Growth Tactics for B2B eCommerce Teams: What Most Get Wrong About Email

Episode Highlights

00:30 – Intro: Kyler’s path from agency owner to B2B eCommerce
03:00 – What distributors get wrong about email marketing (and how Kyler found the gap)
05:42 – Planning and forecasting in distribution: What signals Kyler actually tracked
09:45 – Why the “endless aisle” is a trap for most distributors
11:40 – First growth levers: growing the sales team, fixing SEO, improving UX
16:33 – The lost revenue of not capturing email
22:40 – Personalization in B2B email: beyond “Hi, Bob”
23:50 – Simple segmentation that works: inside vs. outside the buying window
25:52 – Kyler’s 3-part B2B email marketing framework explained
32:10 – What the B2B Commerce Association adds for practitioners
37:23 – Kyler’s podcast and TV recommendations

Resources Mentioned:
B2B Commerce Association
Forward Studios
The 2025 B2B Buyer Perspectives Report
How I Built This (podcast by Guy Raz)
Wisdom from the Top (podcast by Guy Raz)
Survivor (reality TV show)

Full Transcript

Aaron: Welcome back to the B2B Uncut podcast, sponsored by OroCommerce. I’m your host, Aaron Sheehan, and I’m joined today by Kyler Nixon. Kyler, you’ve had a lot of jobs and a lot of roles in the B2B space. I think most recently we met through the B2B Commerce Association. Maybe for the audience, introduce yourself—what are you up to now?

Kyler: Sure. Yeah, I took a little bit of a unique entry into the B2B eCommerce world. When you look at how people tend to stumble into B2B eCom, I haven’t found anyone who intentionally jumped into B2B eCom. It’s just sort of like, I happened to get there.

So, I owned a marketing agency in a completely different vertical—a completely different industry. If you think of what’s the opposite of B2B eCom, it was that. I spent six or seven years building an agency and met a local distributor here in Madison, WI.

They brought me on to do some consulting, and I knew nothing about B2B eCommerce. I didn’t know what an ERP was. I didn’t know anything. I literally knew nothing about B2B eCom. They brought me in to do some messaging, and I really enjoyed it.

Long story short, they ended up offering me a job as Chief Revenue Officer. I was like, “Are you sure you got the right guy? I don’t know anything about B2B eCom—I’m kind of learning on the fly.” Some things in my agency had changed, and the timing made sense for me to take that leap. So, I joined a smaller family-owned distributor right outside of Madison, WI.

If you want to learn B2B eCom, just get thrown in the deep end with no floaties. That’s probably the best way I could tell someone to learn, and that’s what I did for a few years—really learned the ins and outs of a family-owned distributor that was a legacy brand. It had all the things that come along with the B2B eCom experience: printed catalogs, high SKU count, performance marketing—you name it. All those things were parts of the business.

So, I was able to get a great grasp on B2B eCom through that experience.

My son was born at the end of 2024, and that kind of helped me re-evaluate—what am I looking for personally and professionally? The business was in a good spot for me to step out. So, I decided to take the leap, go out on my own again, and work for myself.

Because I had this weird knowledge about B2B eCommerce, I thought, what do I do with this? I decided to lean into it a bit more and, originally, was planning to do consulting—be a fractional Chief Revenue Officer and do consulting.

As I was having conversations with distributors, agencies, or vendor partners, email marketing just kept coming up. No lie, Aaron, probably 50-plus times in these conversations. What I quickly learned was hardly anyone’s leveraging email marketing. If they are, they’re maybe sending a few emails a week and not segmenting their audience. They’re barely scratching the surface, and nobody is really using email to drive revenue and growth.

So, a few months ago, a partner and I decided to launch what’s sort of—well, I don’t like the term agency, but for the sake of conversation, that’s what I’ll call it. We launched what’s your preferred—what’s your preferred term? The business is called Ford Studios. Again, there’s probably not a great term for it. The reason I don’t like “agency” is because agency has this connotation of: come alongside, take my money, don’t deliver results. We’re like, okay, what’s the opposite of that? I don’t have a great term, but we’re effectively an agency. We’re a partner delivering a service.

