Want measurable results that improve your business? Then use these 31 Halloween social media marketing tips.
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During the inaugural B2BNext conference, Hill & Markes presented on how automation is changing their customer engagement. This article recaps the session from Chicago and highlights how this family-owned business used an ecommerce chatbot to lower costs, increase sales and improve customer satisfaction.
Hill & Markes located in upstate New York is positioned as the one stop shop for foodservice disposables, janitorial & office supplies, and industrial & farm stand packaging – servicing corporations, universities, and hospitals.
However, up until about a year ago, this 112-year old family-owned distributor didn’t have an ecommerce platform. Flash forward present-day and they are now leveraging multiple technologies to automate and enhance their customer service.
Providing extraordinary customer service experiences has been the epicenter of the Hill & Markes business model. The strong customer relationships they’ve created over the generations are the basis for their success. And as part of that, their customers have historically relied on the personalized fashion of calling directly into the company – resulting in heavy call volume through the Hill & Markes customer service channel in terms of order placements, inquiries, product support, etc.
The challenge: overloaded call center
In the beginning of 2017 with a newly implemented ecommerce platform, their clientele was not up-to-speed or trained on the functionality of the site. Therefore, they moved back to the “old fashion way” and called in all orders and inquiries. The customer service team was struggling with the workload of managing emails, calls and order entry. Resulting in laggard times responding to each customer and providing that highly-valued customer service with answers and information in real-time.
The solution: training and technology
The first order of action Hill & Markes took was to ensure their customer service and sales teams were 100% comfortable with the features and functionality of their ecommerce platform. Training took place on their staging site where every customer service and sales rep tested and tried with creating shopping lists, sending messages, etc. – anything a customer might do on the site. Since 50% of their orders are generated through customer service, ensuring full adoption among this team was essential.
Once customer service was fully immersed in the capabilities and functionalities of the site, they created a customer training program to educate their clients. When customers called in, customer service reps would walk them through the ecommerce process until they were comfortable to do so themselves. Training videos on YouTube, as well as pre-corded webinars were also created and shared.
One of the primary questions coming into the customer service team was in regard to an item being out of stock. Since they shied away from promoting inventory volume and displaying “out of stock” online, they also wanted to decrease the number of phone calls questioning inventory. Hill & Markes saw this as a great opportunity to test and leverage a live chat feature online.
Selecting the AI-powered messaging platform, LivePerson, they are now able to communicate with their B2B buyers online and in real-time. Empowering customer service reps with conversational marketing tools to cross-sell or upsell should inventory be out of stock. The ecommerce chatbot feature also allows customer service reps to engage with more than one customer at time, reducing lag time between serving clients.
Results: Hill & Markes has seen a drastic drop in call volume and has been able to track 20% of total revenue through ecommerce.
What’s next for Hill & Markes?
Taking inspiration from retailers, Hill & Markes is looking to provide customers with updated and real-time delivery status. Similar to what Amazon is rolling out with Map Tracker– allowing customers to watch a dot on the screen similar to monitoring an incoming Uber or Lyft driver. Stay tuned as we learn what widgets they implemented and lessons learned.
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Heidi Cohen interviews Pam wilson on her new book: Master Content Strategy.
Pamela Wilson delivers an approach that adapts to help you grow your skills as you grow your audience. This approach works for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) content creation — and for bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers alike.
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Are you building customer loyalty? Not sure? Use this complete guide to retention content marketing to ensure that you maximize your content budget. Includes detailed content options and useful tips.
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Heidi Cohen interviews Pam Didner on her new book: Effective Sales Enablement, a sales book for marketers by a marketer about how branding, messaging, different marketing channels, and martech can be used for sales enablement and to facilitate sales engagement.
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Use this analysis of the latest Fortune 500 Social Media Research. Follow these 5 ways to make your business succeed. Includes data, charts and actionable tips.
