Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining this, Sitecore Symposium session. We're very pleased, Jeff and myself to welcome you to a session around Milwaukee tools and how they are delivering a compelling customer journey. And we'll look at it from engage to explore to buy. First, let me welcome today's speakers, myself, Mark Floyson. I work for Coveo. The SVP of product and industry marketing. I have been over at, Coveo for about four and a half years, but previously actually worked for Sitecore as well. So, very happy to be be back talking with, Sitecore aficionados. And, my colleague, Jeff. Jeff, do you wanna introduce yourself? Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Mark. My name is Jeff. I am a senior software developer at Milwaukee Tool. I've been there a little over four years now. And all of that time has been doing site core development. And right when I started, one of the first things we did was implement Coveo. So I have about the same amount of experience for both. So, yeah, really happy that you, invited me to do this conversation, Mark. Good. It's gonna be great, and thanks very much again, Jeff, for making the time. I'm sure that, the audience is in for a treat here. So let's press ahead. We've got quite a lot to cover and a finite amount of time. So really we're gonna go through a couple of things. For those that the very few of you on the call that might not know who Milwaukee Tools is, we'll do a quick overview. Jeff will kind of walk through the organization and then really focus in on how they go about targeting their audience, who that is, the usage of Sitecore and Coveo for the purposes of product discovery, and then really going beyond the product, to thinking about the whole purchase process and, customer three sixty view of the world. And then Jeff's gonna give us some wisdom in terms of the lessons that he's learned. Anything else to add to that, Jeff? No. You've you've nailed it. Alright. Great. Well, let's get into this. So maybe just a a quick intro to the Coveo side of the house, and then I will try and stay out of the way here. So Coveo for many folks, who may know us, Coveo is, a a Sitecore technology partner. We've actually been in a relationship with Sitecore for, wow, almost a decade, one of collaboration the whole time. We're actually a leader in AI powered search and recommendations where really we're helping bring content to Sitecore users, that may be within Sitecore or beyond. So that all of that can basically be made available through the Sitecore experience platform for visitors. And we we were recognized as being a leader by both Gartner and Forrester. We've had an integrated product with Sitecore for many years and as you can see on the screenshot here, effectively, Coveo becomes available within the Sitecore admin console for those that are Sitecore administrators. So we're really easy to integrate and easy to fit in, and it's that combination that, that Jeff's gonna give us some insight into. So let's, Jeff, do you wanna just tee up a bit more about Milwaukee Tools for those that don't know the company? Yeah. So, I mean, on the surface, you know, Milwaukee Tool is really a manufacturing company, and we make power tools among many other different types of tools. But we like to really think of ourselves more as progressive problem solvers. We're dedicated to delivering, trade specific solutions with safety, productivity, and innovation at the forefront of, I mean, everything we do. So we've been around almost a hundred years. And really though, the last fifteen have really seen us completely change as a business. We've been investing a lot more to work side by side with real users and kinda get a better idea of the changing workspaces that they have to go into and work with and what kinds of solutions that they need for a safer, more productive job site. And that mentality kinda started in that engineering side of things where, you know, we're making the tools for you so we should get a better idea of how we can make them for you. But really, that extended out past that and it's really bled into marketing and and pretty much every other, like, aspect of our business wherever we can, you know. And those experience we have Barca upon have seen us, seen what the users can really do with these tools and what they needed, in order to improve the productivity on the job site, and that's just helping us develop new solutions. And we're making these products that, are tackling new spaces. We've just never gone in in the industry. And, you know, our pack out and safety lines are just excellent examples of some of that. So, Well, you know, I think that's an interesting thing. So, Jeff, we're in the unique position here of talking to somebody who actually sells proper tools, not like software tools, you know. So, maybe that's a good segue into, you know, kind of this the stack that you're working with there. Do you wanna kinda walk us through some of the the digital tools perhaps that you're using to bring your, you know, actual tools to your audience? Yeah. Sure. So, you know, our our toolbox really consists of just a couple core things that we're using in our marketing stack, and Sitecore and Coveo are really the core of what's powering our website. And a lot of that data then kinda gets pumped out into a lot of these other tools, which I think are important for us to, highlight because they're key parts of our success. So we're pushing data from our website into Marketo, which we're really using for campaign, email campaigns and, marketable contact tracking and and whatnot. And then, Tealium is really plumbing underneath our website for analytics, for personalization, audience building, audience segmentation, badging, things like that. And then Price Spider, and that's our cash register really at the end of the day. So, that's powering our where to buy buttons that, feed off to our distribution partners. Excellent. Well, let's talk a little bit about what you're doing with it. You have we said we'd kind of look at the engage element of things first. Do you wanna tee that up for us? So what would what do you mean when you think about engaging? Yeah. You know, when a lot of other element aspects of the business are kinda talking