From SKUs to Strategy: Shaping a Successful B2B E-Commerce StrategyFrom SKUs to Strategy: Shaping a Successful B2B E-Commerce Strategy

From SKUs to Strategy: Shaping a Successful B2B E-Commerce Strategy Transcript:

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

Carman Pirie: As normal, I am happy to be here, Jeff. But what is not normal is that today’s conversation is zigging a little bit, like we don’t, we haven’t had a lot of chance to cover e-commerce related topics on the podcast. It’s not that it’s been the desert of e-commerce. I don’t think we’ve ignored it by any stretch, but it’s just I think it’s nice to get back there a bit. 

Jeff White: I think so, too. And as a firm that does an awful lot of e-commerce-enabled web development projects for manufacturers and industrial companies. We probably see it more in our work than we necessarily do with the guests that we have on the show. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And, it’s and it’s a different level of sophistication shall we say, that’s required to make it happen. And a different way of thinking about marketing and relationship building and selling in general.

Jeff White: Yeah, no. I think today’s guest is gonna help shine a light on some really interesting ways of thinking about that. So joining us today is Tyler Simmons. Tyler is the marketing manager at Energy Management Corporation. Welcome to the cooler Ring. Tyler. 

Tyler Simmons: Thanks. Great to be here. Thanks for having 

Carman Pirie: me.

Tyler. Thank you for joining us. It’s really cool to have you on the show. I’d love to know more about the company. Let’s start there. Can you tell us a bit about the firm and what y’all do, and then I’ll ask a little bit more about you. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, absolutely. So Energy Management Corporation has been around since the seventies.

Really narrowed in and focused in on becoming a trusted advisor on a certain range of electrical products, specifically at the moment, generators, motors, motor controls, like variable frequency drives. Specifically we do have an online e-commerce brand. That’s called vfds.com, which is a great domain.

If you’re ever gonna sell VFDs, I’ll tell you that much. But that specifically focuses more on the motor control sides. We do the other products as well, but, VFDs, soft starters related types of products. Ultimately, there’s some differences between how the two operate.

Our online brand is a little more national, international, we. Local brand is a little bit more regional, especially the Western United States. And that’s kinda high level of the company and basically our two major brands there. 

Carman Pirie: And now just for those tuning in, that may not be as acronym familiar, VFD stands for.

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, it stands for Variable Frequency Drives. So it’s it’s a motor control device. If you look at, if you look at electric motors, a lot of the ways they’re very similar to when Tesla invented them, or when he had his brainchild of the three phase AC induction motor. And so there’s been.

Needed improvements in order to add some efficiency, some energy efficiency, some ways to control ’em, and that’s really what they are. 

Carman Pirie: Cool, 

Jeff White: man. If I had been a smart man back in the early the mid nineties, I would’ve bought a lot of three letter acronym domains and just held onto them, I think. I think a person could have retired if we had a little foresight there.

Carman Pirie: So Tyler little bit. What about you? Tell us tell us a bit about your background, how you ended up there. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah. I actually started here as an intern in college. One summer. I I came, I found the job listing online. Real fun story about that as my boss, the listing I applied on, he said, if you love marketing as much as Kanye loves Kanye, go ahead and apply.

And I gave it a shot, came down here and was an intern for a summer. After college, worked some other jobs and then ended up coming back originally in inside sales, moved to outside sales management, and then eventually over to marketing and e-commerce. So been a good path there. But I graduated with a degree in marketing and administration, so this is right up my alley.

Carman Pirie: Really cool. And a nice exposure to the other areas of the firm as well. Yeah. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah. It’s really interesting ’cause I think there’s a lot of. There can be a lot of headbutting between sales and marketing. And you need to be able to get through that. And I think the one place that they’re married more than anywhere else is e-commerce, because you have it all happening on the same page.

It’s gotta be, you gotta be thinking like a salesperson and a marketer. 