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As previously published on LinkedIn, Ana Milevskaja outlines the facts about microservices that commerce pros should know about.
Hardly a day goes by without an article about ecommerce microservices. Microservices is a hot new paradigm for commerce back end among many commerce practitioners. Many developers are experimenting with microservices and others are embracing them head on. Many more practitioners out there will get on the microservices bandwagon in the near future. Here is the good, the bad and the ugly about ecommerce microservices everyone should know about.
The Good: Microservices offer unparalleled flexibility and modularity when it comes to standing up a new customer experience and rapidly adding additional ones. Microservices share nothing: platform, deployment and data storage are all independent. If a developer needs to make a new microservice and s/he works in Javascript, they can just do it in Javascript. They don’t need to learn a new language in order to keep growing the platform. Developers can work in parallel and release all day long, which significantly reduces time to market for any new application.
This is the complete opposite of a full-stack monolithic suite where the majority of functionality lives in a single service that is tested, deployed, and scaled as a single unit. It requires integration phases of the project, quality assurance, etc. to make sure the platform works as one unit because it shares everything. Expanding it into other touchpoints and devices requires a significant amount of customization, making it cost-prohibitive to explore new ideas.
The Bad: When companies are moving from a monolith to microservices ecommerce platform as an organization, it is really hard. You have invested in a monolithic pattern. You got your Oracle licenses, you got infrastructure and organizational inertia to keep doing things the way you have always done them. You have to tell people that bless the release that they no longer have a job or they have to retrain. You have to tell engineers they have to build their own build pipelines, figure out their own data storage. It becomes a big lift on the existing organization to make this change.
You may end up using existing database, because why not, you already have it. Microservices take concept of DRY (“Don’t repeat yourself”) that is typical of a monolithic development and throws it out the window. You end up with connections that don’t need to be there and when you need to release a microservice, you need to negotiate with the teams. What makes it harder is that you don’t know where those teams are all the time. You don’t control the database. You now need to have a white board to tell you about the teams using the same database or using the same shared library. You end up with the distributed monolith to handle the cross-functional concerns.
The Ugly: The real downside of microservices is the complexity the mini-services introduce into the architecture. Developers end up needing a microservice to search for a microservice. The more microservices are being used, the more there is a risk of things getting out of control. In her post, Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar, Alexandra Noonan of Segment described the pain developers went through by the explosion of the microservices and what they did to end it. Another great story, What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services, is from Matt Raney, Chief Systems Architect of Uber. You end up breaking the services into so many pieces that that you no longer know what is going on. You can’t bring change because every time you make a tiny change and you think it is independent, it actually turns out not to be. To make matters worse, you may run into a problem where you may not know how a particular service exists. You couldn’t rebuild it if it died. You don’t know how to make changes to it because the person who made it is gone. You end up in a pretty big mess.
GDPR compliance is another issue. If personal data is distributed among multiple services, how do you delete someone from the multiple databases and report on compliance?
To sum up: Great News! Defining the structure of the data required to perform the service is key. Exactly the same structure of the data is returned from the server, therefore preventing excessively large amounts of data from being returned.
After all, if you set things up the proper way and learn from the mistakes the pioneers have made, you are on your way to success!
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Commerce innovation is not just for retailers and consumer brands, business-to-business organizations must capitalize on the disruptive trends that are emerging. It’s either innovate or die. When B2B buyers leave the office, they become those same B2C buyers; and they all still demand remarkable customer experiences.
So, what does this mean for organizations and bringing B2B ecommerce strategies to the next level? It’s all about the disruption. Digitally disrupt your organization now in order to create frictionless commerce experiences for your customers.
According to Forrester, B2B ecommerce is on track to hit $1.2 trillion in the US by 2021. Therefore, it is imperative for B2B merchants to forge ahead faster with their digital transformation.
Before setting out on this digital transformation journey, let’s go over the challenges the industry currently faces and what to look for in the search for B2B ecommerce technology partners.
