Jason Greenwood of Greenwood Consulting discusses B2B e-commerce, highlighting its complexities compared to B2C. He notes many B2B brands lag behind in digital capabilities, facing challenges like outdated data management and internal resistance. Jason shares a case study that illustrates how streamlining processes can improve efficiency. Hear why Jason predicts rapid B2B e-commerce growth, driven by Millennial buyers’ digital expectations and today’s B2B customer demands.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS

Jason Greenwood: If Nike, with all their incredible cutting-edge DTC capabilities and their amazing physical retail stores, can’t do it all DTC, what makes most DTC brands think they can? Realistically, they cannot.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The once clear-cut boundaries between business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing are becoming increasingly blurred in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. This convergence creates exciting opportunities and complex challenges for companies. As consumers bring their B2C expectations into their professional lives, and B2B companies strive to create more personalized, customer-centric experiences, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how businesses approach their go-to market strategies. This transformation is particularly evident in e-commerce, where B2B companies are racing to catch up with their B2C counterparts in delivering seamless, digitally-driven purchasing experiences. Today’s guest is an expert in helping B2B companies modernize their e-commerce strategies. Jason Greenwood is the founder of Greenwood Consulting, helping brands achieve technical, operational and customer experience excellence. With over 24 years of experience in the e-commerce industry, Jason brings a unique perspective that spans both B2C and B2B sectors, as well as agency and brand-side roles. Jason is also the host of The E-Commerce Edge podcast, which has produced 400 episodes. Jason’s unique perspective is enriched by his experiences as a digital nomad, having lived and worked in the United States, New Zealand, and now Mexico. To discuss B2B e-commerce, I’m delighted that Jason is joining us today from Puebla, Mexico. Jason, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Jason Greenwood: My pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for hosting me. You are spot on calling in from Puebla, Mexico, which is about two hours Southeast of Mexico City, where we’re in the great central plateau. We sit at about 2000 meters of elevation here in Puebla. So it’s an exciting place to be.

Adrian Tennant: Can you tell us about your career journey and what led you to found Greenwood Consulting?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah, I’ve been working in the e-commerce space for over 24 years and you know, I’ve seen some massive transformations in the digital and e-commerce space over that time. You know, prior to the A.I. boom, we’ve had other booms, most notably mobile and the impact on e-commerce and digital experiences, mostly being led by this wonderful thing we call the smartphone and what I affectionately call the remote control of our lives now, because we seem to live everything through the tether of our cell phone. But what I realized after multiple years of working inside brands, having my own e-commerce pure-play, as well as founding, running, and building e-commerce agencies, I realized that B2B had not only been largely ignored by agencies and consultants, but had been largely ignored by the B2B brands themselves from a digital perspective. And so that was one of the biggest motivations for me founding Greenwood Consulting, along with the fact that I very intentionally wanted to become location-independent. I’m originally born and raised in Southern California, moved to New Zealand in my early 20s, lived there for almost 30 years. My wife’s a Kiwi, born and raised in New Zealand, as is my brother-in-law. And then during COVID, we were prisoners in our own country for three years in New Zealand. The borders were shut. You could get out, but you couldn’t get back in again. Even as a New Zealand citizen, you had to wait and queue up for all the hoops you had to jump through to get back into the country. My wife and I are massive travelers. And we thought, “Man, We have a lot of lost time to make up for.” And I also had already at that point, I had a lot of clients in North America and Europe and time zones in New Zealand were troublesome. I had people wanting me to speak at conferences in North America. Travel from New Zealand was difficult. So there was a lot of things conspiring, I think, for us to move to Puebla, but that also meant that I needed to dramatically reshape the trajectory of my career. I was working in, was building an e-commerce agency alongside a very, very good friend of mine named Tony Ho. The agency called Mustache Republic operated across Australia and New Zealand. My wife and I wanted to re-engage with the travel side of ourselves and liked the idea of being digital nomads, but working inside an agency, that’s just never going to happen. So I sold my shares back to the founder and then established my own independent e-commerce consultancy. And the great thing about COVID, if there’s a silver lining there, it is that pre-COVID most clients would have expected that they meet you in person at least once. They want to eyeball you. They want to shake your hand. They want you to present to the board, whatever it might be. COVID erased even that expectation. Everybody was doing everything via Zoom and Teams and you know, G-Suite and everything else. And so it was the perfect time to become an independent consultant. Because then I could take on clients all over the world and they had zero expectation that would ever see me in person. Now, luckily since then, and since the world’s opened back up again, as part of my travels around the world, I’ve been able to meet a lot of these customers in person when I go and visit their part of the world. But there’s zero expectation that that was going to be the case. And so that’s what led me to where I am today. And the reason I decided to specialize in B2B uniquely was because my skillset. So for many years, I specialized in B2C and DTC. And even in my agency work, it was primarily B2C and DTC. B2B brands had a need that was really exacerbated by COVID. And all of a sudden now they needed digital routes to market unlike they had ever in their history. And so it just all, everything kind of conspired together to create a unique opportunity for me. And it’s been an amazing journey for the last four years, building this consultancy and building the life of freedom on the back of that, that it engenders, which I feel super blessed and lucky about.

