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About

The Journey Gap Philosophy

I've Spent Almost Three Decades Learning Why B2B Sites Fail. Now I Fix Them.

From merchandising end mills at McMaster-Carr to building Amazon's B2B content team, I've lived your digital transformation challenges from every angle.

Your Biggest Competitor Isn't Who You Think

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Your customers love working with your sales team. They tolerate your website. That gap between your amazing offline experience and your painful digital experience? That's what I call a Journey Gap.
And while you're debating which e-commerce platform to use, your competitors are closing that gap.

Your Biggest Competitor Isn't Who You Think

Why Product Content Is Your Secret Weapon Everyone thinks B2B success is about:

  • Having the most products ❌
  • Having the lowest prices ❌
  • Having the flashiest website ❌

It's actually about having product data so good that:

  • Customers find what they need in 3 clicks, not 47
  • Your customers can search for their problem they don't already need to know the solution
  • Compatible products surface automatically
  • Search actually understands "that thingy that connects to the whatsit"

Benefits

What to Expect from Better Product Content

Having great product content does more than just make your product pages look good. As predictive and generative AI continue to mature, innovative leaders are discovering new and better ways to build differentiated customer experiences online that are built on foundations of robust product content.

Faceted Search

Attribution schemas that are complete, well populated, and normalized ensure that users can filter selection once to find all matching products for any single value

Site Search

Optimized libraries of item names, product descriptions, and bullet points make it easier for site search technologies to generate complete lists of relevant products in results.

Recommendations

Finding compatible products for recommendations benefits from consistency in attribute value formatting and units of measure, ensuring that the product recommendations you make show your expertise

Personalization

Robust product content ensures that as your users in different segment engage with your site the differences in how they discover and research products are captured consistently - speeding your ability to tune the experience for each uniquely.

Bona Fide B2B Background

The McMaster-Carr Years: Where I Learned B2B Truth

I spent 12 years at McMaster-Carr—the company every B2B distributor secretly wants to be. I wasn't theorizing about customer experience; I was living it. Shipping orders at 2 AM. Taking calls from frustrated maintenance managers. Watching how the best B2B company in the world actually operates.
What I learned: Your customers don't care about your product taxonomy. They care about fixing their problem before their boss notices it's broken.

The Amazon Detour: When Scale Meets Complexity

Amazon recruited me to help them crack B2B. For 5 years, I built their B2B content production team and discovered a harsh truth: Their systems were built for books and electronics, not ball bearings and brass fittings.
By the time Amazon realized that a 2" brass ball valve needs 24 technical specifications (not just color and size), millions of B2B SKUs had already flooded the catalog. Missing specs. Inconsistent units. Critical compatibility data buried in description fields. I did what I could to catch up, but the damage was done—the foundation was built for consumer products, not complex technical ones.
What I learned: You can't retrofit B2B complexity onto B2C infrastructure. You have to build for technical products from day one, or you'll spend forever playing catch-up.

The Consulting Years: From Theory to Battle Scars

Since 2014, I've been in the trenches with dozens of distributors and manufacturers. I've seen every flavor of digital disaster:

  • The company with 500,000 SKUs and 3 people managing them
  • The team that spent $1M on a platform that customers hated
  • The executive who thought "digital transformation" meant "put the catalog online"

What I learned: Most B2B companies aren't failing because of technology. They're failing because they're solving the wrong problems.

The Bloomreach Chapter: Seeing Behind the Platform Curtain

After years of implementing product data solutions, I joined Bloomreach to help them build better B2B features. For 3 years, I led their B2B product development and go-to-market strategy. Now I knew the secret: why some implementations soar while others crash and burn.
Spoiler alert: It's rarely the platform's fault.
I watched companies with identical technology get wildly different results. The difference? The winners understood that platforms are tools, not magic. They invested in their data. They thought about their customer's workflow. They didn't expect software to solve strategy problems.
What I learned: The best platform in the world can't fix bad product data or broken business processes. But good data and clear strategy can make even basic platforms sing.

Our Mission

At Acumental B2B, our mission is to empower distributors and manufacturers of technical products by delivering innovative product content strategies tailored for B2B ecommerce. We strive to enhance the online customer experience, drive revenue growth, and improve margins, ensuring our clients thrive in a competitive digital landscape.

Our Vision

A world in which B2B digital experiences make users feel recognized, understood, educated, and confident that the options presented by the site are exactly tuned to solve their business problems. Whether they are buying products on schedule, replacing equipment they weren’t expecting, or designing completely new customer solutions from scratch, our clients' digital business is seen as the aspirational ideal by their customers and an intimidating challenge by competitors.