So, we launched an email marketing agency specifically for B2B eCommerce distributors and have really hit the ground running. It’s been a ton of fun to blend that experience as a Chief Revenue Officer, take what I’ve learned about B2B eCom, and focus down a bit into a specific channel—which is email marketing.

Aaron: Perfect. And I’ll admit, after working at agencies for many years myself, the email marketing conversation was always an evergreen one, and there was always a lot of room to do more.

I do want to talk a little bit about your CRO experience, though, because a lot of the conversations we’ve been having here—through our current customers, through our advisory board, going to events, talking, doing QBRs, and things like that—is people are trying to figure out how to make sense of the market right now.

There’s a lot going on. I think even last night there was—so we’re recording this on Thursday, May twenty-ninth—last night, federal courts overturned all of the Liberation Day tariffs. So now, we’re sort of going through, what is the market doing? Is the market doing “market things”?

People are trying to figure out: am I going to get refunds on the tariffs I paid for the goods I brought in, or is that gone? Is this going to stick around? There’s a lot happening in the market broadly.

Questions we get: How do we look at the market and predict for my business? How do I predict for my business what the next quarter is going to bring, what the next year is going to bring?

I’m interested, since you were on the sell side, on the revenue and growth side for a distributor: What kind of signals were you looking at from the wider market—either from your sales team or your customers? How did you think about planning for the next quarter, how much inventory to hold, what territories to go after, where to invest, and where to pull back?

Kyler: If I had a perfect answer for planning, I’d be a billionaire right now. So I’ll try to give you my take on it. But yeah, it’s tough. I’ll just empathize with anyone listening—there’s a little bit of science, a little bit of art, and a little bit of just guessing. That’s what forecasting and planning is, I think.

One, I think looking at sales pipelines is a really easy place to start. It doesn’t matter if the sales team says we’re going to be 150% over our goal this quarter. If their pipeline is at a quarter of their goal, you’re not going to hit that. That’s just a really tangible way to understand what’s happening within your current customer base.

From a digital marketing standpoint, especially if distributors have a large portion of their revenue flowing through their eCom platform today, you want to look for signals like traffic. Are our current marketing channels working as hard for us now as they were three months ago or twelve months ago? If the answer is no—ad costs are increasing, traffic is decreasing, whatever the case—it’s pretty tough to assume that’s going to go up. You can pretty safely say, “OK, this might hold steady, or we should forecast it down.” So, look at your ads, your email traffic, your direct traffic—all of those are helpful indicators for what might happen in the next three months.

Again, like I said, if those are flat or down, it’s tough to convince me they’re going to go up unless you’re just going to pump a bunch more money into those channels. Even then, that money probably isn’t going to work as hard for you as it is right now.

Aaron: ROAS can be a really misleading KPI sometimes. And obviously, you’ve got to adjust for seasonality and things like that. But I totally agree—look at the signals your existing business is giving you to make projections. There’s a lot of data there, and I think that’s something, especially in B2B, where digital has moved ahead a lot in the distribution and manufacturing space over the last ten years.

Generally, there’s a lot more data captured and available on the marketing side, if you’ve got it set up correctly, that you can use. You don’t have to go consult a psychic, you know?

Kyler: Correct. And attribution is still a black box. Nobody has really fully solved that. Google wants their piece of the pie, Facebook wants their piece, your email tool wants its piece—all these different tools give you different views of attribution. That’s also not a perfect solution.

What I will say is, now in 2025, the distributors I’m talking to who are succeeding are taking a bit of a backwards approach to what you’d think. You’d think, “Let’s spread our business a bit more broad, hedge our bets, figure out what might win and what might not.” But the brands that are winning—whether they’re down from a revenue standpoint intentionally or not—are doubling down on their highest performing verticals, categories, and products. They’re not trying to be all things to all people. They’re saying, “These five verticals generate 70% of our sales, so let’s lean more into that.” Instead of trying to add product categories or more verticals, they’re leaning into the success they’re already having.

