How To Work Successfully With Agencies In B2B eCommerce

Unknown Speaker : 0:07

So welcome to episode seven of the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I'm your co host Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of trellis. And Hi, I'm Timothy Pierce Peterson. I am a client advocate for trellis. And it's great to have you here today and I'd like to just tell you a little bit about our sponsor before we dive into our topic and talk to our guests today. So our sponsor is punch out to go. And they're a global b2b integration company specializing in connecting commerce business platforms with E procurement and CRP applications. Punch Out two goes I pass technology seamlessly links, business applications to automate the flow of purchasing data. And with their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexities, for punch out counts. logs, electronic purchase orders, ie invoices and the like. So thank you to our sponsor and a throwback to Isaiah to give a quick intro to our special guests today. Yeah, thank you. So we're excited to bring in loan from

Unknown Speaker : 1:13

outgrow.io.

Unknown Speaker : 1:16

So alone, you know, you've been on kind of the agency space working with lots of different companies across the board. And I think you reached out to me, I think it was LinkedIn. Because I think you saw some b2b posts, and you're interested in kind of some of the stuff that you're doing. So we're excited to bring you on. I think you're our first international guests, some of the people who might have have a little bit of experience in international but I think you're the first one that's like, you know, strictly focused on outside of the US market, mainly so excited to talk about that and what you're seeing in b2b and hopefully it can help people think more globally about b2b. So yeah, well, maybe you can give us a little bit more in depth explanation of yourself and your experience.

Unknown Speaker : 1:59

Well, thanks. Thanks a lot for having me, it's an honor to be here. So what we do at outgrow is that we help retailers who are particularly interested in improving their technology, using up to date technology for basically all of their ecommerce experience, we help them reach that goal, and basically transition from old legacy tech to brand new, more interesting and more innovative platforms. So we're specialized on one path from the tour especially specialized on his reaction commerce, which you've probably heard about. So I may have some basis during the podcast today. But we're mainly working with with reaction, and we provide development services for clients and we also provide training for their own developers if they happen to have any or if they want to have their own team in house and we also provide standard you know, architecture technology, consulting And we are based as you said, we're International. We're now based in the US. We're based in in Dubai with clients in typically in Europe or Southeast Asia.

Unknown Speaker : 3:11

Gotcha. Awesome. Um, so what I kind of wanted since you know, you're on the technology side so heavily when I want to, you know, kind of help our, our listeners understand and maybe think more broadly about is just in terms of technologies, you guys see, I'm appealing, you see some different technologies, and maybe we might see in the US, but I'm sure there's still a lot of overlap. In b2c, we see a lot of you know, Shopify, you know, Salesforce demandware, or it's now Salesforce is demandware. And then, you know, big commerce in Magento. But would be to be it seems like there's a larger, like, we see a lot more different technologies and b2b. Definitely a lot of Magento. But there's a platform called insight mission on the platform called unilag. In the US, some of the smaller platforms you mentioned Reaction commerce, like how did you guys get into that? Or did you like evaluate the other platforms? Or what? What made you kind of feel like they were a good fit? And how specifically does that relate to b2b e commerce?

Unknown Speaker : 4:12

So first of all I should, I should outline the fact that we're not only working with b2b clients. We're working on the whole spectrum, whether that is b2b, or b2c, or b2b b2c, which is very interesting as well. But reaction commerce basically basically does it all. It's not a it's not a traditional commerce platform like your Magento or, you know, or the CRP based ones, like, you know, Oracle commerce, etc. It's really more of a developer framework more than anything else. So, basically, reaction commerce is a good choice when you're considering building a fully custom solution, because you have very specific needs, and you're just looking for a framework to start off with, you know, not reinventing the wheel and just, you know, having having this solid platform to start on, which does not get in your way with a plugin system, etc, etc. to kind of, you know, it's it's not preventing you from thinking outside of the box, which is a big problem that developers in Magento have, for example. So this is this is the question that it enters. Yeah. So

Unknown Speaker : 5:25

you're not coming with all the overhead of a Shopify or Magento. Big. So it's more of a developer platform developer tool, almost like a framework like would you say it's almost more similar to something like a Largo or react or like some of these developer frameworks, but

Unknown Speaker : 5:39

yeah, sort of? Well, so reaction commerce, first of all, is a is a graph qL API. So that's, that's what you get first and foremost. Okay. So it's commerce graph. qL API. It's a great fit. If, for example, you have an existing application and you want to integrate e commerce features on top of it, whether that is b2b or b2c. It's a great fit for that. But you can, of course, create ecommerce experiences from scratch with reaction, you get an admin panel, you get a an example storefront, you can build your own storefront on any technology you want, whether that is react or Angular. So it's all those. So it fits a very specific type of clients. But yeah, it's really more something you would consider if you're going to build from scratch and you're just comparing, you know, well, do I build from scratch? Or do I start with a with a framework? So yeah, it's more of a developer framework for sure.

Unknown Speaker : 6:32

And is it? Is it a hosted platform? Or like, is it or do you have to host it? Or how do you how do you guys set it up?

Unknown Speaker : 6:39

No. So you do have to host it yourself? Well, this is this is part of the agency's role, right, but Well, sometimes, but this is something that you would have to administer yourself on. Something like AWS for, its it's using Docker pretty heavily. So you know, simplifies the whole DevOps process quite a bit. And you can basically deploy it on any cluster management technology like, you know, Kubernetes or AWS ECS, or anything like this.

