Stanley Black & Decker hits the nail on the head by empowering sellers with a new ecommerce platform

Stanley Black & Decker has been helping builders—those who shape our world—since 1843. In the mid-1800s, Frederick Stanley started a small shop in New Britain, Connecticut, to manufacture bolts, hinges, and other hardware of high quality from wrought iron. Early in the next century (1910), Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker started a shop in Baltimore, Maryland. Six years later, they obtained the world’s first patent for a portable power tool. Today, Stanley Black & Decker is a global leader in engineered fastening and ranks first in the tools and storage segment and second in security services.

As a company that developed the tools to help builders revolutionize the world, Stanley Black & Decker saw it was time to revolutionize its own tools. Its ecommerce operations needed to become faster, more efficient, and more productive while amplifying sales. Bringing digital into a centuries-old company required huge ambition and effort. But the company rolled up its sleeves and dove right into its commerce overhaul with grit and perseverance. It also called on an AWS Partner, VTEX, to get the job done.

Sales representatives drill down on customer insights to transform into trusted advisers

One of Stanley Black & Decker’s main goals was to empower its sales representatives to be more effective and go beyond simply selling tools to B2B customers. But by deploying a new ecommerce platform, the company ran the risk of replacing personal interactions with digital processes and alienating the company’s hundreds of thousands of longtime clients. Together, Stanley Black & Decker and VTEX arrived at a solution. The VTEX platform automates tasks and gives the sales team a more streamlined way to transact business so that they can focus on what humans do better than technology: building great relationships with clients.

Now each sales representative has a dashboard view of their regions with critical behavioral insights into customer buying preferences, helping the sales representative to provide a more personalized service to their customers. Another benefit of using VTEX begat a major change in how sales representatives took orders: they moved from working on a tedious entry system to being able to automate up to hundreds of orders in one fell swoop, greatly improving efficiency.

At last, sales representatives were able to become trusted advisers to their esteemed customers instead of mere order takers.

Omnichannel platform ratchets up customer engagement

A major piece of the new ecommerce strategy was to improve the customer’s sales experience. Now equipped with the VTEX platform, Stanley Black & Decker sales representatives had access to more channels to engage with customers, including videoconferences, live shopping, and online chats, in turn creating more sales opportunities.

Sawing through complexity and reducing costs

Overall, reinventing your ecommerce platform can be costly. One of the reasons Stanley Black & Decker chose VTEX and its Commerce Cloud is because it delivers a single solution for all the manufacturer’s sales channels. Additionally, it is much cheaper for the company to add new functionalities and new stores in different geographies. It is almost like pressing a start button.

To read more about how Stanley Black & Decker reshaped its approach to B2B commerce with VTEX on AWS, read the full case study.

AWS Partner spotlight

AWS Partner VTEX provides a software-as-a-service digital commerce platform for enterprise brands and retailers. Customers can use this solution to improve their commerce strategy, including building online stores, integrating and managing orders across channels, and creating marketplaces to sell products from third-party vendors. Founded in Brazil, VTEX is a leader in accelerating the digital commerce transformation in Latin America and is expanding globally. Its platform is engineered to enterprise-level standards and features, and it has more than 2,000 customers with over 2,500 active online stores across 32 countries.