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.

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

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.

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

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 

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 

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 

For a lot of B2B organizations, growing their business means modernizing their marketing strategy. Customers engage with B2B businesses not just from several channels, but also from multiple business units within an organization. This complexity demands strategies driven by technology like automation, which can lead to increase lead generation, sales opportunities, and more highly-engaged customers.

• Targeting diverse audiences with personalized messaging across channels
• Gaining insight into all customer touchpoints to gain a more complete picture of the customer’s organization
• Implementing a holistic engagement strategy to effectively communicate your value proposition to customers

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

As eCommerce has become an integral part of the B2B ecosystem, an increasing number of manufacturers and distributors have turned to digital tools and platforms to better engage their customers. Our panel of thought leaders will provide much-needed insight into the strategies that have guided their technology roadmaps.

• Building our eCommerce platforms to serve complex customer needs
• Deploying the right mix of technology applications to remain competitive
• Leveraging technology to weather the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic 

Let’s wrap up the conference with some networking! Our Birds of a Feather roundtables let you meet your B2B peers, while tackling your most pressing challenge areas. Each of our roundtables has a specific topic to facilitate an in depth discussion. Chat it up with peers who can offer different perspectives and help you solve your pain points. This session is only open to manufacturers and distributors.

• Topic #1: Sales Transformation in the Age of COVID-19
• Topic #2: Strengthening the Distributor-Manufacturer Relationship
• Topic #3: Managing Online vs. Offline Pricing Challenges