Unknown Speaker : 0:08

Hi, everyone, this is Isaiah from trellis Welcome to the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I'm your co host Isaiah, like I said from trellis and tamela. You take it away,

Unknown Speaker : 0:21

or I'm Timothy Peterson. I work closely with Isaiah trellis and I work in both b2b and b2c e commerce among many other things.

Unknown Speaker : 0:32

Awesome. Before I welcome our awesome guests who I'm very excited to talk to. We are very fortunate to have an awesome sponsor, a company that we've worked with for years now. Punch Out to go is now our sponsor, official sponsor of the of the podcast. And they're a global b2b integration company specializing and connecting commerce platforms with E procurement and E RP application. So we'll punch out to go is not a pass technology that seamlessly links business applications to automate the flow of purchasing data. With their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexities, for punch out catalogs, electronic purchase orders, invoices and other b2b sales order automation documents in order to accelerate business results, so quite a mouthful to say what they do but to really simplify it, essentially automate a lot of the back office processes and automate a lot of what you want to be doing with ecommerce with all of the customers kind of pyramids and and GRP solutions so that you can really automate the purchasing process a lot more than what you would normally do if you just had just a standalone e commerce website. So great. They're they're a great solution and we we hope that you check them out for yourself. business, your b2b business. So without further ado, Aaron Aaron Shin is our guest from Wigan hammer. Aaron, we kind of go back quite a bit of ways. I think actually, we've been in touch for a few years now. And you're the managing director at one hammer but I'll let you take it away with a better introduction for yourself. That's my basic intro.

Unknown Speaker : 2:27

And Timothy, I appreciate it. So yeah, I'm the managing director of whitened hammers, e commerce practice. Wide numbers a 43 year old IT company out of the greater Pennsylvania, the Philly area. And we've got a number of business units that we have around Microsoft, Microsoft gold partner, Cisco partner, we have other other lines of business, but I get the privilege of running the the e commerce one which has mostly been in the Magento space, although recently Now is in the big commerce space as well, that includes digital marketing and SEO, creative consulting, and the whole shebang. And White hammer historically, as a result of its location, just outside of Philly, has had partnerships with a lot of manufacturing and b2b companies in southeast Pennsylvania, which has been a big hub of manufacturing for, you know, decades and decades. And so we've gotten to work with a lot of larger organizations. And going back I've been in the e commerce space for a little over five and we got them close to six years, and have spent a lot of time just through virtue of working in the Magento space, spent a lot of time working with b2b companies that are looking to add a digital channel to their existing their existing channel map. So definitely excited to talk about this because it's a hot topic now it is a hot topic three years ago, and it's just getting hotter and I think especially as everybody is forced to work from home and figure out how to advertise and sell and deliver.

Unknown Speaker : 4:09

Literally.

Unknown Speaker : 4:10

Yep. And and before you were in e commerce, you were in it in healthcare, right. So you have a pretty deep knowledge of integrations right. From what I understand. Yes,

Unknown Speaker : 4:20

I did. I did. Healthcare, I worked for an EMR electronic medical record company for a couple of years as a technical consultant doing integrations between multiple systems. Before that I was Product Manager at a startup building policy administration software for property casualty insurance companies. So I started in into various sort of highly regulated industries dealing with look much larger sort of maybe slow moving companies or that were trying to adopt, you know, digital transformation. And then I went into e commerce where generally the tech curve was for the most part considerably head of healthcare and insurance. And it's been interesting but it's funny because b2b e commerce is more or less in a place where you see healthcare and insurance being today just beginning to get into the, like consumer adoption of, of technology as a key part of the business instead of just like trying to pay somebody to serve we're going in closet, right, which is it?

Unknown Speaker : 5:30

It's awesome. So yeah, quite a quite a breadth of experience. So I know we can I'm sure we could talk for hours on b2b commerce, like you said, it's still it's still a hot topic and growing with all the, you know, economic changes that we're dealing with from Coronavirus. So, one of the things that, you know, we wanted to make sure he touched on because, you know, you have agency experience obviously, all three of us have quite a bit of agency experience. And we've all dealt with implementing all sorts of different technologies, especially in e commerce. So, um, you know, I really wanted to get into what what do you think the challenges are around implementing e commerce technologies, you know, mainly platforms. And let's kind of start at like a high level and then we'll get into some of the specific bullets that we have. But, um, what do you because like so just to kind of preface that like, from our perspective, we feel like you know, we're crushing it with Shopify, you get up these b2c sites, it's it seems like such a simple process relative to b2b where it's just like, it feels like the opposite. And it's so much harder. What What do you think is what's making it so hard for these b2b companies to implement? You know, Magento successfully big commerce or insight or whatever it is, doesn't matter. The platform, you know, the platform doesn't matter, honestly. Yeah, I think I think it's too big. thing I think one is the maturity of the merchant organization itself relative to