Jeff White: Do you find that your experience in both sides of the house have given you a bit of a kind of ability to talk about it in a way that gets everybody on board? 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, I think so. I think part of it is. Time at the company builds a little bit of trust, but also having talked to customers, I understand that perspective.

I think some marketers can get into a trap of they don’t get the feedback they should. They’re not listening to voice of customer type of things. But coming from the sales side, that’s all I did. It was just talking to customers. Really a big focus on what does the customer want and how do we target that?

And I think it, it helps provide some background that really gets the team on board that yeah, we’re all targeting what the customer’s looking for here. 

Carman Pirie: And you’ve been delivering that online for quite some time now. The e-comm presence is not something that’s new for y’all, is it?

Tyler Simmons: No, and honestly, in all transparency, there’s probably a decent amount of that is part of the success. One of the big things with e-commerce is get in early or at the very least as early as you can. That’s one of the big piece of advice is, if you’re thinking about it, just start it time online is very important.

I wanna say we got the domain in the, it’d be the nineties or two thousands but really they launched it as an e-commerce site. Mid 2010s, I wanna say 20 11, 20 12 ish is when they really started putting effort into that. I. Was an intern in 2016, came back in 2018. So for me it was definitely, there had been some years behind it, but it had it had kinda plateaued a little bit and so we had to look at how do we reinvent this and how do we make it grow again.

Jeff White: Where did you start when you came back to that and now there’s an e-commerce platform, but it’s not, growing year over year, maybe the way that you would want it to. What were you looking at first? 

Tyler Simmons: It’s always hardest, I think, to take a step back and look at the data. It’s, you want to be a little action oriented about it, but first you gotta figure out what, what’s performing and what’s not.

Why are people buying from this? Why aren’t they? And so there’s a little bit of, Hey, let’s look at the data. Let’s look at the common tools. Let’s get a SEMrush and a hfs Google Analytics going and figure out where are people actually going? What are they clicking on? Where are they spending time?

How are they finding us? But a little more than that too is, especially with some of these pages where they get one or two visits, if you have enough one or two visits a month, someone accidentally stays on that page too long. Your data is skewed. So you need a little bit of a qualitative look at it as well as quantitative.

And so getting on the phone with customers one thing we do is a lot of our salespeople internally use our website, our e-commerce site as a resource. They can check stock levels, prices, they can check documents online. So asking our salespeople, Hey, what, what works for you? What doesn’t? Being on the site ourselves, even calling some of our better customers saying, Hey, you use this site of light a lot.

Why? What do you get from this? What is useful to you? What do you wish it had? And so for us it was, let’s look at the data. Let’s look at the feedback and say here’s the things that we have found, attract people, and the things that keep them on our site. 

Carman Pirie: And was it simply a matter of saying, okay, let’s prioritize and itemize that backlog and start working through it, and it pushed you past that plateau and you started growing again?

Or was there a bit of a magic moment or secret sauce 

Jeff White: there? Revolutionary moment, maybe. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, I wish there was, that’d be a whole lot easier. You can 

Carman Pirie: make one up. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah. If you want, we can say we can say it was the moment that I started working on it, it just took off. 

But 

Tyler Simmons: no. In reality it’s a slow climb.

I think we have almost, I think we’re nearing 30,000 product listings. Article wise, I think we have over a hundred articles. We have between our two sites, we have something like 40 webinars online, and we don’t see a jump from any single one of those. It’s. Just consistently adding content and listings that people find valuable, which is, it can be frustrating.

It’s a grind, but. At least there’s a formula, 

Carman Pirie: yeah. But that’s really great insight because you hear so often people, especially in the world of analytics, especially, where the data can tell you a story. People will say we’re gonna do it, and then we’ll see what’s working, and then we’ll do more of it.

IE we’ll see the success in this one skew that we put up. And because of that, we’re going to put up more skews. You’re saying the opposite of that. You’re like, look, if you’re looking for that smoke signal to come out that points you in the direction of doing this more often and it’s just a slam dunk then you’re probably gonna miss it and you really just need to stay focused on more.

