okay welcome everybody I think it's timeto get startedtoday's webinar is going to be on how toincrease adoption of your b2b e-commercesite my name is Scott Frey Meijer I'llbe your host today I'm with the teamhere at you know log for those of youwho don't know you know log is aprovider of e-commerce solutions tomid-market b2b companies but we're nothere today to talk about the you knowlog ecommerce platform instead we wantto be able to give you guys a someadvice some practical experience sharedby a customer of ours on how you couldincrease adoption of your b2b e-commercesite obviously this is a very topical wehave a lot of distributors in the marketwho still struggle to get maybe 2 3 5percent of their online sales onlinerevenue or I should say total revenuecoming from their online channel theones who are really doing well might bean excess of you know 20 25 percent andyou know best-in-class for somecompanies in our industry might be 50percent of revenue coming from theironline channels so what can you be doingto help increase adoption of your sitewithin your own customer base and drivemore prospects to the site as wellbefore we get started before I introducemy guest speaker just a couple remindersfirst we will have a copy of theseslides and a recording of the webinarafter this event we'll send it out toeverybody who registered also we doencourage this to be interactive eventhough your microphones are muted rightnow you can at any time submit aquestion via the chat or questionsdialog box in your GoToWebinar panelthere on your screen so we encouragethat if we don't get to your questionduring the actual webinar we'll have asession for Q&A at the end and try toget everybody's questions answered okaywith that I'd like to introduce ourspeaker for today Mike powers Mike isthe e-commerce manager at Hill and marksa you know log customerhe's been there for about three years orso and has a quite an extensivebackground as a digital strategistworking for multiple firms so Mikewelcome to today's presentation heyScottteam a you know a lot again folks onlineI'm happy to be here terrific hey Mikeso I'm gonna ask you before you get intoyour experience and how you guys droveincreased adoption of your b2be-commerce site this past year maybejust give us a brief background on Hilland marks soa little bit about your company and moreimportant could you share with everybodywhat what were you guys trying toaccomplish now everybody has a differentgoal when they're in the e-commerce gamesome are trying to increase market sharesome are trying to decrease their costper transaction what were you guyslooking to do and I'll just hand thingsover to you at this point fantasticgreat so Scott he remarks we are a thirdgeneration family run business inupstate New York a we service were basedin the the capital region of upstate NewYork just west of Albany we service westto Buffalo north to Plattsburgh in theCanadian border and just north of NewYork City and so we've been in businessfor 112 years and about three years agothe decision was made by ownership herethat hilum marx needed to be positionedfor the new b2b buyer digital NATO'sfolks that are researching and lookingfor information using the web and sothat is a when I was brought on as thee-commerce manager for Lamarck's greatand I will yep I will go ahead and youshould have control of the keyboard andmouse at this point I'll stop moving mymouse around and you should be able todrive the presentation from here GreatScott thank you so on the next slidehere give me one moment should be heyScott it's uh here we arealright so here is a framework of thethe hill marx ecommerce journey that Iwas part of so as you can see here inMarch of 2015 is when the company madethe decision to hire an e-commercemanager now a month prior to my hiringthere was some big news online aboutthem mobile get and an update by Googlewhich meant that websites needed to beresponsive for smartphones and so rightbefore I started there was a lot ofpress and PR about websites needing tobe used on smartphones and so when I wasbrought on though the most importantthings for me was to find a vendor thatwould allow for our website to be viewedon smartphones and tablets at the timeand learning more about the business inthe current infrastructure we were on infour store front platform okay and youknow for us looking at the the platformthat mobile responsiveness was amust-have as well as the rich productdata we were using a another vendor toprovide the product data on ourstorefront website and the goal was tofind a vendor in the marketplace thatcould provide both b2b e-commerceplatform but also help us with that dataenrichment process so with that beingsaid the evaluation started and in inMay of 2015 and happy to say we wereable to sign on with you know log inSeptember of 2015 so that build processfor the folks that are on the line thatare wondering what that process lookslike how long it takesI know MDM modern distributionmanagement comm put out a kind of asurvey of distributors saying that atypical build phase would be 12 to 14months that is exactly where we fell inline with our build process and againworking with the EULA team to understandSSP which was our ERP and alsounderstanding some of the requirementsthat in full of our customers had hadand so that 14 mil 14 month build tookplace and I would say in September of2016 is when we started the process ofbringing on some beta customers so oneof the recommendations I have in youre-commerce journey is for the customersthat have unique functionality or