

Elizabeth McKusick: So, PFERD is, I can explain this in the actual thing too, if you ask, ’cause everyone does ask us how to pronounce. ‘Is it fur, is it pferred? Fair 

Jeff White: Price Pfister, the Fabulous Faucet with a funny name. It’s a very thing. Ooh, yeah. 

Carman Pirie: That’s usually my bit. I’m like, I’m usually… 

Jeff White: I’m doing that as you called it. But I have used that as they…  

Carman Pirie: We’re the two oldest people in every room. That’s why we remember that damn ad.

Rich Caldwell: I certainly don’t remember that ad. 

Carman Pirie: Basically, Price Pfister faucets were spelled “PF” and nobody knew how to say it, so they made that the highlight of their campaign, “Price Pfister, the fabulous faucet with a funny name.” 

Elizabeth McKusick: Oh my gosh. 

Rich Caldwell: And it’s got alliteration everyone knows…

Elizabeth McKusick: That’s amazing. Ours doesn’t have alliteration. It is German for horse. I can explain. 

Rich Caldwell: We definitely need that in the show. 

Jeff White: Yeah, okay. Already recording. Cut and paste here. And we can… 

Carman Pirie: Actually, this needs to be in as it is. Yes. I think we need to figure out a way to edit the story as it’s already been told.

Rich Caldwell: I’ll figure it out.

Jeff White: That’s pretty fun. All right. But we will start with an official beginning. Perfect. PFERD Got it PFERD.

Yeah, I have to turn that on. 

Carman Pirie: I’m a professional. Yeah. Need to get deep. But seriously, look, I couldn’t be more excited for today’s show. I think there’s been a lot of talk and a lot of promise, if you will, for e-commerce in the world of manufacturing and industrial marketing.

And one of the areas that I think has been less explored and where there is an awful lot of leverage to be gained is in e-commerce for servicing a distribution network. So I’m just really excited to have today’s guest on the show and to bring her experience to us. 

Jeff White: Yeah. And unpack that. Joining us today is Elizabeth McKusick.

Elizabeth is the marketing and e-commerce manager at PFERD North America. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth McKusick: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here today. 

Carman Pirie: Elizabeth, I wanna know, look, I have so many questions, but let’s start, I wanna know how you ended up at PFERD, and maybe tell us a little bit about the company as well.

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah, absolutely. So I joined PFERD TOOLS. Now, we recently did a brand refresh and brand relaunch from PFERD to PFERD TOOLS. I joined in July of 2022, so it’s been almost three years now. And prior to that, I was at a direct-to-consumer e-commerce-only business, and we actually sold eco-friendly fine jewelry. So I have all the background of a really techie E-commerce, scrappy e-commerce business. We didn’t even have a sales team. It was all marketing and e-commerce at the previous company. So then in 2022, I joined the team at PFERD and e-commerce, specifically looking at getting all of our product data to distribution. So, PFERD and I can take a step back here and explain what PFERD TOOLS do. We are an abrasive and metalworking manufacturer. So all of the consumables for industrial manufacturing, metalworking, shipbuilding, automotive, you name it, we have everything from hand files to flap discs. Carbide bur in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, specifically, we manufacture abrasive power brushes that we then ship all throughout North America as well as to our headquarters in Germany. That’s like a quick overview of our products and what we make. We sell through distribution, so I’m really excited to talk more about how we partner with distribution, specifically in the e-commerce space and the services that we provide to our distributor partners.

Jeff White: And when you joined, was the platform already in existence, or is it something you helped bring to life? 

Elizabeth McKusick: So when I joined, we had a terrible website, and we were in the process of rolling out a new one globally. So we are headquartered in Germany. And I can take a little bit of a step back and share more about that blooper, as you mentioned, so we were actually founded over 225 years ago in 1799. And the very first product we ever manufactured was a farrier file for horse hoof care, and that is our logo, if you’ve ever seen it. It’s a horse jumping through a hoop. It’s a very iconic logo. It doesn’t tell you anything about our company, especially in German. So we recently did a brand refresh for PFERD TOOLS to show that we are the comprehensive source for metalworking solutions from a history of over 225 years of innovation. From that very first horse file to everything we make today. Abrasive carbide burrs are used for all the products for metalworking. So…

Carman Pirie: It may result in you being required to explain the name to people all the time. But I will say it’s a great story.

Elizabeth McKusick: Thank you 

Jeff White: An awful lot of people don’t really have a decent story to tell about the founding of the company or the name or whatever. It’s just always the founder’s last name; that’s what we call the company. Yeah. But even then, even if there was, we started with this one little product in somebody’s garage in Wisconsin, it wasn’t 225 years ago that began. And with a very specific thing that also ends up contributing to the visual identity. I think it’s really fascinating, and I’m sure it brings up more questions than answers for the first time. 

