The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
How Dilworth Coffee Drives 60% of B2B Leads Through SEO | EP. #241
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What if SEO could become one of your strongest B2B sales channels?
In the 241st episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff sits down with Dilworth Coffee CEO Jeff Vojtar to discuss how the wholesale coffee company built a digital-first B2B e-commerce strategy that now generates roughly 60% of its leads through SEO.
Learn how Dilworth attracts high-intent B2B buyers, converts first orders into repeat customers, manages wholesale margins and fulfillment, expands into high-ticket products, and uses AI to scale its e-commerce and marketing efforts with a lean team.
What You'll Learn:
- How to use B2B SEO to generate qualified leads
- Why search intent can outperform traditional outbound sales
- How to increase repeat B2B purchases
- How to protect margins while managing freight and fulfillment
- How AI can support SEO, content, and customer segmentation
- How to scale B2B e-commerce without a massive team
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The real power to analyze and all that sales data is once we kind of we take what we know about the industry, the customers, and the trends, and then how do we program that into something, you know, through these automated models, and that's what we're learning is does the app send out stuff, does the CRM send it out?
Narrator:Welcome to the Ecomm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff:Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Ecomm Show. As usual, I'm your host Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Jeff Vojta, who is the CEO over at Dilworth Coffee. Jeff, how you doing, buddy? Ready for a good show?
Jeff Vojta:Doing pretty good this morning. Hope you are.
Narrator:Yeah, appreciate you doing on the show. I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. And so in this household, big coffee fans. Wife is she's got. I've flown to places to try coffee in certain areas at this point.
Jeff Vojta:That's awesome,
Narrator:But I also find it in this space very, very challenging. So when I get an opportunity to speak with someone like yourself that's actually been successful at it, it's always very interesting. So I like to start these off pretty stereotypically and just kind of give you the floor. Tell us a little bit about like your background, how you got started with Dilworth, and we'll take it from there.
Jeff Vojta:Sure. Yeah, I'm a CPA by training. I worked at a big four accounting firm, senior manager. Wanted a career change, so I started a coffee shop back in the '90s. Expanded a couple retail locations, but yeah, again, coffee was nearly non-existent. It was C store, something most people familiarized themselves with. Starbucks, 400 locations. So we were pioneers trying to figure out what people wanted, how to do it. We started roasting coffee from our retail locations. I sold the retail concentrated solely on wholesale, and our business and kind of how it grew was basically around what our customers needed and stuff to to make individually crafted drinks to order when they did it, and we just kind of built that centered around coffee and sourcing great coffees and things. So, you know, we migrated from the traditional boots on the ground, knock on doors to sell the product right now. Good old days, advertising. You know, traditional advertising, trade shows, and pivoted more towards a digital first e-commerce brand. Started the process in 2020-21, and the pandemic kind of accelerated those efforts.
Narrator:Yeah. Oh yeah. So one of the things I got to ask. I mean, obviously, I have like a marketing brain, so I kind of go into the marketing side usually first. And you know, with coffee, I mean, if I had to pick like five of the most competitive spaces, coffee would definitely be up there. Like it's like differentiating is a nightmare. Like how how have you been able to get it out there and kind of find that audience that that is more aligned with this?
Jeff Vojta:It yeah, it is very tough. I mean, most of our business, I would say 95% is what we call B2B. We're selling the coffee and things, coffee shops in order to make the drinks, we do have a direct-to-consumer website. It's about 5% of sales. But like you mentioned, coffee is hyper-competitive. Everybody's got something out there trying to be the next greatest thing. Working with our marketing agency is we kind of did this in the brand, and we sort of united and said, "Look, I mean, as we came up, people's preferences in coffee and stuff changed over time, so we just try to have a great cup of coffees, a variety of coffees. We do organic certified. We're kosher certified. We do the naturals and things like that, but we also do flavored coffees and we do a variety of package sizes and other products. And it's all about helping individuals make their individual drink, and I think this, you know, kind of, you know, every person approach, you know, I call them affordable, approachable coffees, has allowed us to kind of stand out. So it's really hard. Everybody wants the neatest, greatest micro lots, but I found it's tough to make money there. And again, the bread and butter, the espresso blends, the house blends, that kind of go out, and and our expertise and how we help our customers sell more of those to that to the consumer, the customers allowed us to kind of stand out. But the B 2b is definitely complicated, you know, compared to direct to consumer, and how do you reach those customers? And again, we want repeat sales. I mean, we most of our customers order two and a half times a month so.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I mean the the B2B side, even though you know it's still B2B e commerce, they're still they're still buying product from you. It's really not a huge difference there with with at least the audience that you're at least with the the process. Yeah, D2C, obviously, there's a lot. More in terms of like, especially with coffees, it's like social media and influencers and all that kind of stuff. B2B, I would say, is like could be even harder because they're busy. They're you know chances are once they find a coffee that works well in their shop, they're in a good spot. So how are you? Is it a marketing initiative or is it really more like kind of more traditional sales that's allowing you to kind of find these retail establishments.