Am I getting your message correctly? 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah I, a hundred percent. I agree with what you’re saying, that’s the message here, and I think it comes back to a lot of it is if there was one skew that would make this work. Everyone would have that on their website and then it wouldn’t work anymore. You might find a magic bullet for a minute, but especially in this online market, you’re looking at every one of your competitors all the time.

You’re seeing what works for them, you’re analyzing it. And it really is just, it’s, like I said it’s the work of it. It’s just making sure that you’re putting in the effort. 

Jeff White: I do think that notion of your internal sales teams using the website as the resource for checking stock levels and product information, it’s almost like that’s a.

If your staff aren’t using your web platform and you’re doing e-commerce to this level, then that should be an indication that maybe things aren’t going the way they should, but if they are using it and they’re talking about it and you see them using it, my guess is that’s a pretty good leading indicator that you have a good product in the e-comm platform itself.

Tyler Simmons: I think more often than not, your staff, your salespeople, your customer service people will know the product better than your customers because it’s what they do all day. And if they can’t understand your website, what are the chances that a customer does? And so it’s a really good gauge. Maybe not that it’s perfect, but if they’re using it because it’s easier than your ERP system, then I think you’ve built something really magical there as far as the customer interface.

Carman Pirie: And beating an ERP on UX isn’t exactly the hardest task. But 

Jeff White: yet, no. An awful lot of eCom platforms are not used by the internal staff and employees. I 

Carman Pirie: just couldn’t resist an opportunity to take a kick at SAP or something. But that, that, I think that’s actually, that’s just incredibly solid advice.

If you can make that. Platform more usable than your in-house ERP is for your inside team, then chances are, is going to be really useful. Useful for customers too. 

Tyler Simmons: I think it is. I think the one thing that you get built in with your own employees is that they trust it. And that’s the one thing you have to overcome, I think with customers is trust.

Because your own employees know, Hey, this is our website. Of course I trust it. I work here. I get a paycheck from here every two weeks, seems all right to me, but customers don’t come with that background, with that knowledge. So that’s the one piece that I think you can’t gain from checking with your internal employees.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that’s a fair point. You mentioned before that the Incom platform maybe cash a broader net than the the brand itself. Physical footprint. Does have you. So is the e-comm situa, is the eComm platform really designed to serve completely different customers or is it a bit of a gateway to a bigger relationship with the firm?

Tyler Simmons: Lemme take a shot at that and make sure I understand your question there. ’cause the big thing that surprised me with our e-commerce platform was there’s a lot of one-time buyers that we. See once and we look at it and you can say, I know I’m never gonna see this guy again. This is a hobbyist in his garage.

He bought a lathe at a garage store or at a garage sale and he needs a VFD to run that thing. And long term, 99 times out of a hundred there’s nothing else that’s gonna happen there. But occasionally we’ll get someone who comes in and says, Hey, I am looking at this half million dollar piece of equipment.

We all know you’re not gonna check out online, but where does that lead in this relationship? Or certain people that say, Hey. I need quick, easy pricing and stock levels on products. So your website becomes an easy thing for me to do. A lot of small business like a facility manager might be saying, Hey I’ve got a million HVAC units I’m in charge of, I just need to be able to order these things quick without talking to someone.

And over time you wanna build that relationship. For most transactions, they just wanna process it. And so there’s a little bit of that side where you, I, from your question, I think you asked a little bit about scale and where that relationship goes. It’s more than a lot of things. Your e-commerce site for the big stuff should become a lead source.

And if they want to continue using it as their main interaction with your company, great. If not, meet the customer where they’re at. Feel free to take it offline and say, Hey let’s talk about how we can better support you. 

Carman Pirie: Is it a complexity of solution where you find that a difference or that line is drawn or is it on size of transaction?

Tyler Simmons: It’s both. I think there’s a certain level of you’re not checking out on $50,000 cart orders with a credit card or PayPal. But I am continually shocked that we get $10,000 credit card transactions over and over. I’m first of all shocked that people have credit cards with that high of a limit.