Unknown Speaker : 7:09

Sure. And so, you know, since this is more of a developer focused platform, do you do you know, do you ever get pushback or like when you're talking to, you know, clients, I'm just kind of curious what you guys are seeing, like, are people like concerned about going with something like this? Or do you have to kind of like talk them into it and explain the benefits? Or how do you guys approach that? So

Unknown Speaker : 7:34

I won't lie to you. It's a very niche market for sure. And what we're seeing is basically, people coming at us for reaction commerce specifically. We're not really we're not really in the outrage game where you know, we're going to try and convince companies to switch over to reaction. If some companies you know, come to us and are comparing reaction commerce to other platforms, of course, we're going to help them to kind of understand what is the better choice. But we're not going to try and convince companies that are not, you know, ready to invest in a platform like this, because it's so different than the platforms you'd typically find. And it's not a great fit for everybody. You know, it's like, for some companies Magento is a perfect choice. And, you know, reaction commerce would not make sense for them. Maybe, yeah, you could say that about any any platform.

Unknown Speaker : 8:27

And just out of curiosity, what what, what, specifically on the b2b or maybe they're hybrid b2c b2b? Why are they choosing reaction commerce? Like have they worked with you know, something else? Like a Shopify or Magento and then decided, hey, like this isn't working, you need to, like look at other options. Well,

Unknown Speaker : 8:52

I would say lots of them have definitely outgrown their their current ecommerce platform which is part of the reason why we've chosen the name outgrow, for the company, but I would say yeah, most of them just don't want to deal with, you know, Frankenstein type of architecture with lots of plugins, you know, basically working with each other and sometimes kind of overlapping. In terms of functionality that you can find on Magento. For example, you have a lot of Magento sites out there, which are just a bunch of plugins come together in one project. And you know, at some point, the more you scale this, the less works you know, and you know, you end up just fighting against bugs, you know, of plugins that you know, don't really work well together, and it ends up just slowing down your process of releasing new features, etc. where, you know, you could have basically an almost almost tailor made platform that would really suit your needs, and it would less, you know, get in your way, a lot less then then then then something that would be plugin based like Magento. So it's Yeah, very specific type of customers, but most of them definitely outgrowing standard platforms for sure.

Unknown Speaker : 10:12

Gotcha. Um, cool. So and how did you get into this? Like, how did you? I mean, just kind of curious, I, you know, I'm assuming you've seen some of these, or maybe you work in some of these other platforms in the past, and you kind of got into reaction inside as like an opportunity to do something different.

Unknown Speaker : 10:29

Yes. So it started with just basically it started with just myself as a freelance developer, I used to work on basically any project, you know, not just ecommerce and sometime, you know, some someday, some clients came to me and you know, inquired about, you know, building an e commerce websites and that was the first time that I was working on an e commerce website. So I kind of looked at my options, etc and found out commerce which was back in the days in a very early beta stage, so I didn't get the chance to use it. And I kind of got some more interest for react for for e commerce because of the you know, the specifics of the market and helping merchants which I find very satisfying, you know, seeing their orders improve, etc, etc. But

Unknown Speaker : 11:25

I would say that

Unknown Speaker : 11:28

when reaction commerce, came out of the beta stage and ended up getting more stable, the more I was working in e commerce, the more I was frustrated with the platforms out there, that you know, didn't fit my ideals of a platform as a developer and didn't didn't really fit my the needs of my clients so much, you know, depending on the project, so I ended up looking at reaction more seriously and it ended up working for some clients that are had at the time. And that was my first project with it. And then, you know, I ended up specializing it, the more my freelance business grew, you know, the more I had to delegate and work with a team so that ended up building outgrow as it is today.

Unknown Speaker : 12:15

Awesome. Yeah, that's that's a cool story.

Unknown Speaker : 12:19

A question for you connected to something I think that you do that a lot of other folks we've interviewed so far, don't really do and at least they don't feature it. I've noticed when I was looking around on your site that you have a big training component to, you know, to your program, so you consultant you trained, and, you know, I'd seen the value of it, you know, from multiple angles. I was an in house trainer for one project that I worked on the replatforming project. That was a pretty big thing a few years ago, and I really love that and the business benefited greatly from having having it in place, but tell me, tell me a little bit more about the Training aspect of what you do.

Unknown Speaker : 13:02

So that's more of a recent addition, I would say to our business model, the core business model is definitely on development. But training and support is something that I see growing tremendously in the future. Because you see, you see a lot more interest lately, you know, from retailers, for having their own teams of developers in house with, you know, with their own project managers, etc. Because they want to be in control, you know, a lot of them that especially the ones that we're dealing with, we're very specific types of clients who have outgrown, you know, one or multiple ecommerce platforms are getting to a scale that is, you know, necessitating to have you know, to have control over your project, and what features they ship and how much time they ship etc, etc. So, this is definitely something that I see growing a lot and especially now with the COVID-19 situation. You see a lot of demand for online remote training over zoom, for example, as a webinar. So yeah, this is this is definitely something that's interesting. And that, in my opinion, will grow tremendously in the next, you know, five to 10 years, you'll see a lot more, a lot more big retailers, in my opinion, you know, build in house teams, and of course, they want to get their developers trained to work the same way and have the same base knowledge of the platform that they're working on.

Unknown Speaker : 14:34

So would you would you say would, you know, there's an opportunity for agencies like yourself and, and trolls and anyone out there to kind of basically help these companies, you know, build up their internal teams?