about our end users, we have a couple of different, terminologies that we use inside the business. And for us, we talk directly to to our end users in different ways than we might talk to distributors and things. One of our biggest projects really was kind of about revamping what we do on the web, what we do in digital space in general, email included, social included, and that's really coming up with a personalization strategy and engaging our end users, our distributors, the people purchasing these tools, and the people using these tools. So we're kind of speaking to them differently across all of our different digital encounters or in engagements, really. Yeah. And I I believe you have a, a property or a program called the grid. Do you wanna tell us a bit more about that then? Yeah. So the grid's interesting. You know? It's really a microsite that's within our Sitecore site. And the main goal of the grid was, to just provide a community for, apprentices. So these are younger folks. Well, maybe not even, but just folks just starting out in a career that's in the trades. And one of the first steps for a lot of those folks are apprenticeships where they're learning skills, they're learning about safety, they're learning about codes, and all that kind of stuff. And there's just a plethora of information out there. Milwaukee kind of stuck our foot in the door and said, well, hey. You know, we should be a partner on that, and we should really start committing to these trades folks just different ways we can help facilitate information as well as give them some perks to keep buying red. And so our website's providing training videos, articles, contests, promotion to all these grid members to kinda help them progress through their careers. And it's really just an excellent example of how we're starting to pursue personalized content. Now, yeah, you mentioned several different elements to it. You mentioned as well that, you know, a lot of this is around training, and I see, obviously, on this example, a lot of videos and material. Give us a sense of the content variety that you've got in here. Yeah. So, you know, to sign up for the grid, you have to create a Milwaukee account, and that just kinda shares a little bit of information about, each user for so let us know where they are, what kind of training they're doing, what organization they're a part of. And then that really opens the door and gives us a plethora of things that we can start showing to them. You know, different trades are utilizing different Milwaukee solutions, and videos are a great example of ways we can really bridge that gap and help them with their apprenticeship. But we're sharing articles and things that, you know, featured apprentices might look back and say, boy, you know, I wish I would have learned this sooner, or I wish I understood what this meant versus that or or things like that. And so there's this kinda two way street we're really trying to help facilitate here even though this really is a Milwaukee property here. And then there's also the gateway to the community. So we've kinda created this Facebook community that, I mean, we've created it, but, really, we've kinda just unlocked the door and and let them do what they want in there in a lot of ways where, you know, there's a lot of questions being asked in there. There's people showing off what tools they're buying. They're they're really kind of making that community their own. And then, of course, to come along with that, to keep them kinda in the Milwaukee theme, there's a lot of contests and giveaways and things, and some of those are just ways that we're trying to help them, get get their hands on some of our latest solutions. And, you know, what better way to power something like this, than than with Coveo. I mean, all these things are just getting pieced and pulled together using all of that Coveo power we have within our Sitecore site. And there's just this really interesting tagging system that we've used to kind of piece and pull all these together so we can query and filter items personalized to the trade or trade organization that each of the schools canning. Yeah. Very cool. So if they wanted to explore further, obviously, a large part of, you know, what you're looking to do is engage with these folks early in their careers and then obviously get them deeper into it. So let's can we talk a little bit about the purpose of the site overall? Yeah. Definitely. You know, a couple years back in twenty seventeen, we kinda had an opportunity to take a step back and really evaluate, like, what are we doing on the website? What are we doing in the web space? How are we approaching digital in a lot of ways? And so, you know, we really reevaluated where we were. We used to have a Sitecore seven two site, and we were going to upgrade eight two, and we thought, what other challenges can we solve? So, you know, we started to dig into what we wanted to do. Part of that was educating whether it's here's the latest solutions from Milwaukee, but also here's safety and other things to go along with that. The grid was kind of in in its early infancy infancy at that time to what it could possibly be and how we could bring people in. But one of the biggest things for us was, you guys, we gotta get search. You know, we gotta get search in a better place. And that's where we figured, well, let's integrate Coveo for Sitecore because that's that's just a winning combination. We have Sitecore already. Let's get Coveo in there. And then our website was just really a product catalog, and we've tried to build up upon that and figure out what else we could do with it. And, obviously, we're trying to shoot to make the where to buy experience extremely good, trying to provide users with a better service experience on in a completely digital environment so they don't have to make phone calls or deal with where's your tool at at that time. And then, of course, you know, we have to provide our sales teams with their own sets of tools and things to make the distribution partners really appreciate their Milwaukee connection that they have there. So we spent the last few years really gathering data on how users and visitors engaging with our website, and then we've kinda started with some