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"You learn that in any squad or any platoon, the leader doesn't stand in the front. The leader is not the one carrying the flag. The leader leads from two-thirds of the way back in a group. It's a strategic point where you can make decisions and steer that team. So, I do that in my career, as well." — Bob Land, General Manager of Berlin Brands Group
Today, digital shelf leaders must drive organizational change in a highly competitive, fragmented, and evolving ecommerce environment. It’s a tall order for even the most seasoned brand executives and requires a very specific mindset.
Lauren Livak, director of the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI), and Bob Land, general manager of Berlin Brands Group, recently hosted a DSI webinar where they defined and characterized the executive mentality required for digital shelf success today.
The webinar, “Drive Organizational Change With Executive Leadership Principles,” includes actionable advice for executives trying to accelerate their organization’s digital journey and striving to achieve their organization’s ecommerce objectives and outcomes. It also offers a roadmap for success for ecommerce professionals whom one day hope to be in the executive seat.
Here are Livak’s and Land’s insights on what true ecommerce leadership now looks like.
According to Livak, leadership in the digital space is all about leading through change.
"The digital space, the digital ecosystem, and ecommerce have changed so much, specifically in the past year, and will continue to change," she says. "So, always keeping that lens and mindset that you are going to have to lead through change is really important."
Livak also discussed several essential truths for digital leaders, including:
Whether you’re a current or aspiring digital leader, you’ll need to hone and grow these skills throughout your career, according to Livak. The throughline across all of these skills is being comfortable with change and having the willingness to adapt. Embracing this mindset will lay the foundation for effective ecommerce leadership.
Leaders must also bring their organizations with them on their digital journey, which requires them to educate, communicate with, and empower key stakeholders, decision-makers, and their overall teams.
They must educate their organizations about their ecommerce goals by communicating with every level of the organization, which can help them get the budget and headcount necessary to execute their strategy. Then, leaders must identify changemakers and empower them to evangelize what they’re trying to achieve within the organization.
Land says executing all these steps requires leaders to remove mental roadblocks that have traditionally impeded change — the first of which is that driving change requires leaders to go it alone.
"Organizational change is a team sport," Land says.
There’s a temptation to go fast to accelerate change, he adds, but the beauty is in going slow and taking others with you along the journey.
According to Land, that’s how most digital leaders find success. It’s no different than the adage, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
"One of the best pieces of advice that I've heard — and you never hear this during digital transformation — is 'slow down.' Usually, you hear 'speed up.'" — Bob Land, General Manager of Berlin Brands Group
Land, who previously served in the Navy, says good leaders who want to achieve ecommerce objectives and outcomes actually lead from the back.
"You learn that in any squad or any platoon, the leader doesn't stand in the front. The leader is not the one carrying the flag," he says. "The leader leads from two-thirds of the way back in a group. It's a strategic point where you can make decisions and steer that team. So, I do that in my career, as well."
Despite all the digital shelf playbooks out there, cultivating leadership buy-in isn’t as simple as walking executives and decision-makers through a standard step-by-step process.
Land says ecommerce leaders must prevent their executive teams from chasing shiny objects, especially when it comes to direct-to-consumer (DTC) approaches.
Rather than relying on Walmart or Amazon as primary sales channels, for example, some executives may think standing up a DTC channel is an easy way to grow their company’s margins. However, Land says the problem with this line of thinking is that it takes a while to build a successful DTC channel.
Instead, ecommerce leaders need to have a larger conversation with their executive teams and educate them on the importance of cross-channel data, fostering a cross-channel presence, and using these things as assets to drive overall sales.
It’s also important for ecommerce leaders to have a direct line of communication with the CEO. Land was vice president of consumer experience at Dorel Juvenile, a leading juvenile products manufacturer, when he hosted the DSI webinar. He says reporting directly to Dorel Juvenile’s CEO made all the difference in his role.
If having a direct line of communication isn’t possible, it’s still important for ecommerce leaders to understand their audience. Most C-suite executives haven’t come up through the ecommerce ranks. They’ve ascended to their positions from sales, marketing, or product roles.
"So, you're talking a complete[ly] foreign language [to them]," Land says. "They're all smart and they're all willing to learn, but it's just knowing how to understand what they want and [that] what they consider a win might be different than what you consider a win."
Land says that ecommerce leaders persistently struggle to get the budget to do their jobs effectively. Businesses often allocate resources based on retailer-specific metrics like same-store sales and the number of doors, but these metrics often have nothing to do with ecommerce.
Instead, organizations need to make budgeting decisions using ecommerce-specific benchmarks like average order value (AOV), Amazon traffic, and the like. Land says it also might be valuable to look at ecommerce performance at the SKU level to decide where to apply the budget.
"There certainly is a bottom-up, SKU-based approach for ecommerce, absolutely. It's just funny how you've got to do some educating typically with the sales team because they don't know traffic, they don't know conversion rates, they're not accustomed to putting that into their planning process for budget planning and forecasting," he says. "It's just a different model altogether. I think something needs to be done that marries these two approaches into one."
Another challenge for ecommerce leaders involves determining how to deploy their team. There’s often a question about whether to hire externally; retrain and elevate people internally; or create a separate group solely dedicated to ecommerce.
"It's really this piece about who is going to do what in the organization, internally versus externally, [working with] agencies, and all of that. I think this deserves more space on the strategic agenda," Land says.
He adds that it’s important for organizations to identify and elevate rock stars in different domains, whether an employee is highly skilled at running Amazon ads, a great media strategist, or a search engine optimization (SEO) expert.
Land says it’s beneficial for companies to create formal training programs, supported by online learning platforms that offer on-demand, self-paced, or real-time training that caters to employees’ different learning styles.
When Land was at Dorel Juvenile, for example, the company invested in a learning platform called Lessonly to upskill its team. It used the platform to import 101 videos from software providers and create more advanced training videos to help employees become more adept at using the software and tools the company had adopted.
"What we used to do is say, 'Oh, we did introduce new software today. We're going to do these big 100-person training sessions and try to get the swath of the company covered,'" Land says. "A lot of people don't learn like that. They're visual learners or self-paced learners."
Investing in employee training can not only help ecommerce leaders upskill their teams, but also retain skilled talent in a highly competitive job market.
Land says Dorel Juvenile also found that this investment empowered employees and positioned them to move into other emerging areas within the company, such as DTC.
Whether it’s upskilling their teams, clearly communicating their goals, or educating their C-suite counterparts, ecommerce leaders play an important role in guiding their organizations’ strategic direction and growth.
As Land says, organizational change is a team sport, so ecommerce leaders need to embrace cross-functional collaboration and define and create shared goals across the enterprise to achieve digital shelf success. And when they do succeed, it’s crucial for them to be loud and proud about it and “keep the good news momentum going,” as Land says. This will build buy-in across the organization and make the executive team more enthusiastic about what digital can do for the brand.
"Celebrat[e] wins loudly. If you can, do it on a legendary level," Land says. "Every step toward making a digital transformation work is worthy — even probably more exciting than you might think as a DTC leader or digital transformation leader."
Check out more of Livak’s and Land’s perspectives on ecommerce leadership by listening to the full podcast episode.
