Article first published on Electrical Trends and accessible at  http://www.electricaltrends.com/2018/05/revenue-generation-content-key-takeaways-from-b2b-online-conference.html E-Commerce continues to be a heavily discussed issue within the electrical industry with distributors, in aggregate, investing millions of dollars and manufacturers redesigning sites, investing to build, manage and enhance product content and considering the alternative channels that eCommerce is creating be it Amazon Business, Grainger and Zoro, HomeDepot.com , Ferguson.com , AutomationDirect and a myriad of alternatives. A challenge for many is “what information is ‘right’?” It’s a loaded question as “right” is in the eyes of the beholder (or should we say “the person trying to sell you something”?). NAED  has shared some information (and is in the process of releasing a report from the Channel Advantage Partnership on Amazon Business), marketing groups have shared their visions and suppliers and have helped some members travel this journey and others have sought external support. And as some know, there are eCommerce conferences to broaden distributor and manufacturer information knowledge. One such meeting is  B2B Online , which was held in Chicago earlier this month. KYKLO USA Remi Ducrocq, CEO of KYKLO, an E-Commerce provider to automation distributors and electrical distributors seeking commerce-enabled sites for their automation business, attended B2B Online and shared his insights: “I recently attended the 4th edition of B2B Online. One of the fastest growing eCommerce conferences, the meeting has grown from 200 to 800 attendees in four years. This year’s meeting brought together E-commerce leaders from major manufacturers, distributors and technology vendors.“ After three years at the forefront of this topic in Asia, I was curious to determine whether the North American market, known to be leading the B2B e-commerce transformation, would have solved the challenges faced by manufacturers and distributors in Asia.“ I discovered, the challenges are the same in the U.S. as in distant Southeast Asia and all points between. Distributors and their partners face the same set of issues. With this perspective, allow me to share my key takeaways from the conference. One: E-commerce is about sales, not marketing. At the beginning of their e-commerce journey, most distributors mistakenly believe their webshop, which is the on-line store portion of your website, only serves as a marketing tool and “information portal.” Using this, buyers will be able to check product data, price and availability. The few distributors, who set-up a platform and establish the proper adoption of their sales organization, will testify e-commerce is not just about marketing. It’s about customer experience and driving more Sales. As Russell Scherwin of IBM’s Watson Customer Engagement stated in his presentation: “Where are you? In marketing, ecommerce, digital? No, you are in sales.” For B2B, where growth relies on business relationships, e-commerce exists to strengthen those valuable relationships. Providing a better customer buying experience, equipping sales people with digital tools and enabling more sales should be the major goal and the order of the day. Understanding e-commerce seems simple, but most B2B organizations still have a very strong B2C bias. This causes them to set the wrong expectations and ultimately fail their digital transformation. Since most electrical wholesalers have discovered that selling to the consumer (B2C) is not profitable in their current business model the issue is doubly concerning. E-commerce is about sales operations and customer experience for distributor’s targeted customer list which does not include homeowners. Two: Content remains a major challenge, even for the most advanced players. Despite major investments by manufacturers and distributors, poor content was repeatedly sighted as the big hurdle by panelists and key note speakers. Silas Carter, Dell’s E-commerce Senior Manager, repeated the message: “Get your product data right, because if content is not correct, you will not get anywhere. This is a ‘must have’ component.” Further, Essendant’s VP of Pricing and Integration, Ken Sauers, made these three key recommendations: Data quality really matters Start small and get early wins Find the right partners Mr. Sauers went on to say, “It’s important to not be satisfied with what is provided by manufacturers. Instead, you need to be pro-active, find partners with the right expertise assisting with the process and accelerate the impact for the customer.” Industry leaders have discovered content is the core foundation of a successful digital transformation. And, building relevant, taxonomized and searchable content is an expertise which requires distributors and manufacturers to partner with companies who do this as their core business. Three: Don’t build custom systems, instead pick the right partner for your digital journey! The US edition of B2B Online showcased many vendors. Attendees had plenty of options for gathering information on PIM, e-commerce and content services. A critical point: Most (if not all) of the vendors are technology experts but not industry/domain experts. Referring back to the speakers, e-commerce allows you to deliver complex product content in a seamless and simple manner, delivering a B2C like experience while embracing the B2B business processes of your industry. One might think distributors and manufacturers have the industry expertise and that they might steer their purely technology-centric partners in building specifications for the data required. But experience dictates something completely different. Why? Because building an in-house, custom e-commerce site is akin to maintaining a server farm rather than using a cloud solution. Simply stated, it’s re-inventing the wheel and thinking you’re good at everything rather than a specialist in selling your products. E-Commerce companies are specialists in designing these systems. Does your IT department have these skills? Probably not, and if they do, my guess is they are probably underpaid! Using partners with internet expertise and domain knowledge from within your specific industry allows you to accelerate progress and instead focus on implementing adoption – and driving additional sales. Four: Marketplaces: Amazon, the elephant in the room. Amazon, the undisputed leader in the B2C e-commerce revolution, has strong ambitions in the B2B space. It was no surprise that Martin Rohde, Amazon Business GM, opened the Monday morning sessions. Martin restated Amazon’s main priority is always: “Doing