The Future of B2B E-commerce: AI, Amazon, and the Changing Buyer JourneyThe Future of B2B E-commerce: AI, Amazon, and the Changing Buyer Journey

The Future of B2B E-commerce: AI, Amazon, and the Changing Buyer Journey 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 are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m excited for today’s show. How are you doing? 

Jeff White: Yeah, I am too. We don’t often get to dig into all things modern e-commerce.

Carman Pirie: And what’s fun about recording this show today is that we were on the other side of the mics earlier in the day, being interviewed on this other podcast. 

Jeff White: Which was not about e-commerce. 

Carman Pirie: No. But I feel like we should; we have no excuse now. We should be well-practiced. 

Jeff White: Yeah. We don’t often have multi-episode days, but I am excited to dig into this because there are some really exciting things happening in e-commerce with manufacturers these days. Not all manufacturers are in it. I think a lot of people are considering it. But hopefully our guest today will be able to illuminate some of the things they’ve learned and give our audience something to listen to and understand.

Carman Pirie: I have zero doubt. 

Jeff White: For sure. So joining us today is Meghan Flynn. Meghan is the VP of E-commerce and Digital at Justrite Safety Group. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Meghan. 

Meghan Flynn: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Meghan, you say that now, but it’s early on. You could go sideways at any moment. Thank you for joining us on the show. It’s really lovely to have you with us today. And I, Jeff’s right. We just haven’t been on the show; we haven’t really gotten into e-commerce as much as we probably should. I think it’s an exciting topic to dive into.

And we’re, I must say, also equally excited to share the benefit of your experience and expertise. And it seems you’ve made a career, as I think you said, of working in non sexy industries. And so I guess to kick things off, maybe tell us a little bit about your career and how you ended up at Justrite.

Meghan Flynn: Yeah. First off, I’ll say that I’m quite proud of my unsexy industry past. So as you look through my career, it’s hit in a lot of different trade-focused areas. Starting my career off really centred around the automotive trades, where I started with a major retailer. At Sears Holdings, I got the ability to work with some major brands right outta college, so Diehard and Craftsman. So that was invaluable. After that, I was lucky enough to spend almost 10 years at a company called LK. If you’re not familiar, chances are you’re still using them every day. So huge in kitchen sinks and faucets, and then also water bottle delivering stations.

So when you’re at the airport, and you’re going to fill up your water bottle, chances are that LK is helping you do that. So wonderful products and great experience there working across. The retail segments, the digital segment, and the international segment. And then after that was able to move into power and electrification.

So super exciting considering all that’s happening now, where I got to stand up the digital center of excellence for Ideal Industries. And then that brings me, after about six years at Ideal, to the Justrite Safety Group, where I’m now the Vice President of e-commerce and digital, really focused on industrial safety solutions.

So 11 brands across the globe, and I can’t think of anything more relevant than protecting the places people work, the people who work there, and the planet that we call home. So while not sexy, great industries to be a part of and very proud of them all. 

Jeff White: Certainly very relevant and important to the work of many manufacturers.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of unsexy industries, Jeff. That’s where the, I don’t know, I feel that’s where real business lies in some ways, right? 

Jeff White: Hundred percent. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And I think we all say unsexy in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way ’cause we obviously must find them sexy to work in or else we wouldn’t be there. It’s just I think that the Justrite brand is very… I’ve known it for so long. So now I’m almost like, it almost needs no introduction. But maybe I’ll give you an opportunity to give us a bit more of an introduction to it, just to make sure any of our listeners who don’t know the Justrite Safety Group, some of the other brands that are also part of the group, or what have you, give us a bit more texture there.

Meghan Flynn: Yeah, so I’ve been very fortunate to work for some quite storied brands in my career. As we talk about the Justrite Safety Group, obviously, a lot of people would recognize its flagship brand, which is Justrite. Also, we have brands like Eagle, NoTrax, Checkers, ComplianceSigns, Accuform, NMC, Hughes Safety Showers, and USCS, just to name a few, so really great.

Safety products span a lot of industries, which is nice when you think about the type of buyer that wants to come in and upgrade the safety in their facility. It makes it easy to do business with one company versus, versus running around. 

Jeff White: And of that type of business, how big is the e-commerce practice within the Justrite Safety Group? Is it a very large channel within the overall? Obviously, you don’t have to give us exact percentages or anything that’s protected information. But I’d love to get a sense of the opportunity that you’re seeing. 