Adrian Tennant: As you’ve mentioned, your consultancy now specializes in B2B e-commerce. What key differences exist between B2B and B2C e-commerce?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah, so B2B in a nutshell is businesses selling to businesses as opposed to end consumers of a good or product or a service. And usually when we think of B2B commerce, we’re talking about manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors selling to businesses. And those businesses may consume those goods directly as a business. Think, you know, a business selling office furniture to another business and they use that in their office. Then there is businesses selling to businesses who resell those goods into the market. So it might be, you know, a big box store buying off of manufacturers and then selling those goods ultimately to an end consumer. But that transaction between the manufacturer and the retailer is a business to business transaction. And historically, most B2B transactions were done based on email. a CSV or a spreadsheet with a PO attached to it, sent into the manufacturer or the distributor, “Here, send me this order and then bill me and then I’ll pay the invoice 20th of the month following” sort of thing. But another massive difference between digital commerce in the B2B world versus the B2C world is that when we think of e-commerce through a B2C or a DTC lens, people think a Shopify website selling goods to an end consumer or a brand selling through Amazon or eBay or through any number of marketplaces, selling through social shops, Instagram stores, TikTok shop, etc. So that’s kind of digital commerce through the B2C or DTC lens. In the B2B world, there are three primary channels that B2B brands sell digitally to their customers, whether that’s a distributor or a reseller of their goods. The first is EDI, which is electronic data interchange, which means me as a buyer, my ERP, my procurement system generates a PO and sends it electronically to the seller’s ERP system or fulfillment system. And there’s really no humans involved, right? That’s one computer talking to another computer placing an order. Then we have punch out, which is a similar type of digital transaction where there’s more human involvement, where on the buy side, there’s an e-procurement platform where they connect to my catalog system, which is usually my e-commerce platform, but they connect digitally to that system. They pull down my catalog into their e-procurement platform. So procurement manager, for example, can pull down, see what I carry, see my pricing, see my MOQs [minimum order quantities], any of those details, and then place the order actually through that e-procurement system on the buyer side. And then that order is then digitally placed through my commerce platform. The final one is self-service e-commerce, which is the thing that most closely resembles e-commerce in the B2C world, which is the buyer logs into a trade portal, a seller’s portal, or a buyer’s portal from their perspective. They log in, they can see the products, they can add them to a shopping cart, they can populate their cart by uploading a CSV and saying, add these things to my shopping cart. And then they check out and either they pay by business credit card or they pay on account or whatever payment methods are available to them. And then those orders are integrated from that e-commerce platform down into the fulfillment system or ERP or WMS or whatever it might be for fulfillment. So there’s these three primary digital routes to market from a B2B perspective. And then of course you’ve got emerging B2B specific marketplaces like Amazon business and other vertical specific B2B marketplaces that you can also sell through as a B2B seller. So those are some of the really big differences between the two. There’s others too, but those are the real big differences. And so helping B2B brands understand the data that they have to prepare in the backend around product data and getting that organized, getting their customer data organized. Even getting ready to adopt digital channels in the first place is wildly more complex in the B2B world than the B2C world because in the B2B world, these products often are very technical in nature. If I’m selling coffee mugs or t-shirts in the B2C world, everybody on the planet knows what a coffee mug is and everybody knows what a t-shirt is. In the B2B world, if I’m selling pumps, for example, five pumps might look on the surface identical, But they might have different inlet sizes, different outlet sizes, different head handling capability, different throughput capability, leaders per minute, et cetera. And so the specifications or the product attributes in the B2B world tend to be massively more complex than in the B2C world. And being able to support that is much more complex. It’s much more difficult usually. And it’s more difficult to aggregate that data together to be able to efficiently and effectively sell B2B products. combined with the fact that you have much more complex pricing models in the B2B world as well. So in the B2C world, As an example, price is an attribute of the product. I sell this product, this coffee mug for $6. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you come to my website in the B2C world, you buy this mug and you’re paying $6. In the B2B world, we have very complex trade pricing where the pricing is an attribute of the customer, not the product. So these types of unique complexities in the B2B world mean that the consulting that you have to be able to do as a consultant to be able to service that industry and even the language that they use. So in the B2B world, most people don’t use the word e-commerce. Again, they’ll use the term trade portal or buyer’s portal or something like that. They don’t necessarily even use the word e-commerce, but that’s what they mean when they’re talking about those types of digital services. And so even the language that we use, you know, in the B2C world, we use the word click and collect. If I’m going to go to a store and pick up something in the B2B world, we use the term will call. for going and picking up something from warehouse. So even the language that the B2B world uses is totally different to the language that the B2C world uses, even if they’re referring to the same thing. And so being able to consult and speak the language of this industry is really important because otherwise you just won’t be taken seriously.

