For the builders and protectors, for the makers and explorers, for those shaping and reshaping our world through hard work and inspiration, Stanley Black & Decker has been providing the tools and innovative solutions to get the job done since 1843.

A global leader in engineered fastening, the company ranks first in the tools and storage segment and second in security services.

Stanley Black & Decker consistently invests in innovation and digital excellence across all their business units, which is why they selected VTEX as the perfect partner for their commerce transformation journey.

Bringing digital into a centuries-old company requires great effort, huge ambition, and alignment with global stakeholders. Stanley Black & Decker dove into this transformation knowing that going digital means much more than putting their product catalogue on the website. For them, it means rethinking how they do business and how the evolution of the world impacts how they engage and transact with customers.

Thinking about the business in such a holistic way enabled them to go through their whole sales process and spot key points where they could use technology to streamline buying and selling processes. The company viewed this as an opportunity to go beyond selling tools: they’re delivering value in an ecosystem where their brand reputation and the bonds they create with their customers makes them unstoppable.

“If we want to keep on being the biggest company in the world, we need to constantly look for ways to disrupt ourselves and make sure that we push ourselves harder than any competitor would ever do.”

— Orlando Gadea Ros, Business Innovation Director at Stanley Black & Decker

To Stanley Black & Decker, one of their main goals was to enable sales representatives to be more effective in this digital era. Technology is an important tool for them, but it is also crucial to embrace process change to achieve better results. By automating tasks and giving the sales team better tools, they can focus on doing what humans do much better than technology: building great relationships with clients.

When you run a global organization, with multiple regions and hundreds of thousands of clients per region you face an inevitable challenge: how to go digital without losing personal and emotional connections? How do you build those bonds that used to be built on your brand and personalized service?

The answer they found is to use technology to assist both their customers and their sales team. While customers can get the latest information about Stanley Black & Decker products and services, and recommendations for which products are right for them, sales representatives can transition from order taking to become the trusted advisor that really helps clients be successful.

“We’re moving our sales team from being order receivers, to trusted advisors that help our clients be more successful at what they do.”

— Orlando Gadea Ros, Business Innovation Director at Stanley Black & Decker

Leveraging VTEX Commerce Cloud as a headless commerce platform, Stanley Black & Decker built a custom field sales application that gives each sales rep their own dashboard with customer insights. In regions with many customers, they now have visibility of customer behavior and preferences, order history, and additional insights that help them remain close and provide personalized service to each customer.

In the past, Stanley Black & Decker sales representatives spent a considerable amount of time placing, reviewing, and changing orders instead of supporting their existing clients or bringing new businesses to the company. To improve efficiency, VTEX Commerce Cloud enables the sales rep to submit bulk orders with dozens or even hundreds of line items and add them to the shopping cart on behalf of their customers in a single step.

With VTEX Commerce Cloud, 52% of Stanley Black & Decker’s orders are now made through the bulk order feature. Saving sales reps countless hours of line-by-line order entry and eliminating the potential for incorrect orders due to human error. Another notable feature is the ability for a sales rep to configure orders and submit them to the customer as a quote. Once the quote is approved by the customer, the sales rep can move ahead and place the order on the customer’s behalf.

B2B commerce implementations tend to be more complex than their B2C relatives, and that’s mainly because no two B2B projects are alike. The success of Stanley Black & Decker’s digital transformation was only possible by integrating e-commerce with other parts of the business, including finance, pricing, marketing, product, customer service, warehouse, and supply chain. Now, everything is connected so every part of the organization has the visibility and control they need.

One of the project’s main deliverables was to have more control over their sales margins and the ability to adapt business rules as their priorities change. Stanley Black & Decker’s digital transformation roadmap includes implementing online B2B stores and field sales applications in all 50 countries where they operate, starting with emerging markets.

“The [VTEX] platform gave us the ability to better understand our data across the entire business. From pricing, logistics, customer profile. . . all perspectives. The beauty of this project is that in the end everything is connected.”

— Lorianna Egozcue, eCommerce Channel Marketing Manager at Stanley Black & Decker

A key part of the project was the use of VTEX Commerce Cloud’s Price List feature to ensure each customer sees the correct price. Since pricing policies vary depending on several criteria, such as region, country, industry, and more, managing endless possible combinations gives Stanley Black & Decker the ability to set unique prices for each customer while keeping track of the commercial conditions applied to every order.

Although 70% of sales are focused on a smaller mix of best-selling products, each client has its own negotiated set of benefits. Before placing the order, the sales rep can capture key information like Order Type, Operation Nature, Payment Conditions, Quotation Approval Number, and more.

Unlike B2C, most B2B purchases are not paid for with credit cards but instead with promissory notes to be fulfilled in the near future. These lines of credit are controlled by the seller with credit analysis and are made in many different ways, from paper invoices to complex EDI payment systems. With VTEX Commerce Cloud, Stanley Black & Decker can automatically check if a client has available credit before accepting the order.

Most companies think about promotions in a linear way. During Q1, they plan Q2 promotions. Then launch these promotions, communicate them and wait for the results – to, only then, change course if needed. This approach tends to be too long for a world that’s moving fast.

For Stanley Black & Decker, VTEX Commerce Cloud’s powerful promotion engine gives them a centralized system for managing promotions for all channels. It ensures consistency for customers and gives the business control over discounting and margins.

“Now we have everything end-to-end and can set up and keep track of any promotion. We have one platform where we have full visibility of the whole flow.”

— Lorianna Egozcue, eCommerce Channel Marketing Manager at Stanley Black & Decker

The ability to combine promotion types and define which customers and regions are eligible for certain promotions gives Stanley Black & Decker a whole new world of possibilities apart from that traditional linear thinking.

The opportunities for upselling, cross-selling and delivering personalized promotions are endless and have had a huge impact on their sales.

While most people focus on the complexity of B2B operations, the ramifications of hidden costs need to be highlighted. Managing several integrations to different back-end systems and applications while dealing with complex information and data processing can be very expensive.

Energy consumption, technological overhead and human resource need to be considered. Businesses around the world struggle under the weight of platform management and maintenance.

“Having a single comprehensive platform versus multiple platforms with separate implementations and integrations reduces the total cost of ownership.”

— Orlando Gadea Ros, Business Innovation Director at Stanley Black & Decker

One of the reasons Stanley Black & Decker chose VTEX Commerce Cloud is because it gives them a single solution for all their sales channels, including customer self-service and field sales applications. With a single platform, Stanley Black & Decker maintains one source of truth for inventory, orders, promotions, and customer data across all channels, with increased business control that helps them boost sales and increase productivity and margins.

With VTEX Commerce Cloud, it is much cheaper and faster for Stanley Black & Decker to roll out B2B stores for different geographies. Essential integrations are already built and their business rules are preset. It is almost like pressing a start button.

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