The Role of Adaptive Merchandising in B2B

Today we're going to discuss why merchandising matters to B2B brands. Joining us is Johan Boström, a Co-Founder at inRiver, which is a product information management company. Their SaaS solution helps customers build better experiences and they're on a mission to make their customers best in class at marketing and selling their products. In part 1 of our conversation, Johan is going to talk us through the role of adaptive merchandising in B2B.
About the speaker

Johan Boström

inRiver

 - inRiver

Johan is a Co-Founder at inRiver, which is a product information management company. Their SaaS solution helps customers build better experiences and they're on a mission to make their customers best in class at marketing and selling their products.

Show Notes

Quotes

  • “We coined the term PXM (Product Experience Management), which is widely used in the industry today. What we wanted to do when we did it, lead a data management solution behind because we’ve always looked at ourselves as part of the MarTech stack.” - Johan“Most of our customers today are B2B customers, we started in retail and grew out of retail into B2B. What we have helped our customers achieve has always been merchandising for all their touchpoints where they’re meeting their consumers.” - Johan “A B2B buyer today is of course also a B2B consumer and they tend to want the same experience when they are buying for their employers.” - Johan“Merchandising from a B2B perspective is different from a B2C. B2B buyers tend to want to find the solution to their problems quickly. So the merchandising part is more about helping the buyer to find the right spare part, accessory, or solution that they are tasked to find for their company.” - Johan“It’s no longer about selling to a buyer, it’s about facilitating the buyer in its buying journey and making it easier for them to buy and that’s what we mean by merchandising for B2B company.” - Johan“One of the things that I urge the customer to do, is not only to describe their product and the universe around the product with all its accessories and parts like that. It’s also to describe the application of the product.” - Johan“It’s more about we’re moving the friction in the buying journey and making it very easy and digestible to get to the right thing. It requires more content than you usually see.” - Johan“B2B buyers have a tendency now to go to places like Amazon and that means that like an A+ page an enhanced page and content becomes really crucial. Even in the touchpoints that are out of their control such as third-party marketplaces.” - Johan“The buying process for a B2B buyer is to solve a problem. It’s not because they like to buy a piece of welding equipment. They do it because they are tasked to solve a problem.” - Johan“Getting the right attribution is also critical. Some come in for a spare part, some come in for an accessory. Guiding them in the right way is all about merchandising. If you do that right, the friction will be taken out of the buying journey and you are more likely to get to sell thus you need more content and figure out how to adapt these content to these personas in the channels.” - Johan “In order to adapt, you need to have more content and the content needs to have a structure to make it easy for the front-end solution to adapt to the buying behavior of the customer.” - Johan “Merchandising is not just about product assortment which most people think about, it is about essentially modifying your sales pitch to be relevant to the right person.” - Ben “You need to be able to guide them quickly to what they are looking for and when they found it, you need to be able to articulate why they should buy your product very, very, rapidly.” - Johan“Many of the products that B2B is selling will change rather slow, some products will have a very long life cycle.” - Johan“It’s not only about the current products that you are selling. You also need your web presence to be able to give them access to products that are no longer sold but are still a very important piece of their infrastructure, which is also a very interesting business opportunity.” - Johan 

About the speaker

Johan Boström

inRiver

 - inRiver

Johan is a Co-Founder at inRiver, which is a product information management company. Their SaaS solution helps customers build better experiences and they're on a mission to make their customers best in class at marketing and selling their products.

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