invention on behalf of the customer.” Amazon for Business is quickly learning and adapting their platform to meet B2B needs such as business pricing (only for qualified Amazon Business customers), quantity discounts and even, CAD Drawings for many products. It leads the charge on new delivery techniques further pushing the envelope always faster with Amazon Prime shipping. Despite what I would characterize as a friendly keynote, it’s quite obvious Amazon is a major threat to distributors. And, those distributors who focus only on fast delivery and pricing without concern for customer value will ultimately lose to Amazon. But, distributors have what Amazon can’t easily develop: domain expertise, buyer experience and after sales services. Drawing a Conclusion E-commerce leaders agree on one major point. If you want to be successful, distributors need to understand it’s all about Sales and Buyer Experience. You will not succeed if your content is not right. Digital transformation requires companies to find capable partners with domain expertise in your specific industry, content and e-commerce technology. Amazon for Business will not wait for you, the train has left the station, and it is key for distributors (and their partners) to accelerate their digital transformation. Growth and long term sustainability depends on it. Byline – Remi Ducrocq is CEO of KYKLO and formerly was with Schneider Electric. KYKLO provides distributors with webstores and eCommerce services, inclusive of robust content. The company works with dozens of distributors throughout Asia and has been named a Global Partner by Schneider Electric to provide distributors throughout the world with a best in class system with enriched product content. KYKLO was recently recognized and featured in an article by TechCrunch the magazine devoted to breaking news in the tech industry. KYKLO recently attended the AHTD conference. Some Thoughts For some distributors there is the opportunity for a robust eCommerce site to be more integrative into their sales process. This depends upon your business model. Understanding your customers’ buying experience is important and it can change by customer type, their role as well as their size. Learning more about your customers and their needs to reveal new opportunities. Content is king in the eCommerce world. Correct, quality content is critical to ensuring a quality customer experience and gaining adoption. Many in the industry still have a ways to go. The more information that distributors have on their site/SKU the more traffic will come to their site, the better the on-site search experience and the increased likelihood of customer adoption and sales conversion. If distributors seek to provide an “Amazon / Amazon Business content / search experience” then they need the same quality and amount of content that Amazon Business receives from manufacturers. Gaining a third party perspective as well as input from outside the industry helps generate ideas and, sometimes, affirms convictions. Thank you Remi for being our “on-site reporter.” The question for distributors is “are you confident that the data you have on your site is the best available at this time?”

KYKLO ENTERS THE NORTH AMERICAN MARKET BY ATTENDING ASSOCIATION FOR HIGH TECH DISTRIBUTION (AHTD) MEETING AT CORONADO ISLAND CALIFORNIA. CORONADO, California  — KYKLO, a company dedicated to bringing distributors of automation, electrical and mechanical products to the world of full digitalization, officially launched their North American presence by participating in the Spring AHTD Conference at The Hotel Del Coronado. Founded by electrical and automation industry veterans, Remi Ducrocq (CEO) and Fabien Legouic (CTO) and based in Bangkok, Thailand, KYKLO provides not only an online experience for distributor customers but a full digital suite of services which includes product content, search engine optimization (SEO), suggested add-on products and an application which enables a seller to assist customers in the selection of complex electrical and automation products. Both KYKLO co-founders attended the meeting to meet members first hand. Ducrocq stated, “Interacting with the leadership of America’s top automation solution providers was made less daunting by the openness and friendly manners of the people attending. With our shared backgrounds in the industry, we found much common ground and discovered distributors in the U.S. and Canada share many of the same concerns as our existing partners.” KYKLO’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, Fabien Legouic had this to say, “For distributors in the automation, sensing and electrical segment, concerns seem to transcend borders. Customers everywhere compare their service to global giants like Amazon; many seek the advantages of doing business digitally. At the same time, distributors struggle with costs of building a credible presence. The few who have tried went on to discover tremendous costs associated with maintaining up-to-date catalogs online. Our conversations with AHTD members reinforced our belief that distributors in North America need our unique approach.” KYKLO’s Asian customers have seen fast success from the company’s approach, “When we pitch distributors on why they should digitize their sales operations, it is first about how you get your existing customers online. So you shift your business from offline to online and by doing so you’ll get better satisfaction and you’ll be able to saturate your customer base.” Ducrocq said, pointing out that the service has helped some distributors add 20 percent more sales from existing customers. About KYKLO KYKLO ( www.kyklo-usa.com ) was founded by two former Schneider Electric employees in 2015. Based in the heart of downtown Bangkok, the company currently employs over 35 in-house engineers, the majority of whom brings backgrounds from the electrical and automation industry. KYKLO products have been applied to dozens of distributors in Asia and the company has been named a Global Partner by Schneider Electric to provide distributors throughout the world with a best-in-class system. KYKLO was recently recognized and featured in an article by  TechCrunch , the magazine devoted to breaking news in the tech industry. About AHTD AHTD (The Association for High Tech Distribution)  is comprised of the leading distributors, automation solution providers and manufacturers of technology-based equipment used in manufacturing and process controls. The group has enjoyed a dynamic 30-plus year history of providing a forum for improving productivity within the automation and process control industry.