Adrian Tennant: While preparing for this podcast, you mentioned to me that many B2B brands realized during the pandemic that they were 10 to 15 years behind in terms of digital commerce. So Jason, what are some of the most common challenges these companies face when trying to catch up?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah. One of the things that I see when I go in, cause a lot of times brands will come to me and they say, “We’re ready. You know, we’ve got board approval. We’re going to go and spend half a million dollars on e-commerce and we’re ready to go. We’re ready to pull the trigger. We see the importance of it.” So they’ve got the kind of the top down mandate. Maybe they even have the bottom up that mandate because their customers are saying, “Hey, look, you either offer us digital commerce in some way, or we’re going to find a supplier that will, because it makes us more efficient to be able to buy digitally than it does having to talk to Bob, my account manager, to be able to place an order via email and five emails backwards and forwards.” So even where there is very clear leadership support for digital channels, oftentimes there’s a lot of foundational work that needs to be done to get ready to be able to deliver on a digital services layer and an e-commerce capability within the business. And most B2B brands that are doing e-commerce or digital commerce full stop for the very first time, they might have lots of internal knowledge around their products, their customers, and understanding their customer needs and being able to go out and either procure or manufacture products that are a great product market fit. But they oftentimes don’t necessarily have any digital capabilities within the business outside of IT. So their IT team usually will manage all internal IT systems, their ERP, their WMS, their fulfillment platform, their internal desktop computers, their network drives, and they’ll have internal IT capability, but that doesn’t mean they have any internal digital commerce capability. And so oftentimes when I go in, first of all, the sales team will oftentimes see me as a threat and, or the customer service team sees me as a threat. They go, “Well, you’re looking to replace us, right? That’s the idea. The idea is implement these digital channels and you don’t need us anymore. You don’t need the sales team. You’re going to cut our commissions, et cetera.” And when I go in, I’m kind of looked at as the devil and everybody puts up the cross symbol. But usually within 10 to 20 minutes of a conversation with sales teams and customer service teams, I become their best friend really quickly. Because I don’t know a salesperson alive on the planet that likes admin. And anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of a sales person, a sales rep, whether they’re called a BDR, BDM, an SDR – whatever they’re called inside the business – they’re effectively fulfilling a sales function within the business. Anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of their job is just pure admin that adds zero value to the customer experience. They’re pulling down information off of a network drive and then emailing it to the customer. They’re taking an order via an iPad and then they’re bringing it back to the office and they’re manually keying it into an ERP. They’re doing all sorts of manual functions that for them, it doesn’t add or increase the amount of commission that they make and it doesn’t make the customer experience better. And the same with customer service. Customer service is even worse because usually customer service are not incentivized with commissions like salespeople are. But yet, they have to do lots of the same functions. They answer the phones, they answer the live chats, they answer the emails, they answer questions, they take orders on behalf of the customer, and they’re living inside of an ERP, manually keying in these orders, and they’re not even incentivized financially to do so. They’re just making their hourly wage, or whatever it is, or their salary, or whatever it is. They feel the value that they get out of their role from a customer service perspective is we’re super value to the business because we’re super valuable to the customer experience. And again, they sometimes feel threatened that I’m going to come in and it’s like, “You’re going to replace us with robots, aren’t you? Like you’re going to replace us with these commerce systems, right?” Well, no, actually we’re going to make your job a lot easier because we’re going to give you an interface to work in that’s specifically designed for commerce, not designed for finance. We’re going to make your job easier, more fun, more fulfilling, easier to do. And from a sales rep perspective, I actually encourage most business leaders to over and additionally incentivize sales that come through digital channels from a commission perspective for salespeople. because you are going to need your salespeople on board with this project. Otherwise, A, the project is likely to fail, and B, your customers are going to need their sales reps to be able to help them with adoption of these new digital channels. They’re probably going to need to literally physically go and sit beside these customers for the first one, two, three orders, help them get the order in, help them get comfortable with these new digital channels, Help them adopt them, train them on it, et cetera, and show them the value of the digital channels as well. And so the, and then the final piece I’ll speak to is just their data is often a disaster. Their data product data spread all over the business. It’s sometimes in print catalogs, it’s on network drives, it’s on desktop computers of the sales reps, it’s spread all across the business and it’s not ready to present. one to many through digital channels, and two, customer data is oftentimes a disaster. It’s not current. It’s not up to date. We don’t have a clear hierarchy between the brand that’s doing the purchasing versus the individual buyers within that organization that are doing the purchasing. We don’t have clarity around the price lists that either a buyer, the org, or location within that buying organization should be receiving. And it oftentimes is very messy. And a lot of this information is in the sales reps head. And until we can get that out of the sales reps head, And into a digital format, we can’t go selling across digital channels. And that’s the final piece of the puzzle that oftentimes we have to spend a tremendous amount of time cleaning up data and rationalizing data before we can start selling digitally.

