B2B eCommerce With Slatwall - A Modern Headless eCommerce Platform

Unknown Speaker : 0:07

Welcome to episode nine of the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I'm your co host Isaiah Bollinger from trellis and I'm here with Tim. Tim, take it away.

Unknown Speaker : 0:17

Hey look, Timothy Peterson I'm a b2b and b2c e commerce guy for many years and a client advocate for trellis and let me give you some information on our sponsor punch out to go punch out to go is a global b2b integration company specializing in connecting commerce business platforms with E procurement and E RP applications and punch out to ghosts I pass technology seamlessly links business applications to automate the flow of purchasing data. You know with their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexities for punch out catalogs electronic purchase orders, invoices, other b2b sales order automation documents in order to accelerate your business results. So thank you to our sponsor. And now back to you, Isaiah.

Unknown Speaker : 1:04

Yeah, thank you. So David, very excited to introduce our guests David crouch from from slatwall slatwall. Commerce is a platform developed by 1024 web, which is your original company now it's really slat wall commerce, which is the product that you guys have developed. And we've, we've had a little bit of a relationship over the years because you, I think you guys are one of the only e commerce like platforms headquartered in Massachusetts, right now that I'm aware of. They've all gotten shipped out, you know, Adobe bought Magento. And they're in San Francisco, you know, shot flies in Canada. might be some other smaller ones. But you guys, that's kind of how we got connected, because we're both here in Massachusetts, so. And Brad, you know, great to bring you on as well. But I'll leave you guys to kind of continue the introduction.

Unknown Speaker : 1:59

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Isaiah Yeah, so I'm Dave crouch. I'm the CEO of slatwall. Brad use Davison as our cmo is one of one of three partners in the company. We work together, going back to 2002, the three of us, wow. And we started the company in oh eight. And we had built a bunch of custom ecommerce projects over the years, and decided that we really wanted to create a framework that would get us 85 90% of what we needed in every project right out of the box, but was really highly configurable. And that's where slatwall started. That was the kind of starting point for slatwall. And we've been building it ever since. We're a bootstrapped company. So we've we haven't taken any outside money, kind of slow growth, working closely with clients in building the platform based on those requirement. Some of the clients, the clients have given us over the years. We're a team of about 40 people now headquartered in Worcester, Mass. And then we've got a small team in India as well.

Unknown Speaker : 3:12

Awesome. That's awesome. And just kind of curious as this platform evolved. We were talking before we started the podcast. And I don't think you guys maybe necessarily anticipated this in 2008 when you started, but it sounds like it's become more and more of a b2b e commerce focused platform. And when did that really start to like kind of ring bells are like maybe we should focus more on b2b or I'm sure there's a point.

Unknown Speaker : 3:38

Yeah, I mean, you know, to be honest, I'd like to say it was careful planning, but it was, you know, like I said, we've, you know, because we've bootstrapped the business. It's not like we had a huge war chest of money and decided, Okay, here's the direction we want to take the platform. It was really based on the projects we got so very early on. We were working with b2b companies. And starting to build kind of b2b specific features and functions into into the platform. So right, right from really day one. And you know, our client base has really been a bit of a combination of b2c and b2b over the years, but that those b2b features we've continued to kind of build on, you know, another another piece to the platform that really kind of came in early on was, you know, slatwall can sell physical goods really well, you know, any ecommerce platform typically can write it's a shippable shippable. Good that somebody puts in a cart and gets put the box in and shipped out but we also do really well as subscriptions. And, you know, that's certainly been more and more top of mind on the b2b or b2c side, but it's also kind of coming more into play on the on the b2b side as well. When you start to think about kind of reorders and kind of scheduled shipments and Yep, those kinds of things. So yeah, so b2b has really been part of the platform since day one. And again, not because it was, you know, some grand plan, it was just those are the projects that came in the door. And, you know, we built this platform based on on those projects. So

Unknown Speaker : 5:16

and and now that you guys have grown a little bit matured a little bit, you guys have started to focus more of your Yeah, marketing and sales in that in that direction. I'm sure you've learned a lot too from the

Unknown Speaker : 5:28

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you know, I think there's a huge opportunity on the b2b side. You know, we know the business very well. You know, I've got I've been involved in b2b companies, distributors, you know, in the past my family has as well my brother owns a distributor down in Florida. So we know that we know that business really well. We know a lot of the you know, kind of complexities and issues that they come up come up against. So There's, you know, it's just on the e commerce side b2b is just growing so quickly, and there's so many opportunities there. We felt it was a good place to focus.

