Building a High-Performance Internal eCommerce Capability - Episode 188
INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA VAIL
DESCRIPTION
Today we’re joined by Christina Vail, Director of Client Strategy at Profitero to discuss her most recent report - Building a High-Performance eCommerce Organization. This is a great topic to dive into because a lot of brands are in the middle of scaling up their eCommerce channels. There are a lot of questions related to internal teams’ reorganization, maturity curves, P&L, or key principles to effectively speak to the C-suite. Today we’re addressing all these aspects -tune in to get more insights!
Christina Vail is the Director of Client Strategy at Profitero, an eCommerce insights company. Christina works with brands to enhance their eCommerce strategies, including ways to leverage data to drive performance. Prior to joining Profitero, Christina worked at PepsiCo in both brick & mortar, and eCommerce roles and worked in strategy consulting at LEK Consulting.
“You’ll be more successful if you take a measured approach and first understand how mature you are currently. And based on maturity, which organizational models or elements of an organizational model are likely to propel your business forward.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Building a High-Performance CPG eCommerce Organization is a report that gathers retail leaders.
One of the insights this report gives us is: What should my internal team look like? What's the place of outside consultants and agencies in that setup? Concept of a maturity curve, How should brands speak with their executive teams? How do we integrate eCommerce strategy and eCommerce as a channel into our broader business? How should I organize?
In the last year or so, eCommerce, as a percent of total sales, has exploded. eCommerce is going to continue to be a larger portion of the total sales than it was in 2019.
The maturity curve is a key concept from the report - it comes down to where are you currently, how mature is your organization, and then what are activities that you should drive based on that maturity. The premise is that the end goal is that eCommerce is a fully integrated part of your business, and it's managed as a channel in the same way that grocery or mass or convenience is managed as a channel, and it's integrated within everything.
If you're really early maturity, you need to bring a lot of people with you. There are various objectives that you want to focus on in middle-stage maturity. Late-stage maturity is about empowering an organization and integrating the eCommerce headcount into the business units so that the whole organization is really strong and able to manage the channel, and it's not a separate team. What coincides with stages of maturity are three organizational models.
If you're head of eCommerce, you're putting up through sales, you'll likely have P&L ownership.
There are 3 models that brands are using for their Instacart business specifically: marketing-led, sales-led, and a hybrid approach.
The specific challenge with Instacart is that sales from the platform show up on a retailer account, but marketing spend is often covered by the marketing department.
Maintaining connections with the rest of the organization is absolutely paramount.
When it comes to educating or internally communicating, you should focus on the opportunity costs, and focus on where consumers are. Take a data-driven approach to where the consumers are already shopping, and where they're likely to continue shopping. You have to meet the consumer where they are, and then lead retailers to where the consumers are and are going.
It’s about framing it around data and bringing it around the consumers and retailers, and secondly, it's being a translator - being a hyper-effective translator is the through-line in high-performing executives. You don't want to use a lot of jargon.
You want to maintain the IP internally. Use partners who have visibility beyond your organization, outside vendors who can focus on one specific part of your business, e.g. Profitero for eCommerce analytics, but who have a global, cross-vertical view. Match that with someone on your team who owns the data and educates the rest of the organization.
Important is to have category-level expertise.
The long-term benefit of working with outside parties is the scope and cross-vertical, a cross-channel experience that they can bring.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Connect with Christina Vail
Learn more about Bobsled Marketing
Learn more about Profitero
Read Building a High-Performance Internal eCommerce Capability report