by Cathy Gray | Oct 22, 2026 | Customer Journey
Most websites put everything into the first order. Ads, landing pages, checkout.
Then the order goes through and the website goes quiet.
For a B2B buyer, the first order is a test. What happens after it decides whether there’s a second one.
Why A Repeat Buyer Is Worth More
A repeat buyer already trusts you. They know your site, your part numbers, and who to call. You don’t have to pay for an ad to get them back.
They also order the same things over and over. That’s the steadiest revenue a distributor has.
1. A Person They Know By Name
This one mattered most.
Our best repeat buyers knew someone at the company by name, and that person knew them. When something came up, they didn’t call a main line and explain it from the beginning. They called the person who already knew their account.
A website can’t replace that. It can make it easy to reach that person, and make sure the website and that person say the same thing.
2. Reordering That Takes Seconds
The other thing that kept them coming back was how easy it was to order again.
Order history, a reorder button, saved lists. If the second order takes as much work as the first, a buyer has no reason not to shop around. More in 7 Quick Order Features Repeat Buyers Actually Use.
3. Hearing From You After The Order
After an order, buyers heard from us a few ways: the confirmation, shipping and tracking updates, a check-in from sales, and email campaigns.
None of it is fancy. It tells the buyer the order didn’t disappear into a void, and it keeps you in front of them before they need to order again.
4. Bad News Early
Delays and backorders happen. Buyers can handle that.
What loses them is finding out late. A heads-up when something is delayed or backordered gives them time to plan around it. That’s the difference between an annoyed buyer and a lost one.
5. Being Straight About The Hard Parts
One buyer was upset about how high shipping was. It was an LTL pallet going from Atlanta to a residential address in the middle of nowhere in Idaho.
That’s an expensive shipment, and there’s no way around it. Freight to a remote residential address costs more than freight to a business with a loading dock.
He came back later. Of course, the shipping was higher again. It was during COVID, when freight costs swung all over the place, and it was still going a long way to a residential address nowhere near a major city.
You can’t make every cost go away. You can explain it before checkout, so the buyer isn’t surprised.
Track Them, Even Without A Synced System
At the time, our website and ERP weren’t synced. There was no clean report showing who ordered again.
We knew our repeat buyers by name. That works when the list is small. It doesn’t scale, and it leaves you guessing when someone stops ordering.
If your systems don’t talk to each other yet, start simple:
- Check your eCommerce platform for returning customer reports.
- Ask sales who your top repeat buyers are, and who’s gone quiet.
- Keep a short list and check it monthly.
Coming back is the last stop on the journey. For the rest, see 5 Stops on the B2B Buyer’s Journey (And Where You Lose Them).
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by Cathy Gray | Oct 22, 2026 | Customer Journey
Analytics tells you how many people visited a page and how long they stayed. It doesn’t tell you what they tried to do while they were there.
That’s what a heatmap is for.
What A Heatmap Is
A heatmap shows where people click, how far they scroll, and where they stop. Session recordings go a step further: you watch a real visit play out, mouse movements and all.
I used Microsoft Clarity. It’s free, and it groups the frustrating moments for you: rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs.
Angry Clicks
On a site I worked on more recently, the heatmap showed a lot of angry clicks.
That’s when someone clicks the same spot over and over because they expect something to happen and it doesn’t. Clarity calls them rage clicks. I call them angry clicks, because that’s what they look like in the recording.
They showed up all over:
- Images people thought were links.
- Text and headings that looked clickable.
- Buttons with broken links.
The most were on the page numbers at the bottom of the blog posts.
The broken buttons got fixed. Those are the easy ones: a button that goes nowhere is a dead end analytics never flags. The visit still counts. The page view still counts. Nothing says the buyer tried three times and gave up.
What People Actually Look At
On the same site, the owner thought most people read the information above the products.
The heatmap said otherwise. What people looked at was the product comparison chart at the bottom of the page.
That changes what you work on. If buyers scroll past the intro to get to the chart, the chart is doing the selling. Make it easy to find, keep it up to date, and stop worrying so much about the paragraph at the top.
It’s also a good reason to compare products on the page in the first place.
Where Analytics And Heatmaps Fit
They answer different questions.
- Analytics: how many people came, where they came from, which pages they left on.
- Heatmaps: what they clicked, how far they scrolled, what they ignored.
- Recordings: what it was like to be the buyer on that page.
Analytics tells you which page to look at. The heatmap tells you why.
Where To Start
- Install Clarity or another heatmap tool on your site. Clarity is free.
- Give it a few weeks to collect visits before you draw conclusions.
- Check your top product pages, category pages, and checkout first.
- Look for rage clicks and dead clicks. Fix anything broken right away.
- Watch five or ten recordings on your most important page. You’ll learn more than any report.
