B2B Online Connect Virtual Event

What a way to start your day! Kick off your B2B Online Connect Virtual experience by joining your fellow manufacturing and distribution peers in an informal speed networking activity. Like speed dating, you’ll have 5 minutes to meet with 1 or 2 executives before rotating to the next session. You’ll meet lots of B2B peers before the virtual summit begins. Starter questions will be provided to help break the ice, so what are you waiting for? Don’t miss this build relationships with your B2B Online Connect peers! This session is only open to manufacturers and distributors.

Known for superior quality, continual innovation, and rigorous operational discipline, Stanley Black & Decker has been heavily investing in digital excellence across all business units. For them, digitizing the company meant more than launching a B2B ecommerce website. It meant rethinking how they conduct business, how they engage with customers, and how the disruption of a pandemic impacted their goals. Join this session and gain inspiration from Stanley Black & Decker’s successful digital journey and learn how to leverage collaborative commerce for the road ahead in B2B ecommerce.

Implementing and accelerating a digital transformation strategy doesn’t have to mean reinventing the wheel, but may require a course correction. Join our opening keynote session to understand how to continue the evolution of your strategy for the long term.

• Creating a strategy that defines your goals and methods for achieving them
• Making a game plan for your technology implementation
• Surveying stakeholders throughout your digital transformation strategy implementation

Any organization that sells a solution with many options, components, or parts has a significant challenge when it comes to providing documentation to customers as well as internal teams. In this session, we make the business case for a flexible framework that ensures the right documentation is offered to the right person at the right time.

• The challenge of documenting complex, highly configurable products.
• How componentized content lowers costs and improves quality.
• What the future holds for componentized content

As B2B eCommerce become increasingly competitive, end-to-end customer engagement is more important than ever. In this session we’ll tackle engagement strategies that maximize customer lifetime value and support personalized experiences.

• Capturing and activating customer data to identify key customer characteristics
• Leveraging automated lead qualification and nurturing to help your sales teams
• Enabling channel partners to co-manage campaigns and create personalized customer journeys 

To succeed in the next 5 years, every company must become a content company. Content is the number one way your customer interacts with your company. From the top of your funnel through conversion and brand loyalty, content guides your buyer every step of the way. That's why content that's late to the game, or not relevant, is one of the biggest blockers to sustainable eCommerce growth. In this talk, learn why a successful content strategy is no longer a nice-to-have, but an eCommerce imperative in today’s business climate. You'll hear real-world examples of how leading eCommerce companies approach content marketing. And you'll walk away inspired to deliver impactful content that fuels your eCommerce growth. 

Customer expectations have helped many B2B companies to understand the benefit of using eCommerce as a viable sales channel. In fact, having a strong eCommerce presence has allowed innovative companies to better cope with disruptions. This panel reviews the importance of the online channel to better support the needs of your customers. 

• Rethinking your sales strategy from traditional to online buying
• Identifying the best technologies to enhance your customers’ B2B buying experience
• Enabling features that provide your customers with a seamless purchasing experience 

Digital adoption progressed 10 years over the first 90 days of the pandemic. Now customers expect a seamless ecommerce experience — from shopping and payments to delivery and returns. To remain competitive, brands need to evolve with changing customer demands for Frictionless Commerce.

But what does Frictionless Commerce actually mean in today’s market?

To find out, Pivotree partnered with Environics Research and conducted a study of 3,800 consumers to discover what Frictionless Commerce means to them. This session will define the Six Dimensions of Frictionless Commerce (based in the consumer study) as well as provide tips and tricks on how to identify and eliminate friction points in your organization.

All viewers will get a special offer on a free 2 hour consultation with our Frictionless Consulting team to gain insights on which parts of Friction affect your purchasing conversion rates.

Join us for small group discussions that will facilitate meaningful idea exchanges and networking! These roundtables will give you the chance to learn from and network with a variety of other attendees.

1. The New B2B Imperative: Competing on the Digital Experience Hosted By Jason Hein, Head of B2B Strategy, Bloomreach
2. Leveraging Account-Based Marketing To Complement Traditional Outreach Strategies
3. Redesigning Your Website To Align Your Online and Offline Presence

2020 was a year when having a digital presence was more important than ever but what does that mean for the B2B digital marketing landscape for 2021? The shift from physical transactions to digital is unlikely to slow down, and this panel will show you how to make meaningful changes so you can be prepared for ever increasing (and rapidly changing) customer expectations and needs.

• Defining your targets to ensure that your digital strategy is hitting KPIs
• Prioritizing digital channels that your customers are also embracing
• Modernizing your marketing strategy by prioritizing customer acquisition tactics 

Businesses are constantly looking to drive innovation and growth. However, they often lack the foundation that enables data-driven, agile decision-making. In this session, learn how Jimmi Rai, Sr. Director – Data & Analytics at Central Garden & Pet, lays the foundation for innovation & growth by centralizing analytics. Jimmi along with Pallav Neeraj, Asst. Vice President, Sales & Account Management at Ugam, a Merkle company, will walk you through how centralized analytics is being applied to enable better decisions and drive impact across various business functions. This session will:

• Deep-dive into aspects of a centralized analytics model
• Roadmap for analytics maturity
• Key takeaways 

While every manufacturer and distributor can name their highest revenue customers and SKUs, what is often missing is the profit contribution. Knowing that contribution information is the difference between successful growth and inconsistent results. In this session we’ll tackle the importance of recognizing that all customers and SKUs are not created equal.

• Maintaining important customer relationship by focusing on SKU availability and providing responsive service
• Gaining actionable insights by cross-referencing customer and SKU profitability 
• Bringing together operations and marketing teams to redirect efforts toward long-term success
• Planning investments in customer relationships and SKU availability according to total profit contribution

You’re responsible for E-Commerce as part of your company’s digital transformation? You need to align with the greater business needs and choose the optimal way to engage customers online? What options are available? And what are the pros and cons of these options?

The next battleground in the B2B market will be won with customer experience. It’s crucial to have an E-commerce technology strategy that allows you to leverage existing investments, guarantees scalability, and empowers your team with the right tools. Easier said than done, given the number of different solutions in the market.

This session will outline the three main approaches to building an E-commerce sales channel to help you guide the process of finding the right E-commerce platform before making a decision

As B2B organization have had to speed up their digital transformations, it’s often been the case that larger organizations have been tasked with helping others evolve. In this session we’ll take a look at the relationship between distributor and manufacturer, and the importance that digital transformation plays on its success.

• Influencing partners to drive digital transformation effectively
• Looking at the ways in which your partners are an extension of your sales force
• Strengthening partnerships to overcome market fragmentation

Providing customers with a seamless easy to use eCommerce experience is your goal. Harnessing customer feedback – their ideas on what parts of your site they love, what features they wish you offered is a great way to tap into your customer base and prioritize new feature development. 

• Understand how to set up and create ongoing customer experience feedback 
• Review a few options for how to engage your customers
• Getting buy-in from leadership (and legal)

Let’s wrap up the conference with some networking and in-depth conversation! As 5G begins to emerge and private networks occur across enterprises, Mario D’Cruz, Sr. Director of Strategic Planning at Honeywell, will examine how enterprise digital transformation can be expedited and enhanced through 5G.

•  This session is only open to manufacturers and distributors.