Getting Started in eCommerce for Manufacturers

Curt Anderson  00:00

Hey, where’d you go? Hey, Joseph, where are you myth? Let’s see. Let’s get in here. Let’s go here. Let’s go here. Let’s go here. Okay? Joseph Maxwell, my friend, Happy Monday to you. How are you, dude?

Joseph Maxwell  00:11

I am outstanding. I tell you, what the weather here in Kansas, if external factors can affect how I feel? Boy, it sure is doing that today. It’s, it’s an incredible day.

Curt Anderson  00:21

Well, happy Monday. I heard a great line to this morning. I met I go to the gym every morning, and I said, Hey, how was your weekend? And the person said, I’ve never met a bad I’ve never met a weekend I didn’t like. And so I’m, I said, You know what? I’m shamelessly stealing that line. I’ve never met a weekend that I didn’t like. So what a great weekend. Little football fall is starting to kind of like sprinkle out there. That’s right. That’s right. Sports fan, you got baseball, all sorts of fun things going on. Kids are back to school. Joseph, you are a fierce advocate for eCommerce, where you got a ton to cover. So we’re not, man, dude, it’s all business. Today, we’re going to dive right in. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You’re the founder of SwiftOtter. Who is swift otter? How do you make the world a better place?

Joseph Maxwell  01:07

We are a company with a goofy name, to be honest. So, you know, we were founded back in the era where a lot of companies, and still, to an extent, people companies, do have this adjective animal name, and you can kind of just adjective, now and like, that’s just kind of a common practice. And so we were adjective Swift, meaning fast. Everybody wants what they’re what they want yesterday, and then the animal name being otter, meaning otters are playful, they’re creative, they’re incredibly intelligent. It kind of embodies how we want to be as a company. So we basically, we work with manufacturers b2b space, helping companies be successful in this e commerce adventure. And it really is, comes down to an adventure. We have a lot to talk about with what that’s going to look like.

Curt Anderson  01:53

We sure do. And hey, we’ve got my dear friend Diane Byers in the house. Diane Happy Monday. She’s a big Eagles fan. So big shout out to her in Philadelphia. Dan, thank you for joining us. Hey, let us know you’re out there. Drop a note in the chat box. We’d love to hear from you. Would welcome you, encourage you, invite you to connect with Joseph on LinkedIn. He is a powerhouse. Puts out an enormous amount of wonderful content, Joseph, we have a ton to cover. We have a little presentation we’re going to dive into. So let’s go there. So let’s dive in. How about here? Let’s go e commerce for manufacturers. Just we’re getting started. What talk to me? What do we got going on

Joseph Maxwell  02:30

here? eCommerce for manufacturers is a opportunity to diversify how you accept money or orders from your customers. This is one of our customers here. They’re very b2b focused. They’re a manufacturer here in the Kansas City area where I come from, and the goal is to make it as easy as possible to accept orders from your customers. Curt, you can kind of click through these here as I’m talking, sure. So there is a process to doing this, and in some ways, it’s comes down to augmenting the conversations that your salespeople are having with the with your customers. And there’s a several options in there. EDI is one of those aspects, some things that come together to automate this order taking process for grandstand here, in this case, their customers heavily rely on the website to be able to purchase customized pieces, so whether that’s shirts or glassware or containers, etc. So the goal is helping customers get through this process as quickly and efficiently as possible, reducing the possibility of air, keeping sales people focused on what really matters, ie bringing in new work and keeping customer relationships alive and in good spirits. Hudson, here is an example as well. They are pretty much B to B, maybe also a little focus on b2b in the case of the niche of like agencies. So that would be like government agencies, maybe some military sprinkled in there. They bring their products to market. This was a fairly basic website that we stood up super fast. The idea of getting this information quickly into the hands of their customers as quickly as possible.

Curt Anderson  04:14

Awesome. Hey, Joseph. Real quick. I gotta grab a comment while we’re here. So hey, Diane, drops another note here, and I how fitting is this comment here you said swift it is for lickety split. So now she thought it was for Taylor. Now, being that you were Kansas City Chiefs, are you a Taylor Swift Fan as well? Me,

Joseph Maxwell  04:32

personally, not as much, but I know plenty of Swifties. And yeah, Taylor kind of invigorated the whole Swifty thing here in Kansas City. So with 87 and Kelsey and all that good stuff, like it’s it, I’m guessing Kansas City is kind of a hotbed when it comes to Taylor Swift Fan Club. Like, it’s it is alive and well here. So that was an inadvertent association there, but I’ve been called a swift. 50 plenty of times myself.