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

Adrian Tennant:  In partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection is “The Martech Handbook – Build a Technology Stack to Attract and Retain Customers,” by Daryl Alfonso.  This comprehensive guide to marketing technology helps you build effective martech stacks that drive business growth and enhance consumer experiences. The book covers everything from core principles of martech strategy to practical implementation advice, including real-world examples and insights from the author’s experience working with startups and Fortune 500 companies.  Whether you’re a marketing professional responsible for optimizing a tech stack, a business leader driving digital transformation, or a student preparing for a career in marketing, The Martech Handbook offers valuable strategies for leveraging technology to attract and retain customers.  As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on The Martech Handbook when you order directly from the publisher at KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code Bigeye25 at checkout. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and the UK. So let The Martech Handbook help you build a martech stack that drives real business value and keeps you ahead in digital marketing.

Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Jason Greenwood, the founder of Greenwood Consulting, about B2B e-commerce. Jason, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS, so could you share an example of a B2B company that successfully transformed its digital commerce capabilities with your help?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I’ve worked with multiple brands, particularly in the industrial supplies space and by industrial supplies, I mean, industrial goods, right. That are meeting an industrial need, an industrial application, whether it’s an electrical, whether it’s in plumbing, piping, pretty much anything you can think of in the industrial space, either industrial manufacturing or industrial building supplies space. And I’m thinking of one case in particular where I went in and they actually already had an e-commerce solution in place. But what they didn’t have was the ability to combine their content and commerce journey, meaning that in the B2C world, romance copy, as we like to call it, the fluffy descriptions that are aspirational and inspirational, those are the things that are really important in the B2C world because it’s such a psychological and emotional purchase, right? In the B2B world, we have to remember that most B2B buyers, they’re buying as part of their job. They’re not buying because they want to, or they’re not browsing for inspiration. They’re buying because they neeDTComplete a task, right? Whether it’s a procurement specialist, a sales specialist, or a distributor who’s going to upsell those goods, whatever, they’re buying with a purpose. They’re coming to your website or they’re integrating with you via EDI as part of their day job, not because they’ve got some free time on a weekend and they’re enjoying browsing your website. That is not what they are there to do. One of the things that these businesses have challenges with is, especially if they’re a manufacturer and a distributor, which is actually very common. I had a brand recently who about 20 percent of their catalog is manufactured, meaning they make it. And about 80 percent of their catalog they distribute so that they can go to market with a full solution set. As opposed to selling SKUs, they’re selling solutions. That’s what they want to sell. They want to sell packages that meet a need, right? And about 20% of that they make and about 80% of that they bring in and then they package together and then they send