Aaron: What struck me about that remark is that, in some ways, what you’re saying is the people who are succeeding already did the “go broad and learn” phase cycles ago, and now they’re implementing what they learned: here are our top margin, top performing products or regions or service lines—let’s niche into that. But to learn those, they probably had to look fairly widely at all the possible assortment and markets they sell into.

It’s about doing the right thing for the stage your business is at. If you don’t know your high margin items or most popular items, you can’t niche into those—you just don’t know. So, first learn, and then specialize is what you’re saying. Don’t go chasing waterfalls; stick to the rivers and lakes that you’re used to.

This model of the endless aisle, infinite SKUs, that popped up in the early 2000s as printed catalogs just went online—all of that still existed. The problem is, now the endless aisle with tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs means you’re competing with Grainger, Uline, Fastenal—these massive distributors who can outspend you in one day. 

So why try to compete with them SKU for SKU, vertical for vertical? Find places they’re not succeeding or not serving customers well, or deliver an experience they can’t provide. Lean into that instead of just providing a slightly better cost or shipping rates. That’s not enough to really move the needle, especially with the way the economy is right now.

Aaron: So it sounds like, unusually, and you remarked at the beginning that nobody deliberately sets out to get into B2B commerce—which I agree, that’s actually been a long-running theme with many of the guests here. When you ask people how they got here, it’s a very non-linear path.

But it sounds like you brought marketing experience to that Chief Revenue Officer job, which I’ll say is unusual. That’s not a traditional path. A lot of people get into that role through pure sales or ops, especially in distribution. But I’m guessing that because you started off—as you said, your first job was as far afield from B2B as possible—you probably thought about growth and the levers you could pull to affect that growth differently than others might, even if it wasn’t a one-to-one match. I’m curious: what was the very first lever that you pulled as Chief Revenue Officer to affect growth? What was the first strategy or tactic you invested in?

Kyler: Yeah, that’s a great question. Really making me think back to it. One, I will say, we did want to grow our sales team. We had a really healthy house file; as a legacy brand, 85 years old, we had a lot of historical brand trust and authority in various industries. But we had a very small sales team—when I started, it was one person. So that was definitely an area we wanted to lean into, because we felt if we could add a human approach to sales, it would be beneficial—build relationships and try to find new customers.

From a sales standpoint, that was pretty cut and dry: get more reps, assign them good accounts, and try to help them grow those accounts.

From a marketing standpoint, there were a few things we tried to tackle in that first twelve to eighteen months. One was organic SEO. When I started, it was just in a free fall—getting hammered month over month. That was a really big challenge for us. It took the entire time I was there, but finally, right before I left, it started recovering to where it was when I started. But that was a massive challenge.

Email was definitely another area of opportunity. What I’ll say, though, is when I started, we had a great team already doing email in-house, which is abnormal for distributors. A big chunk of our revenue—20 to 30%—was coming from email, which is very unique for most distributors. So, there were obviously opportunities to optimize and build retention strategies, but generally, email was in a pretty good spot when I started.

Then the third thing, or kind of a 3A and 3B, was that we wanted to lean into the user experience on the site and clarify our messaging for customers. We didn’t want to sound like every other distributor. We wanted to highlight the unique things we provide that others don’t. So that’s messaging and positioning. And then, the second part was making sure the site reflected the great experience we were promising through our words. We overhauled the site from a UX/UI standpoint—not a replatform, but a big project. We added better search functionality, quoting tools, and just leaned into the buying journey more, treating it like a true B2B site instead of a B2C site with a lot of SKUs and hoping you could find your way around.

Aaron: Oh, I love that theme. For sure. How—what percentage of the business was e-commerce versus field sales, counter sales, rep-led? Was it a split, or did everything go through the e-commerce site?

Kyler: Good question. Again, it was a little unique—it was probably 70 to 80% of our revenue flowing through the e-com platform and never actually touching a salesperson or an offline channel.

Aaron: That’s very high. I can think of a lot of companies—e-com directors who would give their left leg to have 20% of the business through e-commerce. 