- Check what people scroll past. If the important part is below where most people stop, move it up.
Heatmaps are one way to see your own buyer’s journey. For the rest, see 5 Stops on the B2B Buyer’s Journey (And Where You Lose Them). For what buyers tell you directly, see How to Use Customer Feedback and Reviews to Fix Your Website.
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by Cathy Gray | Oct 22, 2026 | Customer Journey
Customers will tell you what’s wrong with your website. Just not on the website.
They tell customer service on the phone. They mention it to the counter. They leave a Google review. Most of it never makes it back to whoever runs the site.
Where Feedback Actually Comes From
For me, it came from three places:
- Google reviews. Public, and usually about the whole experience, not just the website.
- Calls and emails to customer service. The most specific feedback you’ll get, because the buyer is stuck on something right now.
- Sales and counter conversations. Questions buyers ask in person that the website should have answered.
None of these show up in analytics. You have to go ask for them.
Small Fixes Count
Not every piece of feedback is a redesign.
Some of the fixes that came in were as small as a misspelling in the technical specs, or a spec that was obviously missing a decimal point. Obvious once someone said it, and easy to miss in a catalog of thousands of parts.
A wrong spec is worse than a missing one. A buyer who orders off it gets the wrong part, and now it’s a return, a phone call, and a buyer who trusts your pages a little less.
Spelling and spec fixes take minutes. Make them as soon as they come in.
Asking For Reviews
Most reviews don’t happen on their own. You have to ask.
I asked in person, at the branches. It was part of a local SEO campaign to bring more traffic and sales through each location. I made a flyer with a QR code and reported the numbers at the monthly sales meetings: the number of reviews and the percentage change for each branch. It turned into a competitive game between the branches.
I also tracked monthly revenue from sales. It wasn’t a huge difference, but reviews and revenue grew almost in parallel.
Asking in person works because the customer is standing there after a good experience. A QR code makes it one step instead of five. And tracking it made it something the sales team could see, not just a marketing project.
Turning Feedback Into Fixes
Feedback only helps if it gets to the person who can change the website.
- Keep one list. A shared spreadsheet works. What was said, where it came from, and what page it’s about.
- Ask customer service and sales once a month. What did buyers ask this month that the website should have answered?
- Read your Google reviews for patterns. One complaint is a bad day. The same complaint three times is a fix.
- Fix the small things right away. Typos, wrong specs, broken links, outdated hours.
- Save the bigger things for a monthly look. Missing pages, confusing navigation, a checkout that doesn’t fit how buyers order.
Every question your team answers over and over is something the website could answer instead.
Reply To Reviews
Good or bad, reply.
A short thank you on a good review shows other buyers someone is paying attention. On a bad one, say what you fixed or how to reach someone. Keep it short and don’t argue.
Buyers read the replies as much as the reviews.
Feedback And The Rest Of The Journey
Feedback tells you what buyers say. Heatmaps show what they do. You need both. More in What Heatmaps Show That Analytics Don’t.
For the full buyer’s journey, see 5 Stops on the B2B Buyer’s Journey (And Where You Lose Them).
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by Cathy Gray | Oct 22, 2026 | Customer Journey
I’ve watched buyers take every route there is.
Some researched on the website, then called to order. Some found us on Google and walked in. Some ordered online once, then came back through their rep. Some did all of it in the same week.
The B2B journey rarely ends at checkout. A lot of the time it ends with a phone call, a PO, or a forwarded email. That doesn’t mean the website failed. It means the website is one stop along the way, and every stop is a place you can lose them.
Here are the five stops, and where buyers slip out at each one.
1. Research
Before a buyer picks a supplier, they figure out what they need.
They pull spec sheets and catalog PDFs. They cross-reference a competitor’s part number against yours. They compare you against two or three other suppliers. And some still call before they trust what the page says.
I’ve seen buyers do all four, sometimes for the same order.
Where you lose them: the page doesn’t have the answer, so they go find one that does. Specs stuck in a scanned PDF, no cross-reference, nothing to compare against. The full list of what buyers look for is in 10 Things Buyers Need Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone.
2. Finding You
One customer found us from the road.
He had just picked up a new vac truck in Florida and was driving it back to Alaska. He was going to be traveling through our area, and he chose us because we were the easiest to find on his way back. He could order online.
He placed the order, and we confirmed it would be ready. Until he got there, the warehouse manager kept asking me when the guy was coming: the order was taking up space, and he was trying to close out tickets. Then he showed up and picked it up.
We weren’t the only supplier along his route. We were the one that showed up when he searched, with a way to buy.
Where you lose them: your products are named the way your company organizes them, not the way buyers search. Or Google and AI search show a competitor first.
3. Checking You Out
Found isn’t the same as chosen.
