44: Breaking Barriers in E-commerce for Manufacturers- with Nicole Donnelly

Meet Nicole DonnellyNicole is a fourth generation entrepreneur and the owner of DMG Digital - a content marketing agency for manufacturers. Nicole is the host of the Tales of Misadventure podcast where she invites successful entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure and how they turned lemons into lemonade.You have two different cultures attempting to make something totally new together. Do you mind speaking to that challenge a little bit? And then what were the things that you did to navigate those two different cultures working together? They're to the point of education. These technical partners are sometimes so technical that they're way up here. And they've gotta step down and really try to meet these manufacturers where they are.So, the first thing I think is so important is to help them in the discovery phase, really understand what are their business constraints. What's their pricing model? How are they shipping products now? And really understanding those constraints very, very well. That you can architect a solution that's gonna address and taking a crawl, walk, run approach to say we can't solve all these problems all at once. So Magento is an incredibly robust platform, so extensible. You can customize it to the nth degree, which is beautiful.The great thing is that it can grow with the organization as they continue to evolve. But you gotta really understand upfront as much as possible what all of the business constraints are so that you can make sure that over time that's gonna be built into the platform.Where would you advise that it makes good sense to put that 20% when you expect to go over budget? There's lots of places that money can go. You hit the nail on the head about it always going over. You have to set that expectation with the clients up front. Anyway, where would it go? It definitely depends on the manufacturer. Being able to integrate your e-commerce platform into your ERP is huge. And of course that's not something that you can always do right out of the gate, right? You gotta start with just getting their products catalog in there and everything.But I would say that that would be something that you could invest in, like in a phase two or a phase three type of situation.And so much more… Connect with Nicole!LinkedInDMG DigitalDMG Digital Manufacturing and Marketing InsightsConnect with the broads!Connect with Erin on LinkedIn for web-based solutions to your complex business problems!Connect with Lori on LinkedIn and visit www.keystoneclick.com for your strategic digital marketing needs!  Connect with Kris on LinkedIn and visit www.genalpha.com for OEM and aftermarket digital solutions!