The waste management industry might not come to mind when you think of digital innovation, but Wastequip is a prime example of what it looks like.
Wastequip, a leading manufacturer of commercial waste equipment, has undergone a six-year transformation to build its ecommerce capabilities, expand its sales team’s capacity, and give customers a self-guided, omnichannel experience.
Here’s how Wastequip has built a best-of-breed B2B tech stack and what other companies that have traditionally sold offline can learn from Wastequip’s transformation.
Disparate Systems, Decentralized Data, and Absolute Disarray
Wastequip had to build its digital shelf operations from the ground up.
Kevin Creese, the company’s director of ecommerce, describes where the company started from in one word: disarray.
“We were not really organized,” he says. “Our data was everywhere. We had SKU information kept in spreadsheets and digital assets stored in different places across our network."
These challenges undermined data reliability, accuracy, and consistency and complicated the onboarding process for new customers.
Wastequip knew it would need a strategic technology partner to get its data house in order, so it turned to Salsify and other execution partners to build a best-of-breed B2B tech stack.
Grappling With Go-to-Market Complexity
Wastequip needed to address these issues quickly because it operates in a complex industry related to servicing equipment and purchasing parts. It wanted to streamline the buying experience for customers.
“We wanted to give our customers information about their inventory and simplify how we go to market with our parts. In our industry, parts are complex. It's hard to figure out the appropriate parts to buy. So, was there a way we could approach this and make it an easier shopping experience for our customers? We're trying to meet them where they are.”
— Kevin Creese, Director of Ecommerce, Wastequip
Wastequip customers may buy online, order parts on the showroom floor at a Wastequip facility, or in the field on the back of a garbage truck, for example. Wastequip also sells across multiple retail channels, including Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, and Amazon, so it needed to ensure a streamlined buying experience across both the physical and digital shelves.
Though Wastequip has 12 brands under its banner, it decided to start small. The company began its transformation with Salsify by focusing on one brand, Toter, which manufactures highly durable and sustainable plastic carts and containers.
“We modeled our data after our most complicated customers’ onboarding template, and then used that to set the standard for where we were going to go from there,” Creese says.
Building a Best-of-Breed B2B Tech Stack From the Ground Up
Wastequip worked with Salsify to centralize and standardize its assets and SKU data.
The company also collaborated with Americaneagle.com, a web design, development, and digital marketing agency, to help it make technical decisions and choose the right platform for its new ecommerce sites. Additionally, OroCommerce, a B2B ecommerce platform with a built-in CRM, helped gather customer insights to drive better buying experiences.
All of these platforms now work together to support Wastequip’s omnichannel experience.
After initially launching Salsify with its Toter brand, in 2021 Wastequip moved onto its Mountain Tarp brand, which manufactures tarping products and solutions.
The Mountain Tarp project was smaller by comparison, involving 2,000 parts. During this pilot, Wastequip fully integrated its enterprise resource planning system (ERP) and pricing and inventory systems, syndicating this data from the Salsify PXM to its websites.
“We went through that project, implemented Salsify and direct feeds for all our marketing data and content, made all that work in the back end of OroCommerce, and figured out how our orders and our customer data were going to flow within our business processes,” Creese says. “We had to define all those things and make sure there was structure behind how we support this program.”
A Phased Implementation Approach
Next, in 2023, the company focused on its Wastebuilt brand, which manufactures refuse parts.
This phased implementation approach allowed Wastequip to learn, implement best practices along the way, and innovate faster.
“With Mountain Tarp, it was an approach where we knew that there were other business units and there were other opportunities,” says Brendan Cameron, head of manufacturing and distribution at Americaneagle.com.
“By starting your project with that knowledge, knowing that ‘we're going to have multiple storefronts running off a single instance, we're going to have similar rules and ERP integrations,’ you're going to start to see diminishing returns go into your implementation efforts,” he adds.
This approach has also enabled Wastequip to strengthen data governance and optimize its product content creation workflows.
“All of our product category information and all of our products are actually fed from Salsify,” Creese says, adding that Wastequip has automated much of this process, along with the workflow to incorporate external partners that help the company with content development.
Externally created content is then brought back into the Salsify platform, where Creese’s team reviews it for accuracy and then publishes it.
Wins and Lessons Learned
The changes Wastequip implemented have driven both business and revenue impact.
Better SEO and Discoverability
Wastequip now has a streamlined process for creating metadata and titles for its equipment. It has outsourced this process, using Salsify as its central source of truth.
So far, the company has created metadata and titles for 60% of its 60,000 parts, scaling SEO and improving product discoverability.
Customer Growth, Better Customer Insights
By making Salsify its data foundation, Wastequip was able to onboard nine new customers immediately after the initial Toter pilot. With OroCommerce’s native CRM, Wastequip has also gained a deeper understanding of its customers.
“All of the interactions that a buyer has with your company need to be digitized if you're going to learn anything about your customers, and if you're going to predict and anticipate what they want to buy from you, when they want it."
— Aaron Sheehan, Vice President of Strategy and Partnerships, OroCommerce
Revenue Growth
Since building out its digital experience, Wastequip has hit its revenue goals every month. “The growth has been phenomenal,” Creese says. “We've seen nothing but an upward trend.”
Improved Customer Experience
Sales reps aren’t spending as much time placing orders for customers. Instead, Wastequip has given them a real-time self-service experience through its website. Customers can place orders through the website whenever they need without waiting.
“It's just part of the process, like you would have when you're registering on Amazon or any of those other large retail platforms," Creese says.
Increased Productivity
Wastequip’s ecommerce sites are driving productivity for its sales teams. This means sales reps can spend more time on higher‑value work, like supporting the company’s market expansion.
3 Best Practices for Other B2B Brands
Wastequip’s approach to building a best-of-breed B2B tech stack offers some important lessons for other industries similar to waste management that aren’t typically considered digital innovators:
1. Start With People and Pain Points, Not the Tech
Creese says change management is crucial to the success of any internal transformation. His team built buy-in by visiting Wastequip locations and speaking to frontline employees and sales reps.
“Speak to the people that do the work and actually have to deal with the order placement, the customer creation, and talk to them about that,” he says. “Talk to your field service reps and spend time internally. Go visit them. It's important to understand the pain points of the business.”
2. Educate Internally
Creese and Wastequip’s leadership positioned the website as a tool that would enable its sales team’s work — not replace it.
The company also empowered sales reps with actionable data, such as what customers weren’t interested in buying, which has helped reps see how these changes positively impact their everyday work.
3. Align Compensation Models
Wastequip also attributed any website sales for customers to their assigned sales rep. This good show of faith paid dividends.
“We had to really think through that as an organization and how we wanted to address it,” Creese says. “We came up with our own solution that worked for our company.”
What’s Next for Digital Innovators Like Wastequip?
Wastequip isn’t done evolving. It’s treating transformation as cyclical, and plans to accelerate its AI adoption next. The company has started using Salsify Intelligence Suite and its AI-powered capabilities to reduce repetitive tasks and save time.
"With the appropriate amount of time and investment and just trying to ask the right question and build the right prompt, we've been able to see some very positive growth utilizing Salsify's Intelligence Suite,” Creese says. “I’m using that as a new key to help my people respond more efficiently and spend less time doing maintenance and more time helping with impactful projects."
Freeing up your team’s time to help with more impactful projects: Your teams win, your business output wins, and your customers win — this is only possible with the right tech.
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