needsto get them on as early as possible andso when we were rolling out ourfunctionality for test you know I wantedto reach out to some of our vendorsthem to participate in testing of thefunctionality to get their buy-in andthat made us feel comfortable with goinglive in December of 2016 so once we wentlive all of the 2017 was a year ofcustomer onboarding in trial and errorokay and so you know being a distributorthat had a platform that we reallydidn't analyze the data of the traffichow people are using it we wanted tomake sure that all of last year we woulddo things that would allow us to getintelligence on how the site works whichmeans implementing Google Analytics andin my taste actually hiring a personthat would manage the the backend of ourwebsite and including the product dataso that happened in March of 2017 andhere we are today on the call and youknow having approximately 25% of ourrevenue going through our web and happywith those results so let me segue sojust to start out with kind of a win youknow we were able to target roughlythree hundred and eighty three customeraccounts that prior to going live withyou in law were calling in their ordersemailing their orders in in some casesfaxing orders in so of those threehundred and eighty-three accounts thatrepresented 1.3 million dollars ofonline revenue floral and marks and Ican attribute that to working not onlyinternally with our sales team andmanagement and customer service butmaking sure our customers were part ofthe process as well so the goal of thispresentation or or this case studywebinar whatever you want to call it isfor me to share with those that are onthe call today that may be starting thejourney or have just gone live and areand what they should do so I want toprovide as much information on what wedid here to share with the folks on thephone todayso really the the customer onboardingstrategy for 2017 was really simple itwas internal and external what were thethings we were going to do to get buy-infrom the internal team as well as theexternal team and so as you can see onthis slide you know the the internal andexternal strategy was broken into Iwould say four silos for each ok the toppriority internally was making sure thatour customer service team wascomfortable with the website 50% of thisbusiness orders were coming in throughour customer service team it wasimperative for me to make sure that Iwas bringing them along on this journeyso whether whether it was as theThursday customer service morningmeeting where I could go in and sharefunctionality with them I did whateverit needed to be done to introduce thewebsite to them in bits and pieces sothat they would get comfortable with itwith that being said towards the endyou-you-you're provided a staged websiteso each of our system ER service folkswere are given a credential orregistered on our stage website and wereable to take five orders and place themthrough the stage website with nothaving the fear of breaking something orplacing a live order so again gettingthem comfortable with placing orders onour stage website was a huge win for usand as you can see I would say the 101advanced training and some of the otherthings that I'll touch base in thispresentation were all steps we tookplace to really get people comfortablewith the site externally those were ourbig wins when it came to how we wereengaging with our customers and what wedid to get them interested in our siteso let's get down to actually specificexamples as I just mentioned to youwe wanted to make sure people werecomfortable with the website so whetherit was customer service meetings whetherit was when the sales reps were at ageneral sealed meeting and it wasvendors in-house demoing products well Ihad a breakout session where I wasactually reviewing the functionality ofthe website the ability to compareproducts if a customer places in orderand they want to share it with asupervisor or a co-worker I wanted tomake sure that I was showing all of thatfunctionality as much as possible to myinternal team okay and as I mentionedhaving the team be comfortable notfearing breaking anything getting on toour stage website and using it as atraining tool now the advanced trainingthis is where you know we had fiberstake five to ten customers that hadunique functionality so for example wehave a university a large Ivy Leagueuniversity in upstate New York that hasapproximately 60 buildings on campuseach building has one manager thatorders for hey landmarks so what theywanted to do is make sure that if anyoneat that building is placing an orderthat those orders would go to thatapprover and so again doing specializedtraining internally for my team to showhow customers would use the multi levelapprovers and also their shopping listsagain reviewing everything with as manypeople internally as possible and sorealizing 50 percent of orders are beingcalled into customer service and 30percent through sales rep we needed tomake sure our first line of defensethese people were comfortable witheverything that we were launching to ourcustomer baseso from internal to customer facing andexternal so I was fortunate enough tohave during the winter breakactually spring break one of our topsales reps son who goes to school up inPlattsburgh New York with looking for aninternship and I was trying to figureout a way he wasn't interested in doingsales he has a marketing degree fromSUNY Plattsburgh and I was trying tofigure out ways how can we use somebodythat wants to be part of our team andright away creating a position customeronboarding