Curt Anderson  05:01

I you know what, Diane, I’m going to say this. Joseph created Swifty before Swifty was even cool, right? That, do I have that, right? That

Joseph Maxwell  05:09

that’s probably about fair? Yeah. I actually don’t know when she started her music career, but I started, I put my name down 2012 so there you go. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  05:18

It might be close. Might be close. Yeah. I digress. Thank you, Diane for the comment. Let’s keep the party rolling. What do we have here next? Yeah,

Joseph Maxwell  05:25

so this is a product page for Hudson in this case, and one of the big benefits to helping your customers be able to purchase from you is to be able to give them these options. So in this case, we have the option of what color, and I don’t remember size. Can you drop the comment, move the comment off the screen there? Yeah. I wanted to make sure, yeah. So then we have quantity. So in the case of with E commerce, we can put multiple options, literally, a product configurator, very basic in this level, but it’s E commerce. It’s technology. This can be massively extended out here, per the need, the requirements, whatever, as we go forward into the future, to make it super fast, super easy for your customers to be able to purchase from

Curt Anderson  06:10

you. Yeah, this is great. And so, you know, for our manufacturing friends out there, and we can dive in, because if you’re a custom manufacturer, you’re like, hey, wait a minute, you know, I don’t have that finished. Good. There’s a lot of opportunities here, but we’re diving into, you know, again, I think the big thing that Joseph’s sitting on is how you make it as easy as humanly possible for somebody to buy from you? How do you remove that friction?

Joseph Maxwell  06:30

Absolutely yes, and investing in this type of technology will help your customers appreciate the brand that you have, that you present the quality that you bring to the table. Jay Thomas was, was a recent release for us, where they manufacture high quality shelving. So it’s a little bit more on the b2c side, but they definitely have a strong b2b focus here. And their goal is to get these to have a website that matched the quality that they put out, and this website looks absolutely gorgeous. And I’m not I’m I get that not every b2b Company wants a gorgeous website. Number one is functionality, and that’s the far and away, the most important aspect of this. But the goal here is to help your customers understand what you sell, why they should be able to buy, why they should buy from you, and to also create an emotional connection with them, such that they want to buy from you, such that you are elevating yourself in this massive playing field of all these other manufacturers they can purchase from. They single you out for a number of different reasons. You are standing out from the rest of the pack,

Curt Anderson  07:42

right? Absolutely. So. So again, you know, creating that competitive advantage, you know, Damon, I love talking about, like, the blue ocean, red ocean. You know, how can you separate yourself, especially in the manufacturing world, where so many, you know, they’re, they’re say this politely, and lots of love. You know, a lot of manufacturers are lagging a little bit, or maybe e commerce wasn’t a top priority. So this is truly an opportunity to separate yourself. So let’s keep the party rolling. We’re talking about the audience. Joseph, what are some things that we want to think about here?

Joseph Maxwell  08:12

Yeah, I’m going to. We’ll talk about ROI. And I think part of the issue why e Commerce has lagged in all transparency with manufacturers is their manufacturers have a plethora of challenges that they’re they’re working through, whether it’s foreign competition or, well, actually the number one would be workforce issues, right? And so this idea of E commerce, I have not met anybody that says, oh, that’s, that’s a terrible idea. What it is, is it’s kind of gets bumped down the priority list just because there are other seemingly bigger challenges. And I think in this case here, with E commerce, in fact, we’re going to talk about here in a little bit how it’s actually going to help a segment, not at all across the board, your workforce issues, but it’s actually going to help a segment of that in this case. So the first part of the conversation we need to have is who is going to use your e commerce website? And we’re going to talk about what e commerce is, what it means there’s there’s maybe some ambiguity there, but the first thing is who we target, and once we look at who we target, we can look at what e commerce is going to look like for these people, the first thing that we often think about when we think of, oh, we’re going to do e commerce, is try to get as much order, new orders, new work as possible. So we’re going to put a website out there, we’re going to put an order of these products on there. We’re going to get orders, and we’re going to grow our business this way. And I think that is fundamentally a challenged perspective. As far as looking at this picture, what we need to do is start off and say, How can we make your existing customers as successful as possible? Make it as easy as possible to place these orders? And so by focusing on your customers, then we will be successful. We’re going to get your customers to place. Orders to the website. And of course, on the edges, we’re going to have new customers finding your website through good search engine optimization, maybe some paid media in there, but the goal is to focus exclusively on your customers. Anything else around the edges is extra, extra bonus points. So we need to think about, how will your customers use it? What are they going to do on the website? And there are four categories of users that we can identify that we’ll be wanting to access your website and gain value from it. Number one, the most obvious is the end user, or their purchasing department, right? So number one is, we need the details of these products, specifications, if it’s a stocked product, and I know it’s not the case for all of you, but you might have some inventory, some stock, making sure that’s on the website. Good photos, they’re going to want to see. Accounting, when was my orders placed? Do I owe you any money? What is the status of my orders? Very importantly, I’m kind of doing a circle here. Uh, pricing. What does what is it going to cost me specifically for the negotiated pricing that we have worked through? End User very important. But if we were to focus exclusively on end users, we would be missing three other segments that are very just as important. Number two is architects, engineers. If, if you’re you’re selling widgets that go into other people’s products? Well, it’d be kind of nice to get to get architects and engineers fully on board with your products. So they’re actually specking it into this process, making it easy at the very top of the funnel, the beginning of the conversation is going to enhance the whole sales process. And so we what we can do to help this part of the aspect. This aspect is providing very clear, very detailed specifications on here, CAD drawings, the MSDS and sheets, replacement parts, making sure these are super easy accessible, so that they’re not going to have to try to call you up. And you know, who knows what to get information as far as what this product’s looking like?