it back out again. They had two completely different platforms, one for content, one for all this wonderful brand information and all this fluffy stuff that loves to get indexed by Google so that Google can send you the traffic to the right pages. And then they had their commerce platform, which was completely independent. Well, what we did is we rearchitected this and they had actually a subdomain for their content website and their shopping website, which to Google looks like two completely different domain names and they see it as two completely different brands, right? We want to bring all that beautiful, rich content around products. into the commerce platform so that we can have it all being managed through a central domain name. And we want to be able to present that at the right time to the customer as part of their buying journey. ‘Cause not everybody will need that additional content. They just want to know the facts, the figures, the stats, the specs, and that’s fine. They can go into a category of light switches, for example. And they can then filter down. They can basically take those hardcore attributes of the product and they can filter down and find exactly what they want for the exact application they need. But other buyers, they need more information, right? Especially if they’re a distributor buying off of these guys and then they’re going to resell it. The challenge that they were facing as a result of this separation of church and state, so to speak, is that it was anywhere from six to 12 months to onboard a new supplier brand into their business because it took them that long to be able to generate the content, go to the supplier’s website, scrape the content, download the PDFs, rewrite the content for the buying audience that made sense, getting it uploaded into the content engine, and then manually deep linking from the content website into the buying page on the commerce website. And this was all a manual process. So what we did is we architect a way where they didn’t need to do it manually anymore. Plus we were helping them onboard a third party service that instead of their marketing and merchandising team having to go to the supplier website and grab all this information and then map it in, we were engaging a third-party service to do this via A.I. They could go to the supplier’s website. They could download the collateral. They could map it into the content areas and the attribute areas. using the correct attribute nomenclature and mapping that the seller wanted to use across their categories, bring consistency to that process and automating about 90% of it. So this meant that they could go from onboarding a brand that would take them 6 to 12 months to onboard that new catalog into their engine so they could start selling and bring that down to less than a month. So these are the types of success stories that B2B brands really want to see, and that helps them to recognize the efficiency of not just selling digitally, but also procuring digitally and gathering and aggregating and streamlining their content and product data management process, automating that, that brings massive efficiency instead of just throwing more bodies at it and saying, “Well, look, we want to bring our product catalog onboarding from 12 months down to one month, so let’s hire 10 more people.” Well, no. Can we use automation, integration, and AI to speed that process up with no additional bodies? So these are the types of big wins that technology can bring to these legacy B2B brands that don’t even know that technology exists.

Adrian Tennant: We’re seeing more and more direct-to-consumer brands wanting to establish B2B channels. Jason, what are some key considerations for companies looking to expand from DTC to more B2B?