Jeff Vojta:A little bit of all of that, but we really found you know starting around 2018, trying to do more direct sales and getting the people, the shop owners. They're busy, you know, they trying to get appointments. They don't want to talk. And again, there's a lot of coffee shops, but they're spread all out. So, how do you reach them? And more importantly, we want them at the startup phase. So, there again, when people are envisioning their idea or concept, they don't have a place to go visit. So, the internet is perfect for that. So, building what I call a more robust website with a lot more content and the pillar pages for SEO, and now the artificial intelligence AIO type stuff has been key to like just driving traffic to the site. We worked on that. Then we employed search engine marketing stuff to even try to go more because again our customers are scattered all over, mostly the East Coast. So again, what we found is the buyer, which is the shop owner, the manager, when they have a need or they're looking for products, and it can be I don't like my current coffee roaster. We need to do something different. I need a new piece of equipment, or my normal supplier is out of something and they start go searching. So we want to appear when they pick up and you know search for something, and then our service and our you know attention has got to win them back for those repeat business. So we sort of have that cycle or funnel to get them in there to try to get them to the first order, and then we try to nurture them for through the next three to five orders, and hopefully by then we kind of got them on a repeat cycle.
Narrator:Yeah, interesting. So is it? Do they set up like a subscription, or is it still just kind of a staying in touch with them until they need to reorder?
Jeff Vojta:Staying in touch when they need to order, trying to offer different services. Because again, we've looked, you know, their business volumes fluctuate so much. Subscriptions have been really, really tough in that front. Is like one week they may need 100 pounds of coffee and a couple cases of this, and the next week they need 50. So yeah, and again freshness and even a little coffee shop. They don't have a ton of storage space, so yeah, we we tried to build it. You know, order as you need it, and it shows up in a day or two.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, you know, even with brands that are more DTC that want to go B2B It's always a to them. It's like a whole different mind shift and figuring out like how do I go after that and like so to your point, obviously especially for coffee shops, it's great to get to them when they're first opening because they may not have made a decision yet, and then figuring out if they're thinking about changing or not. It's obviously a little bit harder, but when you're trying to find people that are potentially opening up shops, is that been from direct approaches, or is that actually more from like you said with like SEO initiatives and things like that and they're finding you that way?
Jeff Vojta:I would probably 60% of the leads are SEO type stuff coming to the website. I'm I need help in trying to open my shop, the big part are just kind of referrals of knowing people, current customers, industry partners, and things is like okay, I'm you know they've heard they got the lead from somewhere and says okay this group can help you plan your shop, get the equipment in there, you know, and other things that you need to do to get open. So I mean, in our business, the B2B, the referral from trusted sources is key.
Narrator:Yeah, yeah. I mean that would make sense, right? The referrals, partners, things like that. Past customers are obviously always going to be fantastic. Do you do anything in terms of like advertising initiatives, anything like that? Like I would think, like with gated content, like you know, X things you need to know to open a coffee shop or something like that.