Meghan Flynn: Yeah. So I would say one of the things that brought me to Justrite because we’re privately held. I won’t get into the numbers, but it was a very healthy piece of their business.

And with potential to grow. I know that when you guys started off, you spoke about how you haven’t done a lot with e-commerce for B2B, and I think the interesting thing is that for the longest time when we were approaching B2B as marketers, there was almost the assumption really in the leadership suite that when people came in, it was like they took off their B2C hat. Put on this B2B hat and expect fewer customers who were used to a digitized experience, now all of a sudden want to make phone calls or send faxes. And while yes, some of those things still might be true. When we look at the power and potential of B2B e-commerce, it’s really that people have become very used to this digital world.

And the ease of doing that, the ease of information and bringing that over in B2B in a unique way that supports those products and journeys is something that I think was overlooked for all too long. 

Carman Pirie: Have you seen it from a trendline perspective? I think on the consumer side, the e-commerce hype through the pandemic was insane. But then, it was such a cooling of the jets afterwards. But on the B2B side, are you seeing that just continuing to go upland to the right from an adoption perspective? 

Meghan Flynn: I think that the pandemic was a powerful catalyst in the switch in how people do business and how they’re working. But I think another very powerful topic of conversation, when you think about that shift, has been the generational targets that we’ve had. So based on generation, there are different ways that people like to do business, and I can speak for myself as an elder millennial, I love to avoid a phone call like nothing else. If I can do it via chat, text or digital, I love that. Gen Z tends to mimic that behaviour. So as we look forward, it was not just a shift based on a cultural event that happened, as we’re looking at the balance of the workforce and millennials becoming the primary workforce with Gen Z coming up fast behind. We need to be looking at the ways in which they prefer to do business. 

Jeff White: This reminds me, I should never base any business decisions on how my oldest daughter actually wants to do things, ’cause she’ll call for any reason at all. You’re always worried. It’s a dramatically bad phone call because they come out of nowhere. Like, why are you calling in the middle of a workday?

Meghan Flynn: Yeah. One of the things that I found really interesting is being in e-commerce. Like, I love the idea of ratings and reviews. It’s such a powerful element of social proof. And when I think about myself as a millennial shopper, I will dive into those ratings and reviews. I wanna see the pictures, I wanna see the star rating. Now, if you juxtapose that against my son, who is Gen Z, when he’s going to evaluate something, he’s straight to YouTube, and so he wants to see the people that he’s looking at, he wants to see the product in motion.

He wants to see what they’re saying. So like, even these elements that are standard, like the idea of social proof, are rapidly changing within the generation. So, keeping up with the fact that now when you look at it, we need to service millennials and Gen Z. And oh by the way, we can’t forget about this wonderful base that has this that’s brought us to where we are, which is our friends the X-ers and the boomers. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, same. Can X get at least one mention in this podcast? Please. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Not connecting us too tightly with the boomers. 

Carman Pirie: No, exactly. 

Jeff White: That’s interesting, though, because so often when people are focusing on. What is the element of social proof that you’re going to use within an e-commerce type platform? It is the reviews that people go by. I hadn’t thought so much of those external platforms that maybe are more independent, and how are you leveraging things like influencers or others in order to get those external reviews of the product? 

Meghan Flynn: So I will tell you who does a really good job keeping pace with trends, and it’s not going to shock anybody. And it’s Amazon, right? So when you look at how Amazon has gone after these evolving trends, you still have the ratings and reviews. There still is that element of we’re lemmings. In order to even get a click on a product, you wanna see that other people have bought it before you and that it has a good star rating.

But in addition to that, they’ve started to allow creators. To upload videos against those products. So for the millennials and me, that’s going to skip down and read the reviews for the Gen Z, they can start to look directly within Amazon for those creators to watch those videos without leaving the platform. Which is clever. And I anticipate that as we look towards off-Amazon and owned brand commerce, those types of things will continue to expand. 

Carman Pirie: Meghan, you talked earlier about B2B e-commerce people just in some ways almost ignoring it in the C-suite in many organizations. And then it just occurs to me in the last five to 10 minutes, our conversation has been very future-looking. In some ways, we’re just talking about offering content creators a space within the reviews to have videos, et cetera. Do you feel that the gap between the B2B manufacturers that get it and those that don’t is widening?