Curt Anderson  12:07

Yeah, I love it, hey. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna grab another comment here. So we’ve got, uh, Diane dropped another comment here. Workforce issue in foreign competition again, my language, loving it. And then Skylar’s in the house here today. Skyler, happy Monday, my friend, top Purdy and top challenge for manufacturers. And so he’s got a little link there, so you guys can check that out. So alright, we’ve covered two folks who are who’s number three,

Joseph Maxwell  12:30

number three dealers. You know, a lot of manufacturers, as you know, sell through dealer networks. And so while it depends on your your dealer agreements and such. It might be that you can’t exactly sell to the general public, and I get there, there’s reasons for that, viewing dealers, then as your primary target audience, and making it super simple for them. Or if, if they get one of their customers calling them up on the phone, are they going to be able to go to your product page and quickly answer the question when they place an order, make it so that it can be placed through the website. Provide excellent order status, provide their dealer pricing, and perhaps provide also the MSRP price. They know what to tell the customer. Additionally help them understand what what they’re able to provide to their customer through this process. So this dealer portal is absolutely critical. And one thing I forgot to say, there is EDI. If you depending on what size of your dealers are, they might want EDI being able to use your website as a source, as a hub for accepting these orders, means one place that your customer service, representative, sales people have to go into to be able to find order information. It’s all right there in this easily accessible hub.

Curt Anderson  13:48

Okay, so we’re winding down number three. Let’s dive into number four. How about the installer? Installers

Joseph Maxwell  13:54

is just as important. This is a depending on the product. This is a post purchase user on your website where they have some questions, installation instructions absolutely critical. So this, this, this persona, the more we can provide to the website, the less it impacts your technical support team being able to direct people to the website as a first source for this information, but not necessarily the only source, right? We have to keep hospitality in mind, such that your customers are able to easily access you, the people that power your brand, but it’s also self help through this process.

Curt Anderson  14:38

Yeah, I love that is. How do you know, providing that digital self serve experience. I think Joseph every time we’re together, we talk about, how do you help that ideal buyer, whether the architect, the installer, procurement, whatever department they’re in, or whatever you’re facing, how can you make that buying decision on a Friday night, at midnight, without having to wait for you to open up your doors on a Monday morning? Let’s take it one step further. What. Can your website offer that your sales team cannot one

Joseph Maxwell  15:04

word? One word that I use to describe this is autonomy, being able to just like what Curt set it up so nicely here, being able to allow them to self serve off the website when needed, but not exclusively, right? Unfortunately, we often see websites as a barrier. No a website to just be a facilitator. It’s going to allow the customer to do what they want, be able to give them the tools so they can again, do it anytime. 24/7, no matter where they are in the world, they can place this order. They can self service. However, it’s not like it’s a barrier. To be able to access your team. Autonomy is absolutely critical to making sure your customer is happy. So this could be, customer entered information. I want to place an order. Could be also the EDI. I think that’s a really important part of simplifying stuff. So I was talking to a it was actually more on the distributor side. A few weeks ago, they get hundreds of orders a day they get they have six people manually accepting these orders and entering it into their ERP. When we started talking about this, this type of concept, their mind was blown, because they were like, what if we took those six order takers and repurpose them to doing other business value, adding I uh, activities here in our company, or they’re going out and chasing net new and that’s what this ROI concept, we’re going to be talking about here as we proceed forward, just a little bit, is helping people understand the value that this brings. And so we see right here, no waiting on sales people. We don’t have to hunt through catalogs, waiting for order status updates. You can read through this list right here. When I’m sure you’ve gotten emails from another manufacturer that says, hey, we just digitized our online experience. We’re super excited. Here’s the value you can get. You can go online, online, and you can create an account. I think all of us think go online, create an account. Fantastic. What good does that do to me? Nothing. It’s actually a benefit for the manufacturer themselves, being able to track and keep everything associated with each other in their ERP, this list right here that is a benefit to your to your customers, and it’s marketing materials like this. And I consider this marketing that should be included when your salespeople say, hey, we have this new experience. We’ve upgraded this experience. Here are the benefits you can get out of this. Yeah, now, now we’re in a good place. Now we’re talking,

Curt Anderson  17:30

yeah, I couldn’t love this more. And again, when you think about it as a consumer, how do you shop? You know, my my wife and I have, we have a wedding that we’re attending in a few months, and so last last night, we needed to book a hotel. And so, you know, we have a particular brand that we really prefer. I just pull up my phone, I go on the app, I literally hit like, two buttons put in the city, like, like, within 30 seconds, I have my hotel. That’s right. Make it easier. I, you know, I shamelessly, probably, you know, maybe I could look other places. Maybe I could try to save $10 or $20 here looking at other places. But they just make it so simple. They’ve created a loyal Raven fan. Joseph, let’s keep it going here. So what can we achieve? I

