Integrating Systems In B2B eCommerce With Jeremy Rudolph From Celigo

Unknown Speaker : 0:07

Welcome to Episode Six and the brutal truth about the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I'm your co host, Isaiah Bollinger. So I have the brutal truth about sales in the back of my mind. That's another podcast. That's how I kind of stole their name for our name the hard, the hard truth. Hi, I'm Timothy Peterson. I'm a b2b and b2c e commerce expert I guess you would say and currently I'm a client advocate for trellis. Also, if, if folks are happy to listen in and welcome to our podcast, I just want to mention our one of our sponsors punch out to go. They're a global b2b integration company specializing in connecting commerce business platforms with the E procurement if you could say that three times fast Any RP applications and their IPS technology links businesses applications to automate the flow of purchasing data. So thank you to punch out to go as one of our great sponsors here on the hard truth about b2b e commerce. Thanks, Sam. And I'm excited to introduce our guest, Jeremy rudall. From from Sligo, Jeremy, we've been working together for a little while now. And you've got, you know, over a decade of experience in the technology space, obviously now with integration company seleka going before that, doing other kinds of integrations and logistics so quite a bit of like SAS experience, technology experience. I'm sure you've worked with all sorts of different retailers, b2b companies, manufacturers, distributors, kind of, you know, everything across the board. So yeah, well, thanks for being here. won't want to hear more about it. Kind of what you're all about.

Unknown Speaker : 2:02

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks Isaiah and Tim really appreciate the opportunity number one to be a part of be a part of this podcast. And also just want to mention, if you're if you're not tuning in, live on video, you'll notice my background is is black here, definitely wanted to support the Black Lives Matter movement that we have going on right now in our country, and just make sure that I'm making my statement and doing my part. So just a little bit about me. I've been in Silicon Valley software for a little over the last decade, designing, developing, deploying and operationalizing software as a service and cloud architecture solutions for every type of business so ever anything from SMB to mid market to enterprise, so I've worked with companies such as Joe Smith in his garage selling widgets, ecommerce, all the way up to companies the size of Walmart, Alcatel wireless, Tencent centric, connected home and everything in between. My main focus has been on the sales side, I've worked with multiple folks on different teams across cross functionally coordinating across different departments. And I've, I've essentially been able to bring together some of the brightest minds in, in commerce, but also put together some structures within not only e commerce omni channel, in b2b but also within the supply chain. So I'm really excited to be here today. Really appreciate again, the opportunity, and thank you for having me.

Unknown Speaker : 3:55

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is gonna be really, really good for people. out there. And the reason that we've done this is to kind of like, try and remove the hidden secrets of b2b commerce. You know, b2b, we feel like there's just so much more complex than b2c. I mean, a lot of b2c companies are kind of getting away with the simplicity of you know, spin up Shopify, do some Facebook ads, and all sudden they're making millions of dollars. Obviously, it's not that simple. But you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's a little bit easier to execute technically, why than it is in b2b, with b2b um, the reason that we actually you know, even know you guys, as you know, trellis was doing a lot of integrations for b2c and b2b but, and b2b, we found that integrations were just like the backbone because these companies typically have an E RP system, right? Like most companies and b2b of NetSuite. I know you guys you know, have a strong NetSuite background. Whatever you know in for si p i mean we can name all the ER P is they have it eirp that's like basically powering their company. And obviously, there's a lot more infrastructure, but that seems to be like the core like central piece of most of these b2b companies, and then all sudden, it's like, oh crap, we got to do e commerce. And our e commerce system is not the same as a NetSuite, you know, some people might use WooCommerce. But typically, it's like NetSuite and Magento or NetSuite, and Shopify or, you know, something, I'm using that as an example, but some sort of two different systems, and hence, Sligo, and that's kind of where you guys are born, is bridging that gap. So, um, I want to talk about like, why do you think it's so hard? And obviously, you know, you guys are trying to make it easier, but, but generally, I think it's been historically hard for companies to overcome this integration hurdle. And I think there's lots of reasons for that. But what I want to hear from you kind of why do you think it's been so hard for companies over the last, you know, what's called the last five years?