Business for Business (B4B) is a new definition of what we would call a successful company in the B2B environment. Why successful? In B2B we define a business as one that operates in one direction, so it supplies a product, solution or service to another business, but with only a short-term business perspective. In other words, a company delivers a product or service, fulfils the agreed specifications but then passes onto another customer. We can imagine it as an assembly line where business relationships are assembled in boxes one after the other, ready to be shipped and forgotten after they are accomplished. Hardware, licenses, software are sold without caring how they will be used. On the other hand, the notion of B4B is very much linked with services, subscriptions and recurring businesses where the company will develop and provide products, solutions and services but aimed ultimately at making the customer successful. In the B2B model, if the specifications provided by the customers do not satisfy their real needs, your product or solution will not satisfy them as they won’t overcome their challenges. This can eventually turn into complaints and quality issues. B4B then is about understanding the needs of your customer, the challenge they want to address, and subsequently structuring your offer to make your customer successful in the long term. It is about shifting from unidirectional technical product transaction to value proposition, answering to customer needs and allowing them to be successful. It is a shift needed because eventually the Total Cost of Ownership for the company requires it. No matter whether your company sells a physical product or a digital one. If you sell hardware, you are still going to work with your customers on the usage of this product and receive benefits from them by cooperating along all the product cycle. When we talk about software, this partnership is even more obvious because the company needs to work with the customer on a day to day basis to make him successful. B4B is indeed the business model for SaaS companies, through which profits and margins are actually made, as opposed to B2B where the tendency is towards a commoditized market ruled by price wars. This new approach sees a renewed role for small companies that can implement this business model fast, as opposed to complex and small decision-making processes of corporate organizations. It is then the model of agile. The pre and after-sales value of B4B In the B4B model, the relationship between your company and your customer can go beyond the initial agreed offer. The offer, in fact, will change depending on the customer needs. For example, a company offering a different solution packages can indeed sell them standardly, but the difference in the new model lies in how and when it sells them to the customer, as opposed to a simple direct transaction model such as B2B. The biggest change on the company side is the role of internal teams (sales and customer care) and the processes managing them. In B4B these teams need to change their mindset and adopt one that is more proactive to understand the customers’ business and needs rather than focusing solely on product expertise. For sales reps, this means possessing the same vocabulary and understand the synergies of their market so that the offer can be better tailored. For the after-sales part, in the B2B model most companies have already a customer care team to take care of complaints and product replacements. The shift happening with B4B in this sense starts by changing semantics: not anymore customer care but rather customer success.   The team is then in charge of keeping in touch on a daily or weekly meeting with the customer to deliver not only the solution, but also their expectations. Thanks to this approach it is possible to identify additional customer needs and support his business activities, with potential positive business outcomes: it is estimated that 86% of buyers will pay more for a product or service if they receive a better customer experience. Ultimately, the company adopting the B4B model cares about the performance of the customer/partner rather than solely the performance of its product or solution. If your customer is going to be successful, also your business is eventually going to be so. It is about a change in KPIs: from lagging to leading. The role of data and IT in B4B Data is the key enabler of the B4B model. More and more customer, market and product data is collected nowadays. The volume of business data worldwide, across all companies doubles, in fact, every 1.2 years. Also, technologies like the cloud can help daily activities run faster, as opposed to expensive and slow in-house software. However, data available needs to be used more by companies in taking strategic business decisions and should be analyzed to shape real valuable solutions for the customers. Usage of data, in fact, not only costs the company for its collection and management, but it becomes even detrimental from the moment it is then poorly used.   The role of B4B in the electrical, automation and mechanical industry As the B4B model would want, it is important to start from the end-users and their needs, because the needs of an electrician and the ones of a big factory are different. Electricians will need easy and fast availability of products, having favorable payment conditions (being able to pay in cash money), while large factories will need after-sale services for positioning and technical support. So what would retailers and distributors need to satisfy end-users needs? Examples for electricians can include e-catalogs to allow them to check for products and their availability and place orders directly from computer or smart devices, while for factories distributors can provide a means through which manufacturers product offer is standardized (specifications, pricing, availability) for longer periods of time. The Electric, Mechanical and Automation markets are currently facing a slow-growing market. In such a market companies need to change their business model. With B4B they can sell more and better and so sustain their business in the longer term.