Dan Renda, head of global ecommerce, Siemens Healthineers

The increasing global demand for such products, he adds, coincides with the growth in the manufacturer’s ecommerce transactions. To maintain that kind of growth, Siemens Healthineers is continuing on a path to make it easier for its customers to purchase online — while dealing with challenges, Renda said in a general session presentation at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition last week.

Overall, elective surgeries declined in number during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hurt the imaging business, he said. Since then, business is back on track, and the company is focusing on its ecommerce strategy.

Siemens Healthineers sells products ranging from COVID tests to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.  The company’s ecommerce sales primarily cover consumables. They include small laboratory instruments and chemicals used with its complex medical imaging and laboratory diagnostics machines. Additionally, Siemens also sells service contracts, warranties, education, training and certification materials online.

“A lot of our ecommerce revenue comes from smaller products” that support the machinery/testing processes, Renda said. “It’s these smaller products that are a high-volume type of business.”

Keep it simple

But, while enabling customers to buy online, Renda cautions against offering an overabundance of tools.

“It’s really looking to what makes the most sense and ‘why do I want to receive this particular market?’” Renda said.

The majority of Siemens Healthineers’ ecommerce platform revenue is coming from customer purchases transacted through SAP Hybris. It’s an ecommerce platform that business software provider SAP has used as the core of its Commerce Cloud ecommerce software.

Dan Renda, left, sifts with Digital Commerce 360 B2B editor Paul Demery.

“We have a very deep integration with SAP on the back end,” Renda said, referring to enterprise resource planning software. “And we can offer the customer a very tightly integrated process where we are getting the dynamic pricing from the back end to your environment.

“We can show the customer all their orders placed offline or online, and we have the ability to allow the customer to check the status,” he said.

Making ecommerce as ‘frictionless as possible’

Renda noted that, ideally, the less involvement needed from the IT department, the better. Especially when entering new markets with ecommerce, it may deploy a lighter version of its ecommerce software to test the market without integrating with an enterprise resource planning system, then connect to the ERP if the company decides the market is worth developing.

“If that site gains traction, it’s a great way to justify an investment or further level of integration,” he said.

Siemens Healthineers recently rolled out the Spryker marketplace software suite as part of its ecommerce offerings. The goal is to make the ecommerce experience as frictionless as possible, Renda said.

In addition, Siemens Healthineers wants to make it easier for its biggest customers to place online orders.

Large customers “don’t want to have to log onto our web shop,” Renda said. “One of the things we’ve done is give the customer the ability to create an order template. This can be created from prior orders. It’s just a list of commonly ordered products/materials that have been taken by this particular user.”

Saving over 60,000 hours of manual tasks

Also, Renda said customers can maintain standing orders using scheduling and payment options.

“So, they might say, every 30 days, just send me these quantities,” Renda said. “And they know it’ll show up on their doorstep.”

Online order flow efficiencies result in savings, Renda said.

“We can document, a conservative estimate, that globally we’ve saved over 60,000 hours of manual effort,” Renda said. “That’s one way to look at return on investment.”

Without rekeying orders, Renda says, Siemens Healthineers can have a better degree of care quality.

“The customer can see the status that comes from contract delivery orders,” Renda said. “There’s an element of customer satisfaction that’s affordable.”

Hospitals are a main customer segment for the company, and many of their purchases are not suited for online transactions, Renda said. Moreover, a customer’s purchase transaction for large, high-ticket products like MRI machines is typically conducted with the help of consultants and engineers alongside Healthineers’ sales team.

“But we want to move into a world where there is more of that buyer journey” online, he said.

One goal for now is to help customers plan equipment configurations online.

“We want to do a better job on our part to keep track of where our customers are — wherever they are — and really have a more cohesive online life,” he said.

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Mark Pickett, vice president, cross-channel growth, MSC Industrial Supply Co.

“It’s not up to me to decide how a customer engages us,” Pickett said during a June 9 general session presentation at the EnvisionB2B event held last week in Chicago.

Pickett added that B2B sellers must realize omnichannel has become the standard, not the exception, in the B2B ecommerce world. To underscore his point, Pickett cited McKinsey & Co. research that found B2B buyers like having the option of engaging across channels. They like using in-person, remote and digital self-serve options, depending on the situation.

Pickett said MSC’s customers expect the distributor of about 2 million industrial products to be available on several channels and offer a unified experience across them. That means it’s essential for MSC to present consistency in product displays, offerings and customer service.

