Cultivating a Digitally Driven, Data-Centric Culture at Sonepar USA

• Kayla Repp, an MDM Digital Innovator award winner, created new digital widgets to help Sonepar USA’s sales staff improve its visibility with customers. 

• Sonepar USA’s digital capabilities allowed it to quickly pivot to curbside pickups and more online ordering during the pandemic. 

• Next up on the technology roadmap is implementing Google Analytics 4 (G4) to increase website analytics of its customers. 

Kayla Repp has been the spearpoint for Sonepar USA’s digital transformation effort that has benefitted the distributor internally as well as created a better omnichannel experience for its customers. 

Repp, one of MDM’s five 2021 Digital Innovator award winners, joined Sonepar USA in 2016 as a digital analyst before being named to her current role as digital analytics manager two years later. 

“Kayla, in partnership with the IT team, has helped to expose and operationalize digital data and analytics to our sales organization to support the customer omnichannel experience through a widget-based sales analytics platform,” said Sonepar USA’s Brenda Andolina, in her nomination of Repp. “She’s been driving visibility into how our customers are interacting with us across channels and highlighted opportunity for additional channel shift. 

“Sonepar is fostering a data-centric culture to enable us to understand our customers and their needs better, to drive additional value in our customer partnerships. Kayla is responsible for applying data to highlight early stages of attrition and to highlight growth opportunities.”

The new digital widgets focus on KPI tracking, customer interactions, web-based activity, branch and sale rep performance, according to Andolina. The sales teams can see how their customers are interacting with Sonepar and then take more proactive and well-informed actions based on that data. 

With the Sonepar sales management program, the company’s sales reps can see who has registered online but has yet to log in. This information enables them to connect with customers and provide additional guidance to leverage Sonepar’s digital services and solutions. Repp says she worked with Sonepar’s IT team to develop the digital widgets. 

“I’ve spent a lot of time partnering with them (IT) on developing digital related widgets for customer tracking and looking at the omnichannel journey,” Repp says. “It also includes understanding different customer touch points, web activities, log-in data and things like that. 

“It’s a homegrown solution where we do advanced reporting and analytics, goal setting and sales planning throughout our organization where we’re really trying to drive data adoption and just ingrain it into the day-to-day activities of our organizations.”

More consumable data

Harnessing data has been a challenge for distributors and manufacturers. The goal of data analytics, or big data, is to take all that data and turn it into actionable items. 

“In the past few years, we’ve made a lot of strides in making data more consumable,” Repp says. “With our IT team, we did a project a while back that centralized all of our data into a data lake and then created analytical data sets. Being able to operationalize data from there has been incredibly helpful. 

“We’re a lot more confident in the timeliness of the data, the data quality, data governance and practices, all of which helps with building that trust around data and analytics.”

A quick pivot

Sonepar USA, the Charleston, South Carolina-based subsidiary of Sonepar Group, started to get a bead on improving its digital capabilities around the same time that Repp started working there. Getting an early jump on its digital transformation was especially timely during the pandemic. 

Because of its digital capabilities, Repp says Sonepar USA could pivot quickly to curbside pickups and contactless signatures for better safety measures during the pandemic, as well as promoting its existing digital solutions that were already in place. 

“I think COVID really helped highlight the value add,” Repp says. “I feel like we always have to drive the change management for the adoption of digital solutions, both internally  and externally with our customers. 

“I’m super passionate about digital and I’m a firm believer that companies that don’t digitize will become obsolete in no time at all. It’s a never-ending journey, but Sonepar has made definitely huge strides.” 

While there’s a cultural shift needed for embracing the digital tools and technologies, Repp says focusing on the value that those technology platforms and solutions enable is the best way to approach change management. 

“Technology is there to make our customers lives easier and our lives easier,” she says. “It just became more apparent during COVID.”

Google Analytics upgrade

Next up on Repp’s to-do list is implementing Google Analytics 4 (G4) in order to boost the performance of Sonepar USA’s website and mobile analytics capabilities. Sonepar will run G4 in tandem with the previous version of Google Analytics until all the kinks of the former are worked out. 

“The thing I’m most excited about is it’s really going to help us stitch together our customer experience across channels, especially across web and mobile,” she says. “Both our website and our mobile app will be tracked via Google Analytics G4. We’ll get to see how our customers are interacting with us across platforms in a way that we haven’t before. It’s bit more seamless, and it will enable us to see a customer add something to the cart on the mobile app, and then later log in on the website and actually submit the order.  That will allow us to see how our customers are using our solutions so we can better optimize that experience.”

With 12 operating groups across the U.S., Repp says she is constantly on a learning curve. In order to keep up with the latest technologies, she attends industry conferences. Repp says having analytics support across Sonepar helps teams share best practices in order to better serve customers and sales staff.

Building resource groups

Repp is also a key member of Sonepar USA’s women’s employee resource group and is on the steering committee. The resource group, Women Advocating Today for Tomorrow (WATT), offers training to women in the organization as well as mentorship opportunities. It launched in 2018. 

As Sonepar USA’s first employee resource group, WATT has helped pave the way for subsequent groups such as the African American Employee Resource Group that launched last year and the Pride Group that launched in May. 

“It’s been really cool to be in on it from the ground floor,” she says. “I feel like employee resource groups are great for shaping the culture of an organization and making people feel included. They are also great for retention or having an outlet and network to go to if you’re struggling with something. We’re really hoping to provide value to the associates across all of Sonepar.”

As for advice for others who wish to follow in her analytic footprints, Repp says it’s important not to stay within the exact confines of what a person has been hired for. Understanding the customers, logistics teams and visiting warehouses has enabled her to get a more in-depth knowledge of her company and how to do her job. “I feel like distribution is complicated enough and then electrical distribution is a very nuanced industry. There are a lot of specialty products and very complicated projects that our customers are doing that we support,” she says. “Learning the big picture is very important. I feel like sometimes people are scared to leave the confines of their role, but it’s been incredibly valuable to me.  

“I’m lucky that my company is super supportive of that by giving me the autonomy to explore the company and the industry. It’s definitely helped me in my role.”