Unknown Speaker : 6:09

Yeah, no, that's awesome. I just wanted to touch on one thing that you said that was really interesting. And it's kind of come up in different ways. Throughout since this is episode nine and talking to some people on the merchant side, that actually like work for distributors or manufacturers, and some people kind of like on more of the product or agency side, like like you and us. trellis. And I think this idea of subscriptions for b2b is really interesting. I think what what I kind of see as the future of b2b is people want the kind of the bulk purchasing ability to get a discount of let's say, I want 1000 units or 10,000 units, but I don't necessarily want them delivered all today because I don't want to have to sit on 10,000 units and I don't necessarily want to have to pay for all 10,000 units today. But I want you to give me the discount Another 10,000 maybe you give me this scheduled, you know, subscription, kind of like b2b subscription that maybe you guys tweak for specific use cases, and they get like, you know, 100 a week or 1000 a week or whatever, whatever it is, and some sort of, I could see there being lots of different nuances to that. And it sounds like you guys are kind of already thinking about this and seeing this in action and have actually built something into the core of your product. Yeah, we have and let Brad jump in because he can talk more about it. But yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 7:32

it's, um, it's really been, again, subscription and kind of a subscription model is something that we started really early on in the in the building, the slatwall platform, but this idea of kind of scheduled shipments is really something that we've spent a lot of time on in the last like 24 months. And like you said, there's a ton of complexity to that.

Unknown Speaker : 7:58

Brad, I don't know if you want to add some Some color that

Unknown Speaker : 8:01

Yeah, yeah. And I think the one really interesting thing that we've been hearing from from a lot of people and in different conversations is they sort of look at their, their big sale that they make. And maybe they make that online and offline, it's really complicated. And, you know, that gets done. And then they say, Okay, well, what now? Right? And then a lot of times there are those supplies that that run out, or things that you know, are going to break in six months. And you know, the machine itself, maybe it's going to last, whatever, five 610 20 years. And so they know that chances are this new customer I just signed up is going to need this stuff. And all they need to do is just a way to sort of apply that intelligence to what they're selling. And the subscription really lets them do that. Yeah. Hey, you know, Hey, Isaiah, I know this machine you just bought for a couple million dollars is going to need these supplies in three months and six months, you know, just have them show up and so Really lets the sales guy, you know, not focusing solely on that business, but lets them focus more on finding more of the big sales young, let the supplies kind of handle themselves.

Unknown Speaker : 9:11

Let me interject for a second Brian because, uh, you know, one of the things that I've seen, and this is sort of one of those crossover things that we're all watching in real time, but I've seen a subscription, let's say, like orders where there is a view, let's say in a dashboard for the consumer, and it's basically showing percent of order that's been fulfilled, right? And you move it back and forth. And you say, Well, at this point, it should be 25% of your fulfill but do you want to move it up to 33 so that in the next shipment, you're moving at this far, and then as you get closer to the end of that hundred percent of the order, you know, all of these automated reorder, you know, tech, you know, technologies come into play, you're getting communicated to differently and it really saves so many steps, people Love that kind of flexibility. You know, it's just very personal. Right? That personalization, I think is coming in.

Unknown Speaker : 10:06

Yeah, absolutely. And really, when you, when you sort of think about a subscription, you really all you're doing is you're scheduling deliveries. Andrew, you know, and and so really in the back end under the under the subscription banner and slatwall You know, that's really what it's called. And so if you think about, you know, just like if you go out and you, you know, subscribe to a magazine that's going to arrive in your mailbox, well, maybe not now, but back in the day, right? Anyway, you know, every every first of the month? Well, it's the same thing. You're just you're planning that out over over, over a year over six months. And so, or maybe it's just ongoing, but you know, that that's gonna happen. So when you need to move that up or change the delivery date, or, you know, change how much is being delivered? You know, it's it's a much simpler process than going in and saying, Well, let me go find That machine model that I, that I purchased, let me find exactly the part that I need or the supply that I need and then start the whole process over again, which is done up to your point in a much cleaner interface. You know, then what, you know, we would have had or what someone usually has, as far as reordering goes,

Unknown Speaker : 11:20

yeah. And if you think about what people love your point of how it's really like scheduling delivery in the future, and I think there's like a win win on both sides. Because as a customer, you don't have to worry about logging back in all the time and placing an order, Oh, I forgot to reorder this thing. And then I'm out of it. And I have subscriptions personally, obviously for things like that. So I don't have to worry about getting new product for whatever it is, like razors is obviously a popular one.