Unknown Speaker : 7:07

digital presence, right. So, b2c companies, the e commerce revolution started in the 90s. Really, and there have been a lot of brands, direct consumer brands that have grown up digitally native. They understand SEO, they understand paid, they understand fulfillment. And there are lots of platform options. That is sort of mature around that starting with Woo, you know, on the WordPress side, moving on to Shopify and Magento, in big commerce and many others. And so I think organizationally, if you talk to a company that is selling direct to consumers, they've been doing it for a while, or they are staffed with people who've been doing it for a while, and they are if not ecommerce pure play e comm is one of the two pillars online Which their businesses built. They have no channels they're not. They're not picking up the phone and calling customers to get new customers. They're advertising and they're delivering online. And so for b2b companies, a lot of times they're behind that curve. And you know, this has been talked about, you know, I think we've probably both heard a lot of the same thought leadership over the years of b2b being, you know, 10 years behind b2c in terms of technology adoption. So I think that's one of the reasons why in b2b, it's so hard is because the expectation for what the technology can deliver in the boardroom, when they're making the decision to go digital, because they want to be to see experience, but internally, their product data, their operations, how they conceive of their pricing, how they manage their customer data, none of that is actually ready to support a b2c experience. And so the two the two pressures that you see are on, you know, internally, they still aren't thinking a lot of times of e commerce as people Key to their business as a b2c company is because it's a zero to 5% part of their revenue. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, b2c companies is considerably higher. And so the institutional focus, isn't there. And then the groundwork internally for like, Are there people empowered to make decisions about the future of e commerce channel, directly empowered to do that, or that decision by committee inside of the larger b2b organization? And a lot of times it's decision by committee. And there's not like a single stakeholder with a vision, it's executing on a vision. And those two things tend to slow down the process.

Unknown Speaker : 9:38

Yeah. And would you say it's fair to say that so just to add to that, that b2b e commerce you know, you have more organizational operational complexity, because you're not just like, typically just it's not always as simple as just add to cart, you know, this is the price and that's it. They might not have special pricing or whatever it is. So there's more complexity, operational complexity, The more data, so more complexity and less internal sophistication. Like those are two bad things to have for getting up and running. Yep. You see where I'm going with that? Like? Absolutely, absolutely.

Unknown Speaker : 10:15

I totally agree. I really see it on the pricing side, if I had to pick one place where I see the complexity really show up and b2b, it's, you know, there are a lot of companies that have been successfully selling for decades, a family of distributors, small manufacturers, and the like. And the pricing strategy has been you sending the sales, you send the sales for sales reps forth in the world with Excel and sample books, and they figure out pricing. And they write it down on a piece of paper, or they remember it and it's all it's not, it's not standardized. It's not digitized and it's all in people's heads. You You accrue that over decades of time, and you end up with a real ball of yarn when it comes to trying to figure out how much any particular person who's buying from you shouldn't Paying for parties or buying for you. And translating all of that into a computer system which relies on standardization and relies on rules and formulas to calculate things can be tricky. A lot of times. We know Aaron,

Unknown Speaker : 11:13

one of the things that comes to mind you just really underlined it is that, you know, a lot of businesses and b2c, they, they they went through a disintermediation process. I mean, this is what B school people talk about all the time, right. That was really what the disruption was. So, you know, you go direct to a consumer, you know, the whole idea. He does b2b didn't really do that. Right. And that's part of the reason that everything is, you know, quote, unquote, behind b2c, but also there's a lot more, you know, of these layers in b2b than there are in traditional b2c businesses. I mean, so, you know, I've used examples in other episodes of ours, but yeah, just a project that comes to mind is is exactly what you we're describing it's like moving from like, you know, catalogs and spreadsheets or faxes or whatever people were doing, to allowing a customer to go directly to a site to place an order in some sort of way to construct it online. And that's been a leap for a lot of companies.