specialist that was somethingthat myself in our digital specialistscame up with to take this intern and saylisten we are going to train you up onall the functionality of the websitewe're going to also make sure that wetrain you on frequently asked questionsor maybe errors or issues that aretypical Long'susers of our website and we're gonna letyou loose and put you on the road andthat's exactly what we did so we tookthis person and when it came todeploying him to the mouth of the fieldwe were making sure that he was thepoint of contact for onboardingcustomers making sure he's addressingany comments or concerns and so that wasa big win for us on those days duringthe week where he was not on the road webrought him into our multi training amulti-purpose training room and he usedour YouTube channel and created one totwo minute videos on the functionalitythat we are deploying and trainingcustomers on and uploaded those throughour YouTube channel and one of thebenefits of that is now customer servicein sales reps and but customer has aquestion on how to order through theservice rep customer service rep or salethe guide can quickly send that link tothe youtube video or we have somecustomer service reps in the signatureof their email they have how to registerhow to shop how to create a shoppinglist they embed those links in theiremail to make that seamless migrationpossible and so when it came to thecustomer onboarding specialist we saw ahuge spike and not only users we're juston the website but also new accountsthat attributed to that one point threeeight million dollarsso the through to the success of thatonboarding specialist we thought whatare some of the other ways we can getmore and more customers on board againback of them back in my mind and Irepeated three times on this call fiftypercent of our orders come throughcustomer service they are first line ofdefense in some cases our customers havea very tight relationship with our repswhat can we do to get them to buy in andkind of move that needle for us so welaunched a customer service event withwhich was by far our most successfulpromotion what we wanted to do is takethe folks that were calling in theirowners guide them on our website how toregister show them where there are myitems or their products that they'rebuying and walk them through how toplace an order online now the goal wasto incentivize the customer service repon that first order to get themregistered and have the customer placein order so we created a spin where itwas approximately you know five dollarsfor that first order plate and then forthe next two to three orders that arepleased through the website by thatcustomer the this customer service repwas incentivized on the goal was to getthis user who is comfortable withcalling in orders to have somebody walkthrough how to register even if nexttime they call back in that customerservice rep said hey listen mistercustomer we got you registered let's dothis one more time and again I'm here tohelp but we want to make sure you'recomfortable and we actually saw afantastic response 25 percent ofcustomers spoken to during thepromotional period converting completelyonline seventy-five percent wereextremely excited in some cases theydidn't even know that they had theability to order online in tracking thispromotion we had one gentleman whocalled in and said you're telling meAcula order online right now he actuallyhung upand registered and was able to place theorder so overall from a customer servicespin it was extremely successful spiff a$1000 investment correlated to over ahundred thousand dollars in onlinerevenue and again freeing up the timefor our customer service team from beingorder takers to being customer servicereps cross-selling upselling guiding thecustomer journey and so for us I'mextremely proud of that first step thatwe conducted with our team so in theback of my mind I knew when we went tolive on December 12 to 2016 that'slaunching a brand new website and notdoing anything with it we weren't goingto be successful the website is asalesperson in my eyes that's working 24hours a day 365 days a yearokay and so it's imperative to make surethat we were doing everything in ourpower to promote this website sowhatever our one of my biggestrecommendations for anybody that's onthis call that is just gone live or isgoing live is you know once you've hitthat goal live button make sure that aremaking yourself available and/or yourteam to educate your customers on thewebsite so example you know Scott'susing GoToWebinar when I first came onboard as a you know log customer I waslistening to their weekly webinars and Ithought to myself why not do the samefor our customer so what we did was weused the event calendar functionality inUtah in the sim we did a weekly webinarfrom 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. every Thursdayand I did a high-level overview of thefive to seven pieces of functionalitythat our customers would be using on adaily basis at the conclusion of thatwebinar we used a Google survey that goout to those userssay how was the content of the webinarif there was anything else that youwould like us to review please let usknow and again in this day and age witha distributor having you know ecommercewebsites Amazon the more times you'reable to have touch points with yourcustomers I think the the better you'reoff and so we got a ton of valuablefeedback from those surveys I would sayon any given webinar we'd have 10 to 15to 20 attendees and I'd get 90 to 93percent response response rates to thosesurveys