Unknown Speaker : 11:47

But I think I could see with b2b. They want more to Tim's point, more personalization. I think you're already seeing that in some of the b2c but even more personalization, b2b of like, Sure, I'll sign up for the subscription but I do want some control. Have, maybe there's a month where I don't need it or whatever it may be. Yeah, that's exactly. When I say we spent the last 24 months. It's our it's all around that right. So yeah, I may, I may want this product this month, but then even to configure what's part of that shipment, right? And then how, what's the frequency of that shipment? So the template is there. But giving a customer the ability to shift that either the order, you know, the frequency, or what's part of the order within some parameter, right, it's got to be a minimum order level perhaps, or they can only you know, they can only shift that shipment out another 30 or 60 days, right, you know, again, based on maybe the pricing parameters that were part of the original kind of purchase. So those are the some of the complexities that we've we've kind of built into slatwall over the last 24 months and give a lot of flexible ability to the to the end customer. Cool.

Unknown Speaker : 13:04

Well, yeah, we're already getting deep into the weeds, which I like, yeah, we want to we want to give people some real insight into specific things they could be doing better. Um, but yeah, we could definitely keep going into the technologies. But I think let's, let's change gears a little bit. Tim, do you want to talk about some of your favorite topics?

Unknown Speaker : 13:23

I have probably

Unknown Speaker : 13:26

one of the one of the things that I like to bring up, you know, the folks we are fortunate enough to speak with and our listeners seem to really like this is really about success and failure is, you know, people are making investments, right. And they're different stages and, you know, their business cycles, let's say, you know, they're early stage or they're kind of been around a while and they're trying to decide about upgrades or changes, or they're mature in some way and becomes as big, let's say, multi year project Keven. So, let's talk a little bit about what you see as like, what to say. Successful b2b ventures should be doing today. Maybe that's a way to turn it on said, instead of saying like, how do people fail, but what should a successful b2b player be looking to do, you know, right now or in the next few months?

Unknown Speaker : 14:14

And certainly, you know, circumstances in the last few months have probably changed that a little bit. I think a lot of it, a lot of where people can see success is trying to get away from those big multi year projects. And trying to tack on

Unknown Speaker : 14:33

to say a three year project is successful.

Unknown Speaker : 14:38

On many of them, right?

Unknown Speaker : 14:41

is really trying to prioritize what's going to give your customers the biggest return in the business the biggest return and, and do that in a in a much smaller income incremental way. And I think that is where people see you know, the most success You know, we talk about agile all the time, right, as a company, but trying to, you know, trying to approach these kinds of projects in that way. doesn't mean you can't think about the big picture and kind of lay that roadmap out, right at a high level. Yeah. But really kind of tried to tackle that in, you know, in stages, and, you know, have kind of evaluate along the way, because, you know, you try to build, you know, this massive project, which is, you know, 12 months, 24 months, however long it is, by the time you get a third of the way through that things have changed already, anyway, and what you thought absolutely is, you know, it doesn't even make sense anymore. Some of your

Unknown Speaker : 15:41

ideas might have just, you might not have been good.

Unknown Speaker : 15:46

Or, you know, the market changes completely like it has in the last four months, right. Yeah. So, you know, I think in for, particularly in the b2b side, you know, a lot of those challenges around their traditional channels. You know, are gone, right? I mean, the sales guy knocking on the door, the trade show, right? Those things just aren't there anymore, or they're difficult or more difficult. And they've, you know, they've always kind of seen, you know, ecommerce spending as maybe a nice to have where now, it's, you know, probably seen more as a necessity, right? We need somewhere, but

Unknown Speaker : 16:26

especially if you want to grow,

Unknown Speaker : 16:28

we don't have, you know, a million dollars, you know, in a year or two years to get that done. So how do we do that in a much quicker, more cost effective way so we can see some return, you know, more more quickly, as opposed to,

Unknown Speaker : 16:44

I love that answer. And I want to dig into that a little bit more. Because, you know, we, we, we love the clients that kind of get on board with more of an agile MVP approach, and sometimes it goes really well, but I'm just curious, and I'm sure you guys have dealt with these challenges. Do you guys find it can be challenging from a project management standpoint for there's, I think there's a few challenges. One is getting people to align on some sort of budget, like, especially a lot of these distributors and manufacturers and b2b, they're used to hit what's, what's it gonna cost? You know, it's 100 grand, you're gonna get me up and running. And that's all that's, it's gonna be that but when you go agile, sometimes it's hard to be it's not always gonna be this set 50 grand or 700 grand scope. So how do you guys manage that from a project management standpoint? And

Unknown Speaker : 17:34

that's an ever moving target. I mean, you know, what we, you know, there's, there's, there's a couple of different ways to do it. We have, we have an engineering process. So it depends on the scope of the project, right, some of these some of the things that we're doing now, there's three big lifts right in a project one typically is I want to you know, custom design front end Right, that's that's one big lift, right if you can do that. So a lot of what we're doing now, so let's eliminate that for now let's, there's some great templates out there. You're gonna look professional, it's gonna work. Yeah, yeah. And then we can kind of look at that down the road if you need to, you know, really get better.