Unknown Speaker : 14:46

Well, in my opinion, yeah. You know, the, the agency model works great for the majority of retailers, but you always have this tiny fraction of them that will want to have their own in house team and might as well help them To do it the right way, right? So there's definitely business to be done here. There's definitely help that's needed from these retailers to build these teams internally. So why not help them? And, you know, a lot of agency owners will say, Well, you know, this is taking business from us, etc. But I mean, these people have already made up their minds, and they're already moving to an in house team. So yeah, whatever you say, it's gonna happen, you know, so might as well help them do it the right way, implement the right best practices, have their developers really trained on the platform of choice. And, you know, you'll end up with with something that will really benefit them. And you'll actually end up with long term, recurring customers, because guess what, when they'll, you know, upgrade to a larger team or something like this, they'll come back to you for some more training when you know, the platform that you've trained them on has a new major version, they'll come back as well. So it's definitely business that agencies can get into the more technical agencies. Least. And it's not that much overhead when you already have a team of developers working on projects, they have the knowledge. If you have developers who have this interest for training others, then it's it's a pretty easy, you know, second line of business to add to your Yeah, I agree. Sure.

Unknown Speaker : 16:19

Yeah. What What I find interesting too, is that, you know, I spent a lot of my career as a marketer, in addition to doing a lot of e commerce work. And, you know, it just kind of happened in marketing first, because there were so many different things that kept popping up in digital marketing. It's like, okay, now we have to learn affiliate now we have to learn marketplaces, and now we have to learn, you know, social ads and all these things. So really businesses that were equipped agencies that were quick to train really done quite well with that. So I'm a big fan of this happening, you know, in this part of the business world. Yeah. Yeah. So let me let me change gears just for a second if it's okay, I wanted to see if I can ask a little bit about these. success and failure because that's a favorite topic of mine. And I think it's something our listeners, our viewers are going to be very interested in as well. And what do you see is the defining factors of really a successful b2b e commerce operation in particular today versus one that's struggling or maybe not quite there yet.

Unknown Speaker : 17:22

So one of the common factors that I see for b2b projects that are failing is typically you know, most of them have almost no scop for no no specific scope for for the project, you see a lot of projects, you know, coming to agencies with like very broad requirements, etc. And you know, that that that is what happens when you have no technical people on the other end, who you know, will, you know, put together some very generic requirements, but nothing really specific and you end up having a vague idea of what the project should look like, you know, at first, you know, for people who are just getting into the agency business, the requirements may seem very fine. But when you get into the specifics of the project, and you're midway into it, you realize, Oh, well, this, we didn't talk about this specific feature. We didn't talk about this, we don't really know how it's supposed to work. And so you end up figuring out things, you know, kind of in the middle of the action, which is something that typically ends up causing delays. So this is definitely something I would say, you know, is a big factor for not successful big factor failure of b2b projects. And you see that together, we've no real ownership from the retailers on the projects, you know, basically saying, you'd see you'd see the retailers basically saying, All right, well, you're the agency you take care of everything. And you know, when You have when you have your when you have your your punctual demos, for example, if you have a demo every two weeks, you know, nobody would really say anything. And I'm sure you've been in this situation where Oh, well Yeah, it looks fine, it looks fine. It looks amazing, great work. And you know, you don't really get any feedback. They most of the people you're going to talk to on the retailer side. And once once again, I'm talking about these projects that are failing. Typically, the people you're going to talk to are not really technical people. So most of them will not really understand the technical layer of what you're building. And the technical layer may very well be extremely important depending on the nature of their business, and the complexity of the project that they're building. So there really needs to be ownership from the retailers in order for an agency led projects to work is not doing all the work. This

Unknown Speaker : 19:57

is a common topic. We've been kind of discussing. I think For most of these episodes, it keeps coming up or they need to have that internal person. So for for these, you know, retailers, b2b merchants, distributors, manufacturers, you know, whatever kind of company it is trying to do a new b2b site, what kind of person would you recommend that they have? Like? I, you know, I personally don't think they necessarily need to have a developer in house but maybe someone that's at least technical enough to understand, you know, how to communicate with an agency, we call it the e commerce manager, but maybe kind of like I think they have to have kind of like a skill set that's somewhat marketing somewhat business requirements, you know, understanding the business processes and understands a little bit of the development enough to communicate well in detail with the with a company but what are you what kind of skill sets and people are you seeing that are internally working well with you guys and where that's not where the failures not happening?

Unknown Speaker : 20:53

Well, pretty much exactly what you're saying. An e commerce manager is definitely well, Chief of e commerce. You You know, would be definitely something something that works very well, that we've seen working very well on the projects that were involved with, you know, the the general skill set of understanding broadly, you know, the technologies behind the website and being good at marketing as well. So being able to, to to take care of all the marketing and merchandising aspects, basically, is something that every company should have internally. This is not something that you want to delegate to an agency, in my opinion, especially, you know, it depends on the scale of the business. But if you're on a larger scale, this is definitely something that you want to have in house. And I would go even further saying that, you know, the ideal project scenario for me would be an angel, an angel project where the product owner would be on the retailer side. So if you have this marketing slash, slightly technical person who happens to have skills in a job project management, and who can play the role of a product owner. To a certain extent, that would be the perfect scenario for me because there would be total ownership from the retailer without getting too technical, either. But at least you know, the retailer knows exactly what is going on at each stage of the project. And I think that's really valuable.