Unknown Speaker : 5:59

Yeah, so There's, there's a couple ways that we can look at it. So I'm going to take, want to take some of the things that that you said, and I'm gonna probably mix in a few of the things that do the things I know here. So in terms of let's we can talk about all different sizes and shapes the company. So I want to make sure that this is relevant to share every time. It's out there, not just not just large, not just small, but you know, every everybody in between as well. So, oftentimes when a company starts, again, Joe Smith in Kentucky selling widgets out of his garage, he may just be starting with let's just let's just use Shopify or Magento as an example, a simple a simple e commerce website Shopify has made it very simple to spin up a website, I think overnight now with basic templates, but essentially what what you can do there is is turn on a store sell those widgets out of your garage and be up and running now. Great. But what happens when your business starts to take off? What happens when Oh, e commerce, let's just let's just use the e commerce case for a minute. We're not talking about b2b yet. But we're looking at a product is it's either trend, I call it the pet rock trend, or it's now like in the times of COVID-19. It's an essential good. So I'm selling toilet paper on the website, and all of a sudden everybody's wanting to buy it, right. So it's a, it's very quick to market and it gets a lot of traction. Now, with that, simultaneously, you're trying to figure out multiple things within your business. So you're not just looking at, well, how do I produce my product fast enough at this point, ply level and how do I make sure that I have my supply chain infrastructure built out properly? How do I make that? I'm also thinking about how do I make decisions on do I ship this error? Or do I ship this overseas? So there's, there's right especially right now there's a huge cost differential for that. Historically, the margins on products that were shipped that are shipped by air are very high. So we're talking electronics and pharmaceuticals. However, we're seeing a lot, you know, just industry wide. The error rates right now are four to six times greater. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of folks that have kind of, I'm going to just say, struck gold in a good position that are using those error rates, even though they may be giving up on margin to satisfy the demands of their customers. Now, at the same time to keep it on point here. At the same time, there's also potential retailers reaching out to Joe in his garage. Joe is trying to figure out how do I, how do I? How do I even work with these retailers? Right? Like, yes, a bunch of documents, and I don't you know, I just signed a deal with them. They just sent me a bunch of documents, I don't know what to do with them. I have to send products to their facilities, I have to integrate with some system I've never heard of, I don't know anything about integration. And at the same time I'm looking at, I can't fulfill my product anymore because my garage isn't working. So now I'm in a three PL scenario or three PL situation or third party logistics for the folks who don't know. Um, so I'm using an outsource warehouse facility to do all of my shipping and pick back of my goods. So it's there's a there's a huge challenge for Joe. But not only for Joe, some of the larger companies as well trying to figure out how do I how do I keep as my business is scaling very quickly? How do I keep a handle on all these different pieces that are moving at the same time and hire the right people build the right build the right infrastructure in terms of my supply chain build the right systems, and that pertains not only the b2c piece, but the b2b piece is gonna, you know, generally be more complex and a lot more and just a lot more difficult to get sorted out because the resources are not available today.

Unknown Speaker : 10:51

Gotcha. So so you're so you would say that part of it is just, it just so there's there's so much complexity around all All these different systems and for the average b2b company, it's probably a little bit overwhelming when, you know, retailer, ABC and D or like any day, you got to integrate with my life legacy, you know, whatever e RP or eating, you know, here's our Ei documents or whatever. And all of a sudden, they're like, Whoa, like we're not, you know, we're not CTOs. We're not technical software engineer people. They're just kind of overwhelmed. So you think that there's just kind of like a, what, I guess, would you describe the challenge of these integrations as just like, kind of like, a lack of knowledge and kind of clients, just companies being overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential complexities that they're facing? or How would you describe that?