Unknown Speaker : 18:17

Yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 18:19

absolutely, absolutely. The other big lift is, is data. And that's never ever easy. You know, everybody's data is in, you know, it could be in multiple different places, you know, if you're, if you're a distributor, you're getting it from different manufacturers and different formats. You know, what's the state perhaps of any RP system and the data in there. So data, it's really tough to kind of quantify the level of effort on that side, that that tends to be the biggest on and then the third lift is generally integrations right. And, you know, whether it's with an earpiece system or Yeah, CRM or now, that's becoming certainly more and more kind of commoditize, if you will, right. I mean, API's have certainly made great

Unknown Speaker : 19:10

middleware platforms are like a salute. You know, we've a good partnership with Sligo. There's like Dell boomi is obviously a big one. Yeah. I'm sure you guys have seen all this stuff out.

Unknown Speaker : 19:21

Yeah. So, it that, you know, so that has

Unknown Speaker : 19:24

become Not to mention our sponsor punch out to go. So I gotta, I gotta mention them.

Unknown Speaker : 19:30

Really simple,

Unknown Speaker : 19:33

though. Yes. So those, those have become a bit of an easier left. So the, so the big one is the data. So that's when we go into a project. That's where we usually spend most of the time is, is understanding the state of the data. Yeah. And so then the question becomes, do we do that in a sales kind of process? Right?

Unknown Speaker : 19:54

off because if you don't charge for it, I mean, that could who knows how long that could take?

Unknown Speaker : 19:58

Right here. That's where the balancing act becomes, or you do it in a formal engineering, you know, where you're actually gonna, you know, do a deep dive into the data and build, you know, workflows and all of those things. That's, that's what we'd like to do. You know, so, you know, the client knows exactly what they're going to get out of the the end of that they're gonna have some really actionable kind of insight into their product data and how that it's not. It's not even just product data, it could be accounts, right? It's orders, but usually it's products is the biggest mess, young, but how are they? How are they going to, you know, kind of get that into a state where it's going to work, you know, in an e commerce setting, because very often that's different than what might be on a yard.

Unknown Speaker : 20:47

You know, younger,

Unknown Speaker : 20:48

better moving resources around versus, you know, actually merchandising and pricing and promoting them online. So we'll spend, we'll spend as much time as we need there. And figure out what that effort is and build that cost into, you know, come as close as we can, to fixed as we possibly can, you know, we, we've done it, you know, we've done this so many times that we, you know, we're able to, we're able to come as close and be as comfortable with that kind of fixed costs on some of those things as possible.

Unknown Speaker : 21:23

But, you know,

Unknown Speaker : 21:25

we're still moving in somewhat of an agile fashion as you go through, but I really like the idea of breaking out the big chunks. And I totally agree, like having some MVP approaches are showing them the incremental change of maybe let's, I think actually, it was like our third episode, we're talking to Aaron who's got a lot of project management, ecommerce experience, and we're talking about, you know, if you don't have this massive budget, you know, which most of these tests don't maybe focus on, you know, your product data is probably number one, because if the product is not in there, I mean, you can't really sell much right? You can't Really, people can't really browse an order and then maybe after that you focus on you know, the integration or something like that. or potentially the theme or just basic Yeah, yeah, we had a we had a interesting conversation with a manufacturer and they're you know, they're probably you know, 70 or $80 million company and they have they had a they have a bunch of stuff written in Lotus Notes if you can believe it.

