Chris Baltusnik is the Ecommerce Transformation and Operations Leader at Owens Corning, a building materials company that develops, manufactures, and markets insulation, roofing, and fiberglass composites. Prior to joining Owens Corning, he was Senior Manager, Business Development and Ecommerce at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Chris began his career in sales and client experience at the Cleveland Cavaliers before transitioning into business development and account executive roles at companies such as TRG Multimedia and Mills James Media Production.
In our conversation, Chris talks about the difference between adopting an omnichannel approach versus a multichannel one: with omnichannel, the focus is on leveraging data to better understand buyer behavior instead of trying to influence it. He also shares his experience transitioning from traditionally distribution-based businesses to direct-to-consumer sales models.
Before you can optimize the customer journey, you need to thoroughly understand it. My initial phase is to gather a comprehensive analysis of the target consumer’s shopping habits. This involves understanding their motivations for browsing, their shopping preferences, and duration of stay, among other factors.
From there, I start crafting a tailored user experience roadmap that reflects how consumers typically engage with the product through the selling channel. I include the integration of strategic conversion drivers and recommend A/B testing here and there as well, especially for new products where we may lack certain data points.
For example, during my tenure at Goodyear, we discovered we had a window of approximately 10–12 days to convert a consumer into a customer once they began their tire shopping journey. Upon learning this, we strategically allocated resources toward bottom-funnel marketing tactics, like retargeting campaigns via social media platforms. This helped ensure our brand remained at the forefront of the consumer’s mind during the decision-making period. We yielded pretty strong results.
Yes. The major difference in the building materials industry as opposed to tires is that it’s B2B-focussed. A B2B company generally doesn’t have as much purchase data as a B2C company. With Goodyear, we were able to track the customer journey, whereas at Owens Corning, we don’t sell direct-to-consumer. Our customers are our distributors who then sell to the end consumer.
A big strategy that I work on is trying to get strong data to help our distributors in their buyer’s journey. It’s essentially a B2B2C business model. Since our distribution network is how we sell, before I can run any new strategic initiative, my primary concern is always the impact on our current value chain. That can be really hard when you’re excited about a new potential opportunity to drive meaningful growth.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure the main source of potential channel conflict is involved in your overall strategy. I’ve seen so many times when people sacrifice quick wins for what got them there in the first place.
For our B2B selling model, our site is used more as an educational tool to drive traffic to our key selling channels, which are our distributors. I was on a webinar the other day specifically focused on distributors and how they’re utilizing configuration models to show a different color roof based on what shingles the consumer is interested in. That’s one digital touchpoint that’s really driving business for building materials.
Previously, you’d think of a configurator when you’re shopping for clothes and want to view a shirt in a different color, for example. That technology is now being leveraged in older, traditional industries to show different color shingles, what insulation would look like in a house before you put up the drywall, etc.
This one, small question seems to consume the entirety of my existence. It’s an extremely important topic for those in strategic leadership positions, especially in an ever-changing, technology-based ecosystem. Something that altered my viewpoint was adopting an omnichannel approach as opposed to a multichannel one. I look at a multichannel approach as one that targets various channels with the goal of directing buyers to purchase on predetermined selling platforms.
On the other hand, an omnichannel approach uses consumer data to understand the buying patterns across different product categories, platforms, and devices. The data is then leveraged to create a product segmentation strategy, which is set to guide the decision on how and where to list each product.
Essentially, the focus is not so much on influencing buyer behavior as it is leveraging data to better understand it. That way, you can build your strategy around being present with where your potential buyers are shopping.
For both Owens Corning and Goodyear, we didn’t look at selling on one channel versus another. Instead, we’d do data and analytics research to understand where people were shopping. One platform that came up a lot in my research was Amazon. You wouldn’t necessarily think to go to Amazon for tires or building materials, but I was able to show that there was a significant transaction volume on Amazon for both. The key is not to steal from your current value chain and drive traffic toward Amazon, but to leverage that channel to steal share from buyers who are already transacting on that platform.
It is. Multichannel is more segmented and omnichannel is more cohesive. It’s building that one overall strategy and then determining how to take that to market based on buying behavior. For example, people are buying more using their iPhones. That’s not necessarily prominent in my industry right now, but in the tire industry, we were seeing it more and more. As a result, we had to be mobile-friendly. We had to develop our omnichannel strategy to be tailored around people who were using iPads, iPhones, etc.
