We recently spoke with Brooke Logan, Director of B2B Digital at NAPA Auto Parts, where she oversees eCommerce, merchandising and marketing for the PRO segment, which she describes as “anyone in a garage doing a repair.” In this role her team oversees both their own website, a Software-as-a-Service product for auto repair shops, and integrations with other shopping platforms.

Master B2B: Your team oversees a wide range of projects. What’s the most challenging part of that…Or is it all just difficult?

Brooke Logan: Well, we’re starting from scratch, so the hardest part is deciding the prioritization. We have a huge company with all of these opportunities and all of these large customers, so of course the first question is where do you focus? I think of it as: Where do we put the most resources when everything needs help? Everything is imperfect. Everything doesn’t work the way we’d like it to work. Everything has massive opportunities. I know a lot of people in our industry struggle with that. We have under-invested in digital for a long time and we know we need to fix it…and somehow we have to fix all of it.

Master B2B: How did you think about prioritizing all those opportunities?

Brooke: We’ve really tried to focus on the basics. What do we need to do to build a foundation, to get to table stakes. And once we’re there, then we can pick and choose ideas that go above and beyond that. We’re very focused on understanding what’s going on with our major customers and what their biggest pain points are. And then we think about how do we come up with one thing that solves a problem for many, many customers? We consider what offers the biggest impact relative to the level of effort.

Then on the e-commerce side, we’ve re-built the entire website over the course of the last year and we’re just re-launching it. For that, we were very focused on getting the basics of shopping right. There are so many other ideas we have to build functionality for our customers. There are so many options for that. But we can’t do any of that if we don’t get the fundamentals correct. It’s even been a challenge for us to understand what the fundamentals are.

Master B2B: We’re now 25 years into e-commerce, so the baseline has obviously changed over time. How do you know what the fundamentals include now?

Brooke: For example – In the B2B space, visitors aren’t spending time browsing around the website just looking at things. Our users come to the site for something specific. They have a car and they just need a part for it and they want us to find it quickly. So we know that we need to understand how to make the shopping funnel as fast, and as correct as possible.

But to get to that, you have to think about every single step in that buying process and all the scenarios that could exist when someone is taking each step and getting down in the details. It’s not enough to just say, “yes, the ‘happy path’ works so we’re all good.” You really have to think about all the nuances and all the details and work through all the different scenarios that can happen. I spend a lot of time with the team working through those scenarios, and making sure that we’re defining our needs clearly for the developers who are building the functionality. We need to be thoughtful about every single part of the experience, otherwise it’s going to be a terrible experience for customers.

Master B2B: More than most people we speak to in B2B, you’re approaching your role through a B2C lens. So much of B2C eCommerce is based around the concept of ‘browsing’ – and so much commerce software assumes browsing will be part of the customer experience. How do you even cut browsing out of your UX when so much software is built around it?

Brooke: For probably ten years I have said that B2B is like B2C Plus. And what I mean is that B2B is all the great B2C experiences plus a bunch of other stuff. But the thing that got really lost is that I never meant that we just copy what a B2C site does for B2B. There’s always nuance for customers – you have to figure out what a person is trying to do when they come to your website. For B2C it really is more aspirational and a little more focused on browse – For example, maybe I do want to see all the pants at J. Crew and I don’t want you to narrow it down to one option for me.

For B2B it’s making sure that we apply customer context. We spend time with customers, go through their workflow and what they’re trying to achieve. Then we make shopping really fast – it needs to be at least as good as the experience of going into a shop. For example, a customer will have their vehicle VIN number. They want to come to the site, type in the VIN and find the correct brake pads and rotors, then add them to the cart. So we say – Okay, let’s focus on how we optimize that flow. Maybe we’re letting people search for all the things they need to complete their job at one time and they’re just going through the checklist. Check, check check, add to cart, done. You can never discount this understanding of the customer and listening to them.

And again, I have to say all the time, it’s not “listen to them tell you what they want.” It’s to understand what they need and solve for that. You have to have vision, because customers can’t understand what’s possible. If we understand what they need, then we can design to solve for those needs.

Master B2B: In your role, how do you make sure that what you’re hearing from customers – and hearing from other stakeholders – actually leads to a cohesive product that reflects your company’s strategy?

Brooke: I was thinking about a prior role that I had – When I got there, if the team heard from a salesperson saying they wanted something, they built it. If a customer said they wanted something, they changed the website to do it. But the biggest part that was missing was the strategy. How does this all fit together? What do you want to actually do? You can’t just go build a bunch of different things and have it fit together. You end up creating kind of silos, and some weird dynamics because people are just off building whatever people they talked to told them to build.

Master B2B: How do you bridge the gap between listening to your customers and creating a product that actually reflects your strategy? How do you link those together?

Brooke: It’s hard. I often have to have a conversation where I say that sometimes what a customer says they need is not actually what they need. We need to get a better understanding of what they need – dig in and get to their underlying problem.

For example, I’ve heard customers give feedback that our catalog is “messy.” I want to go back and figure out – “what’s actually the issue you’re running into so we can go and figure out how to solve it.” We’re not just taking what they say – We’re really trying to dig into it more deeply. And it takes time for an organization to get there too. Where I was previously, I think we were able to execute well, and the sales team really was able to see the benefit of how we were working and how much our digital properties improved. If you can continue proving that you’re delivering a really great experience, you’ll get buy-in from your team. But there’s a journey to get to that for sure.

Master B2B: Your customers aren’t product managers (obviously). If your customers are telling you they want something, whose job is it on your end to take that feedback and turn it into something useful?

Brooke: I put it on our product manager, for sure. They should be taking feedback, but they should also be looking at the research they have at their disposal. Then they should reassemble it in a logical way that makes sense and produces a product that resonates with the customer. The customer doesn’t understand how digital products work. For example, we hear from customers all the time that they want us by default to show our search results by availability. But if we did that, they’re going to get a lot of unhelpful search results. We’re better off saying – we can let you filter by when you need a product and make sure that you can see if you need something today, you can filter by that.

Master B2B: So do you have product managers assigned to parts of the website?

Brooke: Yes, typically there is a product manager for each site section. Some companies assign product managers subsets of a section of a site, but I prefer site section because I think the product manager can also really understand what their metrics are and what they’re driving toward. Plus it’s easier for a dev team when they own a section of the website to implement something if they own a whole part of something, rather than everyone on the team stepping on each other’s toes.

Master B2B: Finally, do you have a prediction about a new technology we’re going to hear more about in 2023?

Brooke: I think we’re going to hear much more about Extended Reality in B2B. We’re thinking about using it in a few ways. Training is a big one. Extended Reality technology would allow us to ensure consistency in how our technicians are trained to install parts. It would allow us to ensure consistency in our stock rooms, which can get pretty disorganized.

I also feel like we’re at this a real tipping point on expectations for B2B experiences. And you know, we see really dramatically changing demographics in our industry, so at some point, there’s going to be this watershed moment where people are no longer going to accept buying from a B2B site that offers a terrible experience anymore.