Joseph Maxwell  18:12

have this ROI form. Feel free to jump in there and check it out. Actually, we can jump to the next page. Kurt has a little more information here. The idea is, can we project what having this digital sales channel will do for the bottom line? So for 10 million organization, if we with a 10% profit margin, if we can move 10% of that, so that would be a million dollars through this e commerce channel in the first year, what are we looking at getting? So we look at and see 51 grand. That’s yeah, well, that’s okay. I mean, it seems to pay for itself, and that’s the one thing that you know. It should be roughly break even in a year. And an adventure, that business venture that you start breaking even in a year is considered a pretty decent capex expense. But what then, as you start projecting this out, as we do in this spreadsheet, it starts coming alive as far as what capabilities and what this will look like. And the interesting aspect, though, this is actually a smaller part of the overall value that you will get from E commerce. We separate it out based off of the channel. So looking at this, this is the channel of your website. What additional profit can we drive to your your brand, your manufacturer, you as a company? Extra work. We can bring you Kurt if we can go on to the next one, I’ll share a really exciting aspect of this as well. Perfect. Hey,

Curt Anderson  19:39

real quick. I’m sorry to go off track for one second. Yeah, we do have a question I like to pull up for you real quick. So our friend Skylar asked, What e commerce platform do you most recommend to your customers? How about that one? Joseph, before we dive in next

Joseph Maxwell  19:53

that’s a great question, and I will quickly answer it with saying, it depends. There’s there’s a. Couple out there that I think are really good. There’s some manufacturers that start out with WooCommerce, which, it’s fine. It’s a great one to start with. Typically, we would generate, we would typically start our evaluations with either Bigcommerce or Shopify. Bigcommerce is very, very b2b friendly. Shopify is a little bit more well known, and so there’s people that come to us and have Shopify as top of mind. It’s a little bit more work, usually, to get something like that built out on Shopify. Bigcommerce has a lot more of that natively added in, which means less project cost and an overall better experience. So like I said, it depends. There’s a lot of different factors that go into this, but at the end of the day, the goal is that a manufacturer is happy and on a platform that will last them five to 10 years.

Curt Anderson  20:45

Yeah. And for friends, Skylar, thank you for the awesome question, and you want to take that conversation deeper. Anybody out there, please reach out to Joseph. He’s on LinkedIn, super active expert. He will answer all sorts of questions. Feel free to reach out to myself. We’ll dive deeper. As he mentioned, you’ve got WooCommerce. Bigcommerce is a big friend of ours. And of course, you’ve got Shopify. One more question, what’s the biggest expense in getting online?

Joseph Maxwell  21:13

Getting the product catalog set and configured is pretty much always the biggest expense. I mean, it depends on the design and all that stuff. But yeah, getting the product catalog formatted, pulled out of the ERP, configured, getting pricing set, making sure all those are correct. That’s, that’s, that’s pretty much the biggest load of work.

Curt Anderson  21:33

Excellent. Okay, Scott, thank you for the questions, Joseph. Let’s dive let’s pick up right where you left off.

Joseph Maxwell  21:40

Absolutely. And this is, I couldn’t be more excited about this section here. So the question is, what does the website offer the sales team? Now, when we back out, back up and look at this from a sales company’s sales person’s perspective, it actually can feel like this is a negative, right? Because now, instead of my customers as a salesperson, placing their interacting with me for my orders, and I get commissioned for that. Now they’re going through the website, and that could be daunting, right? Because now the website is actually taking money away from me. I’m gonna have to go chase other opportunities. Now, what we recommend, and have seen be very successful is your customers remain your customer. So if they go purchase through the website, you still get that commission. And what that ends up doing is pulling that workload off of the sales team workforce here, and it allows them to go chase net new opportunities. In other words, being able to expand the overall revenue for the company. And the next slide, I think, demonstrates this very well. In fact, this is the biggest area of growth for manufacturers when implementing e commerce. It’s a workforce issue, actually, as they are able to reduce the workload on their sales team, make them far more efficient the sales team. Look at the year one. Remember the year one? Net profit was like about 50 grand of with our projections for 10 million company on that same company as we were able to reduce the load on the sales team and allow them to go chase new business, 150 grand projected first year on this new way of working as we’re as we push 10% of our profit, of our of our revenue through the e commerce website that now net 200 grand of extra revenue this year, profit, excuse me not, revenue. Profit is incredible, yeah, and it exponentially increases past that. Let me put it that way.

Curt Anderson  23:44

I couldn’t agree with you more. And hey, Joseph, did you you heard about my mom’s favorite book? My mom has a favorite book. It’s called, it’s called stop being the best kept secret. That’s right, written by her favorite son. So anyway, that was just a shameless plug. But in that book, stop being best kept secret, there’s a chapter, how do you scale your company with E commerce. The great thing is, as a manufacturer, you know, when you’re not adding major cap x, everything is a variable expense as you grow your your business. I couldn’t agree with you more. And again, what you have here just kind of recap you’re showing, you know, profits going sales that are going right into the bottom line, creating net profits, all net new and as you point out here, on that threat side for the sales rep you’re showing you know they can go out instead of being the order taker now, they can go out and keep building their business and be better sales persons. Is it persons or people’s whatever it is, Joseph,

Joseph Maxwell  24:37

let’s keep moving. It’s all it it’s all it all works the same way. Oh, good.