Unknown Speaker : 22:24

I agree. I mean, one of the one of the things that I've advocated for in a lot of a lot of different situations is really a digital organization. And, you know, again, it's people change these terms all the time. But basically, it means that the, you know, there are hard skills and their soft skills there. Because, you know, if it's a marketing organization, there may be some folks who are more strategic and don't really have a lot of the skill sets that are necessary. If it's an e commerce organization, sometimes at least it used to be the case that some people were just technical. So that was also an issue. There. Were only Technical. And so now it's kind of like, well, what terms do you really use? So I've often just kind of put it in this box and say, well, it's the digital organization, there needs to be these owners, you know, these stakeholders that really can play both sides of that coin. Yeah, and I think this is such an important topic. So because we see the exact same thing with you, where you think that you know what they need, but then you get into it. And it turns out, that person didn't really understand and didn't give you the right requirements. And then you're like, Oh, crap, we're halfway on this project. And the person that we thought was telling us what was accurate, didn't actually know what they were doing. So you know, going, kind of digging into those failures more, and the successes like because I also think sometimes companies will hire someone like that, but they hired the wrong person. So do you see that like, you know, and because I think that's a really challenging situation because they have the person and you think they're good, because, you know, in sales, sometimes it's that like, everyone's happy and they're kind of like, Oh, this is gonna be a great product. That's three months into it, you're like, oh, man, this person wasn't as good as we thought they were going to be on driving the project. So can you speak to that a little bit, I'm just curious to see, I've

Unknown Speaker : 24:10

also never been on the retainer side of things. I've always had my own agency or worked as a freelancer. But what I can tell you is that, you know, when you're hiring, if, if you're listening to this podcast, and you're a retailer, and you're looking to hire a person, like this, look, for past experience, look for, you know, if you're hiring, typically for disposition, you'd be hiring a pretty senior person. So you know, look for both technical experience. Again, we're not talking about having somebody who's been a developer, it's not really you know, what we're looking for here, but look for past experience, that would be slightly technical, maybe some project management skills, projects where that person was a lead, and, and actually, you know, involved in the technical aspects of the project to a certain extent, and Lucas For, as we say, you know, important to have marketing skills as well to understand the consumer aspects of, you know, what, what you're building as a company. So it's important to have marketing skills, it's important to have worked in, in, you know, with with Merchandising, and, and, and the catalog aspects etc. Because you'll want this person to kind of have wear two hats at the same time, you know, be able to, to weigh in on the technical projects that you'll have going on and also weigh in on the marketing decisions and you know, what is going to be in terms of which we're going to put up in terms of content of the website, etc, etc. So ideally, that person should wear the two hats and obviously have experience into

Unknown Speaker : 25:48

two sides, you know,

Unknown Speaker : 25:50

previously,

Unknown Speaker : 25:52

yeah. So kind of going into the next topic, and I think this is part of the failure is be, you know, agencies I struggle to work with merchants that don't have good scope and don't have that good internal champion to work with you. So that's pretty clear. But where else do you see? Because I think that there's a lot of agencies failing with b2b specifically, I want to dig into b2b because I think b2c is a lot simpler. You can kind of get away sometimes with Shopify or something like that. With b2b you have like, potentially corporate accounts, corporate experiences that might be different for b2c. Where do you see like, you know, and it might be hard for you to answer this because you don't know what the other agencies are doing. But I'm assuming you get a little bit of a taste when you talk to a company they've they failed with someone else. Do you understand like, oh, why this failed? Where do you see these b2b agencies fail? Or agencies failing with b2b is that do you think that sometimes they don't even understand b2b? Like they get e commerce but they don't understand b2b and then they try and do it and it fails. And that's why they're coming to you potentially.

Unknown Speaker : 26:57

I think I'm seeing two scenarios here. I'm seeing agencies that typically don't work on b2b projects and kind of try to improvise things. And I'm also seeing companies well, agencies that only work on b2b and have never worked on b2c projects. And that, in my opinion is not necessarily a good thing depending on on the areas of work in the agency. Of course, if if the people individually have experience in b2c then you know, that helps tremendously. But in my opinion, you can't be just focused on b2c because on b2b sorry, because you end up kind of in this echo chamber of practices that are very specific to the b2b world, which is, it's important to be aware of them, but then you kind of end up losing track of what is happening around outside of this b2b bubble, where you can take inspiration from what's happening, for example, in the b2c world, so I'm seeing a lot of that where, you know, you kind of just Have this agency that keeps on applying the same methods that have been used for the past 10 years since basically the invention of, you know, b2b e commerce. And they don't really innovate just because they've always been doing the same thing always dealt with b2b clients. So, you know, well, we've always done that. We've always done it this way. So why would we change? That's typically what I'm seeing. So to summarize,

Unknown Speaker : 28:25

just so people understand and I think, because we, I think we pride ourselves at trellis and I totally agree with you is that one of the reasons we're good at b2b is because we have a lot of b2c experience and and vice versa. But I think it's important to also understand b2b and the their uniqueness of b2b like you can't just do b2c work and think that it's just gonna work magically for b2b there's there's a big difference but being able to do to, to do both is important and you think that agencies are both both experienced to be successful

Unknown Speaker : 28:58

if that makes sense. That's for sure, you can just ignore that the specifics of b2b I mean, whether you like it or not your clients are obviously going to be at a certain scale, they're going to be dealing with crps and things like things that you're typically not find in a b2c project is it you know, accept if it's at a certain scale, I mean, if you're, or if you're working for Macy's, of course, you know, it's a big project, but you're gonna have to deal with your piece but, you know, if you can just forget about all this and and kind of ignore it, the b2c b2b clients will have specific needs, and they will have specific technologies, you just have to have, in my opinion experience from both worlds to kind of pick the best from each side and kind of combine it to bring in new ideas, but also, you know, not be ignorant about the way that your clients work because there are some things that you will never be able to change about their workflow and the way things are slowly.

