OVERVIEW OF HOW TO DIGITALLY ENABLE YOUR SALES TEAM:

Adrienne Hartman, EVP of Marketing at JJ Keller, discusses aligning sales and e-commerce teams in B2B. She emphasizes channel-agnostic strategies where sales reps receive credit regardless of how customers purchase—through websites, e-procurement, or direct contact.

JJ Keller runs 14 marketing websites, hosts 300 annual events, and is implementing a customer data platform to accelerate lead delivery to their 600+ sales reps.

Key strategies include eliminating channel conflict through aligned incentives, automating journey-based marketing, focusing on AEO through review sites like G2, and tracking buying signals to alert sales in real-time.

FAQ

Who is Adrienne Hartman and what does JJ Keller do?
Adrienne Hartman is the Executive Vice President of Marketing at JJ Keller, where she’s worked for 18 years—17 years leading e-commerce directly and the past year leading the overall marketing organization. JJ Keller helps businesses comply with government regulations (Department of Transportation, OSHA, Department of Labor) through physical products, online solutions, and professional services including consulting and managed services.

How is the marketing organization structured at JJ Keller?
E-commerce is part of the marketing organization. Marketing also includes a sales academy that trains new sales talent over four months (which also generates leads), and an inbound sales team that handles inquiries from websites, catalogs, and direct response materials. Adrienne has a peer who manages the main sales organization of over 600 sales representatives.

What’s the key to aligning sales and marketing teams?
The sales leader is Adrienne’s closest ally—they talk every day. The marketing team is aligned to support sales rather than compete with it. The fundamental strategy is being channel-agnostic and ensuring sales reps get credit for orders no matter where they’re placed—whether through JJ Keller.com, e-procurement systems, Amazon, or any other channel.

How does JJ Keller eliminate channel conflict?
For assigned accounts, sales reps receive credit regardless of where the order is placed—whether through the website, e-procurement punch-outs, or any other method. This removes the feeling that e-commerce is “stealing” sales from reps. The internal marketing message emphasizes that digital channels help reps “make sales even when you’re on vacation” by handling busy work.

What is JJ Keller’s digital footprint?
They operate 14 marketing websites supporting different business aspects and cloud products, run a store on Amazon and other marketplaces, and host approximately 300 events annually (both webinars and in-person events around the country). Their main site serves as both a direct transaction vehicle and a lead generation tool for sales reps.

How do the in-person events work?
JJ Keller hosts events nationwide for industry professionals—for example, 90 transportation professionals in Atlanta learning about regulatory changes. Sales reps attend these events (though they limit the number due to having 600+ reps), and both sales and regulatory experts present. Marketing drives traffic and attendance to these events digitally.

What technology upgrades is JJ Keller implementing?
They’re currently selecting and implementing a customer data platform (CDP) and modern marketing automation system. This will enable more intelligent journey-based marketing, allow sales reps to send personalized messages through the system, and most importantly, get qualified leads to sales faster to prevent them from “collecting dust.”

Why is lead delivery speed so important?
The longer leads sit unused, the less effective they become. When sales reps at a major show like the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) don’t receive leads until 10 days after the event ends, those leads are cold and have lost their impact. Research shows the first company to respond to an RFP wins the business 67-70% of the time.

How does JJ Keller handle e-procurement integrations?
The marketing/e-commerce team handles all e-procurement integrations and punch-out connections (like Coupa or Ariba) so sales doesn’t have to figure out those systems. They provide sales reps with “cheat sheets”—if a customer mentions certain keywords, reps simply call the e-commerce team who handles the technical implementation.

What is JJ Keller’s AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) strategy?
They focus on the fundamentals that worked for SEO, which also impact AEO. Additionally, they’re emphasizing review sites like G2 because answer engines give significant weight to these platforms and user-generated content. Notably, they’re NOT pursuing a Reddit strategy, which is a deliberate choice.

What are the most impactful digital tools for sales teams according to the LinkedIn poll?
57% said AI-enabled prospecting tools (the top choice), 29% selected better CRM and e-commerce integration, 14% chose cross-channel sales incentives (considered table stakes), and 0% selected pricing tools—likely because marketing typically doesn’t own pricing in most organizations.