Unknown Speaker : 22:32

I believe Yeah, I don't even know what that would look like or what that would be but can you access that

Unknown Speaker : 22:41

but um, you know, if they they sell kind of equipments very expensive the stuff they sell, I've got a spare parts consumables business, but they training, you know, they used to deliver in person, but they've got this new online kind of training that they've built. in there, you know, there was real value to that. And getting for them this MVP was how do we get our, you know, make it way easier, way easier for our customers to be able to just purchase that online training that elearning. You know, this is across the world if they're in Europe, Asia, South America, North America. How do we, how do we take those modules that we've built and make those easier to buy purchase access, right? Yep. And that was their kind of MVP and the kind of consumable stuff. It's, you know, it's okay. You know, they're fine with that for now. But the the return on these elearning modules, right, because the margins are, they built it already. So it just, it's just access. Yeah, great. That's really what their MVP was. So that was, you know, in replacing Lotus Notes is kind of a bonus. So, you know, that was an easy one to kind of focus on and narrow down to that kind of MVP. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that we want to try to focus on with, with these customers. Yep. And then then once, I think it's so important to get something live, right, so people do is they spent too much time trying to get live, and then you can make the incremental changes and see see more progress. And exactly, and I think that you talk about success or failure. And a lot of times, you know, they focus on the project, and not what needs to happen after that project, right? Because this is an experimental, you know, what, in order for this to be successful, it's going to need, you know, ongoing kind of resist marketing. And sometimes that buy in, isn't there. And, you know, they're like, well, the project's done, you know, it should

Unknown Speaker : 24:48

you ever done, your ecommerce site is never done.

Unknown Speaker : 24:52

That's something I actually wanted to bring up to Brad, you know, Brad, I'm the CMO of a tech startup in addition to a lot of the other things that I work on. So your cmo You understand what these responsibilities are and how things work? So how do you have conversations with, you know, potential clients? And then clients really about? You know, exactly, you know what we're talking about here. But the ongoing piece of it how things aren't just a discrete project for 30 days or till the end of acts? Like

Unknown Speaker : 25:20

how do you talk about that? Yeah, that's a great. That's a great question. And I think, you know, part of it is, those conversations come up a little bit when you sort of talk about, well, here's what we're going to do for lunch. And then, during that process, you start to you start having the conversation, okay, here's the things that we think we might want to do in phase one. It doesn't have to be, you know, a set list of of deliverables. It doesn't have to be a function. It doesn't have to go into any detail, but just at high level, what do we think those things are? Are What do you think those things are for version 1.1? You know, what are the things you might want to test are the things that would be nice to have all that, when you start talking about that, that sort of leads into the conversation of well, you know, when we, when we're building this thing, now, we might want to test against this, or we think we might want to integrate this into our CRM or, you know, you sort of start that conversation. And inevitably, if you can have that, it seems like that's a really good lead into sort of, you know, putting some light on, oh, well, we're going to need somebody who sort of understands, you know, marketing or, you know, we're going to launch all these other product categories online for sale, we're going to need some way to get that data, we, you know, we might need to loop in an IT guy or you know, those sorts of things. And, you know, there's within e commerce projects, and certainly you guys have seen it, too. It doesn't just involve, you know, a really select team, you know, inevitably sort of leaks out and I'm sure you have to looping other people that, you know, may or may not typically think of themselves sort of as involved in that business, or that business channel. So, you know, it just sort of the the earlier on, you can start talking about, you know, what do you what do you guys going to need when we flip the switch? What are you going to need? And, you know, there's some shifts to it, certainly, but, you know, you may not need integration support, but you're going to need, you know, marketing product, you know, photography, maybe, you know, all those things to sort of expand out and really deliver on the next version. And, yeah, I mean, that the early you can start talking about the future and heat out as as crazy as it sounds while you're maybe in the development process. Usually the better that works out.

Unknown Speaker : 27:47

Yeah, great, great answer. Because exactly, that's exactly how I think of it. It's like I got to talk about the future, you know, before you even start anything.

Unknown Speaker : 27:56

Yeah. And I think that you know, part of it is You know, during during the process, you know, I mean, what do you call it engineering planning, you know, whatever, whatever word you use for it, you know, there are gonna be things that have come up that, you know, someone's going to react and say, oh, man, we really should have thought of that, you know, that needs to be in the MVP. Oh, okay. So you love that in, but then you have to say to yourself, well, do I want to push the launch date out? Do I need to add in a new resource? Or can I can I take something that was in my MVP now, and maybe I can move it out. And you sort of start to have that conversation that, of course is going to happen during the process, but there's a lot of value to sometimes almost kind of forgetting about things. And it because it sort of reassesses your priority to say well, you know, back in February, we thought this thing was really, really important, right? You can imagine sort of pre coded priorities right? And then what they might look like now and it could be completely different just based on you know, the business You know, at that point in time, maybe a new product line in the new executive, you know, things change. And especially when you're, you know, launching over the over the course of a few months, you know, the business could look different. And those things tend to move around. I think