Before a buyer orders, they check whether you’re legit and whether you’re the right fit. Product pages, the about page, reviews, a phone number, an address, real photos.
Where you lose them: something on the site doesn’t hold up. I watched a sale go to a competitor because an about page claimed something the business couldn’t stand behind. The full story is in They Called the Lead Back And It Went About How You’d Expect.
4. Ordering
This is where B2B splits from retail.
Some buyers check out online. Plenty don’t. The person in the field builds the cart and sends it to purchasing. Someone calls it in. Someone requests a quote. Someone needs a place for a PO number.
Where you lose them: the website only works for one of those paths. The cart doesn’t match what sales quotes, the quote request sits, or checkout has nowhere to put a PO.
5. Coming Back
The first order is the hardest one to get. The second should be the easiest.
Repeat buyers reorder every way you can think of. Order history on the site. A call with an old invoice. Their rep. Rebuilding the cart from scratch.
My favorite was the forwarded email. A buyer would send an old order and say: I need to reorder this, but in different amounts.
Where you lose them: reordering takes as much work as the first order did. No order history, no saved cart, no easy way to change quantities.
How To See Your Own Journey
You won’t find all five stops in one report.
On a site I worked on more recently, the heatmap showed a lot of angry clicks. Most tools call them rage clicks: someone clicks the same spot over and over because they expect something to happen and it doesn’t. Most of them were on the page numbers at the bottom of the blog posts. Some were on buttons with broken links, and those got fixed.
Analytics showed the visits. It didn’t show the frustration.
Three places to look:
- Heatmaps and session recordings. Where buyers click, scroll past, and give up. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, and Crazy Egg all do this.
- Customer feedback and reviews. What buyers say when it works and when it doesn’t.
- Your sales team. They hear from buyers at every stop, especially the ones that end in a phone call.
When sales, customer service, and the website give the same answers, it doesn’t matter which stop a buyer is at.
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by Cathy Gray | Oct 16, 2026 | Business, Website
The website and the sales team aren’t supposed to compete for the same customer.
At an industrial hose and hydraulics distributor I worked for, they did for a while. The website had the lowest pricing tier, and counter, inside, and outside sales were all up against it. Customers were shopping us against ourselves. The full story is in Sales, Customer Service, and the Website: Working From the Same Playbook.
Once we fixed that, the website stopped being competition and started being a tool.
I just started at a construction building supplier, and I’ve already seen it there too. A customer who didn’t speak English didn’t know the part name, so they pulled up a picture of it from the website on their phone and showed it at the front counter. Another customer was describing what they needed, and instead of pulling parts from the warehouse to compare, the counter cleared it up with a picture from the website.
Different industry, same idea. Here’s what it looks like when the website backs up sales.
The Website Is A Sales Tool Too
At the distributor, our reps used the website with customers. Inside sales pulled up product pages while the customer was still on the phone. Outside sales pulled up a capabilities PDF from the website to share on visits. They knew where to find it, even though it was tucked away in the navigation menu.
That’s a win and a warning. If your own reps have to know where to dig, your buyers probably won’t find it.
It only works if the website is something a rep is proud to pull up. Clean product pages, real specs, clear pictures, and pricing that matches what they’re quoting. If a rep has to say “ignore what the website says,” the website is working against them.
Sales Support Looks Different In Every Business
It doesn’t have to be product pages and spec sheets.
For a residential remodeling company, sales support might be a photo gallery of finished jobs. Even simple videos of the work in progress help. A homeowner who has already seen the kitchens you’ve built walks into the estimate halfway sold.
Whatever your sales team ends up explaining over and over, or wishing they could show, that’s what the website should have ready.
Make It Easy To Reach A Person
At the distributor, our phone number was on every page. It sounds small. It isn’t.
A buyer who has a question halfway through a product page shouldn’t have to go hunting for the contact page. Put the number where they already are: the header, the footer, or both.
Some buyers will always want to talk to someone. The website’s job is to make that easy, not to talk them out of it.
Give Sales Room To Work
When we moved website pricing to match counter sales, something else happened. It gave the sales team room to work with.
If a customer needed a better price, a rep could offer a discount right there on the phone and win them back before they hung up. The website set the baseline. Sales had the flexibility.
If your website always has the lowest price, your reps have nothing left to offer.
Hand Off Quotes Cleanly
A quote request is a buyer asking to talk to sales. If that request sits in an inbox nobody checks, the website just made sales look bad.
Know who owns quote requests, how fast they get a reply, and who else sees them. I learned that one the hard way. More in Quote Requests That Go Nowhere: Fixing the Follow-Up Gap.
Tell Sales What The Website Says
Your reps should know what’s on the website, especially anything that makes a promise. Lead times, return policies, what the company is and isn’t.