Kyler: I’m sure we’ll talk about this later, but we have our mutual friend Justin King with the B2B eCommerce Association. One of our first conversations, I said to Justin, “You talk a lot about platform adoption, getting people to adopt the platform—and that’s great and important—but the world I was in was acquisition. We needed to get more customers and retain them. We didn’t have an adoption problem—we just needed more customers.” That spectrum in B2B is fascinating. Some brands have very little revenue flowing through their platform and need more adoption, while others need more new customers—acquisition. It’s a unique spectrum.

Aaron: The great thing about e-commerce is that it scales more linearly and effectively than the traditional offline model.

You alluded to this earlier, but email marketing as a channel is under-resourced and underappreciated. I would say in e-commerce for sure, especially among SMB to mid-market brands. Sometimes the big enterprises will throw a big team at it, but it takes a while to get to that point. And honestly, even very large companies are still doing the “sign up for our newsletter” thing—everybody gets the same newsletter once a month, maybe.

So, I’m super curious. I know when we talked before, you mentioned that in your current role—your not-an-agency that is an agency but isn’t an agency—you did a survey about the email channel. I’m curious: how did that work and what did you find?

Kyler: Yeah, so it was pretty informal. At some point I’d love to do a more detailed, larger survey, but it was sort of like—I’m seeing this a lot, let’s pull on that thread and just see what happens.

We reviewed distributor websites—probably around 100 to 130 distributor websites. All we did was go to their site and see: do they have a pop-up or an opt-in? Like you mentioned, a lot of them have that little “join our newsletter” in the footer.

Ninety-five percent of those distributor websites—when I entered my email address, I got nothing. I don’t even think the box on the bottom of the site was connected to an email service provider. Think about how much revenue is being left on the table by these distributors simply because they’re not capturing email and doing something with it.

I talked to a distributor who’s spending well into six figures on Google ads, driving hundreds of thousands of people to their site every month—and they aren’t capturing that traffic. Unless that customer purchases something, you just let 98% of your website traffic walk out the door. And you paid for them to get onto your site and then did nothing after that.

D2C—it’s tough to compare D2C and B2B, and some people have feelings about that. But in general, D2C has figured that out. Every D2C site you go to is going to have a pop-up or something that greets you in the first 10 to 30 seconds. Why do they do that? Because it captures the traffic that’s on the site, then lets you nurture them through email.

That was the biggest thing we found—so many distributors are literally not even capturing the traffic they’re already paying to drive to their site.

Aaron: It’s really interesting too because, when you’re in the room having the conversation, I’ve heard many times, “Well, my customers are just like me, and they skew older, more male, typically.” There’s a certain amount of—I don’t know a better word than crankiness—around the idea of an email capture pop-up. “Well, I never fill those out, so no one will.”

When you talk to decision makers in D2C and B2C brands, you’ll hear a lot of the same sentiment: “I never click those, so nobody does.” And yet, email is one of the top performing channels in almost every healthy e-commerce business I’ve seen, because it’s personalized and targeted based on user actions, and everybody has an email account.

The truth is, people will fill those out—and do. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a whole bunch of very expensive email marketing platforms out there, and plenty of inexpensive ones, too. It’s a rich, well-served, almost commodified world. If people’s break room conversations about “I never do that” were really true, the market wouldn’t exist as it does.

You’re absolutely right: you can’t just drive traffic to the site and then not present people with an opportunity to get on a list, or to learn something about them for retargeting or list building. Are you a distributor? Are you a retailer? What’s your role in the supply chain? Where are you? What do you do? Learn about the people, then you can market to them later. Maybe they don’t buy something right away—nobody buys on the first visit. It takes time.

The nice thing about a platform like Oro, and eCommerce platforms in general, is that they have these events and data already baked in. So if you come to my site and I capture you as a lead—maybe you give me your email in exchange for something—then you come back and visit, or you build a quote or a cart, now I know that about you and can cater my messaging to help you in your buying journey.

I agree with those executives who say email marketing is bad if you’re just blasting product into your customer’s face and not actually helping them through their buying journey. That’s the wrong approach—100%. It’s annoying, it’s spammy, it’s all the things people hate about email marketing.