Unknown Speaker : 29:54

So I just want to zero in on one little piece of that because having worked on, you know, both b2b and b2c myself, you know, on agency side and you know, on the brand side have been ahead of e commerce for both b2b and b2c? You know, what I've seen is that, you know, it's talking about clients as consumers, and really they, you know, saying, Well, if I can do this in my b2c transaction, does it make sense to apply some of that here for b2b, you know, how to make it, frictionless how to make it you know, more seamless how to do delivery a little bit differently or get notifications a little differently? So is there a specific, you know, one or two things that you think you've taken from b2c? And you've seen applied very, very well in b2b labeling? I mean, very specific things.

Unknown Speaker : 30:45

Yeah, for sure. You know, the first thing that comes to my hair is transparency. That's where I see a lot of b2b retailers failing, just because once again, just because it's always been done that way. So for example, you know, you have a lot of b2b websites where, you know, the manufacturer is selling directly to clients, but they're not. So you have you have a catalog, you can browse the catalog, etc, you have product pages, but you don't have prices, and you have to create an account to get the prices. Oh, why is that? You know, your, I'll tell you what, you know, the first thing I hear when I suggest All right, you know, put some public prices so that's, you know, it reduces the friction and you get a better conversion rates. You know, some smaller, some smaller entrepreneurs and SMEs. You know, maybe they're just getting into the game and they're not used to that and guess what, they're probably going to go with your competitor, which is showing prices publicly it's not that big of a deal, but it gets to some more consumers who are maybe not used to this. You'll you'll always have your history your your previous you know, recurring customers who've been with you for a long time for sure. But you know why? Would you not make your priceless public? You know, in my opinion is not that big of a deal for most obviously during exceptions, but for most industries, and what what I'm hearing when, you know, I'm suggesting to make the priceless public kind of essentially making it work as a normal b2c e commerce website is Oh, well, you know, prices are different for each consumer depends on the volume that they order, etc, for sure it does. You know, that's one of the specifics of b2b. But what you can do is you can have a, you know, standard unit price or you can even specify on your PDP that, you know, you need to order 100 units, you know, to qualify for an order, that's no problem, you can still show a unit price. You can have customer accounts are linked to your E Rp. And that's pooling on the e commerce platform itself, pulling the discounts the corporate discounts that some of your For getting individually you can do that, you know, it's just a little bit of development work but you can do it and that does not prevent you from it's not because you have prices there are individual to each client that you cannot show a standard base price. And the second thing that I'm hearing all the time is oh well we don't want to we not all the time but sometimes is we don't want our competitors to see your prices. Well guess what your competitors already have your prices because they've signed up as a ghost customer that doesn't exist and they've already gotten your

Unknown Speaker : 33:34

time. All the time. I totally agree the reasons the reasons they're not doing it don't outweigh the benefits of doing it and that's the problem is that these companies have been doing this stuff for 100 years or 50 years. And the market has changed. trellis. We buy a tons of I mean not as much now as Coronavirus around the office all the time that we buy. We bought all our furniture online. We buy like all of our supplies online before Sign up for b2b below Apple b2b account. We have a Lenovo b2b account, but we want like speed are going to log in quickly and by and see prices and like if you if we have to, like call in or like, deal with a slow process to get prices, we're probably not going to do that. Because it's not worth the effort for you. No.

Unknown Speaker : 34:21

You know what I think I think you touched.

Unknown Speaker : 34:24

I think you touched an interesting point here because you talked about office supply. And one thing that I see growing a lot in the future is, in my opinion, subscriptions for b2b businesses, especially in office supplies, you know, this already exists, but it's, you know, it's not very widespread, but the day that it starts, you know, convincing larger corporations and really the whole b2b market to to go ahead and use subscriptions just like you know, b2c customers would, then it's going to be a huge change for b2b e commerce and this is definitely coming Whether, you know, whether you like it or not, it's coming because Yeah, because of sometimes the discounts that you could get, you know, if you subscribe for a year to a product, you know, some things like meeting room supplies, etc, this is definitely something that's going to be

Unknown Speaker : 35:15

absolutely or like coffee or you know, whatever it is food, like if you have like food that comes in like snacks. So actually what I you know, from from, from some of our previous b2b Merchant gas, I think it's kind of gonna be a sort of like subscription, but maybe a little bit different where it's like, I want to purchase 1000, I want to get the volume discount of 1000. But I want some control on delivery. So maybe I get 100 in March and 200 in June when I need more. So you get like a little bit of control of when you get those deliveries so that you're not sitting on 1000 units of something you don't need all at once. So I think that's kind of where where the market is moving, but it's not quite there. Culturally Or technology wise, where companies can just easily do that. There's even though a, b to c, you know, component to that right now that I'm aware of I was working with a business recently for health a wellness product, and did in order for consumers to get the volume discount basically work exactly the way you're describing it as if they had to pay them to agree to a certain number, like I'm buying 48 of these that will be shipped for a month. If they cancel at any time, then they are required to pay the full price for the products I already got. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because this stuff's in b2c, and it's like, why can't we just apply that to B to B? And these b2b companies, they're like, No, we can't do that. It's not how we you know, there's still so stuck stuck in their ways sometimes, but I think things are changing fast right now. I think that you know Coronavirus has obviously opened up people's eyes and made people realize how how important ecommerce is no matter what you do. So I'm curious, because, you know, I really like getting into the specifics here. We talked about some of the b2c specific features that are applying to b2b. Are there any b2b specific features that you have seen as very successful that are maybe more b2b specific? Like, you know, corporate accounts is a good example. I mean, obviously, if you're b2c, you don't need corporate accounts for a cost company. Other any that you've seen the most successful so far?