Carman Pirie: Now, to be fair, I think I started in Germany and made my way to Wisconsin sometime. 

Jeff White: No, but compared to a lot of small, even multi-generational manufacturers in North America, they’re still less than a hundred years old. Absolutely. 

Elizabeth McKusick: It is also still the same family that is in leadership of the company, so that’s in ownership. So that is a really cool story, too. So it’s the same family for over 200 years, and I’ve gotten to meet numerous members of that family, and it’s a really cool place to work.

So it’s fun, but yes, PFERD. Is the technical pronunciation. In North America, you’ll usually hear people say fur, especially if they’re in the south or maybe even pferred, but it is technically PFERD. 

Carman Pirie: So we’re three years in, we’ve got a bunch of product data we need to get sorted out. We’re on a mission to get our product data in the hands of our distributors so that they can actually make hay and to see I’m sticking with the horse and now see ah, and. And then they’re also taking possession of a new and hopefully better operating website over that time. 

Elizabeth McKusick: Exactly, yes. 

Carman Pirie: Take us through it. 

Elizabeth McKusick: It was a challenge. It was really fun, though. So when I started, they had already developed a really good e-commerce solution, an e-commerce platform for our distributors as a distributor portal.

And that had started in Germany with our headquarters, and they’d started the international rollout of it. Usually, with our company structure being headquartered in Germany and then in the US, sometimes we do things first in the US just to try it out and then the headquarters team will do it better later down the road. However, in this case, the website that was developed globally was an awesome solution. And I came in and I had been from a really high-tech, fast-paced e-commerce business, and I joined the team in July 2022, and that month that I joined, I think I went through a lot of, what have I done?

Because with the Atlantic Ocean in between, I joined at a time when our global head of e-commerce was actually on parental leave, and so was another team member. So I went from my previous role, where I was project managing the whole website experience for our developers, to not having access to our content management system in a terrible-looking website in reality for what was currently out there and not having the contact I needed to make progress and make things work. And I was definitely going through what I have done? But then our team members’ parental leave ended, and they came over to visit the US. They walked me through the platform that they had developed globally, and I was really excited to see it because it was a headless front-end, very high-tech system that combined a PI system, a very intense ERP system, a content management system, and also a commerce platform.

All together to make a really cohesive user experience for our distributor port partners. So it is a direct-to-consumer field, but an exclusively business-to-business distributor portal. And so then my task, essentially following that meeting and all of the planning, was to roll that out in North America. So then that was the US, Canada, and Mexico. Getting to project manage that, getting to roll that out and working with all of our distributor partners throughout the rollout to make it a good experience for everyone. 

Carman Pirie: And Elizabeth, when you were, you mentioned it seems incredibly comprehensive, PIM and ERP, CMS, obviously. My curiosity is, when we think about the relationship that you have with your distributors, I’m assuming it’s fairly robust. There are a lot of moving parts and components to that relationship. Were you seeking to make 100% of that relationship happen online right out of the gate, or did you stage it in some way to say, these are the core things we want to do and do really well, and then we’ll move into these other things later? What did you think about that? 

Elizabeth McKusick: So I think something that we focus on as a business is still being personal. And so we want to be really high tech and easy to do business with, but we are not trying to take the personal element out of what we do in any way. So we’re working on what works for our distributors, so refining what they’re using the most when it comes to our distributor portal. So they need the product information to be accurate, right? So that actually ties hand in hand with getting the e-commerce data out to distributors. So they need the product information to be accurate on their own e-commerce websites. They need good imagery; they need all of that. So the same PIM system that we use to organize everything for our own website, that’s what we pull the data from to give to them for theirs.

And we now have a team member dedicated specifically to those who, in any format you want, she will work with the distributor to get that to them. So helping them. Support their own e-commerce business. That was probably priority number one. Because their sales increase when they can have our product data on their sites. And our sales increase too, when they purchase more of it, because they have a good e-commerce experience with our product. But then, when it comes to the portal, they need the accurate information for their end user orders, right? So, making sure that our inventory information is available so that they can view inventory, and they can view their order history.

Those are probably the two most important things for them. So that they can check on an order status for their end user. And then also product availability for us. So we have all of that. So those are the things that we really like to get, and also the purchasing experience. More cut and dry e-commerce, like purchasing journeys. 

Jeff White: I really wanna thank you for illustrating the incredible value of investing in the product information management platform for your distributors, because I do think that it is still a thing that a lot of manufacturers are trying to wrap their heads around. Even if they’re not offering an e-commerce experience themselves, they’re also not providing good data and good imagery, appropriate descriptions and specifications and all of that stuff that gets baked into a PIM. So I think it’s awesome to hear that it was an exceptional experience and also drove sales by having more reliable, better quality product data. Thank you for sharing that. That’s really cool. But my question is, how have you considered how your distributors use your platform in terms of their sales process? Are you allowing them to buy in different ways, or just ship you a PO or things like that and still use that platform? Or is it a little more regimented than that? 