But second off it’s just, it’s a lot of trust to put into a site which I’m obviously super grateful for and I’m glad we’ve built that trust level. I think complexity is a big part of it. ’cause what I’ve seen is, we’ll get calls about, for us, we call ’em micro drives. Basically small little VFDs quarter horsepower.

We’ll get calls about that all day because the person buying it is so unfamiliar with them. They’re like, I don’t know if this is gonna work. And it’s a 200, $300 transaction, not in the large scope of what these can become. Not a huge deal. But then we’ll get people calling about the massive medium voltage drives as well.

And I think it’s based on their level of comfort with the products. If they’re comfortable that they’ve got the right thing, they don’t need to talk to us. So I think there’s a certain level where there is a high bar. Or there’s a certain bar where, yeah, it becomes unrealistic to check out online.

But otherwise, I think it’s mostly a knowledge thing of a comfort level. 

Jeff White: If you think about the structure of your pages and of the like a typical product on the vfd.com site, what do you think the things are that you’re doing there that are helping to engender that level of trust?

Like what, just from a tactical level, what are you putting on those pages that you think helped to elevate it and make people comfortable dropping five figures on something online? 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the most important things that I didn’t realize was important is a picture. Having a picture gives them a really good level of comfort that they found the right thing or that they’re in the right ballpark.

It can be a stock image. There are certain lines where we use the same picture for everyone, and it’s a picture of the entire series of drives. We’re not showing you the product by product, but there’s just a certain level of. They’ve got a picture up, they did some work. I’m looking at the right type of thing.

As far as text, I always get really conflicted. Conflicted internally about that one. I look at Amazon’s website and honestly, I think Amazon, personally, I hate Amazon’s layout. They’ve got text everywhere. It’s all monochromatic. It’s tough to see, and yet it obviously does really well. And so I think there’s a certain level of you’re.

If you try to tailor it to what everyone likes, you’re gonna build a site no one likes. So for me, it’s what is most important to someone making a decision, and how do we get that highest up the page? And so for us, we put. Bullet points of our technical details as the first main piece of text. It’s the horsepower, it’s the voltage, it’s the overload, rating, size, dimensions, whatever might, whatever questions our salespeople get the most when they’re looking at a part number.

That’s what we want answered first. Obviously pricing stock levels. In our case, we don’t necessarily say the stock level, we say whether it’s in stock or out of stock. Just to give us a little buffer room and to give us the ability to look at things as they go. No one’s perfect at getting orders pulled all the time, and no one’s perfect on inventory.

And we found that avoids some headaches. But overall, I’d say, those are the things that are most important. And then I think if they’re willing to go farther down the page, that’s where you start saying, what else could they be looking for if they didn’t find that answer already? Is it.

Man, is this thing easy to start up? Is this thing comparable to this other product? And so those are the other types of things that we’ve found on page are important to have, but maybe not the first thing you think of. 

Carman Pirie: Certainly. Interesting. Tyler, I wonder, I. As you you’ve talked about this in a few instances, whether it’s content that’s helpful and and helping people navigate and use the products or know which one is which or which one’s best for them or, so that, I’m thinking about that educational content, and you mentioned as well, like hobby buyers, if you will, the people that show up and you’re never gonna see them again.

Both of that, those kind of comments pointed me to wonder, do you find yourself in a place where you’re maybe looking to actively dissuade the hobby buyer or does it have to factor into your content planning, et cetera, to say, are we, is what we’re making right here only gonna help buyer that really don’t want anyway?

But at the same time, maybe it stops you getting a hundred phone calls a day into your customer service line. I don’t know. So how has that factored into your 

Tyler Simmons: planning? I think I learned my most painful e-commerce lesson on that topic. Those hobby buyers, they take up more time than I think. We have people that will give us a hundred thousand dollars PO with one five minute phone call.