Time-honored analog relationships
B2B buyers expect sellers to know what their SLAs include, including any specific negotiated pricing and order history – often this information is not a part of the digital buying experience. To overcome this, organizations need to look for vendor’s technology capabilities that allow their business to set up account specific buying experiences for each customer.
Managing multifaceted purchase flows
Buyers have more product and service selections than ever before. Those businesses that don’t meet the customer expectations that include personalization and contextualization, run the risk of losing those once time-honored relationships mentioned above. B2B organizations need to understand how a technology partner will digitalize those complex purchase flows for them. All too often the platform is not set up to handle the digitalization of the work flow, especially if it is account-specific. Organizations need to see how technology partners can drill down into this. A demo of specific use cases ensures the technology partner has experience working with such instances. Selecting a platform partner that allows for this, enables sales teams to shift from order-takers to nurturing customer-relationship managers – hence increasing order and relationship value.
Global growth and efficiency
Managing global expansions can be a daunting task when approaching the laundry list of local requirements and supply chain complexities in each county. A global ecommerce strategy, if that is a part of the big picture plans, must be included in the platform discussions to ensure the technology can be configured to allow for meeting those country and buyer-specific requirements.
Disjointed legacy systems
The bane of all ecommerce practitioners regardless of sector or industry are those pesky legacy systems still lingering around. Legacy applications and organizational silos prevent companies from taking advantage of new technologies and customer touchpoints. Platform selection needs to include one that empowers your business to rapidly experiment with and implement changes without friction; such as headless commerce which allows for a more modular and modern solution. With an API-driven headless solution, you build what you want, when you want. You’re no longer limited to the capabilities of your monolithic platform, but rather build with your customers’ expectations guiding the way.
Remember it is all about the customer, so partnering with an ecommerce platform that supports your long-term growth is key to success. Check back later this month when we share our full B2B replatforming checklist.
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Want to improve your B2B content marketing for next year? Use this analysis complete with charts and tactics on 2019 B2B Content Marketing Research.
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According to Forbes, 7 out of 8 digital transformation projects fail. The problem is that companies aren’t actually transforming, instead they are only attempting to transform by wedging new mobile applications, engagement layers, or channels on old and brittle infrastructure. Frankly, this is not transformation, this is stagnation.
Here are some of the most common and expensive mistakes that send well-intentioned digital projects to their doom.
Successful digital transformation projects aren’t built around shiny objects. They deliver true value to customers. Approach transformation from the customer’s point of view. What will truly fill a need, delight and support a customer along the buyer journey? Use both quantitative and qualitative methods to formulate and validate your hypothesis:
Failing to plan carries the opportunity cost of delayed or abandoned projects, which translates to lost customer sales while giving your competitors time to get ahead.
Define your project requirements, customer journeys and flows. Understand and anticipate necessary integrations. These details should be nailed down before you start to build to avoid mid-implementation changes and issues that can derail your effort.
Traditional, single-stack ecommerce solutions are coupled, meaning the front-end presentation layer and back-end infrastructure (the “stack”) are unified. This creates several technical issues and business limitations.
That’s why top brands are abandoning siloed, single-stacks for more flexible headless commerce solutions.
With headless commerce the business layer and the presentation layer are decoupled from each other.
There comes a point when you need to stop adding to legacy or homegrown systems – it becomes too restrictive, arduous and expensive – and for most organizations, that time is now.
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With a diverse range of real-world stories, Break the Wheel offers a simple but powerful way to think for yourself when surrounded by conventional thinking. Along the way, Acunzo offers six fundamental questions to ask in any situation to start making the best possible decisions, regardless of the best practice.
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Do your social media marketing efforts yield measurable ROI??? If not, chances are you have one or more of these 3 social media blindspots. Includes charts and tactics.
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Former Forrester analyst and founder of B2B Paradigm, Andy Hoar, in collaboration with Vertical Web Media brought a much-needed conference to B2B companies attempting to “reinvent for a digital-first economy”.
