In this week’s Master B2B Friday 15, Andy & Brian discuss:

– What the unemployment numbers mean for digital investments.

– Why personalization is so much more challenging in B2B than in B2C.

– How you define “the customer” in B2B will define what types of personalization you actually need.

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Brian Beck: Welcome to The Friday 15 with Master B2B.  And our music just suddenly stopped.  

Andy Hoar: Did we forget to pay the band?  

Brian: I guess, Andy.  Welcome to Friday 15 everyone.  Brian Beck here with Andy Hoar for another Friday 15 session.  We’ve got a great topic.  We’re going to be talking about personalization.  We want to hear your comments.  This has generated a lot of interesting comments on LinkedIn.  We’re excited about that.  But hopefully our breaking news music will work.  It’s a little bit of breaking news.  Andy, I don’t know if you saw this, but this was posted yesterday on LinkedIn.  Job openings are now the lowest since 2021.  The hiring rate across industries at 3.5% is the slowest since the pandemic hit in 2020.  And so many mixed signals about the economy right now, what are your thoughts?  

Andy: We just got some numbers this morning from the government, the unemployment numbers, jobs, numbers, we get every month in the first week, and the economy’s predicted to have 240,000 jobs created, it was 175,000, and this was on the heels of 300,000 last month in March.  So there’s clearly a decline, but not only that, but also there was a decline of wage growth, which is fascinating because that definitely indicates softness to the market.  People aren’t getting paid as much, but at the same time, in this top sea-turvy world we live in, inflation is still stubbornly high, but nothing’s worse than seeing your wage growth going down while inflation stays high, which means you’re working longer for less money, that really indicates weakness in the labor market.  

Brian: I’m sensing just in talking to a lot of manufacturers, distributors in our marketplace, there’s still some reticence, there’s still some caution in the market around investments for the longer term.  Even when there’s clear business cases, it feels like people are still delaying a bit, and I’m not sure what they’re waiting for.

Andy:  We’ve got uncertainty and we’ve got wars, we’ve got presidential elections, we’ve got all this stuff going on, and at a moment’s notice it could all change.  In fact, they even said economists said with these latest numbers that next month it could be up 400,000, it could just bounce back up.  And so, how do you have to be your Fed trying to figure this one out?  It’s going to indicate what we’re going to do with interest rates, and they put out some stuff like, well, people are going to cut rates later this year, but then this happens, something like, “well, maybe we aren’t, I don’t know.

Brian:  Yeah, tough job. So – the question today is personalization possible in B2B digital commerce? This is a fascinating question, and we posted this on LinkedIn, Andy, and what’s fascinating about it is that unlike our usual polls, maybe we asked the wrong question, I’m not sure, but unlike our usual polls, this was overwhelmingly when we asked the question” is personalization possible in B2B commerce,” 100% said yes.  Maybe we didn’t ask the right question, I don’t know, what do you think?  

Andy: And it wasn’t one person, either. This was like dozens and dozens of people.  I think this is fascinating because there really are two different questions here.  One is: Is it possible? And I think we’ve heard overwhelmingly, yes, it’s possible.  Perhaps the better question, and we’ll see here in a moment, based on some of the comments, “Is it useful or valuable,” or “How can it be done?”  And that’s exactly what Jacobi and Jason waited on. So, in this case, Jacobi had a great comment, I’ll read that one, and when you read Jason.  So Jacobi said, “I want to see any of the ‘no’ answers here.” He wants to call people out, maybe appropriately, who think it’s not at all even possible?  He said that the operative question is not whether it’s possible, but whether it’s valuable and useful.  Jason says something kind of similar.  

Brian: Jason Hein said, “There is a big difference between doing personalization and doing personalization well.”  And there are a lot of things required to cross the chasm between the two – Amen, Jason.  And as we go through some of the data here, and some of the comments, we’re going to see this.  We got about 3,000 views of this post, Andy, and clearly a hot topic, and we’re also starting to see now some of the search and personalization vendors weigh in as well, because they need to be thinking about how you address this, because the stakes are really high.  So let’s first, let’s start by defining “What is personalization.” I took this definition from SAP, and for those of you on the podcast, I’m going to read it.  “B2B personalization is the act of tailoring your advertising offers and communication efforts to fit the needs of each B2B customer.  It involves smarter targeting and better understanding to deliver faster, more relevant, and expected experiences to business customers.” I highlight here the word “customer”, because what is the customer in B2B? Is it the company, the individual, the role, the account, think about account-based marketing, where you’re marketing multiple people?  When you personalize, who are you personalizing to? To me, that’s one of the key questions.  