However, achieving that consistency does not happen easily, Pickett said. It requires breaking down silos, so all parts of a B2B seller’s organization are aware of what the others are telling customers and potential customers. It’s no longer acceptable, for example, for the marketing and sales departments never to talk to each other.

MSC distributes metalworking and maintenance, repair and operations supplies to industrial customers.

Quality online experiences matter

But just offering omnichannel options is not enough, Pickett said. Many of MSC’s customers are small businesses, Pickett said. And they expect their B2B online experiences to be as good as those they get when they shop online as consumers. That means, among other things, offering them online personalization to make their browsing more efficient and more enjoyable.

Pickett said MSC’s ongoing digital transformation goals include driving decreased cart abandonment, improved lead management, increased cross-selling and upselling, increased customer retention and improved seller productivity.

Research shows suppliers that provide outstanding digital experience to buyers are more than twice as likely to become primary suppliers than sellers that offer poor experiences. Those offering exceptional digital experiences are also 70% more likely to become primary suppliers than those offering fair online experiences.

He added that customers want more: speed, transparency and expertise. He says B2B sellers must offer a full suite of communication options — including live chat — that the best B2C retailers provide.

More about MSC

Earlier this month, MSC acquired Engman-Taylor Co., a Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin-based metalworking tools and supplies distributor.

Under the agreement, Engman-Taylor will continue to do business under its current name after becoming an MSC-owned company. The company’s president and owner, Rick Star, will continue to lead the approximately 90-employee business. The acquisition is expected to be roughly neutral to MSC’s fiscal 2022 earnings and slightly accretive to fiscal 2023 earnings, MSC reported.

In April, MSC hired its first chief digital officer. It named to the role John Hill, who most recently led digital transformation at workwear manufacturer Carhartt. He will lead MSC’s ecommerce and overall digital operations. Hill also served in executive roles at such companies as Grainger, General Motors and IBM.

At MSC, ecommerce sales of $523.2 million accounted for 60.7% of total sales of $862.5 million for the fiscal second quarter ended Feb. 26, 2022. MSC’s corporate name is MSC Industrial Direct Co. Inc., but it generally goes by the name of its main business unit, MSC Industrial Supply Co.

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Despite the likelihood of a recession, Mahaney told attendees he doesn’t expect it to rival the early 2000s’ dot-com bubble collapse or the 2007 to 2009 housing crisis.

Investment analysts Mark Mahaney, left, and Michael Brown, right, appear with Digital Commerce 360 senior vice president Mark Brohan at EnvisionB2B.

But how does recession affect investment?

“Recession is a dirty word in venture capitalism,” said Michael Brown, founder and general partner at Bowery Capital, who joined Mahaney in a general session presentation on internet investment trends. Brown told the crowd that the beginning of 2022 showed a slowdown of investment in online marketplaces. But despite rising interest rates, there are opportunities worth pursuing.

“The job of venture investors is to find interesting assets,” Brown said. “Innovation is still happening, and that is why I still think it’s a great time to start a business.”

Existing investments can prove to be more complicated, Brown said. It is a difficult time to raise money. “Many of these companies raise money at valuations that are significantly ahead of what they’re going to be able to achieve,” Brown said. “And it’s going to be mostly a down round to what your [company’s] last valuation is at.”

Hot sectors

“There aren’t any deals coming into the public markets now,” Mahaney told attendees. “I think they’re just putting it off until the end of this year.”

Despite the turbulent economy, some sectors are appealing to investors. Transportation and logistics are attractive areas for venture dollars, Brown said.

“These are pretty difficult businesses with tough take rates and margin profiles, but there are businesses like Convoy or Long Haul Trucking doing well — there are tens of these companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said, referring to internet-based trucking services.

Retail is also an attractive investment, Brown said. In particular, the distribution layer of retailing.

Brown also noted manufacturing marketplace Xometry, which in 2021 purchased ThomasNet, a product sourcing, supplier selection and digital marketing solutions provider, as another company benefiting from the digitization of the manufacturing industry. (Randy Altschuler, CEO of Xometry, discussed his company’s growth strategy in an EnvisionB2B keynote “fireside chat” on Thursday.)

Sectors on the other end of the spectrum include staffing agency ventures — such as companies training workforces in industries such as HVAC.