What does Adrienne see as the biggest opportunity going forward?
Buying signal tracking—using the “digital dust” customers leave behind to alert sales reps in real time when hot prospects view content online. This allows timely follow-up and can’t be done manually with spreadsheets. It requires AI and ties into their CDP implementation and CRM/e-commerce integration efforts.

How does JJ Keller balance direct sales versus lead generation?
Their digital properties serve dual purposes. JJ Keller.com processes direct transactions but also generates leads for high-consideration items. Customers can request free product samples online, sign up for events, or engage in ways that trigger sales follow-up. The goal is supporting whatever buying journey the customer prefers while generating qualified opportunities for sales.

What’s the key cultural shift needed for sales and marketing alignment?
Moving from viewing each other as competitors (the “boxing match” mentality) to viewing the relationship as an alliance. Marketing should see itself as supporting sales with tools, leads, and processes that make their jobs easier—not as a separate channel competing for the same customers. This requires both structural changes (like credit allocation) and daily collaboration at leadership levels.

TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Beck
Welcome everyone to Friday 15 with Master B to B. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar, my partner in our master B to B series. Andy, welcome to 2026. We’re kicking it off with a great topic. Welcome to Friday 15. Andy, yeah, and new music. Well, I knew music to boot. Yeah, we’re going to, we’re going to keep it, keep it fun and exciting this year. We’re going to do a lot this year of integrating, you know, people, people from our community, into our Friday 15 sessions. We’re really excited about that, and we’ve got a great session today. But of course, before we we get to that, we need to, we need to go to our the your aching news. Love saying it that way. Andy, did you see this? This is absolutely hilarious. This guy set up. It’s and a little scary. This fellow set up an AI misinformation experiment. He built a company, right? So he a luxury paper weights company. It’s a fake product, $8,000 luxury paper weights. He wanted to see how llms This is all related to AEO agentic engine optimization, or optimizing for showing up in the search results or the results of queries posed to chat GPT and other ones. And he set up this company which would basically, you know, supposedly, sell these luxury paper weights, and he fooled the llms. In other words, he created this whole fake thing, and the llms picked up on it, and they thought it was real. And he had did a whole bunch of things like posting and Reddit and medium and a bunch of other places. He put up a website. He put up a FAQ, and what it’s fascinating is because in AI search, what he found is the most detailed story wins, even if it’s fake. AI productivity tools are being used as answer engines in a world where anyone can spin up a credible looking story in an hour, it’s PR but for machines that can’t tell who’s lying. I mean, he was showing up as a legitimate he had Elon Musk and other influencers fake commenting on these. This, these paperweight products. This is fascinating and scary, because the whole thing was fake, but, but the the llms thought it was real, over time, the more he the more content he added, would you any reactions? Is fascinating?

Andy Hoar
Well, it just shows you there’s no real guardrails around any of this right now, which in the creative stages. People say, that’s fantastic. We don’t want to curtail anything. That’s all wonderful. Except that when reality sets in and people set up fake sites, and then it just promulgates the fakeness and the falsehoods all around the world. And then certainly people turn around and go, Wait a minute. We can’t tolerate this. But then you start looking at what the the solution to it is, and then the solution some The Cure sounds worse than disease. Like, oh, let’s have an independent body that would verify this stuff. It’s like, well, who’s going to run that right? Then that’ll slow things down. But there has to be something in here to verify that people are really posting these things. And you see, like verification mechanisms in other realms. You know, LinkedIn does it. There’s a way credit bureaus do these things. There’s a way to do this. So, but, yeah, I think, I hope this is a querying call to the industry that this is going to get worse if they don’t do something about it.

Brian Beck
Well, how is it any different than what you know, Google, right? I mean, the sense that people can fool Google too with, you know, but you know, in the world of Google, in the history of Google, you know, getting ranking in Google would be thing you know, you you’d benefit from, from links from like Edu or.gov sites and like so. So Google had some, some level of, you know, authority checking. But this, this whole world of of AEO, is changing so much and so fast, and it presents opportunities, both for, you know, good companies that are legitimate, you know, good actors, but also companies that aren’t right that you know. Think about this. What if a competitor comes in and starts, you know, creating, you know, false stories about about your brand as a, as a legitimate B to B manufacturer, for example, and talking about, oh, they just went out of business, or whatever, you know.

