Stanley Black & Decker Boosts Sales Performance with eCommerce Platform from VTEX on AWS

Stanley Black & Decker, an American brand known for its high-quality tools, needed a new tool of its own. For its sales representatives to be more productive and efficient, the company sought a digital solution and a partner who could help reinvent its sales process. Bringing digital into a centuries-old company required huge ambition and effort, so Stanley Black & Decker called on VTEX on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give its commerce process a digital overhaul. Using VTEX Commerce Cloud, sales representatives transformed from order takers into counselors, taking advantage of more ways to interact with customers, and company promotions became more customized and segmented to specific customer groups. As a result, the company has found new ways to upsell and cross-sell, making an impact on sales.

Before deploying VTEX on AWS, sales representatives from Stanley Black & Decker spent too much time manually entering a customer’s entire order. This took precedence over building relationships with clients and bringing in new business. In addition, Stanley Black & Decker’s former business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce engine was not connected to other departments, like finance, pricing, marketing, product, customer service, warehouse, and supply chain. This prevented the sales representatives from gaining an overall view of the customer lifecycle, from purchase to payment. Finally, the company treated promotions as a linear process with results sometimes taking a while to come in, which was too long to do a pivot, if needed.

“If we want to keep on being the best at what we do, we need to constantly look for ways to disrupt ourselves and make sure that we push ourselves harder than any competitor would ever do,” said Orlando Gadea Ros, business innovation director at Stanley Black & Decker.

Stanley Black & Decker leveraged VTEX Commerce Cloud as a headless commerce platform to build a tailored field sales application that gave each sales rep an overview snapshot of customer insights. Now they can drill down into how the customer prefers to buy, their order history, and additional information that helps them give each customer personalized service.

Powered by AWS services, VTEX Commerce Cloud provides Stanley Black & Decker a single, cloud-based B2B platform for ecommerce that’s easy to maintain and always up to date. With one ecommerce solution, Stanley Black & Decker was also able to cut costs. “Having a single comprehensive platform versus multiple platforms with separate implementations and integrations reduces the total cost of ownership,” Ros said.

VTEX leverages AWS services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk to scale resources and split responsibilities among teams, while AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront handle all the edge load. Other AWS services utilized by VTEX include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for the databases, Amazon OpenSearch Service for NoSQL data, Redis for cache, and Elastic Load Balancing for distributing load. VTEX can also utilize other AWS services as the demand fits. Due to it being a true multi-tenant SaaS solution, all customers on the platform benefit from the same flexibility and stability of AWS.

Sales representatives no longer have to muddle through order taking, processing, reviewing, and changing entries, which took considerable time and inhibited their ability to support current clients or bring in new business. VTEX Commerce Cloud has helped improve efficiency, save countless hours of line-by-line order entry, and prevent human error. Now, representatives can submit bulk orders with up to hundreds of line items and put them in the shopping cart in a single step. In fact, roughly 50 percent of Stanley Black & Decker’s orders are now made through the bulk feature. “We’re moving our sales team from being order receivers, to trusted advisors that help our clients be more successful at what they do,” Ros said.

VTEX Commerce Cloud delivered a 360-degree transformation for the company’s B2B ecommerce. Sales representatives now have more channels—such as videoconferences, live shopping, and online chats—to reach and support their customers, which is boosting sales. The platform also gives customers many more options for shopping and obtaining sales support when they need it. “To have an omnichannel B2B digital strategy, sales roles need to change into a hybrid role,” said Martin Elias Leigh, B2B ecommerce manager at Stanley Black & Decker. “A hybrid sales rep uses more channels, like videoconferences for live shopping and online chats. VTEX helped us support this functionality in our B2B ecommerce site.”

VTEX Commerce Cloud’s robust promotion engine provided Stanley Black & Decker with one system for handling promotions for all channels. This yielded significant benefits, most importantly enabling the company to closely control its discounting and margins. The company can merge promotions and decide which customers and regions are eligible for them. Upselling, cross-selling, and providing tailored promotions have had a major impact on sales. “We are using ecommerce techniques to digitalize our traditional B2B campaigns,” Leigh said. “VTEX Promo Module and Landing Page Creator give us the ability to easily launch new campaigns, from which we are giving relevant information to the business in terms of clicks, conversions, average ticket—all coming in real time from our analytics dashboards we have integrated into the platform.”