Meghan Flynn: I definitely think that those who are willing to explore have the advantage that they were. Probably more primed for some of the cultural shifts that have happened. I can say that when you look at B2B manufacturers, one of the biggest concerns and topics that you hear when discussing e-commerce, especially direct, is the idea of channel disruption. And that’s why I think the conversations really need to be appropriate. E-commerce shouldn’t be destructive as part of a B2B strategy. It should be disruptive, and it’s really supposed to be about meeting the customer where they are. I don’t aspire to take any customers from our traditional distribution channels in my work, right?

I am looking to purely service that customer who upon the site. Wants the product, and we’ve served them something frictionless. It doesn’t serve any good to shift share. It’s about using e-commerce to raise those collective ships. And if those are the conversations you can have with leadership, those tend to be a lot more powerful.

Jeff White: It’s pretty fundamental, I think, to some of the pushback you might have on e-commerce, taking market share from other providers, whether that’s distribution or direct sales or things like that. I think it takes  an understanding that people want to be served, as you said, where they want to be served. And realizing that not having that may mean not making that sale or losing it to a competitor who is willing to meet someone where they’re interested in buying from. 

Meghan Flynn: A hundred percent. And the way that I look at it is, best case scenario, I get a sale on the site. But the next best case is… I am trying to give my customers and potential customers all the information that they need to make the best decision and get the best product. If they’re a tried and true distribution customer and they’ve come to our site for information, the best thing to do in that case is to have sold them on a brand or product. So when they go to their distributor of choice, they’re gonna select our product anyway. So either way, I should be contributing to that sale, whether it’s directly through the distributor or through us. And I think looking at it that way, as a potential to really grow the brand versus just growing revenue, is another important conversation that you can have as you’re talking about this, with leaders or business case.

Carman Pirie: There’s so much of this that I want to get your insights on. I’m just gonna chip, maybe popcorn around here a little bit, and jump into a few different pieces of, I want to get your insight into where agentic commerce is going in B2B. And even maybe contrast it with some of the early things that we’re seeing on the consumer side, or can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing and how you’re preparing for what’s next?

Meghan Flynn: So I should have started a timer on how long it would be before AI came up. 

Carman Pirie: No, I’m sorry.

Meghan Flynn: But no, we’d be remiss if we didn’t hit on AI and agentic. So I am actually, as a B2B marketer, more excited for the power of an agentic B2B application than a B2C. Right? When you think about why I think products like Justrite Safety Group have so much nuance to them, and you wanna get the right product. So there is a lot of thoughtfulness that needs to go into selecting the right product where agentic can really come in and be an aid, and that’s the case in a lot of B2B buying cycles. Whereas when you shift over to B2C, and you think of something like buying jeans, everyone is familiar with the concept of what jeans are, what the different lengths are, and what the different cuts are. What are the different washes? So the need for education isn’t there so much. It tends to be more of a straight conversation of this is the brand of denim I like, this is the cut I like, and it’s facilitating ease. Whereas on the B2B side, there’s actually power within agentic to win more favour for both the brand and that long-term affinity because you’re able to provide not only the right experience, a great experience, but good knowledge along the way that builds confidence. Because if you’re less familiar with the product, the key is understanding why you should be confident in pulling the trigger with the purchase.

Jeff White: For those who may not be familiar with it. How, when you’re talking about agentic e-commerce, are you talking about it from a double-ended perspective, where both the buyer and seller are involved in an agentic relationship or primarily delivering an agentic experience that is purchased via a human on the other end?

Meghan Flynn: I’m speaking about both, right? And I think it, it’s going to be a spectrum. I think candidly, where I see the potential is on both sides, right? We can see, and we already are seeing. Anyone who’s watching web traffic has seen the power of zero-click searches. So if you’re not familiar, zero-click search is, I’ve written my question into say, Google, and where in the past I would’ve clicked on a link to get my information. I’m served a summary. That information, where I don’t even need to enter a website. And that’s common on Google, Claude, or ChatGPT. So I think we’re already starting to see that from the buyer side of things, that their education is happening a lot differently. So, as before, when they were coming in and doing a lot of exploration in the early stages, AI is helping with that exploration.

So from a branded perspective, it’s like one, how do I get those placements? And then two, as we flip over to the other side of the coin, when we think about that customer behaviour once they’re on the site, then how are the brands using agentic to aid in that experience? One is going to be helping reduce complexities and bring value there. But the other is just pure behaviour, right? So ChatGPT and Google are now training us that we can ask these longer-tale, more complex queries. Instead of just typing in like safety cabinet like we did in the past, they’re getting this wonderful answer. So now that we’ve trained that, how can brands start rising to this occasion so that if they want to have that next level of detailed conversation with a brand, how can we engage in those longer-tale conversations and become question-and-answer-focused?