“These businesses are so difficult to scale because of localization problems — you have to have a lot of geographic density to be able to actually build a company quickly. And it’s usually a lower-skilled worker, which is a different margin and pricing dynamic there,” Brown said. “And these types of businesses tend to break up. It hasn’t been a very attractive market for venture capitalist investments.”

It’s going to be an uphill climb for companies to stand out, Mahaney said. He noted that logistics companies will be competing on tight level as one example.

“It’s going to be tough to see how companies really differentiate themselves from competitors,” he said. “So, instead of delivering 18 packages in 25 minutes versus only being able to deliver 14 packages — it’s going to come down to that sort of level of precision.”

Long-term focus

The recession will be a great opportunity for companies to plan their long-term focus, Mahaney said. “By building a better cost structure during these testing conditions, I think companies will become more attractive investment opportunities,” he said.

“Most of our criticisms lie in the nuances — what we pass on are opportunities where it’s probably the right idea, but it might not be the right people,” Bowery Capital’s Brown said.

Eighty percent of investments Brown does are with entrepreneurs that solved a problem while working at a medium or large-sized company and they wanted to start a business without being hampered by management or digitization issues, he said.

Investors make money by buying the highest quality investments out there, Mahaney said. “We use valuation risk by buying the highest quality assets when they’re on sale,” he said.

It’s important to use an economic downturn to plan ahead for the eventual upswing. “Teams that look out [plan for the next] two or three years will be the ecommerce engine marketplace winners.”

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One way to achieve those goals is through data analytics. Addressing an audience during a keynote “fireside chat” at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition in Chicago Friday, Rob Birse, vice president, Global Ecommerce for Kellogg Co., talked about the multinational food manufacturer’s use of data to create a better value proposition for its customers that goes beyond purchasing through digital channels.

Rob Birse of Kellogg’s, left, sits with Paul do Forno of Deloitte Digital in a “fireside chat” at EnvisionB2B.

Capitalizing on digital data

As a manufacturer, Kellogg collects data on the retail outlets that sell its food products. By analyzing what the company knows about a retailer’s operation through in-store and B2B sales data, Kellogg can make recommendations to help a retailer improve its operations.

“Our data strategy is to make data more in the moment to create a value proposition for our customers,” Birse said. “Use of data is about the insights that can be gathered from it, and we have a lot of dynamic data available to us.”

Building on that point, Paul do Forno, managing director for Deloitte Digital, who chatted with Birse for the keynote, added that before a company can use data to make great recommendations to its B2B customers, it must first clean up the data so it can drive insights from it.

As part of its strategy to use data to help its retailers, Kellogg uses sales data from retailers, especially small retailers such as bodegas, to recommend what products should be on the shelf, as well as promotions that can stimulate sales while aligning with Kellogg’s social goals.

A culture of innovation

Kellogg, for example, has a goal of providing millions of meals to needy individuals globally. In some instances, the company has developed promotions with its retailers to donate food to the needy for each in-store purchase. “We view this strategy as the currency of promotions,” Birse said.

Another way Kellogg is pushing its ecommerce business forward is by building what Birse described as a culture of innovation. The first step in such a strategy is to ensure that management and employees dedicate enough time to build that culture; otherwise, efforts to create it can lag, Birse said.

A key part of building a culture of innovation is allowing for an opportunity to fail, which Birse said is not a bad outcome. “Failure helps build the culture of innovation,” he said.

Failures need to be discussed so companies can learn what went wrong and what they can learn from them, Birse said.

Creating a culture of innovation also requires a company to set expectations around its efforts to innovate, do Forno said. Those expectations, he added, should include a change management strategy.

Changing an industry

Another aspect of Kellogg’s efforts to create a culture of innovation is believing in strategies once they are set in motion. “My notion is not to challenge a strategy once it is set, but to turn that innovation into action,” Birse said. “If you believe you can change an industry with your strategy, then you are onto something.”

Seeking out third-party technology partners is another way Kellogg is fostering its culture of innovation. Birse said that Kellogg uses the power of its brand to recruit technology partners and build solutions that can change an industry. “That’s why you invest in technology partners,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with joint ventures.”

Getting B2B buyers comfortable with adopting digital channels is another key area where Kellogg is focusing its attention. Helping buyers know how much to purchase at any given time and how to base purchasing decisions on production levels can play a huge role in helping buyers become comfortable with ecommerce, Birse said.

“There are so many ways to identify customer pain points and use that knowledge to solve problems and apply technology, he added.

