For CPG, The Future of B2B Looks a Lot Like B2C

When I was appointed CEO of Diversified Hospitality, I had little to no experience in hospitality & distribution. Here’s why that’s a good thing:

A little background: I shouldn’t really say “no experience” in hospitality and distribution—I’ve been around the company for 7 years now, and you get bits a pieces through osmosis.?

But I’ve been hyper focused on E-Commerce for the last 7 years. When I started, my goal was to sell hotel-styled packaged soap and cleaning products to individual AirBnB owners. I obsessed about individual AirBnB’s needs and pain points and put together offerings specifically packaged for them (something that very few were really thinking about at the time). But I was also leaning in and learning the technology and how to attract customers when there is no underlying relationship. I’ve learned so many lessons about marketing, advertising, product detail page optimization, automation tools and maybe most important, how to navigate an endlessly changing technology environment with new sales channels, new rules and new best practices.

We have seen incredible growth in our E-Commerce business and today over half of the employees and contractors at Diversified are working in our E-Commerce/Retail division.

Here’s Some Unique Things About E-Commerce Compared to Traditional B2B:

1. You never get a chance to talk to or “Sell” your customer. Instead, you are given a small window of opportunity to display your Hero Image, Title, Reviews, and Price before the customer makes a decision to buy or keep shopping.
2. There’s no Sales Team— the Marketing & Advertising teams are effectively the sales team. Marketing has to know how to get enough information into 6 images and a short video to bring the customer to a purchasing decision. Advertising is the life blood of E-Commerce to get the marketing team as many at bats with qualified customers.
3. Decisions are mostly made from Data…Because we have so much more of it. We look at reports and more reports…and even Reports about reports. E-Commerce tools give small businesses an equivalent amount of data to make decisions almost equivalent to large companies worth billions.
4. Customer Service is mostly automated. Everything from tracking numbers to delayed deliveries—returns and replacements — reading FAQs instead of customers waiting on a response.

So why do I say that it’s a good things that I came in with no experience in hospitality and distribution?

1. This not uncommon territory for me. So far in my career I have never taken a position where I already had experience before accepting the role. The military was my first taste of this. I was managing 50 plumbers, electricians, and carpenters in my first job in the Army without any expertise in any of those fields…over 18 months we got great results. When I started in E-Commerce? Again, no experience. Things have gone well. I’m confident that with experience comes wisdom and that’s why in each role where I had no experience, I leaned heavily on those who did.
2. I have great partners with decades of experience, and I’m learning hospitality supply from some of the best. But I bring my own presuppositions and best practices from E-Commerce into that learning environment and that has proven to be helpful as we challenge the status quo and look to position for the future.
3. One of the fastest ways for B2B companies to grow is by leaning into the automations that are already mandatory in E-Commerce. Sales representatives in B2B organizations traditionally spend a lot of time on activities like taking orders, answering customer queries, and processing transactions manually. By integrating eCommerce technology, these tasks can be automated or streamlined. This leads to faster order processing and potentially higher sales volumes, as sales reps can focus more on customer engagement and less on administrative tasks. And then there’s Customer Service efficiency. Just like E-Commerce, B2B customers want to be able to track their orders, access detailed product information, manage their accounts, and get answers to common questions through FAQs. We know how to make this happen through our lessons learned doing it in E-Commerce. This will reduce the burden on our customer service team, allowing them to handle more complex queries and improve the overall customer experience.

In my opinion, the future of B2B in our industry is E-Commerce. It won’t be a rapid transition, but the world is moving in that direction and we have to be driving that change instead of reacting to it.

It’s my belief that the tools & technology that have driven growth in E-Commerce in general over the last decade are on the way for B2B as well. I believe that will be net positive for customers, end users, and to our team a Diversified as well.