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“There's this tendency to do ‘peanut butter strategy,’ which is just spread it around and everybody gets a little bit of something — that isn't strategy. In my view, strategy is about choices, and it's about trade-offs. Trade-offs mean that sometimes something needs to get less so something else can get more.”
— Dean McElwee, Director of Global Ecommerce Collaboration, Stanley Black & Decker
Today’s CEOs must have an array of skills to shepherd their organizations through transformation. They must be digitally minded, data-informed, and strategic yet nimble enough to adapt to an ever-evolving ecommerce landscape.
It’s a tall order, and many CEOs could greatly benefit from a blueprint for how to help their organizations achieve — and sustain — ecommerce success.
Thankfully, Dean McElwee, director of global ecommerce collaboration at Stanley Black & Decker, has created one. McElwee, who has years of ecommerce experience working for global brands, such as Kellogg’s, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola, has written a new book, “Ecommerce for CEOs: What Every CEO and C-Suite Leader Should Know About Ecommerce.”
The book offers CEOs a roadmap for how they can optimize omnichannel performance and transform their processes and culture to achieve this outcome.
McElwee joined a recent episode of the “Unpacking the Digital Shelf” podcast, aptly titled “Ecommerce for CEOs,” to share insights from the book and what ecommerce business goals he thinks CEOs must prioritize to help their brands succeed today.
McElwee says CEOs should prioritize three things:
“Omnichannel retailing is really a very new phenomenon and it's impacted the way shoppers shop,” McElwee says. “It's impacted the way they buy, the way they search, the way they get new information to decide which brands to purchase, and that's really impacting the way brands then go to market.”
Omnichannel is also affecting how brands allocate their resources. When you can reach a shopper seemingly everywhere, it can be difficult to decide where to invest and to assess which channels offer the best return.
Secondly, brands need to have a proactive, channel-aware ecommerce strategy. McElwee says that, far too often, brands don’t execute an intentional strategy but rather follow industry trends.
“We have often followed what’s happening and not made deliberate choices about which retailers we are going to be on, which marketplaces we’re going to be on and why, and how we’re going to interact with those marketplaces,” he says.
Instead, brands need to better understand the customer journey across channels — and how their activity on one channel informs the buying decisions they make on the other — and use this information to skillfully leverage each of these touchpoints to drive conversions.
“If you’re going to succeed in this type of environment, you've got to look at it from the full-court point of view,” McElwee says.
Lastly, CEOs need to prioritize their business-to-business (B2B) relationships, whether it be with retailers, distributors, or other channel partners. McElwee says to focus on joint business planning and improving the experience for channel partners, so they want to do repeat business with you.
Though it’s clear where CEOs should focus their energy, the bigger challenge is how to translate these priorities into actual organizational tactics and strategies. Fortunately, McElwee has specific insights in this area too.
What are the actual organizational tactics and strategies CEOs should implement to achieve their ecommerce business goals? Here’s a roadmap to help guide your ecommerce success.
Ecommerce accounts for a disproportionate share of growth for brands, McElwee says, so it’s crucial for CEOs to be clear on what their organization’s ecommerce strategy is, set the vision, and then communicate this throughout their organization.
“Make sure that the go-to-market team’s under your business, so those sales teams that work under you, have a clear view of what they want to achieve with their customers,” he says.
McElwee says leaders tend to lean into what he calls a “peanut butter strategy,” which isn’t much of a strategy at all.
“There's this tendency to do ‘peanut butter strategy,’ which is just spread it around and everybody gets a little bit of something — that isn't strategy,” he says. “In my view, strategy is about choices and it's about trade-offs. Trade-offs mean that sometimes something needs to get less so something else can get more.”
Throughout his appearance on “Unpacking the Digital Shelf,” McElwee stressed the need for CEOs to execute a more deliberate strategy. This advice is especially true when it comes to retail media.
“If you’re the CEO, you need to make sure that it's delivering results for you and your brands and understand what success means in that environment,” he says. “Because what you’re going to be faced with is a lot of pressure from retailers to invest more in retail media. It’s very profitable, but it’s challenging to manage.”
CEOs should collaborate with their chief marketing officers (CMOs) and commercial teams to identify the metrics that matter to them on each retail media platform and then work together to determine the best way to balance their spend.
For CEOs, being clear on their objectives and ecommerce business goals at the outset will minimize wasted spend and help their brands make better use of these platforms.
To drive better omnichannel performance, CEOs must foster a partnership mentality with their retail partners and conduct joint business planning (JBP).
Too often, brands conduct joint business planning in silos, with one plan for digital and another for brick-and-mortar. However, today’s omnichannel environment calls for brands to take a more holistic approach and create things like omnichannel shopper profiles to better understand consumer behavior.
“Our JBPs or our work with each of these retailers should understand how shoppers move through [the funnel],” McElwee says.
McElwee says CEOs also need to democratize ecommerce.
To accomplish this, they must build a digitally aware organization and upskill their teams. Upskilling is crucial because companies will need to harness a deep bench of talent to deliver a truly digital business.
“I often talk about ecommerce people needing to be evangelists or missionaries,” he says. “They have to be going out and spreading the word, but the CEO needs to be working with them to evangelize that across the entire business.”
Today’s CEO must be adept at digital leadership to help their organizations navigate today’s complex ecommerce environment.
For years, brands have focused on building the right tech stack, refining their processes, and hiring the right talent, but this work will never be done. They now need to take what they’ve built, refine it, and optimize it for growth.
McElwee has given them a framework for where to go next, but it’ll ultimately be up to them to set the vision and empower their people to execute it.
“I think it's about, ‘How do we learn to bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be?’” McElwee says. “Because I think if we treat ecommerce as a dark art, we're probably not going to have as much success as democratizing ecommerce. I think our job as ecommerce professionals is to democratize ecommerce and make sure that we all understand it.”
To hear more of McElwee’s insights on how CEOs can position their organizations for ecommerce success, listen to the full episode.