Unknown Speaker : 37:29

Yeah, I think digital products, this is something that a lot of b2b companies should be looking at, especially the ones who have a consulting business where, you know, they produce I would say, you know, intellectual work for their clients. There. There's a lot of them that can apply, you know, kind of turn this around and look at selling premade digital products online. So for example, I've worked A very interesting, very interesting project for a map resetter and editor. So as, as in geographical maps, the project is that shopped at geospatial comm if you want to check it out. And this is a this is a business that's been very successful in selling maps and also doing what they call Lancer V's you know, basically like if you want to have an, I don't know, an altitude map of a specific area, you can find it they can have it done for you, you know, they'll send somebody to decide and they'll have it, they'll have your custom map ready, basically, that's what they do. So they have this as a branch of their website. They also sell maps, so you know, paper sheets or, or digital maps. But what I'm wanting to say here is they're also selling digital maps online, you can buy them and download them right away. And this is this is not something that you're typically seeing in this industry. Which I think is very innovative. And it's definitely something that, you know, a lot of a lot of companies can apply to their own industry. I'm talking about this for, you know, for maps, which is a product that you can easily put online. But when you think about it, a lot of the a lot of these intellectual industries where you produce intellectual work for clients, they can, you know, basically resell a lot of a lot of digital products, the way that this map recenter does. So I think this is definitely something that's going to be I'm sorry.

Unknown Speaker : 39:35

Turn there Soren is

Unknown Speaker : 39:37

for no worries.

Unknown Speaker : 39:38

It's possible just to just so that you're aware, it's possible that my internet connection drops, if we have a power outage here, which sometimes happens, just so that's your

Unknown Speaker : 39:48

Let's hope not well, we've made it through most, most of the episodes. So that's really interesting. Um, so yeah, I mean, and that could do you see, I'm just curious if there is any opportunity like, let's say you're distributor manufacturer and you sell you know, you know office supplies the example doesn't matter but some sort of physical good. You think that could be complemented with some sort of like digital products or digital services that are kind of like a compliment to these products in any ways is that or is it more so service intellectually? You know, well it'd be a source

Unknown Speaker : 40:21

I don't really yeah, I don't really see a digital product A p vo for companies selling office supplies for example, it's not really well you know, if you think about it hard enough, I'm sure that you can find something but right off the top of my head that's not really something I get. Yeah, the only

Unknown Speaker : 40:41

the only exception is just to there are exceptions to that. I mean, their office supply companies that provide videos about how to set up your office fully that are based on like how you do a Crate and Barrel, you know, video showing like you know, this is how to do your dining room. This is how to do your kitchen. There are videos now from office supply companies. On, this is how to set up your office, this is how to set up your, you know, the conference room, and they show you all the office products that you need to get in it. Right. So that I think is something that is a tool, but they also have classes that are trained, or they offer classes, like training classes, and how to, you know, create an office environment for 40 to 100 people.

Unknown Speaker : 41:22

I mean, things like that, that I've seen. That's actually an amazing ID.

Unknown Speaker : 41:27

Yeah, and it's easy, right? I mean, you could imagine doing that in less than an afternoon with low production value and then being able to sell that, you know, quite Yeah, for over a for an extended period of time. So I like ideas like that, that have popped up recently. Yeah, so this more digital video digital products and b2b but you're talking about also services so, but I think a lot of manufacturers and distributors do do services, they do do some sort of custom services or consulting or they might sell the supplies but the real value isn't just the base. all the supplies and said they'll come and service the supplies or they'll come and provide guidance, so there might be some opportunity for them to sell that as a digital product in some way.

Unknown Speaker : 42:12

Well, I think Yeah, I'm sorry if I have my dog barking here because thunder, he gets scared easily anyways. So, yeah, no, I think I think there's a huge opportunity for services as well. For example, you know, when you have resellers of, you know, office supplies once again, jumping back on your example. Well, you can have services for I don't know, you know, like setting up your, for example, your buying a whiteboard, you know, what about, hey, we come up to your place and we set it up for you. You don't have to hire a separate contractor to do it. No worries, you know, we'll take care of it. That's, that's, that's something with a special pricing, you know, you do kind of a digital. Yeah, see? Yeah, kind of as an upsell, maybe you know, items. see a lot of b2c b2b companies doing upsells. And this is definitely something that could work for b2b easily. So there are definitely things that you can get take inspiration from in the, in the b2c world and that that includes you know, upsell of services, why not?

