Live(ish) From B2B Online: Getting Internal Buy-In for eCommerce Starring UFPI

Aaron Sheehan: Welcome back to the OroCommerce B2B Uncut podcast. I’m your sometimes host, Aaron Sheehan, and we have a special episode today. Today’s episode is short; it was recorded at the B2B Online trade show conference in Chicago, Illinois last week with OroCommerce customer UFPI. I’ve been informed that the I is silent; they prefer to go by UFP, United Forestry Products. They serve a variety of markets globally, supplying timber to construction, industry, packaging, and other applications. We had two gentlemen from UFP on stage with me, and it was fantastic.

The topic of our presentation was getting adoption for digital commerce initiatives inside B2B organizations. It’s really about internal marketing, right? It’s about how you get people on board for your journey as you’re taking your, let’s say, manufacturing or distribution team into the new realm of digital. Often that can be an externally imposed journey, right? Your customers make you do it, your board makes you do it, your president or C-suite makes you do it. How do you get everyone else who needs to be part of that digital transformation along for the ride and singing from the same hymn book?

I was pleased to be joined by Kevin and Sean from UFP, two very experienced old hands at B2B digital transformation. They’ll introduce themselves on the recording, you’ll hear my questions, and you’ll hear their very insightful answers. It was a lot of fun to be on stage with them and share their learning with an audience in Chicago. So without any more talking, here is the recording from the presentation.

Kevin Pearson: I’m Kevin Pearson, the project manager for this job. I’ve been with UFPI for two years now. Sean and I have worked together in the past; he brought me in to help with this. We’ve been running this together for the past year and a half to get this project up and running.

Aaron Sheehan: So you’ve had good recent experience, but I understand from looking at your LinkedIn that you guys have done similar things at other well-known companies. What’s been your relevant experience in digital transformation and eCommerce prior to UFP?

Sean Cummings: I’ll go first. I started back in 2004, cut my teeth in the motorcycle industry. If you’re from Chicagoland or you’re into cars and motorcycles, I worked for a company called JC Whitney. We were a catalog company back then, early adopters of the internet. In 2004 when I was there, we sent out 60 million catalogs that year, and that was actually down from the previous years. We had about 20,000 products online in my category, motorcycles, and about 100,000 overall. Back then, data management was insane. Since then, I did a couple of startups in the motorcycle industry, and then a small company called Granger found me. Granger, yeah, they’ve been around a little bit, another company there, Zoro, so I did the startup for Zoro. I was the sixth employee, the first Granger employee hired on, and then Kevin came on shortly after.

Kevin Pearson: Yep, going to work at Zoro was my first step into eCommerce, about 15 years ago. I started there as a product data team member and then moved into building and running their customer service group. From there, with the involvement with our ERP and CRM, they moved me into IT operations, where I supported all of that, built out our PMO at that organization, and then from there moved into customer procurement, acquisition, a little digital marketing, and actually had copywriters reporting to me somehow in that mix. I don’t know how.

Aaron Sheehan: Why not? It’s eCommerce; everything is eCommerce, right? No, I love it. So you guys are both very experienced change managers, it sounds like, change leaders, tastemakers? Yes, one might say. It’s a nice one. You mentioned it, of course, that at UFPI you’ve just launched a new eCommerce experience. Kevin, who’s using it? And how does it actually help your customers?

Kevin Pearson: Right now, we have our independent retail customers on the site. Those are typically mom-and-pop lumber yards or custom deck builders or custom home builders and remodelers. We have a group of four test customers on it right now who are helping us get through some heavy testing. We also have our inside sales team and our outside sales team on the site as well to help support those customers. Using the site, impersonation mode has been a huge help for that. How it’s helped them is we’ve been able to do a few things. Obviously, the basic things: give them the ability to order online and see our products and inventory.

But prior to that, it was a phone call, an email, a text saying, “Hey, do you have this? Where do I, can I get this?” We also give them the ability to see their order history, their invoices, their bills of lading. All things that most of us in here, like, that’s normal, nothing to it. But that was still a phone call into somebody, had to chase it down. Our pricing in the lumber industry is very volatile; it changes week to week. So we have to be able to provide them with their weekly pricing and have that update automatically so they know what it is. That was another phone call or a drop-off of a price sheet every week. So those are some of the things we built the site around to help with that.

Aaron Sheehan: I like it. John, it sounds like from what Kevin was saying, maybe you said at the beginning, UFPI does things the old way, or did do things the old way. Kevin was talking about all of the experiences and pieces of information and data that are being surfaced through the new UFPI site on OroCommerce. So what drove the decision within UFPI to learn about this newfangled internet thing? And I’m curious how the sales team felt about it being so old school, you mentioned previously.