Andy: That is THE key question. And unlike B2C, where there’s usually a one-to-one relationship, where it’s a seller and a single buyer, in B2B, it could be a seller and two, three, five, ten buyers. I always go back to one of my favorite things about how companies kind of back into this sort of thing.  Shopping cards in B2B are used very differently than they are in B2C. Many companies bastardize the use of a shopping cart to be kind of a procurement system, where it’s close to the shopping cart.  And they’ll send an email out to everybody and the company will say, “Hey, anybody needs to weigh and take a look at this, let me know.  And by the way, if it’s approved, let me know.”  The business has a shopping cart, it’s an approval hierarchy. Nobody in B2C is doing that. Maybe some people put stuff in there and ask their spouse or whatever, or a kid can do it, but that’s very different.  So you’re right. What is the customer? First of all, there’s no one customer. It’s usually a team of people who have different roles, some are approvers, some are validators, there’s a whole bunch of stuff.  The user is the budget approvers, yeah, the procurement. And the customers can be very different, right? You might have, you’re selling one thing to a company and there’s one customer for that, or a team.  You sell something else, like Granger sells light bulbs to a company, but they also sell fasteners and they sell boxes or whatever else to that same company.  So what’s the customer? The customer? The whole company? Or is it pockets of people in the company? Is it teams for each product purchase? This gets very complicated.  

Brian: Well, it does get complicated. And but the stakes are high because at the end of the day, the expectation of the buyer, there’s some data here, we pulled from Accenture.  The expectations are high, 73% of B2B buyers want a personalized B2C-like experience. That means they’re looking for the Amazon experience all these companies that have invested for years in creating a relevant experience that has their name on it and understands their past purchases and looks at their web behavior and makes recommendations on content.  All these things they expect them, but it’s complex. And the stakes are high. As I mentioned, this is some data here, Andy, I pulled from Wonderman Thompson that says 90% of B2B buyers will turn to a competitor if the suppliers’ digital channels can’t keep up with their needs.  You can lose business over this, right?  

Andy: I’ve always said that B2B is a lot more difficult in my opinion than B2C because they have to do everything now that B2C does based on the comment you just had up there.  People expect a B2C-like customer experience. They expect all of the experiences they get from B2C.  But on top of that, contract pricing, to allow approval processes, custom catalogs.  On and on and on. So it’s like, well, Ginger Rogers had to do everything Fred Astaire could do, but dance backwards in heels. And I think it’s what B2B is like.  B2B is a bit like, you got to do everything that B2C is doing now, but also do these other things. And most are not really well prepared to do that.  

Brian: Andy, where the heck do you get these analogies, man? But the other aspect of that too. And what you didn’t mention is application information, right? How are you using the product? I mean, B2B, sure, I mean, B2C, it’s maybe it’s a little easier.  I’m putting on my shirt to look good today, but I need to know which shirt is going to make me look the best. But in B2B, you’ve got all these application differences and how am I using this product in the field?  What does it go with? Compatibility? What equipment do I already have in place? And hey, does that work with my equipment? Do you already know that I have that equipment? The personalization level when you think about relevance of information is, it’s super complex like you were just alluding to.  

Andy: So, maybe we could question right and people misunderstood it. Is it possible? Well, in the context of all these variables, maybe it isn’t, quote, unquote, really possible. But I think we need to re-define what we mean by this.  How do you do a selling scenario where the person, the other end, has targeted offers and targeted experiences for them. What that consists of is really the question.  

Brian: Maybe we should have defined it maybe a little more tightly because personalization, it can be defined, it can be thought about in many different ways. And one way that people do think about it is as it relates to search.  Here’s a piece of data from our own research last year, 2023 from our State of B2B eCommerce. It says 61% of B2B sellers have lost sales because their site search wasn’t good enough.  So, site search is one element of quote, unquote, personalization. And it is perhaps the most fundamental and the one that’s called out the most when someone types something in the search bar, are you recognizing who they are?  Do you know their applications, their equipment, their past purchases, their geographic location, all those things.  By the way, in B2B, you have an advantage because they’re logged in, right? So you do have potentially some of the aspects that you need to build that.  But if you’re not doing site search well, you’re going to lose, you’re going to lose customers.  