Curt Anderson  24:41

Let’s talk about the inhibition if we could. So let’s dive in here. What do we’ve got going on here? Yes,

Joseph Maxwell  24:48

so we’ve talked about the return on investment, and I think the case is very clear. Take that spreadsheet, copy it, mess with the numbers, and if you have questions, I’m more than happy to talk that. Talk you through. That. But there’s still some inhibitions, some challenges, as far as what this looks like. And I think the most common inhibition is, this is too big of a project. There’s, I just talked about the product catalog, like, maybe, if you guys, maybe you’re more or less have a legacy ERP, and you know, 30 years of bazillions of custom products that have just kind of been entered in. It’s just, it’s kind of a mess. It just the process of collecting dust over time. It’s just, it’s it’s used all the time. And how do you do that? Well, it’s too big of a project. And I get that, what we generally recommend there is, let’s start small. Pick 100 products that you know your customers are going to want to purchase online, the ones that are most commonly purchased. Let’s focus on those. Let’s get those right, and by doing that, we get a process pulled together. So yeah, those custom ones that were ordered 30 years ago. Who cares about those? Just leave them. They’re fine. We don’t have to touch those. But what we can do is identify those products that people order, put those on the website, make sure they’re done right. And then every month, every couple months, pick a time frame we’re going to be adding more products and more products, and just slowly get this process rolling on the website. It’s not when Well, the question is, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? That is exactly the same. You the same idea here. Is that metaphor.

Curt Anderson  26:22

Now, you guys don’t do that for barbecue in Kansas City, right? You don’t

Joseph Maxwell  26:25

do that. Would that would not be not, that would not be unfavorably, yeah,

Curt Anderson  26:29

like that would not be favorable. So, all right, so almost as bad

Joseph Maxwell  26:33

as barbecuing a horse, that’s

Curt Anderson  26:34

right. So how do we dive? How do we, how do we really bunch it down into palatable bites, make it more manageable. What I love that what your team does is that you go into, you know, steps and so, you know, how do we go into, like, a phase one, a phase two, and make it very manageable, palatable and where the expectations are realistic? Let’s talk about gathering information, because I know, as a manufacturer, that can be daunting. What do you have here for us

Joseph Maxwell  27:00

absolutely. So getting all the information collected, it’s a little bit similar to this last one, but idea the project being too big, but this is a little bit more nuanced here. So again, looking at pricing, again, 30 years of pricing, where you have one dealer that has this one price list, and you have this other dealer with this other priceless and you now you have 100 dealers, and everyone has a different price list. How are you going to pull that all together such that it can be pulled into the website? Now it’s possible you can pull it into the website as is 100% possible. However, it’s at this point, it might be an interesting conversation. What would it look like to scale that information back such that like the pricing? So instead of having literally 100 different pricing models, one for each of your distributors, what would it look like to pair that back to five or 10 and streamline things a little bit in the process. It’s going to make information management today, as well as into the future of managing price increases, etc, a heck of a lot easier, right? So

Curt Anderson  28:09

once again, just kind of simplify. Keep it super simple, right? Try to, you know, instead of overcomplicate it, keep it simple. Let’s dive in here. Joseph, how do you any recommendation? Words of wisdom as far as I can’t get buy in.

Joseph Maxwell  28:23

This is a hard one if you do not have a good ROI model. There are very few business people that I know that given return on investment, that they understand, as well as understanding the risks associated, provided their solid return on investment and minimal risks, which, in my experience, is pretty much this type of digital transformation, there’s going to be buy in. The issue is, is that there’s no buy in if there’s no ROI and if it’s just like an expenditure, like what manufacturer or company nowadays just has money to throw around at a an experiment, versus something where we have done the homework to be able to say this is what we’re looking at, and here’s how we came to these conclusions. Nobody has a crystal ball, but at least we can do some homework to be able to figure out what works. Get the buy in. It’s, it’s actually a fairly straightforward, well,

Curt Anderson  29:16

alright, fantastic tip. Now a question for you here. Okay, we have a slide here. It says, corporate views the website like a CD ROM now. So for folks of a certain age, they’re probably asking, what is a CD ROM? So, Joseph, what’s going on here with

Joseph Maxwell  29:30

this slide? Yeah. So I remember back in the old days where the where Windows XP came on a CD and like, you know, it was one of those little things about five inches. You’re not old enough for

Curt Anderson  29:44

my day, my friend, I remember

Joseph Maxwell  29:46

I remember it and or Photoshop or office. I Yeah, long stories there. But so the biggest issue with those is, let’s say you’re a Program Manager at Microsoft and you have this. Release you’re going to put out? Well, you do lots of testing and all that, and you say, someday you have to say, pencils down, we are shipping this code. Well, inevitably, there’s going to be problems. It’s not going to be a perfect delivery. There will be bugs in there. So now, how do you get those new updates out there? In the old days, it’s incredibly expensive to print up another round of CDs, incredibly expensive, so you have to be very careful. And so treating a website as that is problematic. Well, we’re not like that anymore. Be able to update a piece of the design or change some functionality. We’re talking tiny amounts of effort, generally speaking, getting that out there. And so, yeah, I’ll just leave it that I have another aspect. So the goal is here to take a bulldozer to these challenges, these impediments, and achieve success and make this a really valuable part of your manufacturing organization.