And then we have hobby buyers that’ll try and spend two hours on the phone making sure it’s just right. And by the time we start looking at the time that we’re spending, I almost say look, I’ll give you the product free if you just take it, type of thing. So I looked at our salespeople and I personally do a lot of content writing.

I just like writing. So I looked at it and said, Hey, we are consistently getting on the technical side. It’s called face conversion. Single phase power is what most houses have. Three phase power is what most industrial equipment runs on A VFD can convert it. And there’s some things you need to know.

And we get just so many calls from hobbyists about this. And I said, Hey, let me write an article about this that addresses these questions that says, Hey, here’s what you need to know. Here’s what you need to factor for. Here’s some links to the exact series that will do it for you. There you go. The problem is that article became popular enough.

We started getting more calls because they saw us as experts on single phase to three phase conversion. Rather than answering the questions without taking our time, it increased the amount of leads. And for us it was just a, oh man, why don’t, why didn’t I do that about our most profitable products, our mo, our highest revenue?

And I’ve tried, I think it was just, you talk about your one hit wonders about your the magic bullet. That was it. But ob obviously in the wrong direction, 

Jeff White: the entirely wrong product. Oh man. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: But I mean it, yes, but be careful what you asked for, 

Jeff White: the intuition seems right.

Yeah. Solve the problem for them. Make them go away. No. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah. What I learned from that was really. The content and articles, webinars, videos, whatever form of content you use. And obviously video becomes more and more prominent the farther we get time-wise. But the content you produce is what makes you seem the expert.

And so whatever you’re talking about with your content, as long as you’re knowledgeable. Is really what people are gonna think I need to reach out to this guy about, to this person about. And so for me it was, Hey, let me answer some questions. But what it came off as is, hey, these guys really know this topic.

And so that also on the opposite side had the great side effect of saying what do I want people to think we really know? And that helps to inform the content plan. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s not exactly the way that you would want to arrive at that learning, but to arrive there is important.

Yeah. 

Tyler Simmons: And I’ll say at the same time I probably sound pretty ungrateful because, hey, it’s still sales. It’s still, even if it’s not the sales we want, it’s still a couple hundred dollars at a time. We’ll take it. I don’t wanna say no to it, but yeah, it was interesting that it just had the opposite effect.

Carman Pirie: So now that you’re, you’re more than a dozen years into this e-commerce journey, would you, if you had to point to either the biggest surprise that the company’s encountered in doing it, or the biggest change they’ve had to make in order for eCom to be successful, choose your own adventure in answering one of those two questions.

Tyler Simmons: Perfect. I’ll give you two, two surprises. And the first one is one that’s really a boring answer and it’s that you are much more dependent on the technology than I thought I would be. We were using one, one site to host our our website for a while and they stopped supporting the security of a certain as few aspects of that.

And so we had to make a transition. And so at that point it was we’re making a transition anyway. Should we do some rebranding? Should we do some customer interface remodeling type of thing? But it was a project we just didn’t wanna take on, but we had no choice. You gotta keep your site secure, you gotta keep it hosted correctly.

So that, that was one thing is, just making sure you choose the right place to host it, the right way to do it. I think it’s better to be up and selling and getting. Getting leads and getting sales than not, but while you’re doing it just make sure you have a plan on that. On the other side, I think the, one of the big surprises that we ran into was just it you hear so much about relationships as the key for sales, and I think that’s very true from my sales background, but I don’t think relationships are the start to every sale.

Sometimes it’s, you are the only person online who listed this part number, and that’s the part number I need. Sometimes it’s, you are the only person who explained this, and so I’m gonna reach out to you even though I don’t know you. And so it was how, one of the big surprises there is how many large sales could come from that e-commerce store.

You never think of e-commerce as, large projects, turnkey projects, but that was a surprise we ran into. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: I think that’s instructive too, because so many people think about e-commerce and say we’re going to divide our catalog into just those nuisance skews, if you will, or they’re under a certain value and we’re going to put those online, try not to deal with them or handle them with expensive salespeople.