Unknown Speaker : 12:17

Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker : 12:19

So so let's get into some of the specifics to try and kind of help people out and think through this. And we talked before this, that we had a little bit of time. So I think, you know, there's a lot that we could get into, but I like to give it I think it's easier for people to understand it this way, because not everyone has unlimited money, right? That's always the big constraint if you want to, you know, get a million dollars, and I'll go hire the best people and but most of these valuable b2b organizations don't have $5 million to build an e commerce website, right. So typically, these are some of the budgets that we see and I think they're probably pretty relevant to what you see too. There's that smaller, they're just trying to get something And it's a zero to 100 k budget. Obviously, zero doesn't work. But,

Unknown Speaker : 13:05

you know, though,

Unknown Speaker : 13:06

call it 50 to 100 K.

Unknown Speaker : 13:10

Not a huge budget, although it's funny because companies will get sticker shock when they haven't seen a quote from an e commerce, b2b e commerce global. Yeah, they don't realize that that's the low spectrum. But really, I would consider that the low spectrum. b2b e commerce investment is that zero to 100 k budget. So, you know, you have some guy, whether it's the director of it, or just whoever it is, he's going out and talking to agencies and the owner said, you know, we got to get this done for like 100 K or 80 K, what is kind of the guidance or what would what would you kind of advocate for that company to do whether it's platform selection, pre development, you know, how would you kind of approach that

Unknown Speaker : 13:52

the other but budgets?

Unknown Speaker : 13:55

Well, it's gonna depend a lot on and I you know, and everybody hates the like, I am ask you a clear question you come back with? Well, it depends. So I'm going to answer it with but Well, it depends, right? Because a lot of times, if you if you and I had a lot of conversations over the years where somebody came to me with that budget in that deed, and I start with, okay, where is your product data?

Unknown Speaker : 14:20

Do you have it? Do you have product data?

Unknown Speaker : 14:24

No problem.

Unknown Speaker : 14:25

No, not in a digital format, right? There is? A lot of times it's like, well, my manufacturers give me a spreadsheet, which has a part number up to 36 characters, because that's all the as 100 support for the product. Like price, and that's it and I say, Well, great. That's not really enough to build a website on unique descriptions, you need images, you know, you need to understand your cost of goods, you need to understand your margins. You need to be able to develop pricing levels and tiers and things like that. You know, there's some issues If somebody already has all that, then we'll see we'll just glide right over it. But I you have to start in the fundamentals. A lot of times, especially I've never done it before, where they're all their product data, maybe an InDesign files, because they're a catalog business. So they don't have like a spreadsheet of discrete data representing any of this thing. It's literally all in graphics files. Yeah, that's what that's what that's how their channel delivers that information today. And so, I would say maybe start with I would start with an audit of like, what do you I can tell you what you need, you know, to for your, let's say, 50 to $100,000? budget, the zero and not so much.

Unknown Speaker : 15:40

Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 15:42

Start with start with a little bit of consulting or auditing around like, what do you have, and what do you hope to achieve? One of the things I've, I often recommend it to people who have a limited budget, and they're really trying to do a proof of concept, right? A lot of times, you'll talk to like somebody that's like hey, I You know, it's a family business and like, Hey, you know, dad told me to go figure out what e commerce was going to be like. Pop's doesn't want to spend that much money on it. I don't know, what do I What should I do? You know, sometimes the best thing to do is to start small, pick a particular brand or a particular line of goods that you sell or a particular sub brand or something that you have, where you're not trying to get all 3 million of your widgets that you sell on one catalog all at once. That's a daunting task for anybody. But maybe pick a growing segment of your business, a high volume segment of your business with a with a with a reasonably small catalog and some fairly set price levels that may lend itself well to being sold online. You know, a lot of times in b2b, especially an established b2b, coming in maybe a sort of a house of brands approach where there's a lot of like different properties that sort of grown up my acquisition. organically over the years, pick one, start with one, let that be a foundation for you to learn what it's like to build an e commerce site and then live in an e commerce site, and then slowly roll the other brands catalog into time. That would be that's a great place to start. I think for somebody with a with a limited budget, don't try to do too much at

Unknown Speaker : 17:18

one island. Love that approach. So would you say it's fair to say that, you know, zero to 100 K, especially if you know, you don't have like, I think there's a difference. If they already have like something robots in there, maybe they're trying to make it better. Assuming they don't have, they have something kind of old and they're really just trying to get up and running for the first time. Or, essentially, there's time. Um, so it's fair to say that it's almost like a proof of concept foundational project with a platform that you think is going to scale for them, whether that's big commerce or whatever it is, and get, it's almost like focus on getting your product data into the platform. And that's it like Get get your product data into the platform, maybe have some a little bit of other b2b nuances around that. But like, don't try and go too crazy with all the flashy design and other things that are just gonna blow the budget.