Curt Anderson  30:55

Awesome. All right, so Joseph, let’s go here for time. Let’s dive in. Let’s go into one more aspect, we’ve got the plan. Dive into the plan. So now it’s baseball season. Now it is MVP. Now we’re typically thinking, what are we thinking here with MVP?

Joseph Maxwell  31:11

Most Valuable players? Typically, what you hear, you know, whether it’s, I don’t know, Jalen Hurts did pretty well. I feel like he was the MVP MVP candidate here recently. You know, there’s mahomes, oh boy, who was MVP last year on the football side. I remember. So like, we think of that. But here is really what I want us to think about, is the minimum viable product. Now, when we think of minimum viable product, we often think it’s crap. We literally think it’s worthless, because we are thinking of minimum product, and we forget that the word viable is in there. Viable means it has to be usable by your customers. Customers have to be able to find products. They have to be able to make purchases if you if the sales team has to be able to find it useful. If we can’t check these boxes, it is not a viable product. It’s a minimum product, but it’s not viable. And here’s the problem is, when there is not a minimum viable product mentality, we tend to have a lot of scope creep. So let’s pick a number for budget. Let’s, let’s say your budget’s $30,000 for this new website just thrown out numbers here and and the goal is to get, like, a whole bunch of stuff done so without the minimum viable product analogy, it’s going to be just like, but hey, look, we can do this, and we can do this, and what about this and that sort of thing. And that means that budget is going to be maxed out, and there might be us additional money needed, etc, versus if we said, Okay, our budgets say 30 grand. What if we were to put, say, 15 or 20 into the website, get it off the ground, and then we have 10 left over for maybe additional marketing. Maybe we’ll do some paid media in there, etc. We have actual cap. What we find is that the website overall does not take the initial direction is thought, you know, we can all we have a vision, what we’re shooting for, what we’re excited about, but as the website starts taking off, it’s like a newborn child, right? You are excited about this child. And as they go one years old, two years old, they kind of have this personality, and that personality can change over time, and especially as they get in their teen years, you know, they they mature. They become now an adult, they get these ideas, these ideas, unfortunately, sometimes so like the idea is here, giving the website, if I could use the word permission to be able to take on its own form, as far as what products are selling best, maybe, maybe you stumble into an entirely new market of people wanting this one specific type of widget, and you’re able to churn on that. So that was a little bit of an extra discourse there, but one easy way for a minimum viable product drop it on what’s called a subdomain. So I have, let’s say I have mywebsite.com put this e commerce experience on shop.mywebsite.com. And direct your customers. Have your salespeople, direct your customers just like just work tirelessly to get your customers there. Put links on the main on your homes, on your main page, etc, to get people using this separate website. And of course, down the road, you can all meld it together. So what are some important activities that we need to do on our website?

Curt Anderson  34:25

A couple comments for you real quick. Here just Diane says, Hey, viable, the Word of the Week, and it is staying current with customer needs, technology at and and the times is critical to success. Could not agree more. My friend Diane, thank you for the comments here. Those were super viable. Well, hey, just being a Bible, let’s go here. We’ll pull this off the stage, and let’s go back here. Okay, what are some of the elements? What are some characteristics that we’re talking about? Joseph,

Joseph Maxwell  34:57

yes, so we need to be able to help. Customers get a quote for their product. That’s very important. Common in the b2b space, we talk about easy commerce, being able to have them come back quickly and reorder, especially if these widgets are used on the on the production line. You might say, well, we’re kind of a job shop, and maybe a bit of a hybrid here, where, you know, we work through the first product and then it’s the first one is highly custom, like, I don’t have a product catalog for that, but then people come back and place reorders, you know, for the same product over and over again. Well, e commerce is still just as viable for that. We’re more focusing on the customer portal side of this, as this functionality where we have the ability for a very fast reorder process. Maybe it’s a custom product catalog. So you have these custom widgets that are built for you. Maybe there’s five of them and you want to have this. This is a homepage for specifications or downloads or the original drawings, whatever like that also is, is a great place custom checkout fields. So do you need this delivered by a certain time of in more of a, b to b, maybe a distributor aspect of what day of the week, or in this, I guess, be a little bit more than restaurants that I’m thinking of grandstand that exam example earlier here in the conversation of for their customers, they need to know when they’re going to be open or when they should have a delivery. Because, you know, accepting a delivery over the lunch hour is not a great idea, so you have to be able to schedule around companies needs custom company accounts, so be able to track things at that level, which unlocks the capability for your customers to be able to create their own customer accounts and sub accounts and kind of manage this experience themselves. This portal right here, out of the box does this. I dropped our logo here on this, but it does it out of the box. So you have your list of orders. You can see this the status, the awaiting payment. You can pay for those orders in the invoice section. It is all right here. And I absolutely love this customer portal. It’s incredible.