and so again many of ourattendees loved what they were wereseeing and that that was huge for us asa distributor in upstate New York thatis specializes in food service Jancy anoffice supplies industrial packaging itwas imperative for us that at our annualtrade show to highlight our website sooff in the corner away from the vendorsand away from every all the busy thingsthat take place at a tradeshow Iactually had my own room monitor where Idid the same exact presentation on thoseweekly webinars for all attendees thatare at that seminar and again anothertouch point for our customers to showthem you know we're here we're here toeducate them and again that worked verywell also and again I'm going tocontinue one of the things you'll tounderstand is there is a portion of yourcustomer base that whether it's in theirown personal life that just don't feelcomfortable with ordering online and soit's okay to tell those folks that areat these conferences that are on thewebinar saying hey you may not becomfortable today but if you want to usethe website to educate yourself look atproduct images and call in your ordercontinue to do thatso you know I'm talking today althoughthe successes we have but there will bea portion of your customer base that mayfeel alienated like yourpushing them there again you're focusedon giving them a tool to educatethemselves if they still feel likecalling in the orders they can do so butagain I'm finding from our own internaldata that the website is being used bythose folks that are consideredresearchers as well so again back tosome of the external strategies thatwork for us again that onboardingspecialist that we brought in as anintern who created great content and wason the road he was the one that createdour YouTube videos so as you can see onthis slide how to compare productscreate a shopping list saved card guysthis is all of the functionality that isin the base you know log platform okayso making sure that the functionalitythat is used along the buyer journeywith the website we wanted to make surewe documented all that in today's agewith YouTube and video being extremelypopular it was a good tool for us sothis has been pretty interesting for usI would say over the last six monthsI've seen a transition take place withinmy organization when it comes to socialmedia social selling however you want tomake you know call it you know as ane-commerce manager when we created theseYouTube videos you know we were sendingin them jetted out to our specificcustomers but then we started realizingthrough Facebook and Twitter andLinkedIn that if we're able to share notonly this great new investment this newwebsite but other things that ourbusinesses other products and servicesour business is doing without reallyselling it you know look being viewed asa product expert I would say in the lastsix months or so we had five to sevenorders placed through our LinkedIn andFacebook pages so not actually using tosay buy this now but using LinkedIn andFacebook to talk about the functionalityof the website maybe do product reviewsthat's one of the recommendations onthis webinar today I wanted to make itthat these platforms will actually alsobecome sales tool and Scott will mentionNPM it is an omni-channel experience soyou're not only going to get onlinesales from your website you're going toget sales from social media platforms aswell and Mike I'm gonna jump in herereal quick because what I findfascinating about this is and it's notjust the fact that you're taking ordersvia LinkedIn which is terrific but theeffort here has not been relegated tojust your marketing team right youactually have sales reps who are havebecome very active in sharing things intheir own LinkedIn feeds whether it'sproduct reviews or demonstrations ordiscussions about you know the featurestop three features and certain productsso I think that's definitely a take awayyou know from my perspective it's makesure you get your sales reps involvedand it's not just your marketing effortthat's promoting this stuff on LinkedInabsolutely and Scott the other thingI'll share this with everybody whetherit's somebody LinkedIn messaging we hada picture meant a manager at a largeUniversity in Western Massachusettsgo to our LinkedIn page and saw you knowsaw one of these videos sent a LinkedInmessage to I don't know if it was willor Dan one of our or any of our salesreps it's happened multiple times hey Isaw the YouTube video on the top threefeatures were we're not too far away canwe get a demo please set up and you knowfacebook Messenger we've had peoplemessage in using the Facebook messageand then also you know people directlyemailing our team as well yeah terrificalright so with that being said I thinkI'm going to transition here to the thenext slide where I'm walking over to youand kind of have you know do an overviewof this for us yeah I'll take it backjust for a second in addition to whatMike is sharing that they've done inHill and Marx you know we obviously havea number of customers who have sharedthere's an experience and what's workedfor them and driving e-commerce adoptionand I put together it's hardlycomprehensive but just a quick littlechecklist of some some reminders asyou're looking to drive customers toyour siteif you have a front counter get a kioskin there have your website available atyour front counter so people are waitingin line they can go over do researchmaybe even put the order in or try outthe the site for the first timeobviously having your URL brandedeverywhere on your invoices on yourpackaging anywhere