Whenever I find out that a company – or a person – decided to do something new in 2020 or 2021, I take notice. Those were rough years. Even the most fundamental parts of our lives and work seemed to be in constant flux, so the decision to embark on something new during that time gives you a bit of insight into how decisions we made.
I signed up for a farm share and virtually rode the Pan Mass Challenge. Lots of families adopted dogs. People quit their jobs in droves as part of the Great Resignation.
What did Walmart do? They decided to launch a business division to serve commercial, non-profit, and public sector customers using the omnichannel buying and fulfillment/delivery programs they have built for individual consumers as the foundation.
To learn more about the strategy behind that decision and how it benefits institutional buyers, I met with Ashley Hubka, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Walmart Business. Ashley has held a number of consulting and strategy positions during her career and holds a degree in Philosophy from Harvard University.
“Save Money. Live Better.” Work Better too?
Behind-the-scenes planning for Walmart Business started in 2021, with an initial rollout in 2022 and a full-scale launch in 2023. Customers benefit from the same omnichannel experience as individual consumers, with access to online, mobile, and in-store shopping options.
Walmart Business also leverages the company’s fulfillment and delivery capabilities, with “special order” provisions for handling large volume or bulky orders.
When I asked about the challenges Walmart Business can help organizations overcome, Ashley specified two:
Spend management: Not only does Walmart Business make it possible to store (and protect) one centralized payment method for all authorized buyers, but it also offers spend analytics capabilities.
Inventory management: With a wide assortment of items and short delivery cycles, institutional customers can take advantage of the cash flow and storage space advantages of lean-like inventory management.
For enterprise procurement teams that are trying to evaluate the supply chains of their tier 1 and tier 2 (etc.) suppliers, I can see Walmart Business membership as an advantage. Not only does it give them cost effective resilience, but it also ensures that they have access to domestically produced goods, making them less likely to get held up in the case of a supply chain disruption or port labor strike.
As Ashley told me, “Walmart as a whole, given our scope, our scale, our sourcing, both offshore and we have a very substantial commitment to things that are made, assembled, or created in the US that balances our sourcing approach. We have a very resilient supply chain.”
From Consumer to Business and Back Again
One of the things I was most eager to ask Ashley about is the experience of taking a consumer shopping experience and converting it into a commercial one. After all, procurement is constantly being asked why buying at work can’t be more like shopping online at home.
There are some things they purposefully changed. For example, the Walmart Business site navigation is specifically tailored to institutional customers, as is the product taxonomy and terminology. They also expanded the product mix to ensure commercial needs are met.
But what – if anything – have they learned from their commercial rollout that could be applied back to the customer experience? Walmart Business is not a standalone division; it is still fully integrated with the rest of the company.
I’ll flatter myself by thinking that I got close to something with this question. Ashley answered, “I can’t say too much about that, but I will give you… It’s a great, great question. It’s a great observation.”
Fortunately, she was able to speak about three areas where Walmart is ensuring that no value or learnings are lost.
Business center: This is the administrative and reporting ‘hub’ behind Walmart Business. “There may be some elements of this business center idea that some households or families might want to leverage,” she told me. “They might want to think about the members of their household, or they might want to think about spend.”
Reusable tech: Going back to the idea that Walmart Business is not operating in a silo, and that the company is proud of their omnichannel capabilities, they are keeping all of the tech aligned. Ashley commented on this as well, “We’ve built everything in a reusable way from a tech perspective. That’s very much Walmart’s philosophy. It is platform thinking and building in reusable ways. Those may be some things that will be useful to consumers over time.”
Communication via storytelling: I’m a huge fan of storytelling (and stories), so this was right up my alley. Knowing that many of Walmart’s personal customers could also be institutional customers changes the way they look at outreach. “We tell lots of stories, but is there a nugget in there that may affect how we tell stories from a marketing and communications perspective, even on the consumer side? Absolutely,” Ashley said.