Peter Lucas is a Highland Park, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.

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Barry Litwin, ,CEO, Global Industrial Co.

The digital sales channel has become so pervasive, Global Industrial Co. CEO Barry Litwin told attendees at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition, the company no longer sees it as a competitive threat to its sales force.

“There is plenty of market share out there,” Litwin said during a keynote “fireside chat” at the conference.

Despite the opportunities that ecommerce presents, selling digitally is a complex issue for a manufacturer, Litwin added. As a result, Global Industrial has developed a customer-centric strategy centered on personalized commerce and enriched content tailored to individual customers’ needs.

Two pillars of the strategy:

1. Creating exceptional self-service experiences for customers who prefer to purchase online with minimal assistance.
2. Creating a high-touch experience for large enterprise customers who value more interaction in a seller/buyer relationship.

“Customers are indispensable business partners, so make their experiences great,” Litwin said.

Customer retention and feedback

To improve customer retention and drive sales though its ecommerce channel, Litwin said Global Industrial dissected its business to not only understand its revenue and profits stream from ecommerce, but also to create a vision to drive its digital sales the next several years.

Barry Litwin, CEO, Global Industrial Co., discusses his company’s growth strategy in a June 10 “fireside chat” with Digital Commerce 360 B2B editor Paul Demery at EnvisionB2B.

Central to creating that vision was identifying ways to remove friction from the customer experience.

“We began listening to customers to learn about their needs and what friction they experienced to raise customer satisfaction levels,” Litwin said.

The company used that feedback to learn how it can better compete against the likes of Amazon Business and other marketplaces. Along with ecommerce sites, Amazon Business and marketplaces are the preferred options for purchasing, compared to EDI or punchout B2B, according to Digital Commerce 360 research.

In addition to gathering customer feedback, Global Industrial looked at its strengths and weaknesses. While efficiently shipping big and bulky items was identified as a strength, the company realized its needed to pay more attention to areas of its ecommerce business that had been neglected for years. Those include marketing, getting sales reps to engage more in merchandising, and gathering price intelligence, Litwin said.

To address those issues, Global Industrial hired five key executives over the past 36 months.

Personnel and other big players

“We looked for people that can embrace and affect change, and that were nimble and flexible when it came to decision making,” Litwin said. “That leadership has created amazing engagement within the company.”

On the technology side, Global Industrial has developed ecommerce dashboards that provide sales reps with tools to increase customer retention and sales.

“We provide tools that tell sales reps where products fit,” said Litwin.

The company has also begun identifying vertical markets where it can become a bigger player, such as health care, multi-family, nonprofits and group purchasing organizations.

“We see GPOs as more of a long-term play,” Litwin said. “But as we move into verticals, content, product and product assortment are going be areas we can leverage to create value in these markets.”

The right kind of communication

Communicating with buyers on their terms is another key element of Global Industrial’s digital strategy. Increasingly, consumers want sales representatives to communicate through digital channels such as chat and email, as opposed to the phone, as they are more comfortable communicating through those means.

“More and more, buyers want sales reps to chat online or communicate by email,’ Litwin said. “Buyers also want order-tracking information, not just for parcels, but less than truck load shipments. We can now include that information in emails.”

When it comes to making less than truckload shipping more efficient, Litwin said the company is investing in warehouse automation. That will help reduce the amount of walk time needed to fulfill an order.

“Walk time is the greatest time expenditure in a warehouse,” Litwin said. “When a distribution center has the right product in the right aisle, it can improve efficiency and reduce walk time. We are continually looking at way to improve big and bulk shipping/LTL shipping by making the warehouse more efficient.”

Another prong in Global Industrial’s customer-centric strategy is the development of a knowledge center. The center serves as a destination for buyers to access product data and videos. They detail how a product works to put product information into perspective. The center also includes buying guides and articles that subject-matter experts write.

“This has been a big investment for us and was something we had to do, actually,” Litwin told attendees. “We want to take it to the next level by creating more community-oriented experiences, such as creating two-way dialog with customers,” Litwin said. “There is a connection between the content and where we are taking it.”

Peter Lucas is a Highland Park, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.

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2023 U.S. B2B Ecommerce Market Report

Analysis of the sales, growth and trends shaping U.S. B2B ecommerce. Includes over 10 charts, extensive analysis on digital expectations, marketplaces and expansion, and case studies and executive interviews with WD-40, Ecolab and Caterpillar. 