Andy Hoar
I mean, this, you can destroy somebody’s reputation. I mean, these are, these are all just very scalable and very powerful tools that can be used for good or for ill, right? And, I mean, there were stories like last year about how intelligence, Chinese, for example, had been using anthropic to they trick anthropic, which is the Claude system. They tricked them into believing that they were helping to protect a website by identifying the vulnerabilities in the website, when, in fact, what they were doing was exactly what they said, which is identifying the vulnerabilities in the website. So they used quad to hack into a bunch of sites, and Claude sells is a useful idiot in the process. So and then. Course, when they saw that, they changed their methodology. But it does kind of beg the question, why did they prevent that to begin with? So yes, we will live and learn on this stuff, but we get worse before it gets better.

Brian Beck
Yeah, anyway, we’ll continue to follow. It’s fascinating. So today we’re talking about digitally enabling the sales team in 2026 and you know, Andy, for years, companies have sort of ever since the introduction of E commerce, companies have struggled with a sort of tension between sales teams, who have had relationships for a long time with customers, and E commerce sort of taking that business away, right? So are we just sort of shifting from one channel to another? Are we disintermediating channels? Sales teams have have long hated e commerce as a as a competitive channel in their business. And you know, so there’s just been this tension. And what the fact that matter is, though it’s it’s not the reality of how B to B, buyers actually customers want to interact. In fact, Gardner came out with a study that showed that all the way through the purchase journey from problem identification all the way through buying and even referral afterwards. They’re using both channels, B to B. Customers are and particularly now that millennials are the bulk of buyers, they’re using both channels, digital and physical, in the buying journey almost equally, right? So you’re seeing

Andy Hoar
what’s interesting about this is back in the day, because I was there when this was taking place. The group that was having a problem with this was the sales team. They were the ones who said, No, e commerce isn’t being used along the way. We’re the ones helping them at the beginning, or we’re the ones closing at the end. And the reality was both groups were operating interchangeably throughout the journey. But the news at the time was that E commerce was such a factor, right? So I think that’s kind of sort of been baked into the cake at this point. I think both groups understand then, but there still is a zero sum mentality about some of this.

Brian Beck
Yeah, there is. Well, things are, things are changing. Andy, I mean, companies. This is a study that, for those who can’t see it, I’m showing a study from Forrester research that was done last year that showed that 82% of C suite leaders say physical sales teams and marketing teams who usually run e commerce are aligned. 41% say they’re highly aligned. So we’re seeing much more sort of, you know, the organization actually embracing this and understanding that the customer really should come first, and the customer is one that you know should drive this and not, not internal legacy thinking. In fact, McKinsey has come out and said 85% of B to B companies expected hybrid sellers, meaning digitally physical sales teams that are enabled with digital tools to be the most common role in a sales organization. So, so they’ve even put a name on it. McKinsey has and so this is a real thing. And you know, when we see, when we see things like this, we like to go to our community and ask and involve them in in in this discussion. So we we have the one of our superstars in the in the community today joining us on our Friday 15, Adrienne Hartman. Miss Adrienne Hartman is the Executive Vice President of Marketing at JJ Keller. We’re going to ask her what that is, but the most important thing is She’s a, I think, a seven time winner of our case, I don’t know what is it? Adrian, five time winner, three times. Oh, there it is. There’s the trophy.

Adrienne Hartman 8:19
I don’t know how many it is, but every time we talk, I get one more.

Brian Beck
Adrienne, tell us about JJ Keller and what your role is there.