Unknown Speaker : 11:44

Yeah, I think it's a it's it's not just that but I think the the way that b2b has been set up in retail, specifically, is it's archaic. We talked about DDI electronic data interchange, it's it's not the oldest method out there like as 400. But it is a you know, it is a it is a pretty, you know, old method of, of integrating and there's specific rules and specific file types in specific documents that are traded across, across the board. And especially if I, you know, if I'm new, if I'm an entrepreneur and I'm new to this space, it's, you know, usually I'm overwhelmed as an entrepreneur. And that's what, throughout my history, I've worked with thousands of brands just throughout my, my career in in the valley here. And that's, that's, that's one piece now. Every time somebody is going to work with a retailer or quote unquote trading partner, they're going to they're going to get a couple different things in sometimes only when they ask So one is, they're going to get what are called retail compliance guidelines. So how to pack the product, how to label the product, how to send the product in, and they have to 100% make sure that it's set up properly. Otherwise, they're going to get what are called chargebacks. And it's a business for retailers, they make money off of it. It's it's probably one of the world's most well kept secrets in the space. The other piece is so so that goes really hand in hand, Isaiah with what you were saying is, the other pieces, the technical requirements and ensuring that you have a you have set up your business in a way where you're communicating appropriately with that retailer of, hey, when are the goods arriving? When are you know, have the goods been delivered? Am I going to be short shipping is there going to be thinking that are coming in that my supplier may have sent by mistake. So all of those things if kind of in parallel to, to the, to the to the product coming in, the systems have to be talking to each other. Because if they're not talking to each other, at the end of the day, your there's going to be one there's there could be chargebacks, too. There's a lack of visibility and in three The biggest thing is you could get dropped by that retailer.

Unknown Speaker : 14:33

The last thing that nobody wants Yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 14:35

let me let me interject for a second because once I don't even know if Isaiah gnosis but you know I was a retail exact for years before I moved to e commerce. So I was a boss at Old Navy, a guess at Bloomingdale's at Macy's, a whole variety of places and it was ridiculously complicated. I mean, I have to be really blunt about that. A lot of the a lot of the things that we did were just astoundingly antiquated. Even At the time I was doing it before I moved into e commerce, it was just a very, very strange, you know, way of approaching things and it hasn't necessarily all gotten that much better. Because I've worked with a lot of, you know, e commerce players on b2b and b2c side now in apparel, you know, selling either wholesale or selling direct to consumer. And you know, the ones that are selling direct to consumer, it's like food, this is easier, right? And the ones who are selling wholesale to like Nordstrom or you know, others, it's, there's still pieces of the puzzle that are very complicated for people, you know, to figure out and they need, you know, folks like you in order to make that a lot easier.

Unknown Speaker : 15:39

Yeah. And, Tim, from your experience, like when you were when you were an exec on the retail side, were you seeing a lot of these processes, just I guess, from the retail perspective, not even not even from the merchants perspective. But were you seeing a lot of these processes, automated or were they more more done in a manual way? What did you Did you see

Unknown Speaker : 16:01

I was there really? Well, my career goes pretty far back, but basically 80s into the 90s. And I left retail in 2000. So that long ago, but I was it, they were they were going through processes of automation, you know, really moving away from like the faxing of things and the hand delivery of things and sort of those requirements that was happening in the early years of me, in that part of my career, it was moving to an automation phase. But really, the unfortunate thing is that it was still heavily siloed, you know, way too late, you know, so as they started, you know, had, let's say a lot of these businesses had catalog divisions, for example, there was Macy's by mail or Bloomingdale's by mail. They would automate separately in those divisions. And then when e commerce along was like, well, is that another division? Or do we have a grow out of, you know, the catalog division and how do these things speak to each other? And so, you know, it's one of the reasons that I've really spent a lot of time in transfer. projects over the years because people really just didn't correct that stuff early enough or didn't get

Unknown Speaker : 17:06

ahead of the game.

Unknown Speaker : 17:08

So automation is short, but then they automated, nice, very separate ways. So not very useful to the consumer, whoever it was. It's good to hear about the Genesis and then the silos that you know, that you're talking about. And a lot of those silos kind of translate into where we see silos today.

Unknown Speaker : 17:26

So that's awesome insight. Very powerful.

Unknown Speaker : 17:28

Yeah. And I still see those silos. So one of the, I just want to kind of bring it back to what I pass is, and it's kind of a newer technology. Like, when I bring up iPads, I would say, like, very rarely does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Unknown Speaker : 17:44

You got to repeat it.