Unknown Speaker : 29:13

you said something really important that I'm a big believer in with with, especially with b2b commerce, but I think it should apply to really be to see in an all e commerce is that, like, it can't no longer be treated as like, oh, like this one little department or this person, you really want to be successful, like you said, it spills into all the departments and that's why I think you need some executive leadership and and skill there. Because the problem like that I see is, you know, you put in the hands of this one guy who's not an executive, but he has a hard time getting other departments to maybe change processes that would make ecommerce better or do things that make you calmer. So I really think you need some executive leadership there that's willing to go Hey, procurement or whatever it is. You're the ones by products are getting new stuff in stock, you need to do it this way so that it's easier for them to upload new products to the website, you know what I mean? Like, kind of get everyone on board. And I think that whole, like internal, you know, culture needs to change a little bit.

Unknown Speaker : 30:14

Yeah. And that's what really speaks to the, the, the idea of that, that MVP, that sort of quick win, where if there is maybe just that one executive or that one guy who is sort of, you know, tasked with delivering, if that one guy is trying to deliver the the world, it's just not going to happen. Yeah, really be specific about what that is, if it's, you know, you know, maybe the marketing, you know, teams for driving it, well, what's that thing that's really going to going to, you know, provide some value, increase sales, be more efficient, reduce costs, you know, any one of those things. If you sort of narrow that in, then you know, then it can work and get something live and then prove to the rest of the company. Hey, here's what we've done. Let's do more. Right. And yeah, and if, if that if that initial project is massive, it's huge. It's just, it's not going to happen. And then it just, it just provides more ammo to the, to the rest of the team that wasn't necessarily buying in like, Hey, we tried this thing, it just didn't work.

Unknown Speaker : 31:17

You know? Yeah, no, that makes makes so much sense. So,

Unknown Speaker : 31:21

I think, Isaiah, just one last thing on that you mentioned, you know, kind of needing buy in from all of these, you know, entities within the business. I think that's going to be a big challenge on the b2b side again, because this is not for most companies or, you know, a traditional channel, right. Um, and it can be seen, you know, as competing with other channels and a lot of ways, right, there's, you know, you, you talk to manufacturers, and they, you know, they might be selling through direct sales teams or just through distributors. And yeah, e commerce has always has always been seen or in most cases, as Competing with those channels. Right? And that's just not on the kind of outward sales side, but then you know, also that that's within the company as well. So that's a mindset that, you know, is going to gonna have to change. And how does this new channel work within the kind of constructs of, you know, the the traditional business models you've had in place, right? accounting, operations, sales, right, all of those things. And if there isn't buy in there, you know, whoever's leading this charge is not going to do well.

Unknown Speaker : 32:34

Yeah. And I think what you said is so important, and I think

Unknown Speaker : 32:39

a lot of these companies are operating in this fear, defense mindset and all these companies. I'm sure you've heard Gary Vee. He's a very big on social media, and he talks about offense and defense. And I think it is very true that you know, too many companies are stuck in defense, especially these b2b companies and their defenses, protect our existing channels, protect our sales reps because they're scared that if we don't do e commerce, the sales reps will become obsolete. And it's like if you just keep playing defense forever, eventually you just become obsolete because maybe your your retailers died out because they're not doing e commerce or something. You know what I mean? Like you, you got to get out of that mindset to some degree. I can understand having a little bit of that. Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 33:25

Yeah. You know, it's, it's gonna take take some time. But I think if if they're not thinking in that direction, yeah, they're, they're gonna find themselves in in trouble. Eventually.

Unknown Speaker : 33:38

Yeah, you got to score some some points. Right. That's all you need some offense. Yep.

Unknown Speaker : 33:45

So cool. We covered a lot of the stuff we wanted to talk about.

Unknown Speaker : 33:51

So,

Unknown Speaker : 33:52

yeah, I mean, I just have one other quick question. I mean, you can answer this any way you like, but I usually ask folks What they think of b2b versus b2c? And like what b2b is still learning from b2c, like, you know, because in at least my experience, you know, a lot of BC was ahead and a lot of time, at least on adoption, right. So what is what is b2b still learning or what is? What do you think they should be learning from B to C today?

Unknown Speaker : 34:22

Yeah, I mean, I'll answer quickly. And I'm sure Brad, because Brad was on the b2c side for for a number of years. So he could probably jump in as well. But, um, you know, I think probably it's, it's really around, you know, promotion, you know, and marketing Hmm.

