Master B2B Friday 15

This week on the Master B2B Friday 15 podcast, Andy & Brian talk about how to accelerate your digital maturity in 2024.  The discussion centers around a new report Master B2B published in association with commercetools called, "Accelerating Your Digital Vision" that's digs into how organizations can quickly speed up their digital maturity.
You can download the free report here.

On this week's Friday 15 podcast, Andy & Brian talk about whether brands should sell on Amazon, even if they don't get access to customer data.  The resounding answer is, "yes," but with some caveats:
- Brian believes the Amazon 3P Seller Central approach makes more sense than the 1P approach...so why do brands still sell to Amazon directly?
- Don't discount the value of Amazon as an awareness tool.
- Brian shared a survey of companies that don't sell on Amazon and the number one reason why they don't is that they don't have the internal resources necessary to manage it -- it wasn't that they have an issue with Amazon in general.

Andy & Brian give a recap of their experience at the B2B Online conference in Chicago.  
Plus, they discuss what the latest Forrester Wave of Commerce platforms means for industry.
And would you rather work with Gen Z or Gen X co-workers?

In this week's Master B2B Friday 15, Andy & Brian discuss:- What the unemployment numbers mean for digital investments.
- Why personalization is so much more challenging in B2B than in B2C.
- How you define "the customer" in B2B will define what types of personalization you actually need.

This week on the Friday 15, Andy & Brian discuss:
- Does it make sense for an online marketplace to have brick and mortar locations?
- Should you buy a PIM early in your digital journey, or once you've built up a sizable amount of product data?
- A PIM won't solve your data problem, but it will force discipline on your organization around product data.  So why doesn't everyone have one?

This week on the Friday 15, Andy & Brian tackle:
- Is Amazon being unethical when they started selling on other marketplaces to gain intel?
- Do you need to bring in outsiders to help you revisit a digital strategy?
- How do you prioritize the changes you want to make to your digital strategy?

This week in the Master B2B Friday 15 Podcast, Andy and Brian talk about the balance between sticking to a plan, and reacting to external factors - and how do you know when to make a change to your plan. Andy talked about the difference between the 3 year vision, the 18 month strategy, and the constantly evolving tactics.

This week Andy & Brian talk about:- Amazon's bigger investment in Anthropic and what it means for the future of eCommerce
- A new AI chatbot tool called Hume and how it's going to affect first-line customer service workers in the future.  Plus, Andy shares and example of an interaction he had with Hume...

This week, Andy & Brian talk about:- Home Depot's $18 billion purchase of roofing distributor SRS Distribution, and how that will impact Home Depot's strategy moving forward.
- Who should own customer experience? Master B2B recently held an executive roundtable in Atlanta and asked this question and the answers were all over the map.  The guys discuss where they think customer experience should live in an organization, and why that matters.

This week, Andy & Brian talk about Honeywell's digital transformation, and whether their CEO's decision to be incredibly hands-on is what made that transformation successful.
 
You can read more about that story in this HBR article:https://hbr.org/2024/03/the-chair-of-honeywell-on-bringing-an-industrial-business-into-the-digital-age