Dechay Watts is the VP of Digital Marketing Services at Smith Commerce, a performance commerce agency helping brands scale digital sales and transformation across the customer lifecycle. She began her career in PR before moving into SEO and content strategy, co-founding SPROUT Content, a national content marketing agency later acquired by WPP, and has spent more than 20 years studying how B2B companies actually earn repeat business, and why most of the data and technology they buy to do it never gets used.

Justin King sat down with Dechay to talk about the problem hiding underneath every conversation about loyalty, personalization, and customer data: most B2B companies have the tools, but nobody has activated them.

Dechay explains why B2B loyalty has almost nothing to do with points or rebates, and everything to do with removing friction from a customer's day to day operations. She walks through why procurement teams stay loyal to suppliers who make their jobs easier rather than ones offering the best discount, why companies keep investing in customer data platforms without a plan for what to do with the data once it's centralized, and the real difference between a CDP and a CRM.

They also get into the difference between segmentation and true personalization, how AI agents are starting to take over the pattern recognition that loyalty programs depend on (reorder timing, service windows, inventory alignment), and what it actually looks like to personalize for a buying committee instead of a single buyer.

Key idea: Loyalty isn't a program you add on. It's what's left when you've made a customer's job easier than anyone else will.