data points that we could start attacking. And one of those, I understand, is about the search. Yeah. I mean, the the biggest thing that we ended up finding out of that data was just fifty percent of our users drop onto the home page. They come in through organic, whatever it is. Doesn't matter what page they're on. Pretty much fifty percent going right to the search bar, and they're gonna put in a query right away. So we spent a lot of time, prior to that, you know, spent, working on the content of our landing pages and telling stories about our systems, but, you know, many of our users just weren't even getting there. And so some changes to what we do in email marketing and social marketing and things like that we're kinda driving a lot of that traffic to those pages, and then the user would just end up searching anyway. So even still, we needed more and more of our visitors to get a better experience with search. And one of the easiest ways we found with that was, like, we're seeing here with query suggestions just absolutely plummeted the number of searches that were done on our website that ended up getting no results. Good. And then, obviously, you evolved from there as well. Yeah. So we we know once you've done a search and whatnot, fantastic. But if the search results aren't much of anything, well, cool. I'm glad you got a bunch of search results, but sift through it and find it. Right? So, you know, we kind of started understanding, well, what can search do for us, and what can we get from there? So we used to have a search interface that was kind of a list view, you know, lots of scrolling to get through all the products you might have. And, you know, if if the first page of results weren't what you needed, paging and things was was happening quite frequently, honestly. People were getting down to page three of results before they were clicking on things. And so we kinda switched up to this grid like format just so and you got you got a lot more things you can see, and you haven't even scrolled yet. Right? And I I think that was really key for us. And the other main thing was just adding a quick view onto these results. Just get a little bit more information without really having to dig too terribly much. And one of our big real successes after that was, okay, you know, you get to see more results, and there's plenty here, but we were still noticing that we weren't performing as well as we would like. And we have, at Milwaukee Tool, a a team of, folks that go out and work, like, hip to hip right on the job site with all these folks. And, you know, they speak a different language than some of the rest of us that work with tools, and by that, I mean software. You know? So we were able to find out. There's all these different terms and things. You know, a nail gun could be called a nailer or a framer, a circular saw could be a skill saw, reciprocating saws or recip saws or, you know, we have a branded sawzall. You know? We wanna make sure that when people are searching for some of those types of things that we're expanding out all those queries and really providing them with what they mean. It's almost like a translation service in some ways. On top of that, one of the most interesting things we were able to find was looking at our analytics from search. We've kept seeing a lot of our end users are looking for warranties or registration or how do I register my tool. I mean, people are literally typing, how do I register my tool? And, we actually have a web a page for that. But, you know, maybe it's buried. You know, it's difficult to find. Whatever. If you search for it, you should get it. Right? And we were able to find out with Coveo, we could add triggers. So folks are typing in things. We could pick up on that. And instead of really giving them some search results that they would then have to sift additionally through, I can just redirect them straight out to that page. And that really made a significant difference to the number of users that are querying for registration and then just kind of leaving our site. They actually got that information immediately and knew exactly what to do in order to accomplish what they were looking for. So now I have a quarterly exercise where I just run a report, tells me what they're what they were searching for but didn't get any results, and I just figure out ways that we can add different things into our, search page to make sure that they get the solutions that they're looking for at the end. I mean, that's what we do. We're a solutions provider. It's kinda how we like to tee ourselves up. So, you know, in the near future, we're gonna keep expanding on that, but we've got a lot of different ways that we're tackling the space. Excellent. And, of course, a lot of your users are, by definition, mobile and out and about on, you know, client sites and so on. So responsive, I guess, was an important part for you as well. Yeah. Day one, we knew the responsiveness of this had to make sense and work and, you know, our users are spending a lot more time cutting things, breaking things, putting things back together. We don't want them to need to spend a ton of time digging around on our website looking for something. So we really like to make sure one of the principles we set out for is, you know, whether you're sitting in front of your computer, you're on your laptop, you're on your tablet at the job site, you're on your phone at the job site, whatever it is, that experience should look and feel and work very similarly. And we were able to come up with a different presentation by kinda taking that thought process of all facets are on the left and results are on the right and just kinda throwing it out the window and saying, well, what what if they were the same, and what can we do from that? And, you know, interestingly enough, only only three, four years ago, that split in mobile to desktop to tablet was a lot closer to fifty fifty. And in fact, we didn't even have the majority of mobile traffic only four years ago. So, really, we're seeing this tremendous trend in more mobile use on our website, which we knew would be an inevitability, working for us. So, you know, when it came to presenting facets and things like that, we wanted to make sure that this is