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That was the message Mark Brohan, senior vice president, B2B and market research at Digital Commerce 360 brought to attendees of the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition in Chicago on Thursday morning.

“It’s not just big business, it’s mainstream business,” Brohan said, referring to B2B ecommerce sales.

U.S. B2B commerce sales grew almost 18% compared with 2020, reaching $1.64 trillion, or about 12.5% of all U.S. manufacturing and distributor sales. The growth rate for B2B ecommerce in 2021 was significantly faster than the 15.2% growth rate for all U.S. manufacturing and distributor sales, which reached about $13.1 trillion in 2021, Digital Commerce 360 finds.

Marketplaces are mainstream

Within B2B ecommerce, Brohan said, marketplaces are now soundly part of the mainstream.

Digital Commerce 360 estimates marketplace sales in 2021 represented 0.4% of all B2B sales and 0.5% of all electronic B2B sales. That compares to 0.2% of each category in 2020. In a few years, Brohan thinks marketplace sales could grow to 2% to 4% of overall B2B sales.

Mark Brohan, senior vice president, B2B and Market Research, Digital Commerce 360, shares B2B ecommerce growth figures in his opening remarks at EnvisionB2B.

“I have never seen an ecommerce channel on the B2B side or the B2C side grow faster than that,” Brohan said.

Most of the growth in ecommerce marketplace sales is probably due to the growth of the Amazon Business platform, Brohan said. But that represents an opportunity for other marketplace operators, as the marketplaces improve and more B2B customers take to the idea of buying on marketplaces, he added.

“The one thing about Amazon Business — just like Amazon on the consumer side — is they raise the user experience,” Brohan said.  “They raise the bar and … that basically forces all the rest of us to come up to the same experience that we’re getting on Amazon.”

The good news for sellers, Brohan said, is that B2B sellers know their customers and have inventory that Amazon will never have. They could use that knowledge to sell successfully on Amazon. If not, Amazon’s example will provide valuable information about what digital-first buyers want and expect.

Understand your buyers

Brohan explained that it’s important to understand the nature of digital-first digital buyers.

“Who you’re serving out there as a digital-first customer may include a dinosaur like me,” Brohan said.

But as the older generation retires, he added, buying decisions are increasingly made by teams. They’re also made across different teams inside an organization. Among other reasons, this could means buyers might now take up to a month to research digital buying decisions, Brohan said.

Brohan said buyers want to know whether a retailer has the inventory they need at a competitive price. And buyers want to know if it has online support tools like recommendations and supply-chain tools, which can help buyers make purchase decisions.

Digital Commerce 360 research also found:

• 32% of B2B buyers rank ecommerce as the single most effective channel.
• 51% of B2B buyers use an ecommerce site if they are attracted to an excellent user experience.
• 56% of B2B sellers report 11% or more in sales growth in 2021.
• 50% of B2B sellers anticipate significant challenges in securing the funds they need to improve their businesses.

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In a keynote address at Digital Commerce 360’s EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition in Chicago on Thursday morning, Randy Altschuler, chief executive of Xometry Inc., an online marketplace for on-demand manufacturing, talked about how the marketplace is using data to match buyers looking for an on-demand manufacturer and provide them with an instant price quote. Launched in 2014, Xometry connects thousands of manufacturers with more than 10,000 customers, including BMW AG and General Electric Co.

Randy Altschuler, left, CEO of Xometry, joins Digital Commerce 360 B2B editor Paul Demery in a keynote “fireside chat” at EnvisionB2B.

“Pricing can take hours, even days for buyers looking for on-demand manufacturing, because they have to contact multiple manufacturers to determine price and lead times for their products,” Altschuler said. “We use data to create instant pricing for suppliers and buyers.”

Proprietary pricing algorithms

Xometry’s secret sauce for determining instant pricing, Altschuler said, are proprietary algorithms the use artificial intelligence to develop accurate pricing for on-demanding manufacturing. The algorithms analyze the features of the product to be built. They then compare them to products with similar features to determine a price.

“Pricing is a hard challenge, and more data reduces the risk of pricing red herrings,” Altschuler said. “What we do is give manufacturers a price they can use to win the job.”

To receive a price quote, a buyer on the Xometry marketplace, such as a BMW engineer, uploads a 3D computer-aided design model of the product it needs manufactured into Xometry’s online quoting engine. Next, the buyer selects several criteria including the manufacturing process, the material such as aluminum or polycarbonate, and the type of metal finish or other special treatments. Within minutes, Xometry uses its own data on the manufacturing costs to quote a price.