If the website says something sales can’t stand behind, the customer finds out on the phone. That’s exactly what happened in They Called the Lead Back And It Went About How You’d Expect.
Support, Not Replace
The website can answer a lot before a buyer ever calls. That’s what 10 Things Buyers Need Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone covers.
But some buyers will always call, and some customers expect their outside rep to stop by. The website’s job is to back those relationships up, not get in their way.
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by Cathy Gray | Oct 16, 2026 | Marketing, Business
If you’ve worked in distribution, you know the calls.
“I have this part.”
“I’m trying to do this. What do I need?”
There were always calls like that. Some of them need a real person. A lot of them don’t. They need a website that already answered the question.
Here’s what buyers are looking for before they ever pick up the phone.
1. Price
Buyers want to know what it costs, or at least a range. If the price isn’t there, they either call or leave, and plenty of them leave.
If you can’t show pricing, say why and give them a next step that’s faster than a phone call. More on that in [4 Reasons “Call for Pricing” Is Costing You Sales].
2. Stock
Is it on the shelf right now? That’s usually the first question after price.
“In stock” is a start. A quantity, or which location has it, is better. And it has to be right. Showing something as available that isn’t is worse than showing nothing.
3. Lead Time
For custom or made-to-order items, buyers need to know how long. Not a promise down to the hour, just a realistic range.
A buyer can plan around two weeks. They can’t plan around a blank.
And a buyer’s emergency isn’t your problem. Your job is to be clear about lead times and fix it the best you can when something goes wrong.
4. Specs And Compatibility
Sizes, ratings, materials, fittings. Whatever a buyer needs to know it’s the right part.
This is where the “I’m trying to do this, what do I need?” calls come from. The more your product pages explain what a part works with and what it’s used for, the fewer of those calls you get.
Having your catalogs online is a big help too. It may not work for every business in every industry, but buyers use them. Just don’t make a PDF the only place the specs live. Put them on the page as text too. Buyers skim, and search engines can’t read what’s locked in a file.
5. Part Number Cross-Reference
“I have this part” usually means “I have someone else’s part number.” Buyers are matching what’s in their hand to what’s in your catalog.
Old data helps here more than you’d think. I remember conversations with coworkers who had been in the industry a long time. They had old but relevant information that covered exactly this. That kind of knowledge belongs on the website, not just in someone’s head.
If your site lists the manufacturer and competitor numbers your part replaces, and your site search can find them, a lot of those calls turn into orders instead.
6. Freight And Shipping Cost
Amazon ruined this for us. Buyers expect fast, cheap shipping on everything.
Some things just have to ship by freight, at a cost. There’s no way around it. Heavy, long, or bulky items cost real money to move.
You can’t control what Amazon taught buyers to expect. You can control when the buyer finds out. An estimate up front beats a surprise at checkout. More in [Freight Shipping Is Killing Your Checkout].
7. Pickup And Counter Info
Plenty of buyers would rather grab it today. They need your hours, your address, and whether they can order online and pick it up.
It sounds basic. It’s also one of the most common questions a counter gets.
Make sure that info is updated and the same everywhere a buyer might look: your contact page, about page, social media, Google Business Profile, and Bing Places profile. If one says you close at 5 and another says 4:30, buyers won’t know which to trust.
8. Custom Order Details
Custom orders stall when the buyer doesn’t know what information you need. Then it turns into back-and-forth on the phone, at the counter, or over email.
Tell them up front. That’s exactly why I made the S.T.A.M.P.E.D. flyer: one place that showed customers what we needed before they placed the order. The full story is in [Build It Once, Use It Forever: How I Created 1 Flyer That Solved 4 Problems].
9. Returns
What can come back, what can’t, and how long they have. Put it in writing where buyers can find it.
If custom or made-to-order items aren’t returnable, say so clearly on those product pages. A buyer who knows before they order won’t be surprised later.
10. Account Options
Tax exempt, net terms, ordering on a PO. Business buyers need to know whether they can buy the way their company buys.
If you offer accounts, say how to set one up. If they can’t order online with a PO, tell them how they can.
This one matters behind the scenes too. The most annoying thing for accounting is fixing mistakes that could have been prevented with net terms and tax exempt forms on file before the order.
Some Calls Should Still Happen
Not every call is a sign the website failed. Some buyers have a tricky job, an odd part, or just want to talk it through with someone who knows the products.
The goal isn’t zero calls. It’s that when a buyer does call, the basics are already handled and the conversation is about the part that actually needs a person. More on that in [Your Website Should Support the Phone Call, Not Replace It].
And when the website and the people answering the phone say the same thing, buyers trust both. That’s the whole idea behind Sales, Customer Service, and the Website: Working From the Same Playbook.
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