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah, so we wanna be easy to do business with, so we don’t have any sort of requirement, right? Where do you have to place this PO online? We have lots of different ways that our partners can purchase from us. They can still email customers a PDF PO, and many choose to do that. But then we also do EDI connections, right? So that they can place their order in their ERP system and automatically come into ours. In theory, everything should work well, but we find more and more that it’s pretty costly for them in addition to being costly for us. And then we also have our distributor portal, where they can place orders online. And with that, we are continually increasing the ease with which they can place orders. The most common way people order is just searching for the part number at the top of the screen, adding it to the cart, and then checking out that way. But we have numerous other ways they can upload a CSV file. There’s a quick order pad, essentially, where they can just type in part numbers. And we’re exploring more ways to make that even better because the feedback we hear is we don’t want the double entry, right? So if they’ve already entered it in their ERP system, for the especially larger partners who don’t have the EDI connection, it can be time-prohibitive to enter it in two places at once. A lot of people say, Hey, this is just an awesome experience. I like seeing that it was entered perfectly and seeing the availability and the estimated date for every single line item. So I’m gonna place it through the portal even though it’s that double effort. But we’re still trying to make it better so that more and more people just love using that experience. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: A quick clarifying question, Elizabeth. How many of the distribution partners have an e-commerce presence? Because you were saying first things first, servicing their e-commerce via your e-commerce was the kind of first priority. So what percentage are we talking about there? 

Elizabeth McKusick: So, when I started at PFERD, I developed an e-commerce scorecard essentially for our distributor partners, where I looked at their e-commerce websites, and basically, it was like I just noted five different characteristics. Can you add to the cart from the PDP? Can you check out as a guest? Is our product on your site? Is there pricing available on the site? Can I create an account immediately as a user? A couple of different criteria for evaluating the standard e-commerce experience for those distributors. And then also began tracking our sales through those distributor partners to say, okay, this much of our business is investing in e-commerce because they have a score on our e-commerce scorecard for the experience they’re providing their end users. So those customers, we know they’re valuing e-commerce. We wanna see how their business is developing. We also wanna see the B and C-level customers.

We’ve found that between the A experience distributors and the C experience distributors, no one has an F. It’s just A, B, and C. Those e-commerce accounts are growing the most, whereas that B level is not, and so we’re not tracking other businesses differently. And so our theory is that a great e-commerce experience on the distribution side pays off. Mediocre experience, you know what? They might be getting a C because everything’s hidden just behind a login. And they could have a great website. Some of them have beautiful websites, but you can’t check them out immediately as a guest. So they probably just have a really good partnership with their end users, and so their business is growing well, with the B-level customers. Not taking that full step into investing in a good e-commerce experience, they’re stagnant. So they’re not offering any sort of wow factor there. So that’s how we’re tracking e-commerce performance with our distribution. And then we know that 33% of our distributors overall rely on us for e-commerce support that we’re tracking. Sometimes we’ll discover our products on someone’s site and we’re not tracking them, but then we add it to the list to see how everyone’s doing. 

Jeff White: That’s pretty good progress. I wanna go back to something you said a moment ago about trying to find as many ways as possible to work with your distributors to enable them to avoid double entry and things like that. Are you proactively seeking that feedback about iterations that you want to have? Are you conducting sessions, like discovery sessions with them, or is it just receiving feedback as they use it? 

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah, so when we first went through the launch project with our distribution. We selected key partners to be part of a beta program where we actually gave them the HT access code to our staging site.

Jeff White: Oh, wow. 

Elizabeth McKusick: And said, Hey, test it out, let us know what you think. And then when it was our production version but hadn’t been launched, we gave them that HT access and said, Hey, place your actual orders through our site. If you’re willing to partner with us in this, we did give them a nice gift basket as a thank you after.

Ask them, Hey, let us know how this works. Did you get your order when you said you were going to? What feedback do you have for us? So that really helped us work out a lot of the bugs. And then we’ve made improvements from that, like little things and big things, like, hey, we’d like to be able to enter our customer PO number into our order with you guys as well. Like we can let them enter their order number in for their ERP system, like the distributors, but they also wanna enter their end user PO number into the portal. So that was a simple adjustment we made, and that’s helpful for their record-keeping. 

Jeff White: I’m always very interested in that kind of service design side of how you engage with the end users and get their perspective on it, so you can make 

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah. And we do, as we’re rolling out new features or considering new features, we definitely reach out. I reach out personally to the contacts that we have to say, Hey, here’s something we’re thinking about. Don’t tell anyone, but what do you think about this? Does any of our competition do something like this? And then we get that feedback to help make decisions. 