Unknown Speaker : 43:14

Yeah. So and one of the last things I want to get into in terms of b2b e commerce, so I want to kind of make this two parts, you mentioned e RP and making the pricing specific on account basis. Do you see that being one of the challenges? I mean, that's definitely been one of the challenges that we see is that these companies have legacy RP systems, they're not designed for e commerce and then they have to kind of like figure out how to marry that into e commerce and that that's not always an easy thing to do. They might not have good people on there and to communicate that with you. And that can be challenging. So do you guys see that as a challenge with the E RP systems?

Unknown Speaker : 43:51

Yeah, well, I'd say I'd say it really depends on it really depends on the approach to eirp that the company has typically what what will be happening Is that you'll you'll have these retailers who have an ER p contractor and their role is just to take care of the ER P. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they'll be reselling the ER p because they have a license with Microsoft for dynamics or whatever. Yeah. And they'll be providing services to add things on top of the E Rp. But, you know, typically does contractors don't really tend to think outside of the box, just because they're doing only europese. And that's what they do. Yeah, so no, no offense, therefore, Iraqi contractors, if you're listening to this podcast, I have nothing against you. But typically, that's what you end up seeing. And you know, you can do a lot of things with your piece, it's not necessarily a bad thing that your client is using your piece as a main, you know, framework for their, for your business, you can actually extend most of them, you know, dynamics, and, you know, Oracle, a lot of them out there have very powerful features, for example, to make some data available as a REST API. If you can use that to, you know, basically pull data from your CRP onto your website you don't have to rely on batch data imports etc you can just have them communicate natively a lot of a lot of retailers don't do that because they don't see the value which is which in my opinion seems crazy but I guess you know, they've just been explained wrong and you know, they don't really see Oh, well this is a big investment we're not going to do that but he turns your whole online business upside down to do it the right way and have the right integration in place. So it's just in my opinion is just the wrong paradigm which is being applied that a lot of these retailers but you can actually do a lot of very very good things with with earpiece and build amazing experiences provided that you're used to right ecommerce platform.

Unknown Speaker : 45:48

Yeah, so I totally agree that it's very possible and it can be done but why do you think it's why is it the wrong paradigm? It's because they're still stuck in their kind of like batch process mindset are they don't see it as necessary to have the real time data go to e commerce or

Unknown Speaker : 46:04

why do you see it not.

Unknown Speaker : 46:06

So I think to two things here, the first is the investment because obviously, you know, building a bridge between your European and your website can be costly, especially if you have a lot of custom data in your er p, which is typically the case that that can be pretty costly. If you don't build this bridge the right way, there's a big chance that every time you add a new custom field, you'll have to modify the bridge as well to make it compatible, etc. So it's, it's an extra overhead for sure. But the second, the second most common case is that, as you say, you know, a lot of companies are stuck in their, you know, batch import processes. And, you know, after all, it's always been the way it worked. So why change it if it works, you know, maybe our customers are not getting real time prices or real time availability for products but you know, it's updated every 24 hours and it's more than enough. You know, a lot of companies are thinking that way. And I can certainly understand to an extent, but the day that your competitor, your main competitor distorts, you know, improving on that aspect of their business, then there's probably going to have a perfect going to be a preference for your competitor, which is probably going to have a more usable online experience and probably going to be more enticing to new customers. So that's, in my opinion, something that gets overlooked very easily. But it's definitely really important and b2b retailers are doing that and actually paying attention are pretty rare in my opinion, but these are the ones that are getting noticed out there for you know, building amazing experiences.

Unknown Speaker : 47:43

Mm hmm. So the ones that are really building out real time experience that more quick fast, getting the data from the RP the main data that they need to the consumer, the b2b customers hands quickly are are selling. So what do you what do you see as the biggest challenge for people To be ecommerce in the next, you know, 510 years, I think, you know, the past 10 years have been kind of just exploring and getting up and running. And now it's I think it's more about, you know, building that better experience that we've been talking about. But what do you see is kind of stopping or what what do you think the challenge is going to be for these companies?

Unknown Speaker : 48:20

Well, you know, over the past few years, we've seen a lot of, I would say, outs over the past 10 years, we've seen, you know, a lot more sole traders a lot more small intrapreneurs getting started, entrepreneurship has become a lot more common than it was before. A lot of these companies are basically they have their own mindset, which is that, you know, they're dealing with corporate clients that have a certain size and, you know, maybe they're going to deal with SMEs, but they're going to impose the workflow of corporate clients to these SMEs, which don't necessarily need all that, you know, extra overhead when making orders. And I think that, you know, it's important for For b2b retailers to take that into account that there are more SMEs now than there have ever been. And, you know, especially in we've, we've been talking about the Middle East and Asia, especially in Asia, and the Middle East, you know, you know, outside of the US that there's an entrepreneurship, there's even in the US there's an entrepreneurship boom, but it's, it's at an even larger scale outside of the country. So that's even more important for international retailers. So take that into account, and basically expect to well blurred the line between b2b and b2c. It's, I would say that as kind of a summary of you know, what we've been talking about, you know, bringing the C features and, and and paradigms to b2b. This is important in my opinion, because the line is getting blurred. The more the more we the more time goes, the more the line is blurred in my opinion. You have you know, a lot Have sole traders and you intrapreneurs are expecting, you know, a b2c like experience to a certain extent. So take that into account and make your experience more simple and more user friendly. I would I would

Unknown Speaker : 50:13

definitely echo that, in my experience. So the both us and international comments that you made about the, you know, the growth of entrepreneurship, you know, outside the US is really extraordinary. But also, that second part really hits home for me and I think for our for our listeners, there's, there's something you know, about coming into the market now and saying, I'm going to do X, you know, be you as a b2b e commerce business, they're going to have assumptions that are very different from any legacy business, and they're going to want things happen in a very particular way. And they're going to want data to be used real time and all of those things. So it's really just figuring out how to deal with it and making sure to let all those entrepreneurs get what they want and get what they need.