Unknown Speaker : 17:45

You got it. Oh, sorry. Did I cut off for a second? Yeah. So I wanted to bring it back to iPad or integration platform as a service as I guess the that's the correct term. Right, bass. Um, and I think that the, it's a newer technology, right? Like, I think the average person doesn't really know what it is, and even probably the average company and b2b doesn't know what it is. And so what you guys are doing in Sligo as an iPad, like I wanted to kind of describe that for people like, you're kind of sitting in the middle to try and simplify and bridge you can't obviously fix these legacy issues with other companies but you're trying to help kind of like bridge the gap between all of these, you know, different systems in a simpler way, kind of in the middle of everything that you could be integrating with basically, but um, do you mind touching on that a little bit Jeremy and just kind of explain it for for those who have no idea what I pass is?

Unknown Speaker : 18:45

Yeah, absolutely. And I pass is is a new term integration platform as a service as I Isaiah as mentioned, it's in quote, unquote, newer term. However, it iPads has been around for a little while. It's just something that Nobody really talked about until more recently, within the last couple of years, I'd say just just because there wasn't as historically there wasn't as much reliance on cloud applications. And within the last, I'd say, five, five plus years, five ish years, businesses have grown from a very small handful of applications. I think I think the list is called the David's list. There's like tons of for, for applications and number of applications in within a business. But essentially, the number of applications on average per business has grown exponentially across the board. So what we tend to see with that, within these businesses is that with those particular applications, data starts to become silo and especially with with a platform Like, so Lego. What businesses are looking to do is they're looking to integrate applications across the value chain within their business. So we're, you know, they're they're evaluating how do I integrate with my materials resource planning? How do I integrate with my product lifecycle management? How do I integrate with my eirp? So I think you mentioned something earlier, but like, the source of truth system, so how do I make sure that I integrate with that source of truth system and ensure that, you know, my while at the same time on pleasing my finance team, that I'm also communicating with my customer service team, if I'm the one who's procuring and selling the goods on the on the sales side, right, and I think that's, that's really important that all those departments are talking to each other and today, it's done, really between a lot of data silos, manual processes and in spreadsheets, and there's a lot of room for error within that. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 21:07

Yeah. And you guys are help helping automate all that and get basically getting people out of spreadsheets and into the cloud and in theory, the

Unknown Speaker : 21:16

Yeah, the Sligo plug is essentially to help automate applications across the value chain. So, data's are in silos. How do we make sure that everything's talking to each other and that your business is running more efficient, so you potentially don't need to have to be hiring extra people to do a bunch of manual work. The ROI that we teach we typically see is exponential we just had a case study come out the other day for my amigo and my amigo is a b2b customer they sell they sell their their like car they're like almost like wheelchairs or they're like little motor scooters They do I think they're solely b2b. Right? But how do you integrate all your systems in what Ryan was saying it my amigo is that he was getting 10 x ROI on about right after Sileo came in on a project that that he was sitting on for two years within his own internal IT department.

Unknown Speaker : 22:23

And I think that's a lot of what's happening in b2b, I think, um, you know, b2b companies are reluctant. It's almost like they're scared to automate because if they automate it, they're like, Oh, well, we're gonna automate all these jobs away. Which is, yeah, you know, so I don't want to laugh at that. But like, it's I think there's like a reluctance in some cases, because it is true, right? Like we would you know, I'm sure that's a pushback you guys might get, you know,

Unknown Speaker : 22:52

partially and I think, you know, uh, you know, if you're talking to an executive like a CFO, C, level, executive In a company, that may be intent, but in terms of a lot of so I work with a lot of partners who are focused on utilization utilization KPI. And a lot of times what what ends up happening is that there there are people potentially get sucked into things that they shouldn't be working on and we're not we're not billable hours, right? And so how do you take those people off of the stuff that's basically causing noise, right? And then and then put them into the job that they're supposed to be doing. And that's, I think, is is just kind of redirecting the resource into the right place versus versus cutting down on your employer cutting down on the number of employees. Yeah, that's another perspective.

Unknown Speaker : 23:53

Yeah, I love that perspective.

Unknown Speaker : 23:55

One, and I just want to add to that for a second. I mean, a lot of the analyses that I've seen You know, businesses and it could be early stage it could be mature, that are going through automations is that, you know, you, you really do have to look at that org chart pretty carefully. And automations generally do not mean, you know, firing it, you know, it means repurposing, and often you're repurposing, you know, and really kind of shaking things up in a way that does focus on revenue or customers, as opposed to all of these tasks that were taking too much time, you know, for people. So really, it's something that's generally pretty positive for almost any business. So, you know, we're not replacing It's not like that that dystopian idea of what's coming in and taking every job away. It's a very different sort of thing in in reality for most businesses.