Carman Pirie: It’s very cool. Curious what’s been your biggest surprise in this work so far? Three years in.

Elizabeth McKusick: My biggest surprise. In e-commerce or broader? 

Carman Pirie: You tell me. I would just say, in terms of bringing this to life and getting the distribution network engaged in and using the e-comm platform, I just wonder, it’s obviously a very different world from your previous e-comm experience. Curious what the biggest surprise has been? 

Elizabeth McKusick: The biggest surprise when it comes to working with our distribution, I think, is how eager and thankful our partners are for our support. And as I’ve had the opportunity to build a team to provide them more e-commerce data for their own websites, too, they’ve just been really appreciative of that. So that’s been awesome. And then a larger surprise, coming to PFERD in general, we have a really cool global team. And getting to work in that space with people all over the world and learn from the experiences of e-commerce globally and what e-commerce looks like in South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the US, Europe, Australia, that has been a really cool global meeting of the minds for our team. And we use that feedback globally to make everything better for all of our customers around the world. So someone in South Africa has an idea that, hey, we think is great, and we do that here, or we have an idea in the US and or in Canada, and that’s rolled out globally. So that has probably been the biggest joy in what I do. 

Carman Pirie: That’s really cool. Have you found that there’s any one global region that stands out as the region that’s pushing for more innovative e-commerce experiences or doing it really weirdly?

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah, we’re doing it really weirdly. Everyone will probably be listening to this podcast after, so I have to be careful. No, I would say other than the US, which is often the leader in e-commerce, I would say, surprisingly, South Africa. I just wasn’t expecting that, and didn’t know much about South Africa beforehand. And they really use the website as a tool, as a sales tool. In their market. 

Jeff White: Have there been any other kinds of localizations that you’ve done in order to make the site perform in the way that it’s expected in a particular region? 

Elizabeth McKusick: Yeah, so in the US, our website is, when we were looking at product data, it is only Imperial when we were looking at Canada and Mexico because of how they use products and manufacturing. We have both metric and imperial product data available. Just on the portal, we have French for the Canadian website, and then obviously, Mexico is Spanish as well. And then just a few little tweaks we’ve made to make things clearer when it comes to speaking in calendar weeks versus dates.

The US and Canada do calendar weeks, or not calendar weeks. The US and Canada do dates, and then Mexico and Europe or Germany would do the calendar weeks like week 34 or whatever, which is completely new to me. 

Jeff White: So let me get out my calendar and count. 

Elizabeth McKusick: I know I actually have a German planner that says the week number at the bottom so that I have a cheat sheet. But our website and our distributors do not have to have that cheat sheet. It tells the date the product will be available, not the week. 

Jeff White: They always do things weird over there. Like the first floor when you walk into a building is floor zero. That always throws me off when you go to a hotel in Europe.

Elizabeth McKusick: I just realized that now, and you’re right. 

Carman Pirie: Get upset that it’s not one?

Jeff White: It’s the first floor everywhere else, but there is nothing. It’s just nothing. 

Elizabeth McKusick: Ground zero.

Carman Pirie: ground zero.

Jeff White: Yeah. I suppose maybe that’s where that comes from. I dunno. 

Carman Pirie: I dunno. Elizabeth, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wonder, as you look in the crystal ball beyond, continuing to make the site more user-friendly for the distributors, so that they continue to do more on the site, what are you seeing on the horizon? Where’s e-commerce for distributors going? 

Elizabeth McKusick: Where is e-commerce for distributors going? I know there is a ton. Oh my gosh. No, I don’t even want to talk about AI. So I like my team using AI when it’s helpful, but I also think it is overused right now. So let’s…

Carman Pirie: Where is it going for you folks as you look ahead to the next 12 to 24 months? 

Elizabeth McKusick: We are definitely focused on making a better experience, right? Like I already said, but I think where it’s going for distribution, too, is what I’d talked about before with that, choosing to invest in a really good experience or not. And I think that’s what is going to separate businesses down the road, from successful or stagnant. And the distributors that do invest in that really good experience will grow. And I don’t want to say that the ones that don’t won’t, but the ones that invest half-heartedly, I think will be a struggle to stay relevant because you’re either really good in that personal space and you know that’s your strength and you stay in that personal space or blend personal and focus and invest highly on e-commerce. And then you have a really good experience and business growth plan, but doing it halfheartedly isn’t going to grow your business. 

Jeff White: I like the rally rallying cry. Yeah, absolutely. 

Carman Pirie: Elizabeth, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It’s been awesome to have you on the show. I really enjoyed this conversation. 

Elizabeth McKusick: Oh, thank you. This was great. Thank you guys so much for the invitation. It was wonderful to talk with you more today, too. 

Jeff White: Thank you.