BradyIFS + Envoy Solutions, a national distributor of janitorial sanitation, food service, disposables and industrial packaging products, has recently unveiled their new name: BradyPLUS.
Ian Gresham, Chief Marketing Officer and head of omnichannel for BradyPLUS, is responsible for accelerating the company’s marketing strategy, brand recognition and omnichannel business nationwide. Gresham has an MBA from Harvard Business School and impressive leadership experience as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, receiving the Presidential Service Badge while posted at Camp David.
Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein, Ph.D., talked with Gresham about the power of the combined distributors, how to leverage data to better serve customers and how distributors can balance the digital experience with in-person expertise.
Jonathan Bein: What are your thoughts on becoming a branded house versus a house of brands? What does BradyPLUS see as part of that evolution?
Ian Gresham: We have amazing brands and heritage from the companies that have become part of BradyPLUS. We don’t intend to throw that away. Some brands we’ve brought together are over 100 years old, and they’ve had multi-generational family journeys that helped build what they are. That’s become the foundation of what we are. We’re excited to continue to recognize that heritage and the shared experiences many of our employees have had along the way. That has a lot of value. We don’t overlook that.
Our vision is to bring all the brands together to be one consistent promise, a value proposition to our customers, and one consistent set of capabilities from coast to coast. We can interact with a single customer from coast to coast in different locations and offer the same kind of supporting capabilities equally well wherever we play.
The next chapter will focus on systems, processes, teams, organization and culture. The brand will evolve over time — it’s not going to happen overnight. We have a plan; we’re working towards that, and we’re excited to do that and bring our employees and customers along with us.
Ian Heller: What you describe is more nuanced than a branded house or a house of brands. That shows a lot of sophistication; most people don’t see it that way. They think it should be one way or another. What led you to that decision, and how did you enroll the rest of the management team in that decision?
Gresham: We operate in JanSan, food service and industrial packaging environments. Those categories and businesses we’ve brought together share that focus. What differentiates them is geography. They were a brand that existed in a local market. If I were to compare that to my experience at Sherwin-Williams, where we had Minwax, we had Thompson’s WaterSeal, and we had Krylon; that was a house of brands, but every brand stood for a different promise that people could count on.
The brand is a promise, and that promise is based on trust. And trust is based on consistency in delivering results. In our case now, BradyPLUS stands for one promise, and that’s really about partnering for success with our clients. Digital helps us make this easy for them. The magic in our DNA is the consultative relationship where we help our clients think differently about their business; 80-90% of what they buy from us, they bought before. We just keep the trains running on time. But when they have to open a new building and have to think about staffing needs and how they are equipping, we have industry experts who can come in with a new perspective and say: “Here’s a new way to set up your operations. Here are the equipment and the consumables you’re going to need to generate next-level results.”
That promise is consistent across all our businesses. That gave me the confidence to believe that one brand can work for everybody and should, because we’re making the same promise wherever we play.
I have seen companies break things to make a transition too fast, and people who trusted one of the brands lose trust very quickly as soon as something changes. And that’s a risk you have to think very carefully about.
Bein: When we do customer experience surveys, we see frustration from the customers of the add-on company. When it gets broken by the acquiring company, you’re going to hear about it from the customers, and they’re going to say things were better before. Before the acquisition, we did a survey for one distributor in the HVAC plumbing space and the add-on company customers said, “Don’t become Ferguson.” That was a super strong sentiment, a longing for the experience with the previous brand.
Gresham: It’s a dynamic that as soon as anything changes after an acquisition, people attribute it to the new management or acquisition situation. So, we have to be careful about that. We don’t intend to make this happen overnight, but we’ll move pretty quickly and lean on our communication. I’m responsible for communication that supports change management. How do you make people aware of what’s happening and what is and isn’t going to change? What are those changes going to be? What are the implications? How do you make it easy for the stakeholders to navigate the changes? The better you communicate, the smoother the transition is and the more forgiving stakeholders will be — especially if they understand the benefits.
Bein: Talk to us about your platform on digital and how it varies across your different sectors.
Gresham: Our digital journey is just like our brand journey. We had a lot of different businesses that all had their own independent platforms. Becoming one means navigating the transition from many to one with a common system and platform. There are choices about what platforms we use, but more importantly, how do we navigate it? Data dictates. How can we get the data in one place and make sure it’s accurate, clean, ready to use, and we’re able to capitalize on it to make the experience better? I assume many folks can relate to the importance and the challenges of working with data and cleaning it up. It’s a process that is never over.