But on the flip side, if we have those events and that data flowing in from our ERP or eCommerce platform like Oro, it allows us to meet customers where they are in their buying journey and help them—hold their hand until they buy. And then after the purchase, we can come back and do it again. That’s as simple as I can sum up the value of email.

Kyler: No, that’s exactly right. And it’s funny, because we have a lot of tools for segmentation and personalization inside the platform at Oro. I have a feeling a lot of those aren’t used at scale, to be honest, because people aren’t thinking about it that way.

Aaron: And we do a lot of surveys as well of the market. We just commissioned one that’s out now on buyer behavior—you can go to our website or social and find it; I can put the link in the show notes. One of the questions we asked was: what features on a B2B platform, portal, or e-commerce site are you actually using? We’re always curious—what are the experiences buyers are actually looking for?

I think about two-thirds of the respondents said that if personalization was present, they always or often used it if it was available. Now, a lot of times, good personalization isn’t even a feature you notice—it’s just part of your journey, and it’s invisible that you’ve been segmented.

But I’m curious: what are some good ways to segment an audience in B2B sales or distribution, so you can market to them in a way that actually feels personalized? What are some successful things you’ve seen?

Kyler: I love that. It’s such a good question. I think the other reason people struggle with the idea of personalization is that they think it just means displaying the company name when you log into the site, or saying, “Welcome back, Bob.” Sure, I guess that’s personalization—but that’s caveman personalization. It’s not complex.

From an email marketing standpoint—and you’ve said this a couple times—that’s one of the biggest reasons I love email. In a Google ad, I can’t personalize that ad or listing to the customer. I can control who sees it, but beyond that, everyone is seeing the same thing no matter where they’re at in their buying journey.

With email, because we have access to so much data—whether it’s first-party data from your ERP or e-commerce site, or it’s event and behavioral data from how customers interact with the site—we know a lot about our customers if the tools are set up correctly. We can personalize both the information we send and when we send it: right customer, right time, right message. That’s our focus when we set up email campaigns.

So to your original question about segmenting for retention and growing LTV, we keep it really simple. We segment customers into either “inside the buying window” or “outside the buying window.” This will vary by client and industry, but generally, when a customer is outside their buying window, we look for indicators they might be coming back in—maybe they buy every six months, maybe they’re building a quote, maybe they’re visiting more often. At that point, we can personalize the types of messages and lean a bit more into offers or products to try to get that sale.

If the customer isn’t interacting with the site much and is outside their normal buying cycle, we just say, “You’re outside your buying window.” Our goal isn’t to try to get you to buy something you don’t need—that doesn’t work in B2B. Our goal is to nurture the relationship, build trust, add value, and then slowly watch for signals that you’re back in the buying market.

All of that is personalization—meeting that customer where they’re at with a well-timed message, offer, or product suggestion.

Aaron: That’s a great answer. I’m hoping this is a part of the podcast where, when we look at the listener statistics, people actually listen to what you just said.

If they drop off at that point, just don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

Kyler: We know—it’ll be our secret.

Aaron: Okay, so let’s talk about the framework. You mentioned before that you have a three-bucket approach to email marketing. How do you think about those buckets exactly? And if you’ve got examples of what kinds of tactics or workflows fall into those buckets, that’d be fantastic.

Kyler: For sure. I mentioned this at the start of the episode, but our agency is only focused on B2B. One of the challenges with email marketing agencies is that there are a ton of D2C agencies, and they don’t understand B2B buying cycles. So they try to apply D2C principles to B2B. It works a little, but a lot of it doesn’t.

I’ve talked to so many distributors who struggle because the agency made them sound too consumer, or they didn’t understand the customer, or quoting, or all these other things that are unique to B2B. So I say that as context because what we build—our “Forward Framework”—is three parts, designed to build on each other. It’s designed for business buyers and distributors.

The first part is what we call “Conversion Catalyst.” We talked about this earlier, but if you’re driving traffic to your site and not capturing or converting that traffic, you’re just letting people leave and wasting money. Conversion isn’t necessarily a purchase—it could be a quote request, sample request, or joining your reseller program. The goal is to get them into your ecosystem and move them to the next step. For example, we have a client that sells to contractors, so for them, getting a lead to start quoting projects is a conversion.