Unknown Speaker : 18:15

Yeah, that's exactly right. I like to the process I like to walk people through is, let's all sit down in a room and I'm with I'm working one on one. If you're a merchant who's looking to go b2b, we're sitting down, we're talking about a project scope. I will I will sit down and I will say, talk to me about how does an order become How does a customer or a browser become a customer who becomes an order? Right? Walk me through the process of like, I find you I find the part that I need to do the discovery. How is somebody today going to find the thing that they need? How are they going to transact that, how are they paying for it? And how are you going to ship it and fulfill it? Let's walk through that. It's like the Schoolhouse Rock. How does a bill become law right? If you go through that Like, how does a product become an order? How does a, how does a browser become a customer, and let's focus on on a path, a glide path, and really drill into all the things that make that happen. And you map that out on a timeline or on a sheet of paper, and you look okay, you need this data, you need this integration, you need this person pulling this lever internally. Let's talk about shipping. Let's talk about fulfillment. It's like like CRM, like walk through that process and let that drive the scope. Right, drop them drop the notions that you might have around like, I'm paying for a website to be built, and it will have pictures on it of my products and people will buy give you money for it. And that's it. You need to think a little deeper than that. Because you're if you're building a channel, not a website, it's a channel, not a website. I can't emphasize that enough. And there's going to be internal change with the company as a result of building a channel. I think people need to prepare to accept that and usually when you go to the exercise of saying, okay, you know, let's let's go to the library. cycle of how a product becomes an order how the customer fits into all of that, the lights start to go on the switch and start to flip around like, oh, okay, like, you know, maybe we're used to shipping entire pallets, maybe we need to, we're going to give people the ability to buy less than a full pallet. Maybe we need to think about our shipping lines, maybe we need to think about sales, tax liability and state other states, right? Like there's all kinds of stuff that comes into it suddenly, when you when you start thinking about how to line

Unknown Speaker : 20:29

that's quite a mouthful, a lot to think about, but safe to say that they're probably not going to get all of that operational excellence, you know, in some amazing, you know, consumer experience for that zero to 100 k budget, right, like all those integrations all like I guess as you're probably going to have to pick and choose some of the areas that you focus on whether it's product data or some of the order workflow to tie into the RP and even that can get pretty expensive unless you find like a really good product that has kind of already done it for But

Unknown Speaker : 21:00

you said the magic magic acronym GRP. Two, which is on?

Unknown Speaker : 21:07

Yeah, let's let's hold on that. So I think, you know, because we could spend so much time on this, it's safe to say that zero to 100 K is kind of like foundational, you're not going to get everything but you'll get some infrastructure probably really focused around product data. And then you can kind of add to it and build in more things on top of that over time. And then let's, so let's say you get to the hundred to 200 250 K, a little bit larger budget, maybe you can get a deeper integration, you know, more of a complete b2b experience. Well, you know, I guess, you know, how does that change things for you when someone kind of comes to you and they're like, I have 200 kids a little bit more of a, b? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 21:54

Well, you know, when I have that conversation, it's signals to me by the time somebody is willing to allocate a budget At that level that they already kind of know what they're doing. Right? Nobody who's new to to very few companies who are new to transactional, b2b, come to you with that kind of budget. Usually when somebody when somebody shows up with that it means that there are there have been internal hires and processes made already to support the technology. Right? So, you know, I would say, before somebody comes to me with a budget like that, I would say, hey, do you have a director of e commerce? Or do you have somebody whose primary goal is to to drive revenue and collect customer data and do remarketing and all the rest of it around this online channel? Because if you just if you kind of walk into it, and you're like, I'm going to spend $250,000, and but nobody's gonna watch it internally. Nobody knows how to log into the back end and pull an order out. He knows how to log in and change product data,