Adrienne Hartman
Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So JJ Keller helps businesses comply with government regulations. Think about Department of Transportation, OSHA, Department of Labor. We have physical products, we have online solutions, and we have professional services, managed services, consulting, that type of thing. So a lot of different areas that we’re focusing on to help our customers. I’ve been at the company 18 years, 17 of those years leading e com directly, and the last year leading the overall marketing organization. So a little bit of a unique perspective on this. And e commerce is part of the marketing organization in our company,

Brian Beck
perfect, and you don’t manage sales. You have a peer that manages or oversees the sales function, correct, correct.

Adrienne Hartman
I have a peer who manages sales. However, we do have some components of sales that are in marketing. For example, we have a sales academy that brings in new sales talent and trains them up over a period of four months. We train them to be a high performing sales representative during those four months, and they are a lead gen machine during that that time period as well. Interesting. Yeah, and our inbound sales team is also part of marketing, so the the people who are answering the. The inquiries from the websites and from the catalogs and some of our direct response materials as well.

Brian Beck
So everything we shared in the beginning, in the last couple of minutes, I think, based on our conversations, Adrian, I think a lot of those issues are, you know, you’ve experienced, right? I mean, tell us kind of where you guys are from, from that standpoint, what have been some of the most effective things that you’ve seen in terms of aligning sales and marketing?

Adrienne Hartman
Yeah, so I don’t view that that that boxing match. Actually, our sales leader is my closest ally. He and I talk every day, and I have very close relationships with his first line of staff as well, and my team, my marketing team, is actually aligned to help support them. So we’re viewing ourselves with a couple of different lenses, and one of those being Yes, we are all here for our customers and for the overall organization. So we’re trying to drive some direct sales. Absolutely, we run our store on Amazon and on marketplaces. We run JJ keller.com which is both direct transactional vehicle, but is also a lead gen vehicle for those sales reps for some of the higher consideration items, it’s also a place where for some items, customers can say, request a free product sample, and then sales would follow up with them on that. It’s a place where customers can find some of our 300 events we do both online and in person around the country every year. Sign up for that again, strong lead gen vehicle for sales. We actually run, I mentioned JJ color.com but we have 14 marketing websites supporting some different aspects of our business and some of our cloud products as well. So that’s a pretty strong digital presence that we have out there, and we’re doing many different things to drive customers to those sites again, both to make some direct transactions, but also for lead generation. And I think one of the most important things that we did very early on is we made sure for an assigned account that the sales rep gets credit no matter where the order is placed. So if the order comes through JJ keller.com if the order comes through E procurement, punch out any way the customer wants to place that order, that rep is getting credit so they don’t feel like they’re fighting it. And part of our whole internal marketing campaign and push is basically you can make sales even when you’re on vacation. This is this engine is here, working for you, taking some of the busy work out of getting orders in the system.

Brian Beck
So I was just gonna say comment on something. You said engine. You said 300 events. So you’re doing. What are the are these webinars? What are they?

Adrienne Hartman
They’re a lot of webinars. But we also have in person events that we host all around the country for professionals in our industry. We had, I actually attended one in Atlanta in December. We had 90 transportation professionals in the room learning about what’s happening in the regulatory space, where these professionals are working every day, and then we’re also exposing them to some of our products and services. And then then sale sales is in attendance at those meetings as well. A number of sales people. We have over 600 sales reps, so we really, actually have to limit how many of them are at each of these events, but the the speaking at the event is done both by sales and by one of our regulatory experts.

Brian Beck
And digital you’re driving, you’re driving the leads to those events, right? So the traffic, the attendance. Cool, go ahead Andy, absolutely yes.

Andy Hoar
So in the history of this kind of relation between sales and E commerce, you know, we’ve seen ebbing and flowing. We see some companies get it better than others. It sounds like you have a pretty mature relationship and amicable relationship with your team, but here’s the question I have for you. You said any way our customers want to buy? When I’ve seen this in the past, what I’ve seen is companies decide how they want customers to buy from them, as opposed to allowing the customers to tell them how they want to buy from them. How have you negotiated that? Have you navigated that so that you really are deferring to the customers, as opposed to, oh, the sales team wants to touch them this month because they have a promotion coming out. But do we know if the customer wants to be touched this month by the sales rep?