Xometry then forwards the customer’s order to a manufacturer in its network that its platform recognizes as most suitable and available. The manufacturer then decides whether to accept the order.

“All use cases are slightly different. There’s the material used to manufacture the item, the finish,” Altschuler said. “Being able to get an instant price quote solves a lot of problems for buyers and helps manufacturers optimize their production capacity.”

Having access to a marketplace that helps optimize production capacity is important in the on-demand manufacturing space. Many small and mid-sized on-demand manufacturers are overly dependent of local customers, which limits their potential customer base.

“For us, it’s important to understand where the pain points are for sellers, as well as buyers,” Altschuler said. “We are a technology company at our root and will always take that approach.”

With many buyers struggling the past year to overcome disruptions within the supply chain, Altschuler said a marketplace like Xometry can help buyers achieve supply chain resilience by enabling them to find manufacturers with the capacity to fill their order.

“We have manufacturing capacity here in the United States, but the challenge for the manufacturers with capacity is connecting with buyers,” Altschuler said. “A marketplace like Xometry helps buyers identify where pockets of manufacturing capacity that fits their needs exist.”

For manufacturers, the benefit of a marketplace that helps buyers find a manufacturer with capacity enables them to improve the buyer experience.

“As a marketplace, the more you provide value to buyers and manufacturers, the more likely they are to stick,” Altschuler said.  “Our gross margins are growing because out data is more accurate.”

Peter Lucas is a Highland Park, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.   

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When it comes to leveraging technology to create a better buyer experience, and in turn gain a competitive advantage, Macpherson said Grainger looks to create high-touch experiences rooted deeply in product knowledge and customer experience.

For example, when it comes to products pages, Grainger filters products according to the buyer type. A janitor searching for a flashlight will have different needs than a miner or first responder, according to Macpherson. Populating a product page with extraneous content and items irrelevant to the buyer creates a bad buying experience.

Offering the right products that fit their need, whether it is energy-efficiency or a price point, creates a better buyer experience, Macpherson added.

In addition, reducing the amount of time buyers spend scrolling on a page to find a product makes it easier to differentiate brands on the page, find products and understand products.

“In order to serve customers well, you need to get the product and customer information right,” Macpherson said at EnvisionB2B. “The aim is to make it easy to understand the product, the product assortment and how the products on the page differ from one another.”

By doing so, Grainger ensures buyers have the necessary information they need to make a competent buying decision.

“Our goal is to be better at marketing products to our customers than anyone else,” Macpherson said.

Results affirm the message

The results of Grainger’s approach to ecommerce technology has been impressive. In 2021, more than 75% of the distributor’s $13 billion in total sales were digital. In addition, Grainger has more than 4.5 million active customers and carries 30 million products on its ecommerce site and 1.5 million products stocked in distribution centers.

“We would not be as successful as we are without leveraging technology,” said Macpherson at EnvisionB2B. He added that he expects the percentage of sales made digitally to exceed 80% in the next year.

A key element of making Grainger’s digital strategy work is that all employees are aligned with the philosophy of creating digital solutions that serve buyers.

“A better customer experience creates more sales,” said Macpherson.

Leadership approach

At a higher-level, Macpherson said sellers that are successful selling digitally are the ones that employ the right leadership approach when it comes addressing customer pain points. To illustrate his point, he said Grainger recently hired a chief technology officer and a chief product officer.

While the CTO handles the traditional back-end technology issues, he works in close coordination with the chief product officer, who oversees the prioritization of business and technology.

“It’s important to pair the product team with people that our know business,” Macpherson said at EnvisionB2B.

Grainger also uses its technology and product teams to evaluate how customers use their digital solutions. It can then tweak those solutions to provide a better buyer experience.

The company is also using technology to improve online buying experiences through automation. It is making its distribution centers more efficient, reducing the time spent fulfilling and shipping products to its customers.

“That’s one way we are solving the problem of aligning technology and operations,” Macpherson said.

Overall, it is important that senior executives take the time to review the company’s technology and how customers use it, he said.

“It’s important for leaders to unlock technology to solve problems because technology is not built in a vacuum. It must align with operations,” he concluded. “We’re not spending more on technology now. We are spending on it in the right places.”

Peter Lucas is a Highland Park, Illinois-based freelance journalist covering business and technology.

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