Unknown Speaker : 34:40

You know, it's

Unknown Speaker : 34:43

been a very, you know, it's really been tradition, you know, again, more traditional, right? This the sales, salesperson walks in, you know, they follow up with some brochures. And, you know, they gets into a CRM system, they got to keep calling right But leveraging kind of customer data and segmenting that and being able to, you know, use that in an online from online and offline, for that matter. But kind of being more promotional and more kind of marketing focused, particularly when it comes to the e commerce piece is something that I think b2b is can learn from b2c. Certainly, b2c is way, way ahead on that end. You know, it's, and that becomes, again, it's about investment, it's about resources. It's about kind of, you know, leadership saying this is important, right? If we want to be successful, we have to do these things. And I think that's, there's certainly some big, you know, big b2b players out there that are doing that. And it's just going to take some time for that to kind of trickle down.

Unknown Speaker : 35:54

Yeah, right. I love I love that you brought that up, because we I don't think we anyone's been wrap that up when you've asked that Tim like, we've talked about a lot of things, but we haven't really dug into promotions and Brad I'd love to hear your thoughts on this but like that b2c marketing with, you know, we do a lot of, you know, b2c trellis and Shopify and it's, I call it the b2c playbook like it works. It's out there you do some, you know, email signup, promos like abandoned cart promos, or what like, these kind of like promo things, and then you get your Facebook ads and like, it really works. And if you have a good product market fit, you can scale it, but like with b2b, I feel like it's a lot harder. You can't just, you know, slap on a couple discount codes and call it like, That's why, you know, part of why we started this podcast because I think it's just so much more complex. So there anything in b2b marketing that you guys see, you know, there's no one size fits all but you see is working in terms of some little tricks or

Unknown Speaker : 36:56

Yeah, well, I think I think the one the one thing That I think kind of gets forgotten is there's sort of a ton of data that your, that your ecommerce platform generates. Yep. And figuring out how you can access that and sort of lean into that. And sort of gained some, some analysis and in, you know, in a lot of cases, if they're these really high dollar, dollar orders, you know, that that you don't necessarily need huge, you know, volumes to sort of, you know, it's not like you need to go out and sell you know, thousand mattresses or, or some huge, huge number of orders, you know, you might be happy with 234. And so a lot of it is sort of getting the data out of your of your system of your platform. And, you know, using that in sort of a smart way we talk a lot about, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be a new sale, to have value. Um, we were just talking with someone, I think last week, he was like, you know, so many new distributors and wholesalers that he's talking to, you are so focused on on a new sale. And that's not necessarily all the value that your your e commerce sort of operation is going to bring to you. If you just go in there and say, Well, how can I get data out of the platform that's going to enable more repeat business? And could that be, we leverage some some, you know, difference, sort of promotion, you know, like, like what Dave just mentioned? Or even just, you know, follow up with with, quote, you know, send out a quote, you know, to someone that we've spoken with maybe that they generated, you know, a month ago and no one's follow up with them on it, maybe? Yeah, you know, hey, Isaiah, you know, you asked for a quote a month ago, we haven't heard from you, you know, you have any questions, something really simple. It doesn't need to be overly complicated, but you sort of step back and say, well, we already have the sales staff, how can we use data? And how can we use some of the functionality in the platform that we've got to help them out, just in almost like just to be back up, really, and let them you know, talk to their existing customers, they've got in a better way in a smarter way, or reach out to new people in a better way, in a smarter way to drive the business that way, it doesn't need to be, you know, revolutionary, I think like the one thing conversation with that we sort of overhear bunches, you know, someone talking about putting, you know, like a social media buttons on their, on their product pages for b2b and it's like, you know, you can do that. I'm sorry, gonna drive your business. Let's talk about Yeah, doing more smarter, more automated things. So true. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 39:50

Yeah, I love that answer. So and if you're doing it right, you should have, you know, you might have a pretty big catalog. 10 2030 100,000 products. It's potentially, you know, even more but you know, decent sized catalog, and then you might have a decent sized customer base. So you can look at the data, like, Who's ordering, how often are they ordering, you have all this data in there. And then you say, okay, they order once a month, maybe we should offer them, you know, some special offer to buy twice a month, or whatever it is, and just make more data driven marketing decisions, instead of sales reps, just kind of focusing on the relationship and thinking they know what they want, but not necessarily actually seeing all the data.