Adrienne Hartman
I will say when it comes to how the customer places an order, we truly are channel agnostic. We want however the customer. Wants to do business with us. We want to be there for them. And one of the things that we’ve done is as a marketing e comm side, we have made it easy to do e procurement integrations and punch out integrations. We take that work on for sales, so sales doesn’t need to figure out how to work in Coupa or Ariba. We do all that for them, we’ve given them a whole bunch of basically cheat sheets. If a customer says any of these words, pick up the phone and call us, and we’ll take it from there. So we’re really trying on that, on the touching we actually are currently working on implementing a customer data platform and overall marketing automation system. This is something we’ve been working on, actually, for the last few months, selecting a tool. We’re nearing the end of that selection, and then we’re going to be implementing this. And the customer data platform, along with the new, more modern marketing stack, is going to allow us to better have all of that marketing outreach, whether that be rep generated, because ideally we want that. We want a rep to be able to send a personalized message through the system, that then maybe precludes us from sending something else. But we also want, really to have more intelligent journey based marketing. And ultimately, we want to get those leads, the right leads to sales faster, so that they can follow up with customers in a really timely manner.

Andy Hoar
So what happens? Sorry, Brian. So, so what happens when those leads don’t get to the sales reps in a timely fashion?

Adrienne Hartman
You know, the longer a lead collects dust, the less effective it is. And we know this, and we’re currently running on some old manual processes, which is why we were able to move forward with getting approval for the buy in, for upgrading the systems on this. And sales isn’t happy if, if they have reps at a big Sherm Society for Human Resources Management. If we have sales at a big show like that, and they’re not actually getting the leads in their queue until 10 days after the show ends, those leads are cold. They’ve lost their impact. And that’s that’s when sales isn’t happy with me. That’s when that’s when they definitely rightfully so, will raise concerns to us, and that’s part of what we’re trying to do better.

Brian Beck
Adrian, we talked at the beginning of this a little bit about some stuff that’s happening with AEO, with agentic engine optimization, you know, sort of the getting yourself showing up in those search results. I mean, that’s to be a part of something you’re thinking about for generating leads for your sales team, right? And supporting your sales team. What are you guys doing in that area every day?

Adrienne Hartman
Well, a lot of the a lot of the AEO signals are the same as the things that impacted SEO for years. So if you have a site or websites that are strong in SEO, they should be strong in this. However, as you indicated, a lot of what we’re seeing as well is that the answer engines are giving a lot of weight to user generated content. So we’ve taken another angle as well as spending more time and focus on review sites. For example, we’re not doing the whole going down the Reddit path. But thinking about sites like g2 because g2 and those other type of review sites, those do get a lot of credibility in answer engines. Interesting. So no Reddit, this is a strategy. You’re right.

Brian Beck
So we need to get your reaction. We just got a couple minutes left here to our LinkedIn poll. So we asked our community, Adrian on LinkedIn, what are the most impactful digital tools or strategies you can give to your sales team? 2026 really interesting was just to that last point. Number one was selected. Was eight I enabled prospecting tools. 57% said that. People also weighed in. Said that better CRM, E, comm integration, which goes to your platforming discussion earlier. 29% said that then cross channel, sales incentives. 14% that seems to be table stakes. Nobody said pricing tools, which was interesting. What’s your reaction to this? Do you agree?

Adrienne Hartman
I think that these are the right areas to be focusing and I think that the reason why people didn’t vote for the pricing tools is because in our roles, we typically don’t own pricing. I do think that a big area for us to be focusing on, and something that I am looking at as well is really that buying signal tracking, so being able to let sales know that a hot prospect was viewing this content online, and letting them know that quickly so that they can follow up. We have so many clues as people leave their digital dust around, and for us to be able to collect all of that and be more informed. Formed in what we let sales know so that they can act on it in a timely way. That and that all ties into AI, because you sure can’t do that manually with spreadsheets. That that’s what I think the big winner is.

Brian Beck
And it ties into the CDP you’re deploying, and that CRM, e com integration all that, but now, well. Adrian Hartman, thank you very much for joining us today, as always, your amazing insights. I learned so much when we talk with you. So thanks for Thanks for being part of our Friday 15 this week.