Carman Pirie: I’ve got two kinds of bizarre thoughts… I’m wondering if agentic buying is going to heavily favour incumbent suppliers because you’ll standardize on the brand that meets, in your category, in some ways, as long as something is OSHA compliant and fit for purpose and does what you want it to do, they could buy it. They could buy it from your brand, they could buy it from somebody else, but your brand’s been around an awful long time. People know it very well. I could easily see a scenario where that gets standardized, I guess specified as this is what our standard is for us and the supply chain agent can just basically go and buy that when they need it, scouring hundreds of thousands of sites and buying from the cheapest distributor.

I wonder if that’s gonna make the world harder for incumbents, number one and number two. Does it make it harder for marketers overall just to tell a differentiating story? So maybe I’ll stop there and ask you that question. Are you looking ahead to that potential impact? Do you or am I maybe being too much of a conspiracy theorist about this? 

Meghan Flynn: No, I think it’s an excellent question, and I think it comes down to the way in which brands build authority has to change. The worst part is like there’s no easy answer to that, right? Because there are so many different shopping preferences that you have to build authority against.

So when I think of a Justrite Safety Group. One of the values is that we’ve been in business for over a hundred years. And we know safety better than anybody else. And for me, that’s a very compelling business proposition when you’re talking about keeping your workers and your facilities safe. And so that’s something to hang the hat on. But, you flipped it over, and you made it a price conversation, which… There is going to be an aspect to that. And so that’s where, as a marketer, I would want to come in and make sure that I’m able to showcase the value of my products. And it starts to become quite complicated, hitting all of these different buyer wants and needs. I was reading VML put out a report, it was called Their Future 100. VML’s a marketing agency. And one of the trends talked about is the future of storytelling universes. And it was really talking about immersing people in brands and telling stories, and I could tell that they came at it from, maybe more of a B2C standpoint, but I, reading it as a B2B marketer, had that idea then, like, how do I immerse my customers in this Justrite Safety Group world or in this B2B world. And I think that can proliferate into the future, into like augmented and virtual reality. And then also really building affinity at every step of the way. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s interesting to imagine that mix. And it’s also, I can also imagine agentic making it harder to stand out in some ways. And we just actually interviewed somebody on the podcast who was talking about it from a recruitment standpoint. Now it’s harder to sift through resumes because you can use AI to make every resume sound pretty good, and it can connect to the job description better than it used to. So wading through them is becoming harder. Looking for a good cover letter is becoming harder. And interestingly, agentic commerce could make it harder to discern good suppliers from bad because more suppliers will be present.

Meghan Flynn: That’s definitely a concern that I think is on a lot of people’s minds because it’s not about what your story is, it’s about your ability to tell it in the right ways and, with the right, like schema, if you will…

Jeff White: That’s going to attract appropriately. 

Meghan Flynn: Yes. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Oh, there’s a lot of layers to that. 

Meghan Flynn: There is. And I think if I had this wonderful, great, easy answer for you I would probably, I would probably be making millions of dollars right now, but I think I’m in the place that a lot of B2B and just generally marketers are sitting in that it’s changing so rapidly day to day, that there’s a little bit of the future is now and what do I need to be doing based on the latest news that we have and then also continuing to look forward and starting to proactively hedge my bets on what I think is next. Is it going to be pure agentic? Is it gonna be age agentic with a visual index? So it’s like I just take a picture, and I need it, and I wanna replace it.

There’s just so much potential for ways it could go. It’s really about thinking of those possibilities. Ways that it could go, what are the ones that would be most advantageous for my brand, and how do I begin to look at them? 

Jeff White: I think, too, it’s about figuring out what some of those different journeys, what the user purchase journeys are going to look like, because you’re quite right. Some of them are probably going to be very machine-based, where you take a photo, upload the photo, and it decodes what the object is. Processes the order or whatever that happens to be. Another side of it might be more advanced personalization, where we’re using agents and AI to maximize the quality of interaction for people who want that in that way.

What are you seeing from a personalization perspective? Where’s that going? 