Kevin Pearson: Prior to me joining three years ago, two of our big customers, Home Depot, Lowe’s, forced us into eCommerce. We were literally a stocking vendor of theirs, a very large supplier, they made us dropship for them. So we all of a sudden were an eCommerce company; there was no real strategy or anything behind it. So they brought me in from the outside just because I had done it before to help drive that longer-term strategy. Early on, like Kevin said, the sales folks were getting literally texts, emails, we still get faxes. So we decided we needed a B2B site right away. We got leadership buy-in for that, started the whole process of launching it. The buy-in from the sales team and any other group was fantastic out of the gate. We said, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here are all these modern features we’re going to give you, here’s work we’re taking off your staff.”

But the problem is once we started to ask them to do work to help us build that site. Conceptually, everybody’s on board, thinks it’s phenomenal. But once we said, “Okay, now we need your people to dedicate a few hundred hours to this so we could have pricing in line or we could have marketing content,” that’s when we really started to figure out we had to internally sell as much as the salespeople are selling on the outside. We had to sell them everything they asked for.

Aaron Sheehan: Everything they want and promise them that and deliver something roughly equivalent. So I’m super curious, Sean, and then Kevin, as leaders tasked with delivering the site, how did you approach getting that buy-in besides over-promising, obviously? What was the process? Okay, it’s the beginning, your customers are demanding it, so evolution is forced on you from customer demands. Okay, you’re going to deliver it. How do you go about finding out what to build? And how do you go about talking to the people and getting the information, the requirements, to know what to build?

Sean Cummings: I’ll start it out and then pass it over to Kevin. Since I was there before Kevin, I actually interviewed every one of our sales staff that were out in the field, interviewed most of the account managers, a whole bunch of inside sales folks. That group consists of a few hundred people, and then some customers as well, to say, “Okay, here’s what I think you need as an eCommerce guy, here’s what I think you should have.” Our industry is, as I said earlier, a little behind, so we didn’t want to make it too complicated. We set it up in a way that we’re hoping this older generation, as they age out, will absorb and use the site as the younger generation takes over.

So it was through that discovery that we figured out what we needed. Then I worked on the internal selling part to get the leadership involved, and then Kevin came on and had to do the heavy lifting of getting that middle management layer, which is where the biggest frustrations usually come in.

Kevin Pearson: Yep. We had another good partner on this, AAXIS Digital, and we did a big discovery with our teams on that to show them what we needed to get done, get the right information from that, and go through about nine weeks of that discovery. In doing so, we were able to show them what we needed and what we were going to do with the site and around the parameters that they gave us. That allowed us to get them a little more on board at that time. So it was extremely helpful to do that. Once that was said and done, it was a little easier to pull their people in as the project progressed.

Aaron Sheehan: That makes complete sense. So it’s a combination of getting the requirements up front and then keeping people enthusiastic about it along the way because you’re asking for significant involvement from your middle management. The middle management has to go in and say, “Okay, I need people to dedicate time, hold them off of their existing duties, go in and start figuring out how you do things in a way that a programmer can then replicate on the site.”

Sean Cummings: And then the old startup guys, Kevin and I, then also just said, “Okay, our groups can’t get to this, so my team is going to go ahead and execute this in the beginning. It’s not going to be exactly what we want until their groups can get involved and give us some resources.”

Aaron Sheehan: But it makes complete sense. So Kevin, once you’ve got your stakeholders hyped up, now they’re ready for some magic, this magic site that will descend from the heavens and solve all of the digital transformation needs, people can find their bill of lading at last. How do you keep that level of buy-in along the entire way? How long was your implementation journey?

Kevin Pearson: Once we got through the discovery, we did this in about six months to get the test customers up and running. But there were the nine weeks of discovery before that.

Aaron Sheehan: And, sure.

Kevin Pearson: All the fun we know about with contracts that kind of slowed things down.

Aaron Sheehan: I’ve heard of those. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Pearson: But from start to finish right now, we’re about what, a year, a little over a year, and probably a year and a half with internal selling and all that.

Aaron Sheehan: So a year and a half total lifetime, but the actual implementation itself took six months. So that’s 12 months of stakeholder involvement, interviews, procurement processes, vendor selection, discovery, and all of that. Okay. Wow, that’s quite a ratio. And I think, from my experience anyway, a lot of companies underestimate this part of it, right? It’s like, “I’m going to hire a contractor, and they’re going to replace a toilet, and that’s it, and it’s done.” And the idea of spending a year talking about it ahead of time maybe wasn’t on the plan, right? Yep. I’m super curious then. So you’ve got it, you’re building it, you’re keeping involvement, right? Are you going back to the various middle managers and stakeholders, your sales team, your finance teams, your marketing team, your ops people? Are you showing them the site along the way? Or is it “Don’t look in here, don’t look?”