Apart from overall revenue generation, I’d argue that traffic and conversion are two of the most important factors. There’s a limitless number of strategies that can be incorporated based on these two KPIs that often go hand in hand. Let’s say I’m on Amazon and my traffic exceeds the market, but my conversion is less than 1 percent. I’d need to revisit my product detail page (PDP). My descriptions may be inadequate, which leads to a lack of understanding, or perhaps my pricing is not competitive.
Conversely, if my traffic is low and my conversion is higher, I may need to lean more into advertising and promotions to increase awareness. If both metrics are low, it’s likely that I didn’t do enough research on the platform to determine if it’s the best place to list my product.
I’ve spent most of my career in the tires and building materials sectors, and looking back a decade, it was hard to envision that there would be an online market for either. Fortunately, throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with visionary leaders. They’ve influenced my thinking and guided me to position these categories for success in a more digital future.
At Goodyear, for instance, we pioneered a direct-to-consumer sales model through our website. We were the first tire manufacturer in the market to do so. Before launch, we did an exponential amount of work to ensure the consumer would have all the resources and education necessary to make an informed purchase. That’s where touchpoints like a chatbot are extremely helpful.
Post-launch, it became clear that this was a substantial approach. We then optimized the selling strategy based on feedback to maximize customer satisfaction. When I departed Goodyear, our dotcom channel was a substantial part of the business. People are buying tires over the internet in large waves now. That was a great way to take away traditional channels of buying through distribution, go to installers, and put it all in one place for somebody to buy themselves.
At Goodyear, distribution wasn’t a concern for disruption with the way our sales model was functioning. Our main source of channel conflict was with our installers. As we built out our direct-to-consumer channel, we mitigated this by integrating our installers into our platform. They were then positioned front and center for ecommerce customers looking for an installation partner complimentary to their purchase. They were also monetized and incentivized to opt into the program. At the end of the day, everyone was relatively happy.
Digital transformations overall are so challenging. You have an idea and know it’s going to work, but you have to change the overall mindset internally. It’s change management. I started my career with the Cleveland Cavaliers where I was selling season tickets to customers. Now, I’m just selling strategies internally to leadership. It’s very similar, but you just need to think about every little aspect before taking the next steps forward.
When Goodyear was going direct-to-consumer, this was the first time anyone had ever done that. People were afraid. Some people view platforms like Amazon as competitors. Amazon’s growing and it’s not going to stop, so whether you look at Amazon as a competitor or not, you need to have an Amazon strategy. Little tactics like that go along with the bigger strategy of digital transformation.
Cross-functional alignment and leadership visibility are always going to be huge. I’ve always tried to take my leaders through the journey of what I’m doing from start to finish. This is the idea and this is where we want to get by the end. If I’m taking my stakeholders through that entire journey, there won’t be questions arising in the middle about my strategies that are going to take things in a completely new direction. Everyone’s aligned and everyone’s moving forward.
I like to send out biweekly reports. These can be time-consuming, but there are a lot of benefits to doing so. I hold cross-functional meetings for each team and highly recommend steering teams. This is where you have somebody from each business join. Everyone gets aligned and knows what’s going on, and when roadblocks come up, this makes it a lot easier to tackle them. You have all the right people in the room to figure out what to do.
Visibility is everything. It took me a while to learn that. We often want to do things off to the side and run at our own pace, but without having that visibility from leaders and cross-functional alignment, you’re going to get held up. It’s going to slow down your approach significantly.
I think the most critical leadership trait that someone can demonstrate is empathy. The best leaders that I’ve seen in my career are ones who’ve taken a genuine interest in those around them. That’s not just for digital leadership, but leadership as a whole.
Like many others in the industry, I’ve always stretched myself pretty thin to try to overachieve. This is common and can cause a hefty amount of stress. An empathetic leader aims to build a connection with that stressed individual and ensure a better work-life balance.
We always have this preconceived notion that a strong leader is someone who rules with an iron fist. I think those days are effectively in the past. Having witnessed the positive impact on employee retention and morale from empathetic leaders, I’ve tried to ensure that this is not left out of any team that I’ve led or I’m currently leading today.
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