you can think I'veseen customers of ours who have gone sofar as to change the name of theircompany to match their URL um so theyactually will call their company namecalm and and they've gone that farbecause they put that much emphasis onthe online channel punch-outcapabilities another one right theability for your customers to go fromwithin their ERP or within theirpurchasing system and directly interfacewith your e-commerce site and actuallyMike I believe that Helen marks you guysare taking advantage of this with somecustomers right and I should have maybehighlighted that at the beginning but wewe work very closely in the higher edspace and we have two large universitiesin upstate New York that we arecurrently integrated with with punch-outand so well you know basically havingour catalog integrated with their a shopso that users on campus can select ourlogo and place orders directly throughto us is been a fantastic value addScott I don't even know if you're awarethis we and this may not be a you knowbest practice but we were so excitedabout the integration with pancha wewent live about three weeks ahead of ourwebsite with our punch out catalogs withboth those universities we're stillworking with those them today and I'mnoticing that we're getting more andmore users at those universities in youknow getting involved with our productcatalog terrific and now I did not knowthat so that's that's good to know andand certainly you know log can helpcustomers there with that punch outcapability in addition to the thebroader e-commerce platform itself Mikementioned spiffs first customer servicepeople obviously any kind of salesincentives discounts for onlinepurchases first-time purchases issomething to consider making sure youknow sales feels that they are incentiveto help drive people to that channelsales can often be an obstacle we knowthat and getting people to adopt thesite unless they see what's in it forthemso you definitely wanna hit on thatearly on online collaboration tools ifthere's some sort of chat bahut orinstant messaging or you know you knowMike mentioned Facebook Messenger Ithink on the social platform but there'ssomething you can do on your site toagain if people just need help with aquick quick answer or they're trying toconfigure an item and they need someconfiguration help whatever it may be tohave those online collaboration tools soit feels as in-person as possible rightproviding useful content is an absolutemust Mike touched on that as well buthaving really rich descriptions for SEOpurposes and informational purposes theattributes manuals images videos kad'swhatever it may be to enrich the itemdata on your site is going to help youbetter compete and get people there ontoyour website and using that as aninformation resource and and one otherthing I do want to bring up keep in mindif you haven't had products on ane-commerce site before don't forget thatyou're now exposing in many cases yourpricing to the customer for the firsttime so go back into your ERP make surethat information that you're bringinginto your site is accurate for thatcustomer because I've had you know manypeople tell me you get one shot at thisand if your customer goes out to yoursite and they see pricing that says onething and then they call up the salesrep and they get our better price you'vejust lost that person as an online as anonline buy or a visitor of your sitebecause they're always going to go backto your sales rep thinking they can geta better price so make sure those thingsare all working together and ultimatelyyou know this goes to the point of justmake sure that these things aren'thappening in silos right your ecommerceinitiative is not a silo it's acompany-wide division it's not acompany-wideeffort it's not a lone wolf projectright it's not an IT project it's notjust an e-commerce group product this isit needs customer service sales financeeverybody needs to be working and thisis sort of yeah towards thisomni-channel experience where whetheryour customers are coming to you viaphysical means you know in-store overthe phone or they're coming to yourwebsite they should have a similarexperience similar information and beable to transition from one to the otherpretty seamlessly so just keep that inmind this is this is not about ane-commerce silo within your businessall right Mike so with that said whydon't you go ahead and and share with ussome of the results that you saw in thepast year so for us this was kind of thehigh-level kpi's of our first year yearof trial-and-error a year of customeronboarding we were extremely happy andin all honesty I have to attribute thesuccess to not only the customer servicebin you know really going to thefrontline of where our orders are comingin the customer service team I will sayyou know we do have some sales folksthat weren't comfortable with technologythey've been with us you know 3540 yearsin some cases very old school but theywere very much all about bringing Nickand our onboarding specialists alongbecause they realize and I said at thebeginning the new b2b buyer is here it'snot coming there's now starting to takeover purchasing roles and so I think alot of our success was really targetingthose b2b buyers and the best way thatthey are looking for information and sofor us 26% increase in accounts orderingonline really happy with the 25% of ourrevenue coming through our website thatwas uh that was extremely important forus and I'm proud to hang our hat up onthat on the the seventy percent ninetyfive percent increased in users and alsoaccounts