Unknown Speaker : 22:48

which I bet happens all the time. It does

Unknown Speaker : 22:51

happen. And so you know, I would I would say before I love taking companies money, absolutely. I'm in business, right like, I need You know, the people with budgets are what enable us to operate. We're, we're consultants and technologists, but I always try to be really honest with people make sure that they are internally staff organized to get ROI from 200 plus thousand dollars of business. I've cleared my throat now if you know extensively before I answer your question. What I would say is when you have that kind of budget, I think you're absolutely right about a deeper er p integration. It's the thing that everybody wants. Usually at that level, there may be multiple systems involved. There may be an E RP, there may be a CRM, there might be a separate order management or fulfillment or pick Pack and Ship system. There may be an accounting system outside of the DRP rarely, but sometimes it happens. At that level, I start talking to people about their middleware strategy a little bit their internal ETL and reporting tools because, um, if if you're at a level where you're driving millions of dollars through a A b2b channel, you probably need to get pretty decent metrics off of things. And sometimes it can be a pain to pull that data out of lots of disparate systems, especially if they don't talk to each other. And so you're exporting data from one spreadsheet, and I'm putting data in another spreadsheet over here and trying to figure out like, you know, what's our margin on particular segments and they can, it can be hard to pull together, sometimes I would say look at, um, that's when I start talking to people about, okay, if you're, if you've got that kind of budget, there's more than one system. And the next let's look real hard at the integration side of things for you to make sure you have the reporting tools, you need to make decisions about your business. And just to make sure that manual data entry is being eliminated wherever you possibly can, right, because that slows things down as payroll costs. And, and it's a it's an error ridden process to do double entry from one system to another. So,

Unknown Speaker : 24:49

yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 24:50

absolutely. First place, I would start I would start looking from a technology standpoint, on that's also the level at which I might, you know, start suggesting that people move from like, the free version of Magento to the paid version of Magento. Or to look into a free paid platform.

Unknown Speaker : 25:10

Yep, they start to look into larger license costs, big commerce enterprise or Magento enterprise or, you know, they might be looking at insight or

Unknown Speaker : 25:21

probably not hybris at this point, but they might, you know, they're looking at it,

Unknown Speaker : 25:27

because there's, there's some other stuff we want to get into. And we could probably spend the whole time just talking about project budgets and then so once you start to get into the 250 k plus, then I think you start to get into that more sophistication. Um, and, you know, I don't even know if we need to spend a lot of time on that because I think, to your point, they're probably a little bit more sophisticated. But what happens in this, we've seen this but like, sometimes they might have that and I and but they aren't sophisticated. They might say, Oh, we we can afford the 300 k we can explore for four K, but what I'd like, you know, what if they don't have that internal, you know, what do you usually? Yeah. Have you seen that? Because we've seen that, yeah, they're like, have like 350 K, but like, Who's gonna run this site? Who's gonna run this project? You kind of like, no, it's gonna fail. And like you said, it's great to take money, but it's also not great to take money that fails, because that kind of backfires, too. Right?

Unknown Speaker : 26:24

So I don't know, I don't know too much. You know, obviously, we've talked many times over the years for me, I want long term relationships with Mike. Oh, absolutely. The initial site build, but then there's the long term relationship. You know, the ongoing support and maintenance and consulting and marketing services, adding new features and

Unknown Speaker : 26:45

that's the fun part, right, everyone wants to depart. Yeah, get to the projects and the painful part, right, you want to get you want to get to the fun part. But so you know, most some of the companies to 50 k plus might be sophisticated, they might have thought through the platform. They select an agent. They're like pretty sophisticated, and they might be doing well. Let's talk about the ones that they do have the bigger budget, but like, would you recommend they hire someone? Or what would you? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 27:11

Yes, I would. Absolutely. And this goes back to the when you're going to say if you're really serious, if a company is always serious about e commerce as a channel for him, there needs to be unempowered. At least one empowered stakeholder internally, who can make decisions about budget, ROI and scope relative to any kind of IT project or any any kind anything about the channel needs to be their job, that shouldn't be the part time job of the marketing director. If you're going to spend that kind of money, it shouldn't be the part time job of the IT director, community commerce, if you're going to spend that kind of money. There needs to be somebody who is being held accountable to the upper leadership of the business, the Board of Directors, with the owner with shareholders, who they are saying, Hey, this is the growth we want to see. This is the budget we're going to give you. let's let's let's call Through the financial performance of the e commerce channel for them, and then they need to be empowered to go make decisions to hit those KPIs. But if it's if it's a part time job or decision by committee, it really slows down the ability for a company to learn from mistakes or to make decisions that are necessary about vendor relationships, about merchandising about price strategy, sales, you have to have sales buy in on. I have, you know, before you spend that kind of money, your director of sales your VP of Sales needs to be on board with with this and your reps need to not see the website as a challenge. Yes, as