Over 700 B2B commerce practitioners from manufacturers and distributors of all sizes and specialties convened in Chicago for three days to evolve or begin their digital commerce strategy.
The session and workshop packed event left no room to question “should I” or “shouldn’t I”. It was all about the “how”.
Needless to say, Andy Hoar put on quite a show. With a keynote from innovation icon Clayton Christensen, and multiple tracks and workshops spanning commerce best practices, selling on Amazon, and stacking up against Amazon, content management, information architecture and AI, the message was clear: B2B commerce has arrived. It’s big, it’s urgent, and its got to get done.
Key Takeaways:
B2B buyers demand remarkable customer experience
There is no hiding from the truth: today’s buyers are demanding contextual and personalized buying experiences, rich with product information, relevant pricing and recommendations, and frictionless fulfillment options. When they are not getting this experience from one source, what do they do? They go somewhere else. It happened in B2C and it is happening in B2B. While B2B is different, the trend is the same – innovate or die. It’s cold, it’s callous, and it’s real.
Marketplaces are eating B2B manufacturers and distributors for lunch
Have you heard about Amazon Business? It went from $1B to $10B inless than five years. It continues to grow, and no business is off limits. Chinese manufacturers use marketplaces such as Amazon to bypass the distributors and sell directly to consumers. Alibaba and Tmall flooded the market with cheap merchandise and squeezed out the middleman. It’s all about stocking as many SKUs as possible at the lowest price with a two-day or same day delivery. How does one withstand a tsunami called marketplaces? The answer is simple: innovate and disrupt the status quo through value-added services and rich product information.
If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will
We live in a world where most things become commodities. How does one innovate? Pivoting your business model is a must. One of the conference speakers, Darryl Sharper of Arrow Electronics, spoke about a “barn and bank” concept where a distributor can continue to sell products, but offer services such as warranties, financing, servicing, etc. to differentiate its business and stand up to marketplaces. For distributors, it’s about starting with your buyers’ needs, and working back to offer a solution that will really differentiate your business. For manufacturers, it is all about solving channel conflict, flexing their direct to consumer (D2C) muscle and innovating based on direct customer feedback.
B2B commerce isn’t a destination. It is a journey.
The notion of commerce as an iterative process is familiar to seasoned commerce professionals, and it rang true throughout the sessions in the B2BNext conference. It was a constant reminder of what it takes to be successful on the digital journey. Implementing a platform is just the tip of the iceberg that B2B businesses take on when they implement a commerce platform. The initiative must come from the top down to be a success. It mandates a cultural shift in the organization that requires new processes, new skillsets, new ways of going about the business. The importance of training employees to leverage the platform and customers to order online cannot be underestimated. The entire journey can be frustrating, fun and scary at the same time, and becomes a second nature for those that have commerce DNA among the team.
Technology providers are still “vendors”
Many B2B attendees came to the conference to learn how to future-proof their business, yet most were reluctant to engage with technology providers in the exhibit hall or workshops. There was a clear divide between vendors and B2B businesses. It begs the question why? Many technology providers are happy to offer a piece of advice and lessons learned without any commitments. This show offered a great opportunity to meet with multiple technology providers and get answers to pertinent questions, yet it felt like few B2B players leveraged it.
Convergence of commerce and IoT is a fact
A pleasant surprise found at B2BNext was around commerce and IoT convergence. This wasn’t the case a few years ago when B2B commerce was starting to take off in a major way. When Bosch, a 103-year-old multinational engineering and electronics company with $7B in revenue and 400,000 employees decided to reimagine its own business and innovate, they not only enabled their products with IoT capabilities, but also built an entire ecosystem for enabling developers to build apps around these products. This came from Davie Sweis of Bosch who shared his story about this endeavor and shared how the focus on developer community is his top priority.
What were your key takeaways?
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