gonna work on mobile very similarly or exactly the same as it does on desktop. And there's some other things like adding a little quick view button differently on mobile than what we did on desktop. But with that, we've, I mean, we've found some pretty tremendous successes overall with these changes. And in terms of successes, I understand you've got some some metrics as well. Yeah. Some good ones, you know. I mean, I think right out the gate, one of the things we had never, never thought of was the number one page on our website for buy now clicks became our search page. And I don't think anybody expected that to happen when we were really talking about all these changes for search. But when you think about it, a search page is one thing. If I mentioned before, fifty percent of people are going there, that means it's getting a lot of traffic, and it's hard for any product or any other page to kinda compete with that. So the second we added a buy now button or a where to buy button inside of that quick view, we're finding people are not needing to go directly to the product page. If they know what they were looking for, find it, quick view, buy it off our site, and they've got it in their cart. So that was really great for us to see. And on top of that, we started to notice, I mentioned before, we used to have a list view. People had to scroll quite a bit. We're starting to see a lot of change where there was the search results that people are looking for, they're in that first, second row max of their search results that they wanted. So on desktop, you may not have even needed to scroll before you found what you were looking for. On mobile, you might not have had to scroll more than three times in order to find what you were looking for. And, you know, our email and campaign marketing efforts have helped drive more unique visits and sessions to the site. And we're finding that once we get them there, they're finding what they're looking for, and we're converting eighty four percent more binaural clicks than we were last year, which is huge. Awesome. And then, obviously, you've got things like product detail pages and so on. Of course. You know, once you get there, you gotta make sure you have the information you need. And, bit of feedback we had always gotten in the past was, you know, I I know you have this tool, but it comes in a whole bunch of different types of kits. And a lot of that information was quite a bit further down on the page. We did a lot of usability testing and research and such and found that even the simple fact of putting the tabs at the top to a lot to let you know, hey. There's multiple options you can buy this tool with. They come with different things. And that where to buy button is big and red and right there just like our tools. And as you're scrolling down the page even, one of the other big benefits that we had done was kinda create a little fixed header that just stays there along with you. So if you scroll down, you see the specifications, you like what you see, you see the reviews, you like what you see, you don't have to scroll back up to the top and click where to buy anywhere on the page. K. I appreciate we're running tight on time. So let's also just talk very briefly about, the customer three sixty initiative that you've got going there as well, Jeff. Yeah. So I think, you know, it's pretty obvious what the main objective of our our site would be. I mean, we wanna get people into the cart and where to buy and find the solutions they need. But, you know, getting that full three sixty view really means that we had to educate, we had to provide our sales with the best opportunities possible. And then once those users get those tools in their hands, anytime they have any issues with it, we have to have the best best service in the industry. And that really includes having it to be easy, service submission that they can get their tools to us and we can get them back to them as quickly as possible. Yeah. And I think you said from a sales resource point of view that that was a opportunity as well. Yeah. That was a really big one for us, and one of the ways we found out one of the ways we tackle that was, building out Coveo's, search. We were able to build a catalog builder for our sales team. So they could go into a store, they could pull in all the products that that store has on the shelf, and click and create themselves a PDF or a custom catalog, a digital catalog that just had everything that Milwaukee had to offer, right there in one easy to use resource. And the sales folks can duplicate it and share it with the owners of the stores and things like that, and then it's all right there at their fingertips. And this was especially helpful for our accessories side of the business. So, in wrapping up then, Jeff, what lessons did you learn? Yeah. I know. For us, there was, this really nice moment when we did what I like to call looking under the box. You know, there's a lot of prebuilt components in the Coveo Sitecore for Coveo Coveo for Sitecore package. But, really, there's this giant robust framework underneath it that we could build upon and further customize our experience for our end users. And that to me was something that once we did that, we found out we could do a lot more. And then the next one, more context, more power has kind of been a fun thing for us to talk about in the last few years because the more we're learning about our users, the more context we're gathering, the better we are to provide them with the right search results, the right experiences for them, whether it's through email marketing, social campaigns, what whatever that might be. And that's just gonna convert to more sales. I think that's what we're generally saying here with our Sitecore experiences in in general. And then the last bit, we used to just kinda collect data for data's sake, really. You know? Okay. Let's collect this, but what are you gonna do with it? And once we started to think, well, this is what we can do with it. That's where we were able to work backwards, figure out what to collect, how to collect it, and then make the most of it. Excellent. Well, Jeff, I really appreciate the insights. Thank you very much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.