Curt Anderson  36:58

And what shopping cart, is this?

Joseph Maxwell  37:01

This is a big commerce shopping cart.

Curt Anderson  37:06

Yes, big commerce. Okay, so for our friend Skylar to ask earlier about shopping cart, this is a big commerce example. How about same thing here?

Joseph Maxwell  37:14

Yep, uh, quick order right here, right in front of you, hits all right. Here, you can order based off of the SKU quickly pull that out based off of the previous orders you’ve done just literally a couple of clicks right here, easily able to access that peer. You’re able to add your new new customer accounts and give them permission. So maybe you don’t want somebody actually placing the final order, but they can tee everything up, get it ready, and you just do a quick approval. All right, here fully accessible. So at a very basic level, this is what a product page looks like. We already kind of showed this to you earlier, out of the box, just native. But from a configuration perspective, this is kind of a next step, and there’s like 50 steps beyond that, from product configuration, help your customer be able to answer those questions themselves. Walk through this process such that sales is minimally involved, but they’re there when they are needed. These are some examples, again, of additional product configurators, all accessible, all all able to be knocked out such that you are making this process easy for your customers.

Curt Anderson  38:22

Yeah, I love it. And I’m going to jump ahead a little bit here, Joseph. So, you know, I think the big takeaway thing that, one thing that you know, I’ve learned from you, that you do an amazing job preaching, is like, how do you make that emotional connection, and whether we want to, you know, even the most stoic engineer that has no emotion, every decision is still based on That’s right, what do you what do you want to share here?

Joseph Maxwell  38:45

How can we set you ourselves apart is really what it comes down to. So yes, if we’re in the US, US manufacturer, we have that as a, as a, as a positive, but then some people might say, well, US manufacturer could be more expensive. So okay, maybe, maybe that’s a net neutral there. So we need to be looking for, how can we establish ourselves as unique, as as individual, and I think an emotional connection is absolutely critical to that process, in our experience and based off of the studies we’ve done, the about us page is the number one clicked page from the homepage. So if you’re on the homepage, the number one page people are most likely, the page people are most likely to click on is about us. Why they are excited? They’re hungry for this personal connection. Website is this can be this blank wall. It’s just it’s static, it’s technical technology. It’s not human. But as we infuse call it humanity into what we do on our website, it creates that emotional connection. So here is a an about us page with smiling faces, so you’re working with a salesperson. I mean, I don’t think it’s creepy. It’s just like, hey, who am? I? Talking to. And people go to the website, I’m serious, and they say, Who am I talking to? Oh, it’s this person. They’re smiling. It’s a friendly face. And some companies go so far as to put like, their their hobby, or their favorite book they’ve read, or that type of thing. It’s like introducing this person that you’re talking to. And then you start go down the rabbit hole of saying, Oh, well, who’s this person? Who’s this person? And you develop this emotional connection. Kurt, I’m gonna ask you to go back a couple slides to where it says the value proposition. You don’t have to show the yellow value proposition slide. But this is another very important aspect of setting yourself apart, instead of assuming it. When a customer comes to your website and just says, Oh, here’s why I should buy from them. Tell them why you should they should buy from you. Tell them. Be explicit upfront. In this case, you know, ships in the fifth 10 to 15 days in need. Custom sizing, design help this. These are pieces of a value proposition. We can go further. And ideally this is boiled down, put on the product page, put on the homepage. But these are reasons why you should buy from us. This is reasons why we are better. Make it, make it clear as day, spell it out for your customers. They’re not having to go say, Oh, why? Why this company versus this company? Tell them. Make it. Make it quantifiable, such that they’re like, Yeah, I agree. I see your proof you are absolutely better, and thus I have an emotional connection. I see on paper why you’re better. I’m going to give you my business.

Curt Anderson  41:29

Yeah, yeah. Couldn’t love it more. You know, agree with everything you just said. You know, the about section just so critical. Let people know who you are. You know, people do business with people. If you don’t have information, it really you, you’re, you’ve missed, you’ve completely missed an opportunity to create some type of a relationship or establish one ounce of trust, because by doing nothing, it’s like, All right, well, what are you hiding? You know? And then I love all these aspects that you’re, you’re, you know, you’ve talked about proof that social proof. That’s why LinkedIn, that’s why social media, that’s why videos like this is just so important. The last thing that I want to really kind of highlight that you just shared. Like, what are your core strengths? How do you make the world a better place? You know, like, just, you know, shamelessly, unapologetically say, like, hey, you know, in my dear friend Diane, she’s phenomenal with this. You know, talk about like, how, how do you help your customers move the needle? We do acts, and we want to do X for you. So, Joseph, absolutely love it. Let’s start winding down here. You’ve got a couple wonderful programs here going the B to B manifesto. Are you ready? Do you want to share what’s going on here? Yeah, I actually have

Joseph Maxwell  42:39

one right here. So this is a the book that we’ve put together. It’s almost, almost as good as Kurt’s best kept secret book, almost. I’m not going to say it’s quite as good. I’d be lying to say that. But the idea here is what, what does B to B look like, and how can you scale it? Because over and over again. It’s like the question, the conversation we have is, what’s next? I mean, I have a website, what? What do we do after that? And so this gives you a roadmap to make you look super good in front of your leadership team, saying, Hey, we’re going to do this. We’re going to go here. It gives you those next steps and make your life a lot easier.

