April 28 - 30, 2025
Chicago Marriott Downtown
Limited capacity to 30 Distributers and Manufacturers. Please RSVP to ryan.kulp@wbresearch.com
A breakfast full of fun and reflection of women paving the way in B2B business success!
Kickstart your experience at B2B Online in an interactive breakfast session. Interested in hosting a breakfast to get your conference experience brewing?
Interested in kicking off the day as a private breakfast host? Contact vince.esposito@wbresearch.com
The explosion of digital capabilities has created new revenue opportunities for manufacturing and distribution companies. However, there are many pitfalls with your sales and operating models that can hamper success. Using the expansion of services as an example, we will explore approaches for effectively shifting to new value propositions for your customers across digital channels.
The disruption caused by COVID-19 has forced B2B companies to expand the channels they leverage for sales and customer service. At the same time, customer expectations have shifted, and customers are demanding easier ways to make their purchases. In this keynote session we’ll talk about:
There’s an evolution happening in the distribution industry as early movers begin to shape up Digital Strategies for the future. Hear how Wesco is embracing / ushering in the shift to digitally enabled service models.
B2B customers are demanding more self-service options and technical functionality when it comes to online purchases. Furthermore, businesses have determined that by shifting order entry for long tail customers to self-service, headcount will be freed up. B2B buyers increasingly expect Amazon like experiences, but what types of B2C engagements should you be considering in your customer portal? How can you crack the issue of order status? Panelists will discuss how they are implementing and enhancing self-service portals to drive repeat purchases and realize efficiencies, including:
Time for a sugar jolt! Don’t miss the donut wall featuring Chicago’s famous Do-Rite Donuts in the energetic hub of the event, the Expo!
In January 2020, Beacon Roofing Supply, the largest publicly traded distributor of roofing materials and complementary building products in the United States and Canada, brought together its 40 brands to become Beacon Building Products. This change allowed Beacon to help their customers be more efficient and grow their businesses by providing products, services in a new omni-channel format, including a robust e-commerce platform. Our speakers Jamie Samide and Sarah Bradley will take a deep dive into the B2C e-Commerce strategies they’ve since leveraged to tackle the unique challenges and opportunities of B2B.
The old ways of doing business by placing orders through phone calls and emails are not able to support the demands of today's supply chains. Customer cannot receive timely pricing, stock availability, or lead times; it takes days, sometimes weeks, to place orders; and customers spend too many hours trying to figure out when their orders will arrive.
To address this, Stanley Black & Decker has partnered with VTEX and Clouda to build self-service portals across their various business units that give their customers the ability to get instant and accurate pricing, stock availability, and order delivery info. These B2B portals are expected to increase sales and lower operating costs for Stanley Black & Decker, and its customers, by empowering customers to self-serve (pricing, stock, lead times, ordering, shipping status, etc.) which will reduce burdens on internal Customer Service, Engineering, and Sales teams.
Order fulfilment is a critical function within the overall CX, yet it’s one of the tougher things to crack in B2B. The supply chain disruptions of the last two years have not made fulfilment easier, but there are opportunities for removing friction and improving the end-to-end CX. Hear how digital leaders are bridging the gap, including:
This workshop will include group discussion around the challenges and opportunities how product catalogs are managed. The topics will also include discussion around an enhanced shopping cart experience, to name a few: multi-cart, saved carts and print cart.
Limited to 20 MAX
Manufacturers are finding it more challenging to differentiate themselves from their competitors based on product alone. It is now the experience a manufacturer provides to its customers and partners that increasingly provides market differentiation. Join this session to learn how connected commerce can provide a 360-degree view of your customer, from customer acquisition and fulfillment to customer support and loyalty, helping to grow revenue and personalize the customer experience throughout the entire digital journey.
Antonio Espinoza, Sr. Director and Head of Digital Marketing and eCommerce for Philips North America leads the company’s strategy, planning, and execution of digital programs for Philips’s Health Systems. In this session he’ll take a deep dive into the process his team has undergone to take Philips’s B2B business to online commerce via eStore and EDI. Some of the strategies he’ll discuss will be:
In this session, Riccardo will share the most valuable lessons from his eCommerce deployments. What are the key elements to ensure a frictionless user experience? How can data help to make sure you are going to hit your numbers? Find out how you can:
· Build your eCommerce team to successfully deploy on customer-centric data-driven tactics.
· Map out your way to the billion.
· Establish operations to execute on your plan.
Inflation is at its highest point in decades, demand continues to be volatile, and supply chain interruptions and production issues have led to almost daily changes in manufacturing capacity and costs.
Many companies are ill-prepared to deal with this environment, leaving both sales and margin at risk. To protect profitability companies must model, execute, and analyze at a lower level of granularity and a higher level of preciseness than ever before.
AI-based technology and automation are a prerequisite for this level of detail. Attend and learn more about the necessary strategies you need to enhance margins during inflationary periods and maximize sales in deflationary times.
What Attendees Will Learn:
Across the industry, B2B digital leaders are looking to data for opportunities to enhance the CX, determine new product and service offerings and more. Manufacturers and distributors are quickly updating and maturing their data capabilities to deliver value to the business. How do you design a data strategy for diverse channels? How can you pull data from disparate systems?
Panelists will discuss:
For an established B2B Company that is looking to re-platform or for a B2B that is new to Ecommerce, it is important to know the actual business needs in order to build on functionalities that will allow the online business to operate in a successful way. The following are helpful steps to ensure that the most critical things are being considered before your Ecommerce launch.
Dover, an $8B diversified global manufacturer, accelerated into their company-wide B2B and B2C transformation when COVID hit in 2020. With customers and operations worldwide, Dover realized that they needed a strategy to quickly create and publish high quality multilingual content across their digital properties. Deepika and Laura will discuss the following topics:
• Enabling global sales and marketing teams to create and deliver global content with ease and flexibility
• Creating a seamless multilingual digital experience to promote a frictionless buyer journey
• Integrating a translation management system into a global tech stack
• Managing global adoption and education of translation services and technology
Website optimization is a key focus area for marketers to examine the customer journey and make improvements to help customers find things more easily. How do you determine where to start first? Which technology should you be considering to optimize conversions now and into the future?
Panelists will discuss:
Enjoy game day bites including pretzels and cold beer as you make new connections and peruse the latest tech in the Expo.
Talent is a hot button issue for this community. Everyone is in competition with each other with businesses pushing digital skills. As the industry moves more into digital and AI based technologies, what does this mean for recruitment and talent retention? How can you market yourselves and revise your recruiting approach to feel more like a tech company to attract skilled digital technologists?