Jeff Vojta:We we put a lot of free stuff out there. We've tried to figure out a gated or a subscription and short videos or how tos and kind of and we toyed with some subscription stuff. But in us, we looked at it we're a small team and 15 people total in the company. So it's a you know initiative wise is just something. It's like okay, sounds good. We'll kind of get to it. So right now, we're trying to, what I call is transfer all the knowledge, collective knowledge that people have in their heads, and get it into some kind of content or something we can use. And we're trying to, you know, to shoot a lot more video and stuff and capture it and figure out how to put the snippets and things on there. But I mean, honestly, it's it's a great idea, and I think it's you know make it easy for people to get to, but it's a bigger challenge.
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Andrew Maff:Yeah, it's probably it's obviously a longer sales cycle in some scenarios too, with let's talk about the operational side for a second here. 3PL, your own warehouse. What do you? What's your fulfillment?
Jeff Vojta:We have one warehouse. We do it all here, so it's we you know we do the coffee roasting and production, so we're manufacturing, and then we're a distributor of the syrups and the flavorings and a lot of the other stuff, so all of us got to kind of come in here. Orders all come in, and then you know we have a fairly quick lead time for B2B, so we usually try to process them within one to two business days, and you know with one to two day transit time. So we're shipping out through different carriers, and again, it's all about that supply chain cycle. I mean, if you've been in any kind of restaurant, you'll see big trucks going around delivering the things, or in grocery stores. So you know they just have that really high frequency and touch.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And owning that whole supply chain is obviously a lot better on the margin. So how does how does that work? Like obviously B2B, you know they're purchasing from you at a bulk, so they're expecting to not spend full retail, which then means that's obviously affecting your margin. So you have to do significantly more volume. Coffee, you know, well it's not heavy in any way, shape, or form. They order a good amount, so that can get heavy. So freight gets up there. What's tell me a little bit about how you're able to. I mean, you're the CPA, so you're going to know this one. This is probably your wheelhouse of like, what's the? How do you map out margins versus freight and where you're shipping and all that fun stuff?
Jeff Vojta:It and and we have a couple different programs, so we're constantly kind of doing this. So as the weights and things change, we're negotiating with carriers for what we call an optimal box size. So there's you know we we want to be within say 30 to 49 pounds. We want don't want to go over because then the rates shoot up. So we try to maintain it there. They're heavier orders, so as your weights get up, they you know offer different kind of discounted things for a lot of boxes going to one location. And again, you can imagine a coffee shop; they could have 10-20, packages that weigh you know 200 pounds, 300, and then we have customers that order by the pallet. So we have a you know truck comes in here and use LTL carriers. So we again margins on wholesale side are thin, and they have to be just in order for everything to kind of work on there. So I mean freight can be 10 to 15% of the sales cost. So you know we you know we try to offer programs because again we know it's expensive for everybody. Order bigger. We have free freight options starting at 850 up to $2,000 to ship across the country, and some freight subscription models for people who need to order more frequently, and just it kind of caps what their freight expense is in a month, and we run margin analysis and check it periodically, and negotiate with FedEx and UPS to make sure we've got you know competitive rates and study the current models. and It's amazing how much my business partners are engineer by training, so trying to figure out the weights and the boxes and how we how we can pack and then code all of that to help you know calculate some of that on the back end.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, you must have like an operational dream team between you being a CPA and engineers in the background. Like that's that's got to be fantastic.
Jeff Vojta:It's it's good in many ways. Sometimes we get too lost in the details, and we have to again. We look at try to average it out, so you know it's like okay, we you know certain things we're going to make it, and then just trying to figure out the velocity of inventory items and keep them going.
Andrew Maff:Yeah.
Jeff Vojta:And that's you know is we're trying to again how to compete with the others out there on the internet, and they're constantly innovating. So we're trying to do it too, and test it and roll it out as fast as we can. But you know, I look at
Andrew Maff:Analysis paralysis.
Jeff Vojta:Yeah, you get big companies. Oh, they got 100 person group doing all of that, and yeah, we've got three.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, you does it make? I guess it's got to make it a little bit easier since you're manufacturing, though, right? Since you got more control over that. Makes your margins a little bit easier to play with, as opposed to like I would assume not manufacturing margins going to get even worse.
