Beyond Portals: Building B2B Brands with eCommerce

Aaron Sheehan: There we go. This room is perfect for yelling if we need to! Let’s start with a hopefully non-controversial statement: your brand’s value is the trust it provides to your market, delivered through the products and services your customers actually want. Anybody disagree? No? Good.

That’s a good segue to ERPs. Because nothing says trust and confidence like an ERP, right? Who recognizes this? Anyone remember Meatloaf? Our ERP will do anything for customers—but it won’t do that. To build your brand and inspire trust, you have to do a lot. But your ERP, which is the center of most businesses, usually doesn’t deliver what your customers actually want. So if your ERP won’t do it, what do we do? We build a portal. Yay, portals.

So, portals serve current customers. Here’s how I define it—and I’m open to alternate definitions. A portal is for current customers: you’ve got a login. How many people here have a website with a big “login” button at the top? You click it, and suddenly all the color disappears, and you’re left with a white page and a username and password box. It probably says, “Only works on Internet Explorer 10.” That’s a portal.

What’s behind that login is the portal—it only serves current customers. They’re non-threatening, and nobody had to have a “channel angst” meeting about a portal. Sales teams are fine with it; it doesn’t disrupt the channel. All the orders—EDI, phone, eCommerce—end up in the portal. The portal pages aren’t visible to Google, which is a plus for some companies. But the experience is restrictive; it’s a one-way door into your old ERP, and it only works for people who already have accounts.

Let’s talk about brand websites. These are open to the public—your WordPress, Drupal, or Sitecore site. The brand site markets your company. The portal is about operations and transactions; the website is what we marketers maintain. Honestly, most brand sites don’t have much for current customers. If someone already does business with you, they probably know what your warehouse and board of directors look like. The calls to action lead to a contact form or shared inbox. The website isn’t interactive for customers, while the portal is—but only for current customers.

So here’s the question: why are these separate sites? Why do we have separate digital channels? Who can tell me?

Taylor Simpson: Concealing pricing from the open market.

Aaron Sheehan: That’s a good answer. There’s no pricing on the brand site, sometimes it’s a totally separate site, but you’re right. There’s a login that runs the portal, and marketing runs the website. But it should be the same goal.

We did a survey with WBR, the company that puts on this event. We asked around a hundred senior buyers at large mid-market and enterprise businesses what suppliers could do to improve the B2B buying experience. The key theme that stood out? Fragmented information—too many portals, too many logins, and not enough centralized info. Buyers are bouncing from site to site, and they hate it.

Your brand’s value is the trust you provide, delivered through the products and services your market demands. But if half of that is behind a portal login, and the other half is on a brand website that doesn’t actually serve your customers—or show your products and pricing—then you have a problem. Google can’t see it. You have no SEO, no SEM. Discoverability is non-existent. Often, portals don’t have product search, and the brand site doesn’t even know you have products.

So, what do we do? We build an eCommerce website. That’s the North Star. It’s controversial—showing pricing, opening a new channel, dealing with sales team angst—but it’s about building trust. Customers need to see your about page, your leadership team, your warehouses, your years of experience. When they’re first-time buyers, they want to know you’re real and trustworthy. But then you have to show them your products.

Most B2B buyers start their journey online. If they Google a product and your products aren’t findable, they won’t find you. Maybe they’ll find you on Amazon, through a distributor. Buyers need to see what you sell, in detail, to answer their questions. You’re not just delivering products—you’re delivering trust, documentation, data sheets, certifications, and access to knowledge.

The more you gate that information, the less trust you build with new customers. Marketers want to capture leads, but you’re not capturing people with your about page. You’re capturing them with your products and services, and by understanding what your market demands.

An eCommerce website shows you what brands and products your customers are interested in—not just what they buy, but what they browse and search for. That’s valuable insight you can’t get from a portal or a basic website.

With that, I’ll hand it over to someone who’s actually lived through this: Taylor Simpson.

Taylor Simpson: Thanks, Aaron. It’s great to be here. My name’s Taylor, I’m with Ciranda. We’re a food ingredient supplier—we source organic, non-GMO, fair trade food ingredients from around the world and supply food and beverage brands and manufacturers in the U.S.