Andy: Well, there are more SKUs and derivations of SKUs. You can have a product that has a number letter combination of 16 characters. If you get that one of those letters or numbers wrong because you fat fingered, it comes back with a null result. Nothing’s worse than doing a search, getting 15, 15 of 16  of the characters correct.  And then have it come back with not “did you mean this or that” but instead you get “we’ve got nothing.”That’s all part of that personalization equation.  And let’s think Andy for a moment about what is personalization when you think about it from a B2C context?  

Brian: When I go on Amazon or I’m going to shop for myself or a consumer goes out, they’re using their personal email address. They have a consistency of behavior.  There’s solutions out there that will look across all of my behavior across all websites and even create personas of me as I travel across websites.   But people move jobs in B2B digital commerce. That’s one of the core challenges here. Gen Z workers are expected to have 16 to 17 jobs over five to seven careers.  One in three Americans have changed jobs in the last two years. The median job tenure of boomers, those of the older generation, is three times higher than that of Millenials and Gen Z.  Man, these people would jump jobs. You got to follow them around. How do you do personalization when the people change all the time?  

Andy: You’ve developed this highly evolved, very sophisticated personalized experience for a person over the course of, say, a year and a half. And all of a sudden, the person leaves and all of that gets flushed down the toilet because none of it’s really useful because maybe the role doesn’t exist anymore or it was folded into another role or they hired a completely different person who has a different remit.  You know, maybe some of the stuff is useful. Most of it’s not. This is the problem. But if you and I go on Amazon, my profile in Amazon isn’t changing dramatically from year to year.  It’s still me. It’s still kind of the same stuff. But these people working for B2B companies, it’s just not. When a new person comes in, they have a completely different approach to how they’re going to buy things.  And so it’s a constant battle trying to catch up with things that are evolving.  

Brian: So on LinkedIn, Andy, we got some comments on this point and it was a lot of discussion and Jeff Hoogerhyde, who has a long career at 3M is now at Solventum.  He said, country, customer and role-based personalization has been the norm for over 15 years.  And Jeff I agree that those elements we’ve seen it certainly in consumer and in B2B. But then Doug Topkin weighed in who leads e-commerce at Ingredion, which is a huge B2B food products and ingredients distributor.  He said to take personalization to the next level, meaning I think beyond what Jeff’s referring to – digital needs not only to define a healthy set of personas and journey maps, but also get very good at collecting and managing first party contact data associated with the accounts.  And I think even beyond that, Doug, it’s the roles and then understanding and tying together CRM data, tying together ERP data. Because remember a lot of these purchases happen offline, not online.  So we have to look across all channels. That’s the other level of complexity. This is not an easy problem to solve.  But we’re getting some comments in on LinkedIn from the search vendors talking about how this is solved based on role-based personalization.  

Andy: I think we all agree that like what Jeff pointed out customer, country, role but there’s another level down from that, which is it reminds me of like you remember that thing we learned in biology back in high school, Kingdom, Phylum, Class Order, Family, Genus, Species.  I’ll never forget that, but you get more and more specific, right?  We’re at the Kingdom Phylum level here and you have to get down to the Species level and I think what Jeff is suggesting here is that they get to the role at least, but the technology exists today and it’s not true B2C-like personalization if you don’t get down to the actual person, the challenge is that person can change. So you’ve got to be flexible enough to do definitely role-based stuff but get to an actual person and be able to transition when a new person comes along, but I don’t think it’s good enough not to know at the individual level and be able to personalize to some extent.  But not like B2C where you can have that for a persisting case, it’s going to be episodic. 

Brian: So Andy at our Summit on June 4th at the University of Chicago, we are going to do a session on this because this research and personalization and everything related to this is critical.  We’re going to have Coveo as a sponsor helping us with that discussion. It’s going to be a really in-depth conversation that’s going to bring good value to the practitioners because this is complex and you know you saw the expectation is high B2B buyers need personalized experiences and I believe you have an opportunity to build a competitive advantage if you do that well.