Unknown Speaker : 28:44

bizarre. Yeah, yeah, it has to be aligned. Yeah, they don't want to feel like I have a job to this ecommerce site that automates all the orders. Um, so yeah, I think it's safe to say that they you know, they're not sophisticated and it's not like a you know, There's those projects where they they know what they're doing, they come to you, and it's kind of more of an RFP process and you just hope that you went in because you know that there, it's going to succeed. But the ones, the ones that aren't that have that bigger budget, you probably would you recommend, it's like a director of e commerce. Is that the title that you think is often the case?

Unknown Speaker : 29:15

or, or, or something like that is interesting, right? We'll see. I don't know about you. I'm curious to hear your answer on this. I feel like a lot of people's first ecommerce experience is, well, we'll do FBA. Like we'll we'll, we'll pack a truck, and we'll we'll roll it to a house and sell to Amazon and look, we're doing e commerce now, because people can buy our stuff on Amazon. And that's not the same thing as

Unknown Speaker : 29:46

Yeah, I think that would be such a good point. And we've seen this where they don't realize that all ecommerce directors aren't created equal. And they go and hire someone who has enough commerce experience, but really his experiences, you know, shipping product at Amazon and then, you know, loading products on something really basic. And now he needs to manage this super complicated quarter million 350,000, whatever it is $400,000 project where he's got to upload product data and like, it's so much more complicated with how you structure the data. It's almost like you're using pin data, like you're basically running a pin and these ecommerce systems. Yeah. And it's like so so that person really needs to be experienced and well thought out when you hire that person. I think we're on the same page that they need that it can't just be some guy that's on Amazon FBA it, you know, yeah, and I want to jump in on one thing, Aaron Aaron, earlier. I mean, one of the things he said that it really struck me that's I think, high value is that, you know, it's always the long term relationship. So if the budget is 50,000 100,000 or 250, or 400, you know, the it's still a relationship. And everything has a life, right? So you can recommend whatever changes or upgrades or re platforming or whatever needs to happen. But those things all have a life. Is this really something of a process of ongoing innovation in your company? I mean, how do you determine when you need to make the next set of changes, and if they don't initially have a person coming in who's a director or somehow a head of e commerce, there's got to be that relationship in place so that there's a regular review and a regular understanding that they're going to be they're still ahead, or they're with the competition or they're falling behind, right, because of changes that they haven't made. And, you know, I've been on both sides of the coin, and I've been the guy on the outside, you know, making recommendations and then I've moved in house for some of those same companies to be the head of e commerce and to kind of ride it through for a while to make sure that team got built on all the things you said that there was buy in I say, right, you know, there needs to be I am Yeah, the business about the value and you need to work with all the analytics and you know, finance people make sure they clearly see the metrics too, because if it's new, they won't. They won't know all of those metrics unless there's a key player who's saying, here's how you judge the success or failure of this. And wow, that $200,000 investments brought you $800,000 or whatever.

Unknown Speaker : 32:22

Yeah, internal cheerleading. Yeah. That's a good point. That's a really good point.

Unknown Speaker : 32:28

Yeah, so Tim, can you get into that a little bit more? I think we can move on from the budgets. I just wanted to try and give some people guidance on at least roughly what they should do they, oh, you gotta you gotta you got to know it. I mean, I, you know, part of part of my line of work today is talking with a lot of startups where they're starting at square one, and it could be any budget, right? It's not zero. You know, we're making a lot of jokes. Yeah. It's never zero. But they have a wide range and you have to figure out what is on that list. What are they going to be able To accomplish what are the critical, you know, critical needs, but you know what I was really interested in hearing your views on Aaron are really what makes a successful b2b e commerce player versus one that's not quite as successful. So let's let's just kind of come from it come at it from that angle. So let's say I've got, you know, this this b2b business, but what really would make me the most successful I can be like, what are the critical factors there that would make me a success?