Meghan Flynn: First, I love the fact that you hit on journeys because journeys have evolved so much. With digital, and I think it, it ties nicely into your personalization question. So go with me a little bit here as I go on my own kind of maybe journey to try and answer the question. So customer journeys used to be quite linear, right? So you could easily map, this is where we’re at from like awareness and discovery. And this takes us all the way through to conversion and then hopefully loyalty, and you can easily check those steps. And while you can still do that to an extent, digital has made it more of an ecosystem, like a spider web.

So you have all of this different information and touch points where they’re experiencing you on social media. They might have been served an ad, they’re on your website, they’re part of your database, they’re getting information. So the amount of touch points is increasing, and the ways that they’re experiencing your brand is increasing. But why that’s powerful from just a pure personalization standpoint is the amount of behavioural data that we have about customers can allow us to better personalize, and the expectations around consumers for personalization are rising. And it’s a definite way for brands to add value. If you know that a customer has entered your site from some piece of content that’s specific to a product, a channel or a vertical. The best thing that you can then do is, as you’re following them with these other touch points in your ecosystem, is honour that and give them things that are relevant. We’re not just gonna throw something else our company does at them, but how we can then give them something personalized.

That also becomes a very daunting proposition, right? Because when you start thinking about the number of people hitting your websites, the number of possible areas of interest and verticals, it starts multiplying. And then that comes back again to like, how do we use AI to dynamically help us with this journey creation, but then iterating the content and the messaging so that it has maximum relevancy for our consumers.

Carman Pirie: It seems to me that AI will be required in order to optimize for that spider web environment that you’re talking about. 

Meghan Flynn: Correct. I think the interesting thing is, if I think back to just a few years ago, before that release of ChatGPT, the conversation that I was having almost daily was digital is so hungry.

How are we going to feed this? How are we gonna staff in a way that makes feeding this very hungry engine possible? And the nice thing is, then along came AI, and it’s okay, all of a sudden we have a way to do that because we weren’t able to get scale and velocity like we were before without it.

Carman Pirie: What’s one thing that you are seeing that’s impacting B2B e-commerce, impacting your work in the next three to five years that you think most people in a similar role aren’t seeing yet? 

Meghan Flynn: We’ve spent a long time talking about AI and agent so I think that. One is gonna impact everyone, but I also wanna talk about, and it’s one that I think people just, when they thought they got their arms around it, it changed. And that is Amazon. So Amazon came in, and Jeff Bezos was this huge disruptor with Amazon Prime, as it’s like a religion for people, right? Now, becoming a Prime member is more popular than going to church. It feels sometimes. And I think brands were really just starting to get their head around this is how we’re going to play in Amazon. And then, Amazon has said, okay, now we’re really putting focus on Amazon business. It’s going to be a huge disruptor for the traditional distributors. And I think as B2B marketers, understanding and having conversations with leaders about the fact that even if we weren’t ready to start to make that e-commerce change ourselves, Amazon has forced it upon us. And just like everything else Amazon does, they do it very well, and they do it with scale and force. So it’s really looking at not just the potential impacts of direct commerce and what AI is gonna do to it. It’s what are some of those big players who are already out there doing it, because they’re constantly looking to disrupt.

And I think if you’ve sat in B2B, you know that there’s a ton of potential sitting here. And it was this little secret that we had for the longest time of we have these really great customers, we make great products, we have great relationships. And all of a sudden, Amazon figured out, oh my gosh, there’s a whole huge market here, and now we’re gonna go after it and serve it.

And so for me, that might’ve been an unexpected way to end it. But I think it’s also worth noting that while you’re so busy looking over here at something like AI, don’t forget to pay attention to what’s happening in some of the ways that it might be more quietly creeping up on you.

Carman Pirie: That’s outstanding advice, Meghan. Yeah, because so often, and we talked about it in this podcast, that the consumer expectations are so much when Amazon enters the conversation. It’s about how they’ve set this consumer expectation that carries forward to business. But what you just said is that it’s not about consumer expectation anymore. They’re gonna set the business expectation, and that’s going to force people into change in a more rapid way. So, that’s fascinating. I appreciate you sharing your expertise with us today. It’s wonderful to have you on the show. 

Meghan Flynn: This was a fun conversation, and I love that you guys give a platform for B2B marketers because we do so many really important and cool things, and it’s a unique and different way than B2C. So the ability to highlight that has been really fun. 

Jeff White: Oh, it’s always great to have somebody on who can actually talk really well about those things that are just incredibly nuanced to B2B, yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. 

Meghan Flynn: Yeah, thanks for having me.