Jason Greenwood: First of all, about 25% of the brands that I work with that are looking to establish B2B channels are historically DTC brands. About 75% are B2B native, about 25% are DTC brands looking to de-risk their business by establishing strategic wholesale routes to market, right? And one of the biggest concerns that these DTC brands bring to my table before they’ll ever consider engaging with me is, “Well, we make X margin via selling DTC. We expect that our margins will be significantly less in the B2B world. Is it still worth it?” And what we find is when we do the business case, because I oftentimes am tasked with helping them build the business case around establishing strategic wholesale channels before they’ll invest in it, which makes sense, right? They need to know that it’s actually going to work for them commercially before they’ll spend a penny, which makes sense. What we find is when we do the homework, that the net margin oftentimes ends up being almost identical to their DTC channel. Now, when I say net margin, not the selling margin, but the margin they get to keep after costs ends up being about the same. Now, the reason for that is because in the DTC world, yes, at retail, when they are selling the goods to the end consumer, the selling price captures the retail margin and the wholesale margin. That is true. However, they also have an astronomical cost base associated with that because they’re responsible for 100% of the customer acquisition costs. They’re responsible for 100% of the distribution costs. They’re responsible for 100% of the store establishment. If they have physical stores as well, if they’re an omni-channel business. for building and maintaining stores and staffing stores, etc. So the cost structures associated with DTC selling are astronomical and climbing fast. And especially if they sell, even if they sell through Amazon, anywhere from 8 to 12% of that selling price is going directly into Amazon’s hands, not only as success fees, but also FBA costs of Fulfilled by Amazon. Right? So what we find is that by offloading a significant portion of those selling costs to your wholesale partners, because they’re already marketing in their market, they’ve already established their routes to market. They’re already doing their own digital advertising. They’re already selling on marketplaces. They’re already doing all these things. We find that the net margin, because all those costs are defrayed and handed off to your distribution partners. Not only do you get into markets that you could never get into where they’re strong. For example, even vaunted Nike recently has had to backtrack on their DTC strategy. They realize that it has not been as successful as they would like it to be. And wholesale partners – meaning retail partners – that were buying off them that they killed  off. They killed off a significant portion of their retail doors over the last two years in favor of DTC. They realized that they couldn’t fill the gap with DTC sales that they had lost in the wholesale space and the cumulative brand loss effect in terms of visibility is huge for somebody like Nike. And if Nike, with all their incredible cutting-edge DTC capabilities and their amazing physical retail stores, can’t do it all DTC, what makes most DTC brands think they can? They really realistically, they cannot, right? If Nike is not in the Athlete’s Foot, they are going to lose a tremendous amount of business. If they’re not in Dick’s Sporting Goods, they’re going to lose a tremendous amount of business. Nike has to be everywhere their customer is and wants to be, including Amazon. Nike pulled the pin on Amazon because they felt that Amazon was taking too big of a cut. They went back with their tail between their legs and they’re selling back on Amazon again. So this just tells me that strategic wholesale, I’m not selling, say, sell to every Tom, Dick and Harry and don’t be careful about where your brand is positioned, how it’s priced in the market, how it’s promoted in the market. Of course, you have to think about all those things. to preserve the brand equity. But in today’s day and age, it is almost impossible for a brand to be solely DTC and be successful because the customer acquisition and servicing costs are just too high and you can’t be everywhere at all times, no matter how much money you spend.

Adrian Tennant: Great advice. So Jason, looking ahead, what trends do you foresee shaping the future of B2B e-commerce?