Unknown Speaker : 24:48

Yeah, and I know that the

Unknown Speaker : 24:51

I'll

Unknown Speaker : 24:52

keep this one short, but I know that the term digital transformation gets thrown around a lot. Just in the space, but typically what we see just to just define digital transformation from what I've seen, at least, as I see businesses, evaluating efficiencies within, to reduce the amount of time spent on tasks, like Tim said, that don't really need to be performed by a human, but are not that particular humans actual role so that digital transformation is not just across a single application, it's across the entire business.

Unknown Speaker : 25:35

You go, gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I know we're gonna run out of time here, and I still have four topics that we want to cover. So let's keep let's keep moving.

Unknown Speaker : 25:48

So So yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 25:51

Tim, did you want to get into the next one?

Unknown Speaker : 25:54

One of my favorite topics, and you can answer this in any way you wish. In our listeners are always very interested. Things like success and failure, right? I mean, it's just, it's not an either or. Right. I mean, it's not an either or it's like this business is only done successful things. This one's only failed. But I think there are certain certain things that businesses do that, you know, help them be successful in certain things that they have done that help, unfortunately, make them fail. So, do you have any, like ideas? They're particularly for b2b commerce that cause a business to fail or something that they're completely neglecting or really make them winners? Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker : 26:34

Yeah. So one of my biggest pieces of advice across any any business, entrepreneur or large business, small business is fail fast. And because there is always if you're not failing, if you're not failing, you're not learning. Number one, in my opinion, but also number two is if you're not failing fast, you're burning cash. So essentially what what do I mean by that? So let's just let's just talk real quickly, I'll go into I'll go into the lack of systems first. And then I'll talk about the supply chain infrastructure. And what that means just from a probably mostly from a fulfillment perspective, which is where most of my experiences true. I'm the first is with with the lack of systems. So a lot of businesses and I was just talking to one today, this morning, that that was taking spreadsheets out of Shopify, and putting them into their warehouse, their fulfillment warehouses, warehouse management system or DBMS. And, and that's Look, that's one of the inefficiencies we talked about earlier, a type of one Those efficiencies. But if you're if you're doing that today, in my eyes like that's, that's, that's almost classified as a failure. And I'd see I'd say, keep doing it until you get an automate automated process up and running and take that data. Right now it's sitting in a silo sitting in Shopify, or it's sitting in in the WNS, right in in when the the warehouse ships it, you got to put it back into Shopify. So those customers get those emails, right. So if you can fail fast and figure out a way to get those two systems connected, you're very quickly going to meet you're immediately going to have efficiencies within your business. And you're going to be able to refocus your resources into the right things as an operational process. 100 orders didn't make it down to the warehouse today. What happened? My customer is not telling me that it's more of a Being proactive and managing that through a system today, right? And how do I have that visibility in that error management? If you don't have the system in place to control it, it isn't there. The second, the second piece, so that's, that's just one use case. And I have a lot of them, but I'm going to keep it to one just in the nature

Unknown Speaker : 29:22

Wreckit. One is,

Unknown Speaker : 29:25

the second one is just on the supply chain side. So I, it's it's hard to evaluate fulfillment, especially if you hadn't done it before. And you know, most of the time for larger companies are going through an RFP type of process for that particular for that particular part of their business, because they have experienced they've done it before, but for the folks who don't have the experience, choosing a warehouse and being able to integrate quickly. So this is another piece of integration It is number one, but also being able to pull out very quickly. So what I mean by failing fast in this scenario is you choose a warehouse for b2b commerce. That warehouses is mainly focused on b2c, they don't know how to move pallets, they don't know how to ship necessarily cases, they don't know how to move truckloads in schedule freight and do all of that stuff that is normal for a b2b facility. So it's ensuring in simultaneously you can flip it around and a b2b warehouse may not know how to do b2c. So you may structure your, your fulfillment in a way where you're using one facility, a specialized and b2c, one facility that specialize or one company one combination limited to a single facility, but one company that specializes in b2b one company that specializes in b2c that knows the business inside and out that has done this before that can almost be your advocate and be your partner. versus just performing a service. And at the end of the day, like, Hey, we're gonna make money off of this either way, because the fulfillment center generally knows that they got you because it's so it's generally it's so hard and take so long and get integrated with their system with with an iPad, like like slowly goes, you're very easily able to turn, turn on and turn off a warehouse, almost I don't want to say overnight, but within within a week or two. So it makes it