again I tribute that to thewebinars the YouTube videos theeducating your customer service team didit can all be done you know once you golive or even before going live justmaking sure you're communicating withyour team and you know at any possiblechance whether it's an internal salesmeeting I know one fact that happenedwas the webinars that we were doing forcustomers the owner of my company andour regional sales managers every Fridayare now doing webinars with their citiesbecause we have sales reps all acrossthe the entire state of New Yorkalthough six hours away from us takingour reps off the road is something thatyou know what's becominga pain point from the success of thatwebinar with our customers we're nowdeploying internally in our salesstrategy so very happy with thosepercentages but again you mentioned inyour your last live Scott the thewebsite has become a tool for oursalespeople our customer service teamnot only to research but to upsellcross-sell our SBS sheets and manualsare being found in Google so no itwasn't all about just the externalportion of this the success was alsointernally and I'm really proud of thatas well so again you know to circle backaround 383 accounts that wereresponsible in our estimate you know wewere saying it takes five to eightminutes to place an order maybe 10minutes roughly saved us close to 2,000excuse me 200 man-hours by convertingthem online so again coming back to thisparticular slide we are really excitedabout that so what did we learn fromthose folks that were using the websiteagain I mentioned it earlier you have aportion of your customer base that donot feel comfortable with orderingonline or technology so they're going tobe the type that are using the websiteto research Sdn sheets they're lookingat the comparing products they'relooking at navigating your taxonomy orthe product categories on your websitefor potential new products so theability to identify that 10% of ourcustomer base that are consideredresearchers again logging in to thewebsite they're researching they'rejumping around they're looking at theiritems but they still feel comfortablewith calling in the order Scott rightbefore the call we mentioned that forthose of you that are on this call theseresearches are are now our second targetmarket for a customer service bin sowhat can we do now to get those folkscomfortable itmaybe that they just do not want toplace orders online but I think if weare strategic and we do one morecustomer service spin in door seal spitSEALs rub spit I think we'll besuccessful in getting those folks toorder online as wellyeah and I'll say you know not not justwith customer adoption but just overallsuccess of any e-commerce initiativehaving some sort of data analyst onstaff is really beneficial we've seen itwith a number of our customers havingsomebody who can get it not only beresponsible for the the the productcontent and making sure everything's inline but to look at the Google Analyticsto look at the trends to do the businessanalytics around you know who's comingto your site and how can we convert theminto buyers or are we getting a lot ofabandonment on the shopping cart righthow can we have alert sales for so theycan go back now and follow up with thatperson and see if they can carry thatthat order over the finish line sodefinitely another recommendation totake away if you haven't alreadyconsider having a data analyst on staffbecause it can they can bring hugereturns for you absolutely absolutelybecause also Scott a lot of a lot ofdistributors and when it comes to ane-commerce department or digitalmarketing department they may not havethat department but or they may have andor they may have one person right and soI will say when I was sharing my journeywith you if you can get somebody thathas you know through you know someexperience with Microsoft Excel or theability to work with Access database butit can work with large items of data youknow when I had our digital productspecialist come on board she was able tolook at the last three to five years ofsales data we were able to kind of buildcustomer personas and that has beenhelping us now with doing contentmarketing understand who our customersare and by having somebody come on theteam I highly recommend and just likeScott said I would recommend trying toget that person so again I've mentionedthis a couple of times this slide justsaid it's here to show you that you knowwe were able to identify and the trafficwithinthat is on the website using it for youknow their own resource extremely usefulour sales our customer service and salesfolks are sending SDS sheets to theircustomersthey're sending links to product detailpages so it is really become a tool or amajor resource for our team so thetakeaways I don't know if there'sanybody that is in my is a counterpartto me whether they're an e-commercemanager or they're somebody within theorganization that's going to be drivingthis this objective listen you will faceresistance whether it's going to be fromcustomers or you know seasoned salesreps that you know want to do it theirway or folks that just haven't reallybought on to e-commerce being the nextway of ordering for your business butyou know see it through make sure thatyou're doing the things that can impactyou in this role whether it's the youknow the YouTube videos getting anintern or hiring somebody to ride alongwith your sales reps because the folksthat aren't comfortable with it you knowif you're providing them a resource youknow in most cases they want that helpand so we saw a lot of success