Jeff Vojta:Yeah, I would say for items that we manufacture, the margins are probably double. It's on there, and which we love, but we also got a lot of overhead and a lot of capex in order to do that. But it's a it's fixed over a given operating range, and the other items I mean are great because again, any coffee shop that's in business is, I would say, 80% off and probably needs something that we sell. So they're going to be searching for it at some point in time, and hopefully we can get them onto the coffee side and improve the overall economics of the ordering,.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, makes sense. What's the growth plan? Like, how do you how do you speed things up? Is that the goal right now?
Jeff Vojta:Yes. So we've been, you know, as we moved from a closed portal where you had to go sign up, register an account, go see pricing and stuff, we switched it to more of an open catalog. Just you know, it's out there for everybody to see. It's where some of the industry leading people are, and now we're yeah want to grow and again attacking different size companies. So you know people ordering you know $100 versus you know 5000 on an order. So they all need some different things. So whereas we're trying to do new programs, options out there, we're trying to be much more attuned to pricing and skew velocity, and just make you know more frequent adjustments again to push it through to the search engines and get people in there to optimize orders. So we feel like we've done a lot of testing we're ready to do things we're getting ready to add coffee equipment, coffee makers, espresso machines, and things to the website, which we think would be critical.
Narrator:There you go.
Jeff Vojta:You know they're high ticket items, from $1,000 to you know 15-20,000.
Andrew Maff:Those things are not cheap.
Jeff Vojta:It's the sell cycle, the information that you have to have, the after sale process of you know guiding and making sure the equipment shows up is, as well as you know the fraud factor that you know we don't you know we want to make sure we get paid for doing that. So you know again in terms of growth, we feel like this could really accelerate it. We feel it's important to again try to get those startup coffee shops that we can migrate into the regular thing. So it's that razor and razor blade concept getting out there.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, those are obviously you know significantly higher ticket items. Is the thought process that you're going to bring those in and house those in your warehouse, or are you doing more of like a drop shipping model?
Jeff Vojta:Most of them will probably drop ship. There are so many different options that people want, and programming some of that in the web is tough. But we also would love like call up and talk to one of our coffee shop experts. So we, do you really need that? You know, $2,000 option. Do you need this? And again, other services. You know, for new construction and things is you know we've got people who've made the drink, so trying to bring that expertise. And again, our goal is we want them to have stuff that's going to let them be successful and make money. So have the right stuff in there and and show up. So that's one of our ways is leaning into that service aspect and consulting to group a package and do that. So I think that allow us to be more competitive than just trying to sell it and stock it, and and you know, and again, these are things people sometimes my machine's down. I need it right away, but I mean, I you know, they're just it's just tough, and you need warranties and things. We want them to have the maximum, so it's rarely you're going to find something that's immediate shift anywhere in the industry.
Andrew Maff:Oh yeah, and I I am a huge huge fan of that model. Like the I always I'm always telling brands, especially ones that want to get into B2B, that that's you know it's not always about the product that you're selling, but it's also about the convenience that you can provide. Because like especially in your in your scenario, right? Like it's coffee. Someone wanted to buy some coffee. Granted, bulk is a little bit different, but if they wanted to buy some coffee, like ah, they could just go to Amazon get it there. But if you become like the place to go to for coffee shop needs outside of just the coffee that you sell, then it becomes more of a: That's just where I go to get my coffee, and maybe they have a rep there or something like that, and so like just drop shipping automatically opens up, you know, the offering that you have, and it attracts a lot of people. Then you figure out what works well, and if there's certain products that you're drop shipping that customers seem to love more than others, then maybe you private label your own and you make your own, and then you just pay them out. So it's a very interesting like learning process to be able to do that type of stuff too, right?
Jeff Vojta:Exactly, and it's kind of-I mean-is we've talked about the ideas. It's like, can we add value? How do we do that? You know, as we try to build out the model, you know, looking at different 3PL warehouses and stuff to try to help with some of the distribution and things on there. But we also love the fact that you know how we package the stuff that high touch, because again, our customers need these things in order to make the drinks and get their sales. So we kind of we feel very strongly we we want to be dependable. We don't want you to lose and get lost. Yeah, packages aren't there. So as we look to grow and expand, how do we maintain that high touch concept and you know and be a dependable partner to these coffee shops all over.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, yeah, completely. One of the things I always like to ask, because you know we do these episodes, and it's always like someone comes on, and it's like, yeah, my business is awesome, and here's what we're doing, and everything's great, and blah blah. Like, let's let's be honest. There's always something, right? Especially business owners. What's kind of keeping you up right now. What's what's eating at you?