Unknown Speaker : 31:32

simple and easy. So So would you say it's fair to say that, you know, touching, you know, kind of like, simplifying success or failure, so complicated, right, but for just to kind of get people value here listening, that a big part of successful failure in b2b is integrations kind of automating systems in a way. That's smart. And there's a process behind it like, you know, you guys do some error logging stuff. So if something fails, you can see Oh, like This API failed or the data didn't get transferred over so you know where the breakdown is. So kind of having more sophisticated automation around that. And then also having some thought behind your logistics and fulfillment to handle. I almost like to forget b2c and b2b for a second, like almost like a variety of types of orders. You have like, your large pallet truckload orders, and then you have your like smaller, maybe mid sized wholesale orders, and then you have your like one piece item, you know, single item orders, so like being able to kind of have a process that fulfill all of that through ecommerce and all integrated together. would you would you kind of agree that that's like a big part of success and failure. Like I'm trying to really simplify it for people.

Unknown Speaker : 32:47

Yeah, no, thanks for Yeah, thanks for doing that. Yeah, I would agree. So to even break it down further, very simplistic. Habits plan for shipping to retailers have a plan for shipping to wholesale retail stores, small retail stores, so they call them musical cartons. And then have a plan for shipping direct to consumer, both in systems and the physical infrastructure.

Unknown Speaker : 33:13

Absolutely. Awesome. Yeah, this is this is super, super helpful. I think it's gonna really help a lot of people here. Because a lot of times in e commerce we get so stuck on the the flashy. That's why I want to do this podcast, people get stuck on the design and the flashy. What does the homepage look like? And it's like, none of that matters if you can't get the product out the door, right?

Unknown Speaker : 33:35

Like, it's also the 100%. And it's also like, how do I buy? Like if I want to buy something online myself, I want to buy online and shipped to the store. But if you think about that, at the end of the day, what's happening with the supply chain? Like the systems have to talk to each other, right? So if I'm buying online and shipping to store Do you have a way to aggregate all of those orders that are going to that particular store? down in your fulfillment center and create one carton to go there to create to be the most cost efficient, right? most, most likely the answer is no, because this is something that's so new with COVID-19 that a lot of businesses are trying to figure it out. I would say a handful of the big retailers have figured it out. But it is very, very costly. If you don't get it right, extremely, you can be spending a lot of money real quickly.

Unknown Speaker : 34:29

Yeah, it's not just costly Of course, you know, with with directly with money, right? It's costly to your your customers and your perception because really what happens in a lot of these situations that that, you know, I've investigated because I've actually, there are a few companies I've worked for trying to analyze that whole step by step process, you know, seeing like how a customer reacts to something that you're doing or not doing. And you know, any piece of that puzzle that falls apart really hurts your ability to attract customers and to keep customers. So it's it's something that pays off a lot of ways to be able to write.

Unknown Speaker : 35:07

Yeah, it's like enhancing the customer experience is. It means so much it's such a loaded. It's such a loaded phrase, right? Yeah. There's so many things that have to happen behind the scenes and the plumbing to make it work, right.

Unknown Speaker : 35:23

Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker : 35:24

So I was just gonna ask one more question. And then I could throw it back to Isaiah. The The only other question again, this is just something I asked most, really all of our guests is about. It's a dichotomy of b2b b2c and what they learn from each other and in my experience, or at least send let's say, again, like the last five years, as Isaiah said, a lot of b2c was ahead of b2b for commerce right just ahead in innovation and a lot of different things that we're moving on. Moving on and moving along. I'm just wondering if you agree agree with that, or what you would say you, you b2b players can still learn from me to say.