The first step is setting up a curiosity-driven opt-in, a trust-building welcome flow, and a follow-up engine that gets people into what we’re doing. That’s Conversion Catalyst.

The second part is the “Sales Signal System.” As the name suggests, we’re constantly looking for signals that the customer might be inside their buying window. We segment customers as either inside or outside their buying window and look for signals that they’re moving in or out. If they’re inside the window, we send tactical campaigns—browse abandonment, checkout abandonment, quote follow-ups—meeting them where they are in their buying journey. If they’re outside, we stay top of mind with newsletters, brand-building campaigns, and lapsed flows to re-engage customers who haven’t bought in their usual cycle.

The third piece is “Adoption Anchor.” The goal there is to get people to use your e-commerce platform, and we use email marketing to drive that adoption.

So, three parts: Conversion Catalyst for acquisition, Sales Signal System for retention, and Adoption Anchor for customer adoption.

Aaron: Perfect. I love that. I think that’s a really good way of thinking about it. There are similar frameworks for adoption—and really, if you boil down what Justin King talks about, it’s about getting the customer to do the next thing. Whatever it is—logging in, coming back to the site, calling, even offline—just re-engaging. You’re driving the next click or conversation, and over time, those build to sales.

The great thing about B2B, compared to D2C, is that once you’ve acquired and converted a customer, the long-term revenue can be substantial. They’ll come back, because they’re buying for their jobs. It’s not like seeing a shirt on Instagram and buying it once—you probably won’t reorder. In B2B, the ROI is huge. You’ll still be getting revenue from that acquisition five years from now.

Kyler: And that’s why we start with that acquisition offer—the Conversion Catalyst—because if you’re not even capturing people, it’s not just the short-term cost you’re missing, which is potential revenue and the money you’re spending on traffic that’s leaving. You also have zero chance to sell to that customer next year, and the year after, and the year after that. There’s a ton of long-term, downstream opportunity cost you’re missing if you don’t capture those leads.

Aaron: Yep, absolutely.

So, final sort of serious question on this—and you’ll hear why I use the word “serious” in a moment. You’re part of the B2B Commerce Association. We’ve talked about that, and I’ve had several members on lately—Justin King, Jason Hein, Jay Schneider, others. It feels like every couple of weeks they’re adding a new SME to the roster of consultants and thought leaders at the B2B Commerce Association, and you’re one of them now.

How do you view—without getting yourself in trouble!—the mission of the B2B Commerce Association? What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen from them since you’ve been a part of it?

Kyler: That’s a great question. Just a quick back story: when I was a Chief Revenue Officer, I found that role incredibly isolating. I didn’t know that all these communities and associations existed. So, when I was Googling strategies or how to do things, I was getting D2C answers and meeting D2C practitioners. There wasn’t—and still isn’t, to be clear—a lot of B2B-specific resources. There’s a huge opportunity there.

I remember when I left my job, I didn’t have a safety net and didn’t know who else was doing anything in this space. I was holding my son for a nap, scrolling LinkedIn, and I typed in “B2B e-commerce.” Justin King popped up, which was probably the best first result I could have found. I sort of stalked his profile for a couple days, then messaged him and said, “Hey man, love what you’re doing, this is really cool. I felt isolated in my role, would love to learn more if you have time to chat.”

That built a great relationship with Justin and the rest—Jason Hein, Jason Greenwood, Jay Schneider, Sarah Falcon, their marketing director. There’s just a ton of people at the B2B Association who have contributed so much to B2B e-commerce, not just recently but over the last ten or twenty years. As a younger guy in the space, their willingness to put an arm around you, show you how it’s done, and help you find your way has been incredibly helpful for me. I’m really grateful for that.

