Disruption – this is what senior vice president of e-commerce at Konica Minolta Velinda Cox says is driving e-commerce change.

Cox addressed attendees last week in a keynote at the 2023 EnvisionB2B Conference and Expo in Chicago. Konica Minolta is a 150-year-old manufacturer and global distributor of imaging products. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated e-commerce in the company, with Cox spearheading the effort.

Velinda Cox, Senior Vice President of E-Commerce, Konica Minolta

The unfortunate events of the pandemic accelerated Konica Minolta’s e-commerce business, she said. Cox set to work gathering information from the client. Through a series of focus groups, surveys and customer interviews, the Cox team identified where to start.

“We needed to review priorities, capabilities and portfolio items to start with,” she said. “What did customers want to buy online that they couldn’t find from our sales people today?”

A customer-driven shopping experience

Cox said his team realized that customers don’t necessarily want sellers to contact them when researching and discovering products online.

Equally important was deciding which products to make available online. Konica Minolta has an extensive product portfolio, she said.

“We carry a lot of things. We had to offer products at competitive prices in the market. The competitive marketplace changes very quickly in digital worlds,” Cox said.

The e-commerce team has planned a roadmap. Cox needed to identify specific B2B challenges the company might encounter, she said.

“We [planned] where we would meet the logistics of fulfillment,” she said, and answered questions like, “Would we like to ship products directly? “What about longer lead times [during the pandemic] and expose unavailable inventory? »

Konica Minolta sets a schedule

Cox faced several obstacles while building Konica Minolta’s e-commerce business, she said. In 2021, there was a shortage of microchip supply and the blockage of the Suez Canal, which hampered the shipping industry, leaving many businesses and retailers short of goods. Then the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai in 2022 delayed shipments.

“Our core product delivery times went from days to weeks to months in the 30-45 day window we were building our technology infrastructure for,” Cox said. “I’ve told our CEOs in multiple countries that we can’t build a live e-commerce site without a product we can deliver quickly.

“That would be a horrible way to start and a bad customer experience,” she continued. “So we had to rotate our portfolio.”

The pivot included offering third-party products on its website, she said.

“That pivot was what we started with last fall,” Cox said. “I’m very excited because we’re gearing up right after July 4 to launch our core products.”

Konica Minolta began using software provider Elastic Path in November 2022 to launch a product experience management (PXM) system and payment capabilities to create an easy online payment experience for its B2B customers. (The PXM system combines product information management, product merchandising, and a catalog composer to present products to customers.)

Disrupt the digital ecosystem

Looking ahead, Cox looked at Konica Minolta’s channel partners and the challenges ahead in selling and competing with industry dealers, she said.

Selling online has met with some resistance. Cox referred to a meeting with one of the company’s dealers who feared that Konica Minolta “is going to disrupt the whole industry.”

“It would be great if we disrupted the whole industry,” Cox said. “Unfortunately not everyone is going to follow, but I’d rather be the disrupter than the one left behind.”

Cox said it was necessary to keep dealers happy while helping them understand the direction needed to grow the business, she said. It also involved convincing various executives that changing the way he sells his products would also lead to new opportunities, new leads, she said.

Cox has also introduced technology into the customer shopping experience, including further digitizing the way it follows up with customers.

“We need to be there for customers and create new value through experiences,” Cox said. “There was no post-conversion via [online] discuss. There was no instant texting.

“These are [tools] to establish a better connection with your customer,” she continued. Which leads to better retention and new opportunities to learn more about what customers want in the future, she said.

“We never had a [communication channel] where customers could give us feedback instantly,” she said. “This is a great opportunity, and we continue to [plan our] roadmap around that.

Gather the organization

Market alignment is another challenge – what products to offer and, equally important, convincing business leaders that investment is needed, she said. It requires bringing different parts of the organization together, she said.

In the fall of 2022, Cox met with approximately 45 leaders within his organization. This included getting Scrum certification and getting other certifications to understand how to deploy technology to drive e-commerce, she said. Scrum is a software framework that helps companies structure and manage their work across different parts of the business, including software development, research, sales, and marketing.

“We got certified and taught people about design thinking and how we could change,” she said. “It’s about failing fast and experimenting.”

“We came from a culture where failure really wasn’t an option,” she continued. “But we had to help everyone understand that failure gives you the ability to learn quickly and build on those learnings and not repeat mistakes in other areas of your organization.”

Sharing and celebrating failure is important, Cox said.

B2B personalization

Cox revamps the company’s digital marketing efforts.

“It’s about unlocking the data,” she said. “The quality of your data can be an interruption to your goals. You can do so much when you start aggregating views from all your different functional areas.

It is important to use business data to understand customer behavior as well as how the business organization works.

“I have vendor meetings every weekday,” she said. “I’m looking at current vendors, what their roadmap is, while exploring with other vendors and new technologies that don’t exist in our portfolio or our infrastructure.”

This helps Cox keep abreast of what might set Konica Minolta apart from its competitors.

“Personalization can change the behavior and the results we’re trying to achieve with our customers,” Cox said. “You will increase your customer acquisition, increase your revenue and ROI will improve.”

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