We just launched a beautiful new website in January, and we love it. But if you’d asked me a year and a half ago, I would’ve wondered if all this would actually work for our business. Before the new site, we had two separate sites—our marketing site and our eCommerce site. I used to say it was like a married couple living in the same house but sleeping in separate rooms, only talking when the lawyer’s involved. 

Our customers were confused about how to register or get set up. Internally, we had to manage the same product listings on both sites, and nothing was coming from our ERP integration. We were spending a lot of time just managing listings. We were even competing with ourselves for SEO. It was time for some marriage counseling—one site to rule them all.

When I joined Ciranda, I first wanted to talk to our customers. The initial eCommerce launch hadn’t gone well, and customers weren’t using it. We sent a survey to everyone we’d invited to the platform to get their feedback. I really recommend this—ask your customers what’s missing if adoption is slow. Voice of the customer was huge for us. We discovered they couldn’t access the information they needed, like documents. They wanted to pay the way they were used to, and they wanted more shipping methods.

So, we built a brand new website that brought marketing and eCommerce together, and it’s been a big improvement. Now, if you’re a guest or a prospect, you can visit our site, learn about us and our ingredients, and fill out forms that flow right into our ERP system. You can also register for an account, go through our approval process, and get instant access to your portal and dashboard—all on one platform.

We integrated everything with our ERP: product data, customer data, and full order history for every customer. If you need to find invoices, download documents, or pay outstanding invoices, you can do it right there. We also built personalized experiences for our different customer segments. Some customers do a lot of business with us, while others are smaller, long-tail accounts. Our first eCommerce site was meant to serve those long-tail customers and help them self-serve, but we ended up frustrating many of them.

Now, with the unified site, every customer can interact with us in a way that fits their relationship. Some can purchase directly, while others might just request quotes, place orders, or request samples.

Audience Member: I’m curious—how is your sales team organized on the backend? Did you unify your sales organization, or do you have eCommerce reps and enterprise reps?

Taylor Simpson: We didn’t create separate teams. We trained all of our sales reps to use the platform so it became part of their daily workflow, especially for onboarding and supporting customers. We had to do multiple trainings—some people need more help with technology than others!

Audience Member: What about the smaller, “long-tail” customers? Do they have account managers?

Taylor Simpson: Yes, that was actually a big mistake with our first eCommerce implementation. Those customers were all assigned to “eCommerce” as their rep, and didn’t have a real person to contact. We fixed that—now, every customer has a rep, even if that rep isn’t as involved with smaller accounts. When customers log in, they see who their rep is, with contact info and even a picture. For most long-tail customers, once they’re up and running, it’s pretty hands-off unless they start growing.

Taylor Simpson: Before we get to more questions, I want to share some wins. We’ve only been live for just over a quarter, but already, compared to the previous quarter, we’ve seen over a 100% increase in revenue. Bringing the experiences together has increased registrations and average order value. Our internal teams are excited, too—they’re happy to guide people to the site. Customer service used to get email after email for documents, certifications, and data sheets. Now, they can just send customers to the portal to grab what they need. With the old site, no one wanted to send customers there; now, they’re eager to do it.

Audience Member: With your new site, do your sales teams have a backend portal to see how customers are interacting, or track customer behavior?

Taylor Simpson: We set things up a bit differently. Our sales teams primarily use our ERP—sales data flows from the website to the ERP, where we have dashboards and metrics. In terms of CRM, we’re still on NetSuite. We could do more reporting with Oro if we wanted, but our team is deeply invested in the current system.

Audience Member: Has taking care of routine tasks online freed your sales team to focus on growing accounts and looking at metrics?

Taylor Simpson: Absolutely. That was a big part of the goal. We wanted to free up our team to focus on bigger customers while also giving smaller customers the ability to self-serve.

Audience Member: So it’s just a dashboard in your ERP?

Taylor Simpson: Yes, exactly. We could use Oro’s reporting, but for us, it made sense to keep everything in the system our team already uses.

Steve Martinez: One last question—about your average order value. Is your growth coming from customers buying more of the same products, or are they buying a wider range?

Taylor Simpson: I think it’s both. We’ve definitely been cross-selling more, and as customers get comfortable, they start buying more overall.

Aaron Sheehan: Thanks, everyone!