Articles tagged 'Strategy'

Energizing Your Wholesale Channel

Nov 6, 2018 | Tom Rau

Wholesale strategies have shifted. Retail has moved from a landscape once dominated by big box stores, to one that is now much more centered on smaller, specialty retailers. With that comes a new growth opportunity, but the old methods for working...

Showroom: Best Practices to Help You Engage, Educate, and Sell

Aug 8, 2018 | Jeff Tow

Showroom is the content destination that defines your brand, educates your buyers, and provides the materials reps need to make a successful sale. It gives your buyers a B2C experience inside a B2B platform.

But a tool is only as good as its content...

Buyer Engagement During Trade Show Season: Going Beyond the Booth

Jul 11, 2018 | Mark Troast

Engaging buyers within the limited timeframe of a trade show is no longer enough. After all, a trade show only lasts four days, and there are 365 days in a year.

It’s time to go beyond the booth.

How can you attract new business while keeping your...

One Step At a Time - How To Adopt a B2B eCom Platform Successfully

Jun 7, 2018 | Jon Faber

Putting a modern B2B eCommerce platform in place - whether it’s for the first time or as a byway of transitioning between platforms - is best approached through a series of focused stages we call the Envoy stairway. This is a common approach to software...

Turning Specialty Retail into a Wholesale Channel

May 30, 2018 | Mark Troast

The 3 things to consider when you add independent retailer doors.

Independent and specialty retailers represent something of a conundrum for brands. In a time when many regional and national retailers are shuttering stores and filing for bankruptcy...

Focusing On Your Customer’s Success

May 1, 2018 | Rod Grandfield

Customer Success is a term that today is still widely misunderstood. In most of our daily interactions we talk about Customer Success like it has been around for decades and is a commonly understood concept. However, what we need to realize is that...

Now Is The Time To Adopt A B2B

Apr 20, 2018 | Mark Troast

You might think that your brand needs to have all its wholesale solutions in place, from customer management to order capture to fulfillment and logistics. Naturally, you want and expect all these systems to integrate seamlessly. While there are huge...

What Makes Envoy B2B Different?

Mar 20, 2018 | Mark Troast

Envoy’s B2B e-commerce platform is different. But being different only counts if that differentiation offers real added value to partners.

Here’s what sets us apart from our competitors: industry specialization, a stairway of solutions for brands...

The Pros and Cons of Different Sales Channels

Mar 5, 2018 | Mark Troast

The retail landscape is shifting. This isn't anything new, but in the last few years we've hit a tipping point that has seen several big box chains go under. That tipping point has confronted many brands with a question: how do we survive, let alone...

Efficiency, Education, And Enablement In A Changing Retail Landscape

Feb 27, 2018 | Jon Faber

Retail has changed. Demanding customers aren’t dashing into a store, looking for the nearest clearance rack, forking over a few bucks, and leaving. These days, people are looking for an experience.

While yesterday’s customers wanted speed, convenience...

What We Learned From A Brand New Outdoor Retailer (or Why Envoy Is More Relevant Than Ever)

Feb 7, 2018 | Jon Faber

Outdoor Retailer (OR) is the country’s largest outdoor recreation expo and conference. So it was a natural fit for Envoy to be there, given that our clients are outdoor and lifestyle brands. And there was no better location than Denver to bring these...

The Benefits of a Digital-First Strategy for Brands

Jan 11, 2018 | Mark Troast

A digital-first strategy should be a key component of any brand that combines commerce with content. (And if your brand isn’t thinking about its B2B platform as a content destination, it’s time.)

When you adopt a digital-first approach, the life of...

Taking Advantage Of A Content And Commerce Strategy

Jan 13, 2017 | Jon Faber

If you’ve recently discovered the value of adopting the content and commerce approach for your B2B marketing strategy, your next question might be: “How can I prepare my organization for the content and commerce approach?”

Fortunately, adopting content...

Why Your B2B Needs To Be More Like B2C

Dec 14, 2016 | Mark Troast

The B2B world is constantly changing. New technologies and industry demands are creating new paradigms. But there are signposts of things to come if you know where to look. And if you’re wondering what direction your B2B should take going forward...

All Together Now - Content and Commerce Drive a Successful B2B Strategy

Sep 29, 2016 | Jon Faber

It’s likely that, as a channel, your wholesale B2B eCom platform has mostly been where you park existing buyers. As a platform, it’s helped those buyers replenish products and has been viewed as an order-capture utility.

Believe it or not, an eCom...

It’s Time To Give Wholesale B2B Marketing Teams Their Jobs Back

Jul 28, 2016 | Jon Faber

As a wholesale B2B marketer in the footwear and apparel industry, it’s likely one of your goals is making sure content and product information reflects your brand’s story. From product images and descriptions, to sales presentations and catalogs, all...

The Ripple Effect of a Content & Commerce Approach to B2B

Jul 22, 2016 | Mark Troast

It’s easy to undervalue any part of a wholesale B2B e-commerce system that is not directly involved in capturing orders. Although capturing orders is a fundamental part of B2B, focusing on it exclusively can often be a sign of a limited view of what...

Treading Water, Shiny Objects and the Challenge of Building a Continually Innovative Service

May 20, 2016 | Jon Faber

This year we will globally transition a competitor's largest client to our platform. From Envoy’s perspective, what does it mean that this was both possible and successful? Looking at the competitor’s steps since then, what context can be added? Lastly...

What You Need To Know About Designing For Digital First

May 3, 2016 | Mark Troast

In our previous blog post about adopting Envoy, we covered centralized product data. In this post, we’ll continue by examining what you need to consider when adopting a new digital medium for your marketing content.

One of the huge advantages of...

Turn Your Wholesale B2B Into A Strategy For Success, Part 3 - Great Products Deserve Great Visual Content

Mar 25, 2016 | Appropos

Now that you’ve implemented a new wholesale B2B Platform, it’s time to develop visual content that accurately documents your products and allows you to tell a consistent story to your customers across all mediums. The first step to accomplishing this...

Turn Your B2B Into A Strategy For Success, Part 2 - The Cost of Implementation

Mar 4, 2016 | Appropos

Congratulations! Your business has decided to adopt a new B2B platform.

As we mentioned in the first post of our four-part series, Turn Your B2B Into a Strategy for Success, organizations and businesses can expect to face some common challenges when...

Turn Your B2B Into A Strategy For Success, Part 1 - Identifying the common challenges of adopting a B2B platform

Feb 19, 2016 | Appropos

You’ve cleared all the hurdles to ditch your antiquated order placement process and decided to adopt an integrated B2B platform. The budget is approved, IT is on board, leadership has signed off on the idea, and your team is excited about a better...

Six ways Envoy delivers for footwear and apparel companies

Jan 26, 2016 | Appropos

We developed Envoy with the needs of our leading footwear and apparel clients in mind. As more companies adopt Envoy, we’ve compiled a list of highlights that our customers tell us set us apart.

Here what they tell us:

1. Envoy is designed with their...

Envoy B2B Gives Companies A Modern Advantage

Jan 22, 2016 | Mark Johnson

In many ways, the business-to-business world remains stuck in the past. Many of us as consumers enjoy modern, online systems such as Amazon, where we can easily purchase a new pair of pants or some fresh running shoes. Or we simply walk into a store...

Grand Rapids' Appropos leads wholesale business into the Amazon age

Dec 17, 2015 | Rapid Growth

Even as online retailers dominate the business-to-customer retail market with intuitive software and data-based marketing tools, business-to-business wholesale transactions still tend to wallow in clunky, outdated software systems. Grand Rapids-based...