Unknown Speaker : 36:07

Yeah, I think there's definitely thanks, Tim. Yeah, I think there's definitely room to for companies, software companies to to build applications for the b2b side because those are those are, those are missing right now. So if you look at quietly last year, Shopify acquired a b2b company called handshake. I don't know if

Unknown Speaker : 36:35

you heard about it, no one knows what's going on.

Unknown Speaker : 36:39

Yeah, exactly.

Unknown Speaker : 36:42

handshake handshake is one of a very small handful of companies. I think there's, like in, there hasn't really been a company from a software perspective that's figured out an application. Most of the most of the technologies Right now is, is being is being, you know, is being developed by agencies such as trellis, for example, to get one piece of data to another place via a tool such as Lego. And I think there's a, there's a huge opportunity in this space to build an application that can help one salespeople. salespeople who are going out well before COVID-19, who were going out and selling to a retail stores, which historically like, literally people were going into the stores and like taking orders on it, like the more automated ones, were doing it on an iPad via handshake. But I think that you know, being able to launch or push into that system of, hey, there's a there's an actual application Hear where you can just go in it. We set up some training for you. And you're done. That makes it easy. So now you don't have to have necessarily now it's more automated, right? You don't have to have that person on the floor. And I don't know if I'm in there's there's two other systems. So peppery, which is, which is one that I'm not as familiar with. There's another one called tradegecko, which is a another b2b automation platform. But I think, mostly for smaller brands.

Unknown Speaker : 38:27

I've heard of them. Yeah. But,

Unknown Speaker : 38:31

but I don't know if I'm answering your question, Tim.

Unknown Speaker : 38:35

You know, that's okay. I think you're still providing great information for our listeners. So I think it's because it's complicated, right? Like b2b is just a, there's I think there's a lot to learn from B to C from like a marketing and make it easy for your customers to buy. But, like I forget who was actually one of our guests. He has a funny story. Have a friend. He's been successful in b2b like on the ground floor working for distributors doing b2b e commerce. And he's like, you know, I really had to get in the weeds and the eirp and all these things. And he said, You know, one of his friends failed because they he tried to do the b2c playbook, which is just shop flat playbook. But it didn't work because the organization was like, so different, like they had so much more operational complexity. So I think there's a lot to learn from b2c, but you have to like, kind of keep in mind that you can't just copy that one for one, you have to kind of like take it and, you know, use, you know, the b2b side, as well and, you know, kind of combine them to I guess, the way I would put it, what I would add to and, you know, again, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on this, Jeremy is, you know, a lot of I think a lot of innovation needs to happen so that more things can be done on mobile on the b2b side one is definitely behind BTC. So no matter how it looks, or how well it might function on a desktop. There's still some strange lag on moving to mobile that I think would really be helpful.

Unknown Speaker : 40:07

Yeah, I think I think one of the one of the one of the fastest and it's, it's more on the back end and on the front end but one of the fastest growing or fastest disruptors in in this space in terms of supply chain is, is flexport. I don't know if you guys have heard of flex for I've heard of them. They're, they're they're they're a freight forwarding company that gives you full visibility from supplier to in bulk. So they from supplier to warehouse to the destination and they haven't, they have very flexible API's and a nice UI and they make it very, very simple for you know, to to manage your shipments and I think where where it's where the lot of the breakdown occurs because I work very close. I've worked with a couple freight forwarders very closely in my mind My past life is that historically, especially in the freight forwarding, or if you're moving more than just a case of goods, you have to schedule. And so like, what's going to disrupt Next, I believe, at least in the b2b space is going to be on demand scheduling and we're seeing it more and more with like the mattresses of the world like white glove delivery in home delivery and being able to take out an old mattress and bring in a new one and set it up and all that stuff, but being able to schedule the LTL that the less than truckload or the truckload or you know, the there's all sorts of scheduling that goes back and forth. Still, like Tim said, via fax machine. Believe it or not, it's still happening. It's spreadsheets, net, none of this stuff on the it's right for district corruption, similar to, you know, similar to banking, which is, which is also starting to get into a new world into the new world. But I think one of the biggest innovators was flexport flexport. Really kind of Rinat flexport really took this from the very beginning by looking at I think shipping manifests, and was like, there's got to be an easy way. And he figured it out. So I think it's ripe for disruption. Right?

