Master B2B Friday 15

Andy & Brian discuss the pros and cons of B2B companies making their pricing available in online channels.
 
They're mostly aligned with the common wisdom that pricing should be transparent, but they offer 4 reasons why it may make sense to hide some prices:
1) Withholding prices gives the seller pricing power.
2) Making the customer call for price raises their commitment to complete the buying journey.
3) The “price available upon request” notice carries an aura of exclusivity and status.
4) Withholding prices selectively pushed the customer to certain items and away from others.

This week on the podcast, Andy & Brian discuss:
- How will Amazon react to being deemed a "distributor" by the US government, and will that make them liable for the products third-party sellers put on the platform?
- Does digital investment necessarily lead to improved profitability?
- 3 steps to improving your digital profitability.

This week, Andy & Brian talk about why frontline employees and executives have such different views on the state of their businesses:
- What's the "purpose gap" and is there a way to reduce it?
- How can companies ensure they're allowing their staff to make forward progress on their projects?
- Is having differing views on the customer the biggest disconnect between executives and rank-and-file staff?

This week on the podcast Andy & Brian discuss:
- How B2C promotions (like Prime Day) impact B2B sales
- Why internal challenges are the reason why digital strategies fail
- 5 strategies for fixing internal challenges

This week on the podcast, Andy and Brian talk through the 6 characteristics of a great culture and how to implement them in your company...
1) Build your culture based on real-world dilemmas
2) Move your culture from abstraction to action
3) Pain your culture in full color
4) Hire the right people, and they will build the right culture
5) Make sure the culture drives the strategy
6) Don't be a purist

The Friday 15 podcast is off this week for the July 4th holiday, but we wanted to share a recent webcast we hosted about how companies have accelerated their digital maturity.
Join Andy, Brian and expert practitioners including Zoro.com’s CTO Andy Goodfellow, Theresa Kuske from medical device marketplace Chamfr, and Steve Baruch, formerly of MSC, on this special Webcast as they walk through how they overcame obstacles to speed up digital transformation in their organizations.
Master B2B has just released a research report titled Accelerating Your Digital Vision to offer companies a roadmap for how to accelerate their digital maturity. This webcast will bring the findings from that report to life, as we hear stories from the eCommerce trenches.

This week on the Friday 15, Andy & Brian provide a template for getting and sustaining buy-in for digital initiatives, including:1) How you build the business case.2) How you measure value.3) How you sustain alignment.

This week Andy & Brian take a look at why the hype behind first-party marketplaces has cooled, and whether we'll ever see the promise of the model fulfilled.

This week Andy & Brian share some of what they learned while hosting the Master B2B Summit in Chicago, including:
 
- Who owns the customer experience at different companies?
- Where should your next budget dollar be spent?
- Who should be the next hire on your team?
 
Plus answers to those questions and more...

In this week's episode, Andy & Brian give a preview of Master B2B's State of eCommerce Report, which will be released in July.  But we didn't want to wait to share some of the key findings about how both B2B buyers and sellers have changed their behaviors over the past year.