We’re pleasantly surprised with how fast we can pull things together centrally, but we’re still very early in that journey. We look for platforms in the marketplace that are built for and demonstrate strong understanding of the distribution model. I have worked for manufacturers who have implemented an ecommerce strategy, and, I am generalizing, the bar is lower for success. If you’re a manufacturer who’s getting their feet into the water of ecommerce, they get the products online, take a credit card order and ship it. There are some challenges with integrating with the supply chain, but the ecommerce experience is relatively simple. Whatever sales a manufacturer makes in this space is a margin win for them. They make two to three times what they would selling it through a distribution partner. They can succeed with very little volume because they are capturing margins distributors would otherwise take home.
For a distributor to think about an ecommerce experience and the customer experience, the sophistication level has to be much higher. The bar is going to be much higher for customization of the experience, configurability of the experience and the diversity of customer types. Not all things are created equal, and we must look for partners who understand distribution and the complexities that need to be addressed.
Bein: The platform must not just be for B2B but for distribution, specifically. Let’s say you chose Magento, which meets the first criteria but only knows the consumer or knows the manufacturer, you’re going to be lost.
Heller: Many times, we see a lack of understanding about how much more complex B2B distributors are than retailers or consumer marketers. In fact, there’s this absolutely insidious thing that happens where these outside experts say you should make your B2B site just like a B2C site. That’s just nonsensical. In B2C, an account is one person, one email address, one credit card and one physical address. Try selling janitorial supplies to one of your major hotel chains or restaurant chains. You have thousands of buyers with different locations, custom assortments, different payment methods and delivery. It’s complex and nothing like a retail site. Then, think about the complexity of the products; items that may need to be kitted or configured or cut. There’s no comparison. I see distributors using what is really a B2C platform, thinking it’s a B2B platform because they put a PO field in it. That doesn’t make that platform for a distributor. It means if you want to sell to a handful of tiny little businesses that use PO fields, that’s fine, but even those people are not going to use your PO field. They’re going to email the order to you.
Gresham: Absolutely. There is some overlap. B2C want great information, images and videos to evaluate a high-consideration purchase. Another area where we have some overlap is repeat business. Our business may be 80-90% repeat business. So, how do we streamline that and make it easy? While there is some overlap, it would be a naïve simplification to assume we can have the same solutions for very different customer environments.
Heller: What kind of value-added services do you offer your customers?
Gresham: We train them on products and processes for using the products in their operations and servicing equipment. We make recommendations on entire end-of-line automation setups in addition to the consumables. We explain how we deliver products versus a B2C. It’s not dropped on your front doorstep. It’s not usually shipped via FedEx. To become a customer, we do a lot to set up the account and understand how to best deliver to this customer, taking into account their unique needs, their locations and their receiving capabilities. How do they want it? When I go out and talk to customers, one of the first things our customers tell us is that they love our drivers. We own our fleet, and we have our own drivers. And the drivers are making sure that the delivery happens the way it needs to for our customers.
Delivery goes all the way onto the loading dock, into their supply closets or their inventory areas. We are a partner that helps them do business the way they need and want to do business. We’re totally committed to helping them achieve next-level business results for themselves. We don’t just ship boxes. We know what’s in the box, and we know how to use it. We help you with implementing and training your teams. The customers we naturally gravitate to in the market tend to be the highest volume users in the marketplace. They have the most sophisticated needs.
Heller: How do you stay plugged into customers personally?
Gresham: I talk to customers face-to-face; take ride-alongs with salespeople, learning about the challenges and the opportunities. How are we helping people today? A story I love to tell is a conversation with a facility manager who expressed the sales rep was very responsive, and she calls him whenever she has a problem or question.
She gets on the phone with customer service from time to time. With customers, how great the drivers are is usually the first thing out of their mouths. They always bring the deliveries where they need to be. Or, they never get complaints from staff on those deliveries. “You guys do it right every time.”
The website is important too. In today’s world, customers start the process digitally and half of the sales process is over before we talk to them about their needs. They’re researching, and the website is where they go to solve problems first. If they can’t figure it out online, then they reach out to a person. That’s why this intersection of marketing and digital, understanding the customer needs and how to enable it online, is so valuable in our business.
Bein: How do you provide efficiencies for your customers doing digital orders?
Gresham: We know what they purchase, and we make it easy to repurchase. We enable their teams to purchase through the same account, with different permissions and provide the ability to see their budgets and what they’ve bought. We become part of how they operate and how they manage accounts, digitally accessing customer records, information invoices and shipping documents 24/7.