Unknown Speaker : 42:26

Yeah. And I think flexport made a great point. So those companies that like, the average person probably doesn't know too much about either one of those behind the scenes, b2b disruptors, I could be the next big Uber type company, you know, speaking of Uber, and I think you're kind of alluding to and actually I think our last guest kind of, uh, actually brought up a similar point about what we thought the future of b2b e commerce was. It wasn't exactly but I think you guys are it's like two similar points. And it's this kind of like, you know, b2c people want that on on demand, right? Like, once you got Uber and Lyft and like Amazon's like, no one wants to wait anymore like all of a sudden you have these services where it's like, click a button, and it comes to you like in real time and you know, real time restaurant delivery all this stuff is like so real time. And I think that's like there's that's kind of what you're alluding to is that that could come towards b2b like b2b organizations instead of having to buy

Unknown Speaker : 43:27

you know,

Unknown Speaker : 43:29

a 5000 units because you know, I have to buy that every year because I make that 5000 units last year the next year I ordered another 5000 units like maybe this like, bulk purchase, I want the 5000 but I want you know, 100 every few weeks now like an OB eliminate Yeah, exactly. And I want it in real time when I run out of my hundred the next 100 just automatically kind of reshapes and fulfills that demand. And you guys probably know this One of the things that's interesting just about the again, b2b, b2c kind of flip is a company like Home Depot that has the, you know, B to C side and then as the whole commercial division, they are treating those very similarly now, so you can, you can get deliveries of almost any stuff you can get from them to a specific hour. And you know, you may have to pay more for, you know, for that delivery, maybe it's $79 or something for commercial order, but you can get it you can say I want from 12 to 1pm on a Tuesday, and it'll come and so those types of innovations are remarkable innovations they were not possible at all from you know, from most business players ordering pipe and wood and all this sort of stuff. It just wasn't possible. Now you can and so that really kind of raises the bar for a lot of other businesses. And I think that's why we're doing that sorry. I just want to touch on the goal of this you know, you know, there's obviously the Home Depot's the Walmart and the Amazons In the world, you know, I don't think they need the help that we might need, you know, I'm sure they need help and they're gonna innovate. But I think, you know, we're trying to get, you know, people in form that are those mids, you know, smaller mid size and even lower enterprise companies so that, you know, they can kind of catch up and not kind of die out. And I think it's,

Unknown Speaker : 45:25

I still think it's important to bring them up because they're the pioneers of the inefficiencies in the b2b space. Right? That's how that's how everybody is kind of still working today and there's a lot of work to do but again with with a partnership, like with trellis with Sligo, with, there's a handful of other companies out there, if you're able to get those systems, right, it really brings that whole picture together. And it makes you know, makes life a heck of a lot easier.

Unknown Speaker : 46:00

Yeah, absolutely. So that you can compete, you know, we were talking about dystopia for a second with automation. You know, we don't all be working for Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon, right?

Unknown Speaker : 46:15

five companies gonna rule the world, you know?

Unknown Speaker : 46:19

Right, this is, this is awesome, I really, really appreciate all this, this insight. You know, I just kind of want to wrap up here, because probably over the 45 minutes that we're trying to achieve. So I want everyone to kind of stay tuned, keep listening in to come back for Episode Seven, we have lone there's actually working for international agency. So kind of bring the agency experience trying to kind of get the different types of experience in minds together. So we're going to talk more about more about the like, project problems, agency problems, because you know, every company has that, you know, experience of working with an agency and it may go good or bad. So you Thanks so much, Jeremy. Any any last remarks? Anything you want to kind of wrap up with while we close up?

Unknown Speaker : 47:07

Uh, no, I think I think we we covered it pretty well, I guess I guess I would just say, um, again fail fast. If you're working on if you're doing something that is that's burnt where you're burning a lot of cash, figure out where the holes are and figure out how to plug them quickly.

Unknown Speaker : 47:28

Awesome. And then how can people find you because you're a great resource, you know how you like to get

Unknown Speaker : 47:34

me? They can find me directly through trellis or Jeremy je RMY dot Rudolph, are you DOL pH at Sligo cel IDEO calm.

Unknown Speaker : 47:49

Awesome. Thank you so much Jeremy. Awesome. Thank you

Unknown Speaker : 47:53

guys. All right. Thank you.