Episode 22: Building Robust Requirements For B2B eCommerce With Jessica Wetzel

Season 2 of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce podcast treads onward with hosts Isaiah Bollinger and Timothy Peterson welcoming Jessica Weitzal from Punchout2Go onto the show.

Jessica Wetzel is an accomplished eCommerce Manager with 16 years of extensive experience providing strategy and growth in the areas of B2B sales, marketing, and eCommerce. In this podcast, we dive deep into how she helped a distributor go from offline to online with a robust eCommerce site that has evolved over the years. She wrote some impressive requirements documents to take the company to the next level and managed many agencies so she knows how to nail down requirements to get the most of your development team. Jessica is a true leader in B2B eCommerce and is now at PunchOut2Go where she can help you integrate with internal customer systems as a B2B business.

Episode 22 – Building Robust Requirements For B2B eCommerce With Jessica Wetzel

In this episode, co-hosts Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of Trellis, and Timothy Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer of SportsBiz, welcome Kristin Gray, Enterprise Sales Executive at Magento to discuss:

• What advice do you have for distributors to get better requirements when launching new B2B sites?

• Why do companies struggle with marketing in B2B?
• How is B2B eCommerce marketing different from B2C?
• You have worked for the two leading platforms Magento and Demandware which is now Salesforce. What are you seeing from the other platforms you compete with and what do you think makes a good platform?
• What do you think it takes to find good agencies and make agency relationships successful?
• Is there anything B2B players can learn from B2C?
• What is the biggest challenge eCommerce players will face in the coming decade?

This podcast’s origin story

Podcasts are still a relatively new medium for content, but just because they are new doesn’t mean they lack power. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Podcasts have a unique ability to reach people on their time, whenever it is convenient for them – a way that previously did not majorly exist. Podcaster listeners can take the information wherever they go and absorb it as they see fit. And that’s exactly what we are looking to do here. We want to reach a new audience of B2B eCommerce enthusiasts.

This podcast is all about B2B eCommerce. B2B is a different breed of eCommerce and it needs a different breed of Podcast. We get into the nitty-gritty of integrations, adoption, platforms, data and so much more regarding what makes B2B difficult to make successful for eCommerce!

We noticed that a few B2C podcasts exist on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but nothing designed for the B2B eCommerce community. B2B and B2C eCommerce have a lot of overlap, but even more differences. Each has a different set of requirements and customer demands that impact project scope. Let’s call a spade a spade. B2B is harder, more complicated, and harder to market. But it is also a bigger piece of the pie. The eCommerce B2B roadmap to success is not as cut and dry as B2C and that’s why we have started this podcast.

B2C platforms like Magento and Shopify have large communities that support and have done the entre-level work of most projects. The same community does not exist for B2B, but we are starting to build it. The ecosystem may not be as mature, but as experts in the space, we hope this podcast will help some people wake up and reevaluate their online sales strategy.

The first podcast examines major trends around B2B eCommerce as well as answering all of the above questions.  Take a listen for yourself and let us know what you think!

We will be posting new episodes with special guests weekly. You can listen on our dedicated podcast website and download the podcast on all major channels: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, Castbox, Podchaser, Podcast Addict, Deezer, Listen Notes, and RSS Feed.