Unknown Speaker : 50:56

You especially see that in you know, we've done Younger generations and you know, a lot of them have, well, me included, you know, or what we could call digital natives. I'm not really a fan of this term because typically it's used to stereotype you know, generations etc. But it's it's kind of true You know, we've we've been, I was born with the internet, I've never known the world before the internet is very different. I have a very different way of interacting with websites and suppliers online, then somebody who may be 50 years old and used to order over the phone or fax with a paper catalog. You know, it's it's such a different paradigm that that these younger generations and you know, I even kind of feel outdated now when I see you know, my younger brother, which is a 12 years old doing basically anything on the smartphone where I still use my computer for most of my work. But, you know, things are moving quick and especially Typically, when you'll have this young generation who's currently you know, 1415, when they'll when they will turn 20, something like this, they will become your b2b customers. So think about how you want them to feel you know about your brand and how you want them to interact with the products that you have to sell online. That, you know, the whole experience will change dramatically when these younger generations are going to become your customers.

Unknown Speaker : 52:27

I agree completely.

Unknown Speaker : 52:32

It's crazy to think about Yeah, every year it's gonna be more and more that millennial we call them millennials and in the US, is going to become more and more the customer now millennials what people don't realize is I think the youngest Millennials are in the US are now like 24 something. So they're already like in business at the youngest age, and now you have this like next generation below them that are going to start becoming, you know, potentially corporate customers. So yeah, it's definitely happening and And b2b, they have to adapt. I mean, I've kind of kind of what scares me. And what prompted me to do this is I'm, I'm nervous that a lot of these 100 year old businesses aren't going to be around because they're not going to adapt fast enough. Yeah, I won't name the business in order to embarrass them. 100 year old businesses not too long ago is, you know, working on a potential project. And, you know, we were trying to talk about the impossible innovation. So we're saying, Well, you know, think about how people shop for fashion, or you know, how things occur on social media, you know, and they're not like that at all. They're not doing these things, but it's really like tapping and swiping, and are you going to do voice activated ordering? Right? Are you going to really do that? And the answer is, they really should, right? I mean, the answer is, you've got to think about that. Why can't I you know, talk into my Alexa for anything, and order today and make sure that it works for b2b too. Right? And these are things that are are just you know, on the very early edges on the fringes and a lot of people are going to much younger than me are going to be pushing this forward making sure that this happens.

Unknown Speaker : 54:09

Yeah, sometimes

Unknown Speaker : 54:10

sometimes I listen to Gary Vee, which you probably know, we all

Unknown Speaker : 54:15

know, Sherry, I knew Gary.

Unknown Speaker : 54:16

And we did nice. Well, yeah, I was listening to an old podcasts or YouTube video, I don't remember. But he was talking exactly about this about the challenges of b2b companies going forward in the next, you know, 10 ish years and he was giving an example of his marketing agency was able to sell jet engines on Facebook ads. You know, think about it, think when you go to a client and they tell you Oh, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna do unity. We're not going to be able to responsive website because none of our customers use smartphones to order. Think Think about that. You know, they've been able to sell jet engines from I think it was rolling For whatever, and they've been able to sell jet engines on Facebook ads, you know, like just targeting executed on Instagram or whatever from specific industries and they've been able to do that. So when you think about it, you know, jet engines, it's the well, it's it's pretty attractive but I would say it's the least attractive, you know, b2b product in terms of showing probably

Unknown Speaker : 55:23

also really expensive. Yeah, so yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 55:28

I think this is definitely there's a shift in mentality and that the retailers that get on board will be the ones who survive, but a lot of them will definitely disappear.

Unknown Speaker : 55:38

Yeah, I completely agree. And one of the things and this is Gary Vee this isn't me saying this one of the things he says is you just have to go where everyone else isn't right you have to go there first. So go to face if Rolls Royce selling jet engines how to be a first on Facebook and you're going to get extraordinary attention and here we are talking about us and an example right? And so, he was talking about that for tik tok. Recently. Like, you know, it's already too late for some people, they should have been there six months ago, right? Yeah, he's gotta be there first. And then you're going to get the attention as a b2b player, somebody who's unexpected. Yeah. And I think that's the problem with b2b, from my perspective is that they move too slowly. And they've been able to get away with that. Because, you know, in the 80s and 90s, you know, especially in America, the economy is good, you can kind of get away with not necessarily having this crazy technical innovation, but I think that every year that moving slow becomes more and more of a disadvantage in terms of adapting to this stuff. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I think we covered a lot. You know, we might have to, you know, have another one of these sooner than later. I want to remind guests to come back for episode eight. We're actually talking with Mark from Digital commerce 360. I think they're formally internet retailer. They also have a b2b He actually leads they're b2b components. So that's gonna be really exciting. So definitely stay tuned for episode eight and then, but But yeah, thanks so much long this was this was awesome. I think we got into some really specific when we went broad and specific which I like we did we did. It's been really a

Unknown Speaker : 57:18

pleasure having us guests on our podcasts and we'll talk to you again soon.

Unknown Speaker : 57:23

Thanks for having me.

Unknown Speaker : 57:26

Thank you. Thanks so much.