there donot wait for perfection okay we wentlive on December 12 2016 you know therewas functionality that wasn't workingthe way was supposed to I do have togive credit to my project manager andsupport team even in along the journeyof 2017 there's ups and downs and justmaking sure your lines of communicationand and your communicating with you knowyour business needs and what what thecustomer needs with the you know logsupport team they've stepped up manytimes in making sure we're meeting thoseexpectations but do not wait forperfection you know I hear a lot ofpeople say oh we took 14 months to buildour websitewe want to do a redesign to login to thewebsite find your items in place inorder it doesn't matter what type oflayout or UX or UI you have if you'reable to just engage with your customersand get them comfortable a redesign itdoesn't matter you'll be successful ingetting those that buy-in I made surethat the family and the ownershipmanagement was bought in that they tookthis initiative as a serious part of thebusiness this will be a big portion ofthe way we acquire customers today andin the next four three to five years orexcuse me foreseeable future and so youknow for us the internal buy-incommunicating with everybody internallyit was very important and again yourwebsite is a salesperson but it's also aresearch tool for all the informationthat a customer needs in their buyingjourney and so with that being said Ihope I provided a lot of useful data andhopefully some tips because at the endof the day you know we're making aninvestment in a platform and we want tosee it through to be as successful as itcan be so Scott I'm gonna hand it backto you hey Mike thank you and you knowas you're going through those finalthoughts I couldn't help but think ofsort of an analogy you know we talkedabout the need for that omni-channel andI apologize for using the but industrybuzzword right foot that omni-channelexperience and that that seamlesstransition from the physical to theonline world think about think aboutonline banking which I'm sure everysingle person on this call I'd bewilling to bet has done online bankingand to some extent or the other rightbut we don't call it a banking Duywe just call it banking just rightthere's no distinction between if I'mgoing to the bank's website or myfinancial institutions website or I'mgoing into the the branch office I don'tcall it a banking versus banking andmaybe that's how we should be thinkingof e-commerce it's not eco it's justcommerce it's just another Channel and Ithink if you can can do your best tokind of blur the lines between the twocreate create that seamless experiencebetween the twothat's where you're gonna have successreal quick this is not a product pitchbut just for those again who aren'tfamiliar with you know log we do providethat e-commerce or actually maybe Ishould say commerce platform online aswell as the content services we are anall-in-one ecommerce platformspecifically for mid-market b2bcompanies we are going to give you soupto nuts everything you need from theshopping cart to the search capabilitythe mobile experience the the contentmanagement system the the PIM theproduct information management and thecontent enrichment that you need to havea successful e-commerce experience so ifyou're not familiar with us please checkus out at you know log Corp comm let'sopen this up for questions if we couldif you don't mano I want to say onething because I will tell you this whenI sat in at the in Fort user group and Isaw this slide for many distributors andI know for me when I looked at all ofthe functionality the pieces it's alittle overwhelming right you'reworrying about do I have people on myteam that do I have enough resources allit just it seems a little overwhelming Iwill say when it comes to product videosin trainings being somebody that youknow I'm two people on my team we wereable to ramp up quite quicklyin 2017 with all these different aspectsof the platformyeah thanks Mike and and you know I'dactually argue that the other option ina scenario like this is you're going tomultiple vendors for all these differentcapabilities which really increases yourcost and complexity in providing ane-commerce solution to your to yourcustomers so to have that kind ofturnkey all-in-one platform I think is ahuge benefit for our customers let mejump ahead here and take questions so ifyou have any questions right now pleasego ahead and text them in via the chator question panel in your GoToWebinarmeeting and I'm just gonna check here Ithink I did have one question come inMike from Greg Greg was wondering whereare you going now what's what's kind ofyour next step to further youre-commerce journey great question Gregso we are a food service disposabledistributor right and sowhether it's an executive chef or it's afamily-run ice cream stand I believethat the foodservice section of ourbusiness is going to be a mobile-firstbusiness though these folks are on theirfeet they're running into meat coolersthey're going into their basement sowhat's next for Hill & Marx's we'redeploying a mobile app for our customersand I've already received some interestfrom some hospitality and restaurantgroups that want their Executive Chefsto be using this one of the benefits ofa mobile app in in our scenario you knowus Foods is a big distributor for thesethese folks and so the mobile app thatallows for them to add items to a car ina me cooler or have the ability to autosave their cart so that when they getback into their office and they can evenhop on there or 4G our