Jeff Vojta:Just how to bring these things together in the e-commerce realm. I mean, I'm you know, 30-some year old accountant. I grew up in this business, knocking on the door, selling face to face, trying to figure out all the various tools and go on there and the Google Analytics. And it's like, what is this stuff telling us? What's the shopping cart features and platform and the apps telling us? And again, it's like, do we hire somebody? Do we go find a team member? And again, we we can see these things working, but how do we try to accelerate? So I mean, all of these, it sounds easy to post it on the web, but to think through the end-to-end, the complete operational side is just is complex because again, it's like, oh, I'd love to bring in that line. Can I repeat it? Can I have enough skus and depth on it? You know, what happens? You know, is the manufacturer dependable or the minimum order? And then getting it all added and you know the marketing. So it's just these little things, and it's like, okay, I don't have 100-person team that has this depth of experience. So we're doing a lot of trying to teach it, and how do we blend that into a CRM system and apps and things. So I'm like, I just look at it, and I get overwhelmed by all the how everything's interrelated and the intricacies, and it's like, okay, let's let's step back and pick one and go forward.
Andrew Maff:It's a it's a it's a big benefit of of digital marketing and and just e commerce in general being able to have all that data on like every little tiny thing. But then it's also a absolute nightmare because you've got so much data. It's kind of like I don't even really know how much of this is actually relevant. Sometimes it's just vanity metrics, which is like who actually cares about some of this stuff. Very interesting. Totally makes a lot of sense. Are you leveraging AI or anything like that internally to kind of evaluate some of that stuff?
Jeff Vojta:We've been using AI a lot to just help generate, write some content, image cleanups, and things. We from the SEO side to make sure we've got the right tags and the keywords. That's been a huge help. So it's allowed us to get a lot of pieces and things and and do it ourselves. We used to like we pay consultants to do it and oh we can index three blog articles a month or whatever. And we're like, okay, no, we're turning out three or four a week, and the AI has been wonderful to do that, as well as researching the content, verifying, you know, some of our things. So we we are now trying to use the tools a lot more to build in automations and things around customer order size, frequency patterns, changes, and target more specific offers communications directly out to them. So we, the real power to analyze and all that sales data is once we kind of we take what we know about the industry, the customers, and the trends, and then how do we program that into something, you know, through these automated models, and that's what we're learning is does the app send out stuff? Does the CRM send it out?
Narrator:Yeah, yeah. No, I mean it's it's it will probably definitely help with some of the stuff you called out, but it's also another one where it's like it's just so much information. You could ask it anything. Like once you start feeding it all in, then it's like, what do you want to know? And you're like, I don't even know at this point.
Jeff Vojta:Well, that's the thing. It's showing up, and I'm like, "Well, that's kind of great, and it's interesting, but it is a BS answer, you know, when it's going to come in. Is it meaningful? And otherwise, I look at it's like, "Yeah, that it makes no sense. Obviously, I didn't feed the parameters incorrectly, and it's like, "But I got to figure out how to how to have it produce better answers, and you know, call it out when it's not right.
Narrator:Yeah, yeah, it's definitely not perfect yet. Definitely not perfect.
Jeff Vojta:Yeah, and it's I need a few more hours a day to try to dig into it more.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, you and me both. Jeff, this was great. I really appreciate your time. I don't want to take up too much more. I know you're super busy there. I'd love to give you the floor. Tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and of course, more about Dilworth Coffee.
Jeff Vojta:Definitely, it the easiest place to go is dilworthcoffee.com. D I L W O R T H Coffee, and then our B2B site, which is really where most of the action is. You can get a link from there. Just go to pro.dilworthcoffee.com, and you know anything that you would need for your coffee business, you should be able to find there.
Andrew Maff:Your the man, thank you, sir. Appreciate it, Jeff. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff. On whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. Have a good one.
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm Show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The Ecomm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to. Accelerate their growth. Go to bluetusker.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the Ecomm Show!
