The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce – Managing A B2B eCommerce Business With Michael Powers

We are back with another episode of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce. In episode 4, hosts Isaiah Bollinger and Timothy Peterson are joined by The Alaska Rubber Group’s Director of eCommerce, Michael Powers. The Alaska Rubber Group has grown to become a leading industrial supplier to the oil & gas, mining, fishing, timber, agriculture, marine, OEM and construction industries. They offer a wide variety of American made, and quality import products from the leading manufacturers in the industry.

In episode 4, Co-Hosts, Isaiah Bollinger and Timothy Peterson of Trellis bring on Michael Powers who is implementing B2B eCommerce for Alaska Rubber Group. Michael Powers is a B2B eCommerce strategist with over 15 years of digital marketing and eCommerce experience including re-platforming of a legacy B2B eCommerce platform and implementing customer adoption & acquisition strategies. Michael Powers had built out a B2B eCommerce program for a distributor and brought their revenue from next to nothing to 30% of all sales. He is now back at it again with a new organization to transform their sales from offline to online.

Episode 3 discussed the B2B eCommerce landscape when it comes to implementing said technology into a robust eCommerce strategy.

Episode 4- Managing A B2B eCommerce Business With Michael Powers

In this episode, co-hosts Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of Trellis, and Timothy Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer of SportsBiz, welcome Michael Powers of Alaska Rubber Group to discuss:

• Cultural challenges with B2B
• Why do some companies succeed while others fail
• Future of B2B
• B2B lessons learned from B2C
• Biggest B2B challenge for distributors

Michael has a plethora of experience growing distributors brands to be levels of eCommerce excellence. He shares his insights on h9w he plans to do it again with The Alaska Rubber Group.

Why we started this podcast

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.