Kevin Pearson: We definitely kept them involved along the way. We did the whole agile approach, and as we were building out the comps for the site and the strawman, we brought them along with us on that to show them, “Okay, these are the features you asked for, here’s how we’re building them. Are we on the right path? Are we getting what you want out of this build?” That kept the sales team and any other departments that were relying on pricing and marketing heavily involved in the site so they knew what was going on along the way.

We were just extremely communicative on a weekly basis with a lot of different levels of management and senior leadership, the middle management, different departments, letting them know exactly, “Here’s what we accomplished, here’s what we were able to release for you, and this is what’s coming next. Be ready to give us your feedback,” and just had a really strong feedback loop to really make sure that they stayed in the know of what was going on and part of the process.

Aaron Sheehan: That’s impressive. That’s a lot of work. So I’m super curious then, Sean, how do you keep the magic going? How do you keep the magic alive after all these years now, between the two of you obviously, but you’ve got your life, right? You launched this in March, right? Early March. So six weeks or so that you’ve done it? How do you keep the momentum going? How do you keep those stakeholders bought in and providing feedback and meaningfully being part of a testing regime, documenting that, and then also getting adopted as you’re probably rolling it out to new people, right? How does that process work? And what have you seen so far?

Sean Cummings: So we’ve been, like I just mentioned a moment ago, we communicate too much because we learned early on that these folks don’t understand what we were doing. It’s new to the company, new to the organization. So we wanted to make sure that every step of the way they knew what was taking place, what was happening. When we launched in early March, we actually wound up finding some big pricing bugs that took us about a month to fix. So really, it was about two weeks’ worth of orders that we’re getting now. So we’re discovering a lot of stuff. The sales staff that is utilizing it currently is pretty on board because we have been hands-on. We’ve gone to the customers with them face-to-face, we said, “Hey, here’s what we’re building,” and again, we want that direct feedback. We’re about to launch about another 15 customers in the next couple of weeks; we think we’re going to get some momentum there. But the internal part is the selling, and I’m going to blow Kevin up a little bit on this one.

I truly think one of the things that are missed when people are launching big projects like this is the importance of the project manager. The project manager is actually your salesperson internally, and it’s not just somebody checking the box and getting a lot of things done. It is that constant and never-ending, “This is why I’m doing it for you. This is how it’s going to benefit you,” to all the other departments. To me, that’s how we keep that momentum going. Then once the customer started rolling in, we’re also doing a bit of a media blitz once we get past this next round of customers. So we’ll get stuff out to the public, but that’s how we’re hoping this momentum piece is going to stay.

Kevin Pearson: And we’re also meeting weekly with our customers who helped us with the launch and getting their feedback on what they like, what they don’t like, what’s been working. We had all that discovery, and we asked a lot of questions, but I was there a year and a half. I don’t know, this is my first time in the lumber industry. So I was just going off of my own background to ask what I needed to ask. It turns out we asked a lot of the right questions, but then after we stopped, got close to launch, those answers changed or had additional answers that we didn’t know to ask about. So we had to pivot pretty quickly. But by getting this core group of customers and this group of salespeople together, they were able to give us pretty quick and immediate feedback so we could fix some of these user experience and user interface issues we ran into. The pricing was like all hands on deck to fix that. It was really a great group effort on all sides. By doing that, now we’re starting to see more traction, more activity, and a lot more feedback from these customers who are now getting more comfortable with it. So that’s been pretty effective too in helping us out to get it right.

Aaron Sheehan: That’s fantastic. So your final words of advice then for the group are to empower your project managers to not only check the box and go to the Gantt chart but to actually be marketers and salespeople for the effort and to prepare and leave room for the unknown unknowns that pop up once you’ve actually built something and shown it to them. Any other final thoughts then that you would like to leave this room full of lovely people with about how to manage adoption for digital transformation?

Sean Cummings: Back to the over-communicate piece. I think the internal selling and the over-communicating is what has been successful for us, at least in a very old organization where people have been there forever. Our systems are just terrific, so that helps everybody help us out to build them their product. Fantastic.

Aaron Sheehan: I think we are at time, is that right? Yeah, we have time, we get into your pacing. So I guess that means that the book’s about to come out. All right, then I guess we’re done. If you have questions, we will be towards the back for a few minutes. Have you really, you want to talk to them? It’s been lovely speaking with you. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.