But maybe creating that separation of church and state in that moment isn’t exactly the right thing to do because so many of those smaller transactions can blossom. 

Tyler Simmons: I would agree. I think there’s value to, Hey, just get everything online. Who knows? Doesn’t hurt. 

Jeff White: Have you seen any leading indicators about what might be, an e-commerce transaction that’s destined to become a bit deeper of a relationship. Are there any markers about how they might use the site or are you tagging them in some way, shape, or form? Do they download something first? I’d love to know. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah. I think if they visit our content center we call it our learning center your blog, whatever you call it on your site, if they visit that first.

Then I think there’s a better chance that the relationship becomes, you are viewed as more of a trusted advisor rather than a transactional partner. I would say. I think one other thing that we found that I found useful is we actually added in the ability to buy 30 minutes of tech support as an add-on, just as a separate skew that could get added on to any product and people who do that.

Tend to be the ones, again, who are viewing us as a trusted advisor. And so that add-on gives me a little bit of it’s not something that typically hobbyists are paying for because they’re gonna try and figure it out through YouTube Academy, but people who are doing this for their job and know they need to get it right and trust us to help them, they’ll add that on quite often.

And even though it can be a bit of a pain to get it all lined up, it is a really good indicator that they’re a good customer. 

Carman Pirie: Man, that’s a beautiful little strategy. That’s gold. Yeah. Tyler, you buried the lead, like you waited 20 somewhere. I been here, 

Tyler Simmons: I had to make sure they listen to the whole podcast, exactly. 

Carman Pirie: That’s fantastic. I wonder as we as we bring this episode to a close. What do you see as the biggest change or challenge on the horizon over the next 12 to 24 months for industrial e-com? 

Tyler Simmons: I think I’m gonna give you an answer that you’re probably tired of hearing. And it’s ai because it affects the content, it affects how quickly you can stand up websites.

It affects how people are finding websites. You know it for years. You optimized everything for Google. Then you said you were optimizing for Bing so that you could feel good that you’re diversified in your SEO. And you would do other things and obviously you’d try and be holistic.

You’d try and make sure you’re searchable everywhere. But when you’re dependent on people finding you through the internet and consuming your content and trusting it, AI has made it easy for some things to be found. They’ve hidden other things, but also. It makes it a little bit harder to trust content you find online.

And so how do we position ourselves as, Hey, we didn’t just go to chat GPT and know the right prompt to give it. We actually know these products. We know the content, we know what you should be doing. And we wrote this, we understand these products. And sometimes I think for us, that’s leading a huge shift towards video.

It’s, Hey, here are the experts explaining it. Here are the experts showing you how to actually install or program this drive. This is something that is proving, hey we’re not just, we’re not an ai, we’re not, a couple guys in a basement just writing things out, hoping to just drop ship things.

It, we have real experts here who are gonna help you. And then obviously the other thing that, I think is a big trend and who knows where it will go is inventory is always a problem. When you’ve got online sales, it’s a little harder to forecast ’cause you might be sitting there and then all of a sudden something hits your inbox that some item sold.

And so just really anything that has to do with supply chain, with inventory, with stocking, with purchasing it, it affects the business. And that’s something that’s hard to forecast, hard to plan for, but ultimately really important. So not a great answer on how to address it, but it’s definitely one of the things to look at.

Carman Pirie: I’ve gotta say you’re quite right when that the AI answer would be fairly common. I’ve gotta say, I think the first person I’ve heard use video as the response to that. Yeah. That’s really interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, I think we’ve only got a year or two before. Videos are good enough faked by ai that won’t be helpful either.

But 

Carman Pirie: yeah there’s that. But it’s an interesting it’s an interesting content pivot in the face of these changes. Look, it’s been lovely to have you on the show tower. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. 

Tyler Simmons: Yeah, thanks for having me on and thanks for providing this. Honestly, this podcast is great. All your past guests are great to listen to and really appreciate you guys. Thanks so much. Thank you. 

Jeff White: Thank you.