Curt Anderson  43:20

Well, absolutely love it. So go ahead, grab that QR code right there. And so Joseph, super excited. And this just this, it just came out. Correct that. So that one’s

Joseph Maxwell  43:29

been out for a little while, the digital transformation one there on the right, this one just came out. And the idea here is focusing on manufacturers. And what does this process look like to get going in a with the with the digital transformation. So we talk about the process, and is, is E commerce a good fit for you? If it’s if it’s not a good fit, like, don’t go there. There’s no reason to spend any money on it. But this talks about helping you understand that case and how you can achieve success through E commerce for your brand, it packed full of information about that

Curt Anderson  44:07

excellent All right, guys, grab that QR code while it’s still up there. Joseph, best place for folks to connect with you. LinkedIn.

Joseph Maxwell  44:15

Shoot me a connection there. Feel free to send me an email. Joseph, at swift otter.com and yeah, it’s been an absolute pleasure Curt being on here with you. Thank you. Make sure to connect with Kurt. I’m guessing, if you’re watching Well, I also have a streaming on my accounts too. So if Curt Anderson, absolutely incredible person when it comes to understanding manufacturers their needs, helping them be successful. And yeah, super excited. Thank you for having me on here. Kurt, it’s an absolute. It’s been an absolute pleasure,

Curt Anderson  44:44

absolutely. I have one last question for you, my friend. So entrepreneur, long time entrepreneur, you’ve been around for on the block for a few years here, and man, you’re doing phenomenal work. Just really admire, you know, I’ve gotten to know you, your team. You guys just do things with integrity. Very passionate, passionate about helping your clients as you started out your E commerce journey. Well, e commerce and entrepreneurial journey, what was the best business advice that you’ve ever received, or best business advice that you’d love to pass on to maybe a younger, newer entrepreneur out there? Best business advice that you’d like to share,

45:21

focus,

Curt Anderson  45:25

drop the mic, my friend, drop the mic. Focus. Do you want to elaborate on that? Yeah.

Joseph Maxwell  45:29

I mean, as as we as our focus splits, and unfortunately, that’s natural in business, because we have these new shiny objects that pop up, and some of them are good, some of them are not. But it’s the diligence to come back and ask those that are not good, the areas that are not profitable or are sucking up our time, and there’s just no long term value. It’s about being able just to start saying no to some of that stuff. So the idea of constantly focus on one thing, knock it out and work on to another thing. And of course, you’re going to have some maintenance of that over time. But as you do that, you’ll be scaling your team, and you will be able to continue this idea of focusing.

Curt Anderson  46:10

Well, I love it. I have a little thing I say, you know, how do you fiercely and ferociously focus on being your best self and just keep going out there crushing it. Diane has a couple comments here. She says, focus for us, right there. Diane, thank you for your comments today, guys, we’re going to wind down. So first off, how about hey, I’ve got a big round of applause for our friend Joseph today for just absolutely smashing the ball out of the park. So Joseph, just massive respect for you your team at swift outer you guys are just doing phenomenal work, helping entrepreneurs, manufacturers figure out this whole it’s daunting. It can be overwhelming. It is, and you get it down to a really nice level. Connect with Joseph on LinkedIn. Check out his website. He just has a wealth of information, all sorts of live streams, content, a couple books. So reach out to Joseph and so. And I want to thank everybody in the chat box today. Thank you for your comments. Thank you for folks that didn’t comment. Thank you for joining us if you’re touching us later on replay, man, go back and catch the whole thing. Joseph just dropped a wealth of information for those starting out on your E commerce journey. And last thing I like to leave us with, Joseph is I always like to say, hey, just go out and be someone’s inspiration, just like you were my friend, for all of us, and you’ll make the world a better place. So guys, have a great, amazing week. And Joseph, any last words that you want to share? Thanks

Joseph Maxwell  47:29

for bringing me on Curt. It’s been an absolute pleasure here, as we’ve worked together, done a lot of live streams together. And so yeah, it’s I am super excited, super grateful for you and the massive investment that you’ve made here in the manufacturing community, here in this in in North America. Well,

Curt Anderson  47:45

thank you, man. And my mom appreciate you saying that. So good, good.

Joseph Maxwell  47:49

Well, tell her I said that please.

Curt Anderson  47:50

I definitely will. So guys, have a great rest of your week. Uh, Damon will be back. He’s off. He’s out traveling. He will be back. And we have a wonderful guest coming up on Friday. So Joseph, hang out with me for one second and have a great re