Unknown Speaker : 40:31

Yeah, in you know, I think in some cases, you need to talk about a huge product catalog, you know, hundred thousand products, you know, chances are, you know, 10 20% of those products are actually really being sold. Yep. And so it kind of leads you to think, Well, you know, what, are we what are we not pushing right now that we should be pushing more? Or are there some hidden gems in there right now that really aren't selling because they just lost in the shuffle on the website. Maybe they're not merchandise Well, you know, now They're missing product data, you know, heck, maybe some of them aren't even published, you know? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 41:04

Yep. So cross sells

Unknown Speaker : 41:06

your upsell. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, when when you sort of think about that, and think about, well, again, how can you take that and apply some logic to it without going crazy with, you know, your super expensive personalization systems and all kinds of other stuff, just really baby steps. How can I be smarter about what I'm selling and who I'm selling to? I'm contacting people. If you think if you really step back and take that approach, you can get a lot more out of, you know, the e commerce investment that you're making and, you know, drive repeat business and find a whole whole slew of new customers. Hmm,

Unknown Speaker : 41:45

yeah. Great, great answer. Um, so we're, we've been on for a little while now. So I want to just at least get the one of my topics that I like to talk about, which is, what do you got because you guys have done a great job innovating and I think the subscription thing is, is really cool that you guys develop from a b2b perspective, obviously, I think it's been in b2c for a while, but I still think it's very untouched and b2b in a lot of ways compared to what it what it could be. What do you guys see kind of like the next, you know, wave of innovation in b2b? And maybe it is more advanced subscription. But, um, I noticed you guys do headless, or you're supporting that through API. So I'm sure you guys have seen that trend, like what do you know, it's hard to predict 10 years out, but your best kind of

Unknown Speaker : 42:34

future prediction of what you see kind of happening?

Unknown Speaker : 42:39

Yeah, I mean, I, for me, I think, you know, tools, it's not so much on the tool side, it's more about data, and data management and b2b companies just getting smarter about that and better about that and understanding, you know, kind of to talk about Brexit. was just just saying that the power of the data. Yeah. And that's, that's really where I think

Unknown Speaker : 43:09

they're gonna need to spend, or the companies that do spend time in that.

Unknown Speaker : 43:19

Understand understanding the data and how they can leverage it is, is real five to 10 years. So.

Unknown Speaker : 43:26

So you think that, you know, we're going to see kind of a more sophisticated data capability from b2b. Do you think it's going to be technology driving that are more processes within the company is driving that?

Unknown Speaker : 43:44

I think it's gonna be a combination of the two.

Unknown Speaker : 43:48

You know, I think that, uh, you know, that's one of the biggest challenges we see on the technology side is that there, again, there's these, you know, kind of traditionally RPS product around right warehousing and getting it out the door, but weren't really built to, you know, sell online and merchandise and those other things. So I think that's, that's one of the challenges from a technology side is kind of bridging that bridging that gap between kind of E RP and e commerce and awareness, a lot of, frankly, where we find a lot of our projects. But it's also process, right. And, again, understanding the investment and the time and the resources to getting this data, right. And then us figuring out how to leverage it. And again, like Brad said, kind of taking those baby steps. You don't have to jump right into kind of personalization and, you know, spending a ton of money on that. But there's ways to do this and kind of incremental steps, which which can be really powerful, you know, kind of across the company, better reporting, better sales, right? better customer service, you know, all comes from kind of understanding and getting access to that data.

Unknown Speaker : 45:06

Yeah, no, I love that answer. And I think I think we're seeing a little bit of that now. But companies are starting to realize like my eirp really isn't suited for the data I need for for e commerce. And then but then how a lot but I still need that data in ecommerce to some degree and then how do I get the rest into my econ platform? And they just, they between process and technology, they need to kind of figure that out better than they are today. And it's gonna take a while because it's so much data. It's hard to solve that quickly. When you have absolutely, yeah. 50,000 products or hundred thousand

Unknown Speaker : 45:38

products. Yeah, it's not a it's not an easy lift.

Unknown Speaker : 45:42

Yeah. Well, it's a it's great that you just mentioned that because, uh, you know, I want to kind of wrap up here and our episode 10, which is coming up recording next week, is actually with a small kind of like services agency where he he focuses on product data and process and helping companies kind of solve this problem. So hopefully for our listeners that come back we'll we'll talk about what he does to help help him solve that from from kind of an operational standpoint and all actually, I think I'm gonna connect you guys because I he might be a good partner for you guys for some of that work that you know, you might need to offload from time to time since you guys are you know, you obviously want to Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 46:31

Yep, sounds great. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 46:33

exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good.

Unknown Speaker : 46:36

All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks for Thanks for joining. It was a it was great to have you guys and catch up.

Unknown Speaker : 46:42

It was a pleasure having you guys here.

Unknown Speaker : 46:44

Thanks, guys. Yeah, yeah. great conversation. Thanks.