Jason Greenwood: Yeah, so the data from DC360, the US Department of Commerce, and others, their data forecasts that the growth of B2B e-commerce will be somewhere between 8 and 10 times the growth of DTC and B2C e-commerce for at least the next decade. Now that if you think about it, logically, that makes complete sense. Because if most B2B brands don’t yet do e-commerce, because only about 40% of B2B brands offer any kind of digital commerce channel at all to their customers. And if we think that the vast majority of B2C and DTC brands already offer e-commerce, because it would be suicide as a new brand, a new retail brand, I can’t think of anyone that would establish a new retail brand and not do e-commerce. It would be suicide, even if they have physical retail stores. So virtually everybody in the B2C and DTC world does e-commerce today. Whereas the vast majority in B2B world still don’t do e-commerce. So just for the B2B world to catch up to where the B2C world is at, there’s going to have to be a massive acceleration of adoption of digital channels over the next decade. So just the catch up alone is going to be massive. So I think that this is going to be an increasing adoption curve. Combined with the fact that data shows that over 60% of B2B buyers today are now Millennials. That has only flipped in the last couple of years post COVID. So not only are more of the B2B business leaders today, Millennials, but the B2B buyers today are in the main Millennials. They’re not going to go to the Yellow Pages to find you. They are not going to go to a trade show to find you. If you are going to be in their consideration set as a buyer, they’re going to go to Google. They’re going to go widget X manufacturer, widget X supplier, widget X wholesaler, widget X distributor. They’re not going to go through their dad’s and granddad’s or grandmother’s sales channels. They’re not going to wait for a supplier to come and knock on their door. That’s not how they’re going to find new suppliers of the goods that they either need to use in their business or sell on. So, because the demographics of the buyer side have changed so radically, the demographic of how the sellers sell has to change radically to meet those expectations. So that’s why I expect those forecasts. I think those forecasts are possibly even a little bit conservative because I’m seeing a massive escalation in the demand for B2B solutions. And there is massive fragmentation in the solution side of the world today too. for B2Bs, and I expect that not to last. I expect there’s 20-plus top B2B focused e-commerce platforms out there today, whereas in the B2C and DTC world, that’s largely been won by Shopify and WooCommerce. Those are the two big players on the B2C, DTC side. And the B2B side is still massively fragmented. I don’t expect that fragmentation to last. I expect there to be massive M&A activity over the next few years, as well as consolidation and attrition to happen. So it’s a very exciting time to play in this space. I expect demand to grow and I expect B2B sellers to get religion around digital commerce at an accelerated rate as their buyers increase their digital demands. Even if they don’t necessarily want to place the transaction digitally, they want that whole suite of digital services, which to my mind, I still consider that those are digital commerce services. If somebody wants to place a quote request electronically, place a return electronically, download their invoices, download their statements electronically. If they want to do all that stuff digitally, that is all part and parcel of digital commerce to my mind. And I think that is just a native buyer expectation today. So I expect that to accelerate.

Adrian Tennant: Jason, if listeners would like to learn more about your work at Greenwood Consulting or The E-Commerce Edge podcast, what’s the best way to do so?

Jason Greenwood: E-commerce Edge is on every audio podcast channel. It’s on Apple, it’s on Spotify, it’s everywhere, plus it’s on YouTube, plus it’s on Rumble. I’ve also got the video of the podcast is available on Spotify as well, because I’m video approved, not just audio approved. So go and check out the The E-Commerce Edge on any podcast channel of choice. I use HeyGen to convert all of the episodes into Spanish editions of the podcast as well, which is a new thing. I put out almost all my content also on LinkedIn. I’m very active on Reddit. And then of course, greenwoodconsulting.net if you want to learn more about the services I provide. And I also have a whole bunch of information about the podcast and a blog on there as well. So those are the main channels.

Adrian Tennant: Jason, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Jason Greenwood: My pleasure. Thank you so much for hosting me. It was a great chat. I really appreciate it.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Jason Greenwood of Greenwood Consulting. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00: Introduction to DTC and B2B Marketing

02:20: Meet Jason Greenwood

06:29: Jason’s Career Journey

12:40: Key Differences Between B2B and B2C E-Commerce

18:15: Challenges for B2B Brands in Digital Commerce

20:04: Case Study: Transforming B2B Digital Commerce

25:43: DTC Brands Expanding into B2B

30:29: Future Trends in B2B E-Commerce

34:24: Where to Find Jason Greenwood

35:15: Conclusion and Thanks