Wi-Fi they'reable to do so so I'm really reallyexcited for that portion of our businessto I do see it being a mobile first justlike the online banking analogy that youbrought up so the mobile app thedeployment of that this year is going tobe big yeah and you know it sometimesit's a bit of a myth I think that peoplethink that in the b2b space you knowobviously in the retail space Mobile'shuge but that it's not as huge in theb2b space and there's I'm glad I'm gladthat this came up because it's slider weactually didn't have we had the end ofthe deck and gives us a chance to showit Boston Consulting Group actually dida study that that 50% half of b2bsearched at queries today are made onsmart phones and they actually expectthat figure to grow the 70% in the nexttwo years so I think mobile is to yourpoint it's it's a huge momentum in thein the b2b e-commerce space so thanksfor that one of our customers which is alarge university all the janitors thatare in the dorms of their facilitiesthey're equipped with an iPad and theyhave some internal software that they'reusing but they're asking vendors youknow next year will you be providing amobile app so that they're able to placeorders directly from the from to of thatdorm so again more data more researchpointing towards thethe mobile app being baked and we had aquestion here from from Rob and she waswondering what what did you do to makecustomers part of the implementationprocess great question Robin so as Imentioned and Scott if you want to goback to that journey slide at thebeginning with five to ten customersthat warai we consider complex wherethey had functionality multi levelapprovers maybe some budgeting functionin September of 2016 we reached out tothem and set up a working call sayinglisten we're deploying a new websitehere's the functionality that you'reusing today on our existing platform I'dlike for you to register on our stagewebsite and I'd like you to actually usethat same functionality with this newplatform and you know even asking thequestion would you be interested the thereception I got and then theparticipation was very high becausehere's the other thing many if you havelarge customers a lot of these guysdon't want to be surprised right theywant they want to log in place the orderthe minute you launch a new website yougot to make sure that you'recommunicating that effectively to themso for any customers and that you wouldconsider complex I would you know 60 90days out try to get them onto your stagewebsite and have them actually you knowplay play with the functionalityterrific I'd encourage you if there'sany other questions please go ahead andsubmit them Mike one more I don't knowif you can answer this one or not but wetalked a lot about what what worked wellfor you guys and getting increasedadoption was there anything that didn'twork well that you could suggest peopleavoid actually a great question kind ofthing so you have to be careful in thein the in the build phase right soespecially if you're getting internalbuy-in you know many times I would haveyou know you need to make sure that thefeedback is going to be you knowfeedback that you're going to be able toimplement right so everybody wants nowtheir website to look like Amazon wellmany of these these websites Walmart comthey have all this crazy functionalityand you have to understand who yourcustomers are and I think in some caseswhere we thought you know we invitedcustomers to use multi-level approversand you know we spent time going afterthem they really just wanted the basicfunctionality of the website so in somecases I think we're a little moreovereager in getting people to use a youknow and enhance functionality but atthe end of the day just making surepeople are comfortable with the websiteis what I think was a big win for usokay terrific and we have time for onelast question here how did you track thecustomer service reps spits so webasically use the back end of you knowOGG sim to to look at the orderstemplate so we're able to see all of theorders and then we used Google sheets somy digital product specialists created aGoogle sheet that allowed for all thecustomer service reps to kind of have aleaderboard but it also had a tab whereeach of those customer service reps onthat Google sheet were to put theaccount number the order number thecustomer name email and notice onwhether they place the order and at theend of each day we basically wentthrough that document and wecross-referenced the orders through ourERP and through the sim and we were ableto track it that way all right thanksfor that hey Mike I do want to thank youagain for your time today as well aseverybody else on the call I hope thiswas valuable information good insightfrom a fellow colleague of yours in theindustry and the success that they'vehad if you have any questions you cancertainly reach out to you know log youknow our Corp comm or info at you knowlog Corp comm if you have an email feelfree to pick up the phone call us – Iwill certainly answer and so check outour website ask us and I guess if Mikeif they want to get in touch with youI'm sure you'd be welcome to anyLinkedIn request you can find Mike outthere yeah Mike Mike powers at Hill andmarks I'm sure you can find him onLinkedIn and he'd be happymy marks calm and then Michael powersand LinkedIn and I'd be more they if youguys are going up through this journeyyou want to have a call I'd be more thanhappy to help youterrific hey thank you everybody takecare and best of luck thank you
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