As I’ve leaned into the association more as an SME, coach, or whatever you want to call it, what I love about the B2B eCommerce Association’s mission is how practitioner-focused it is. As a CRO, I was a practitioner. I see a lot of associations focused more on vendors, consultants, or agencies—and we need that—but we can’t create an echo chamber of providers and ignore practitioners. The conversations happening in boardrooms or meetings are often disconnected from what happens when vendors and agencies are talking. The more we can align everyone and make sure we’re speaking the same language, moving in the same direction, the better.

Justin, Brett, and all those guys—what they’re building is really helpful.

Kyler: The last thing I’ll say, practically, is I’m super pumped about B2B eCommerce World—the event they’re putting on. I think they have three different events, and the one I’ll be at in November is in Scottsdale. So that’s their U.S. event.

Aaron: We’ll be there too, so I’ll see you in Scottsdale. I want to get some beer tips, Kyler.

Kyler: That’s my goal in Scottsdale! Just rub motor oil into your face every day—that’s the trick.

Aaron: Now we don’t even need to talk down there!
I love the idea that you were kind of stalking Justin King, like standing outside his window with a boom box and cue cards, like in Love Actually—“Hi, I’m just a big B2B e-commerce practitioner, looking for advice.”

No, everything you said about the Association really resonates with me as well. We’re a provider, so we’re a member, but we joined and invest because they don’t let it just turn into a marketplace for providers. There’s no value in that—it just becomes a bunch of billboards along the highway.

Being committed to actual adoption and the success of B2B e-commerce is so important. We’ve talked about this many times on this show, honestly, Kyler—the isolating nature of being responsible for e-commerce in B2B. So few people do it, and you feel like you’re on an island. There’s often no one inside the business who can teach it to you because it’s new for them too.

I have that conversation probably two or three times a month with people who have the job of eCom director, or some channel responsibility inside a manufacturer or distributor, and they say, “Congratulations, you’re now responsible for e-commerce!” I was running the WordPress site and suddenly I’m brought to this back room, given a computer, and told, “All right, now you’re in B2B eCom.”

Kyler: That’s exactly right. No one sets out to be there, because they don’t even know it’s an option when registering for their major in school.

Aaron: I’m going to ask the last question of the show. Longtime listeners know what’s coming, but you probably don’t. I always ask every guest for a recommendation—a book, movie, TV show, podcast, magazine, newspaper, whatever—something you’ve read or engaged with in the last few months that you liked. It doesn’t need to be business-related, though it can be if you want extra credit.

Kyler: Lately I’ve really been into reality game shows. I hadn’t gotten into Survivor at all—literally had never watched it—but I’ve started watching it a bit more. The psychology and strategy behind it, how people interact, how they think and operate, is fascinating to me.

I also really enjoy the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz. I’m sure you’ve gotten that answer a lot—it’s just such a good podcast. He has a couple more: one called Wisdom from the Top—if you like Guy Raz, that’s another good one. He interviews founders and CEOs who have gone through crazy struggles and had to turn their business around. It’s kind of the opposite of How I Built This.

I’m not a big book guy. I listen to audiobooks or skim through them, so I don’t know that I can come up with a great book recommendation. Podcasts and reality adventure shows—those are my picks.

Aaron: That absolutely works! See, that’s the kind of authentic answer you get when you don’t prep people. We’ve had all kinds of recommendations. I have a seven-month-old, like I mentioned, so my brain is operating at about 40% capacity right now. If I come back on, I’ll give that one better thought.

And it gets better once all the teeth are in and they’re sleeping through the night—I promise. It does wonders for your clarity and mental acuity.

Kyler, really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast. There were some very good, actionable insights you shared, and I think it’s a perspective we haven’t had on here a lot. We’ll talk again—we’ll see each other in Scottsdale, and probably before that at another show or conference.

If you can send me the links to your business—the non-agency agency—anything you want, we’ll get it in the show notes so people can contact you. If somebody wants to reach out, what’s the best way?

Kyler: I’m really active on LinkedIn, so you can find me by my name—Kyler Nixon. I’m very responsive to DMs. If you’re interested in partnering, you can go to goforwardstudios.com and schedule a call or send me an email there.

Aaron: Perfect. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. And listeners, thank you—and we’ll see you next time.