Unknown Speaker : 33:32

Oh, that's a great question. I think we've touched on a lot of it. We have

Unknown Speaker : 33:35

we,

Unknown Speaker : 33:36

I mean, I go back to I go back to focus a lot I saying, you know, it's got to be you have to really want it to be successful, which means you have to manage to it the you know, you get the outcomes you managed to write. So if the outcome you managed to is purely budget, from an expenditure standpoint, if you start Say the project was successful, or e commerce e commerce channels successful channel as long as we spend no more than $100,000 building a site. Done. that's a that's a metric. I guess it's better than no metric. But it's not the metric that was discussed in the boardroom when the invest was approved. Right. So what is what is it? Like? What are you trying to do? You know, it success comes from focus and discipline, right. And so, understanding what you're measuring what the what the metrics are, and then managing to those across the business makes a successful, nation successful anything, it's not limited to eecom. You know, these are the things that make a successful business if you if you can build a repeatable process that makes money. Mm hmm. As a business, you have a repeatable process that does not make money. You have a hobby. Figure out which one of the two you have. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker : 34:55

that's great. That's a perfect answer, actually. But if you don't have if you're not making money, it's awesome. Big Brother, unfortunately, a lot of people who have hobbies, their businesses. So, you know, one thing I would just add to this too, is really, I think what we had said early on to about b2b businesses being behind B to C. And and, you know, there are a whole bunch of reasons behind that. But But really, I think that that's something that anyone going into b2b. Now, like, if this is something that's new for them, they're going to have to really understand that that there was a long history or it may actually be there are a lot of people who think it's easier, in fact, to start a b2b business today than there is that it is a sort of B to C, because the competition is so strong, and there are so many people in b2c, but there's still a lot of areas in b2b where people really haven't quite caught up with the innovation and it's not that that groundswell of people started in different places. So there's room and b2b e commerce, I think to a good plaisance Let's go.

Unknown Speaker : 36:01

Absolutely I know I would I it's funny you said that and for whatever reason the thing that came to mind was over the last six years how many people have come to me and said I want to build a marketplace?

Unknown Speaker : 36:21

Got 50 grand build me Amazon a little bit.

Unknown Speaker : 36:25

I want to be the eBay of

Unknown Speaker : 36:29

arts or healthcare equipment or something like that.

Unknown Speaker : 36:34

I don't have any customers but I really want to marketplace because yeah.

Unknown Speaker : 36:40

It's like get just get a basic sign up first. And then and then we'll talk about a marketplace. So who's one last quick question. It's a quick one, just a 123. Do you have a top favorite non client, b2b e commerce player? I'm just curious if there's somebody who really Look. So now we think we're successful that is wildly successful. No, they really.

Unknown Speaker : 37:07

I mean, I feel like the the obvious case study answer is Granger. Right? I mean, they get, you know, I mean, they clearly are doing something right.

Unknown Speaker : 37:20

They've grown enormously.

Unknown Speaker : 37:24

enormously. But I would say that they are they are clearly getting it right.

Unknown Speaker : 37:29

Yeah, we're fans of supply house who if you know, those guys, I think things very, very well over the years. Absolutely. I think that just to touch on that is, you know, I think Granger has the budget to kind of like push the envelope in the system. I think so. Yeah, I think there's someone told me that their first project, their first e commerce project was 6 million. That was just the first and they probably spent way more than that now. So so I think you Well, we're trying to figure out how all the people that don't have $6 million, you know, how do they bridge that gap? You know, but so, so, so going into the next next question, Where do you see the future of b2b commerce going? Like where, you know, especially for some, maybe smaller, some of these smaller mid sized guys, you know, I think the Granger is can push the envelope a little bit, but assuming they're not Granger, you know, 6 million bucks, you know, where do you see whether its platforms getting better and easier for these companies to implement or, you know, better data, you know, your sophistication or where do you kind of see that, let's say the next three to five years, I think anything beyond that, it's kind of a guess.

Unknown Speaker : 38:42

I think there's gonna be I think it's gonna be a tremendous amount of m&a in the sort of the mid size manufacturing distribution side, you know, the profile for a lot of companies that I've talked to is family homes regional player has got carved out a niche organically over the last few decades on And the original founding leadership, it has retired or is retiring and now we're on to like maybe third generation who are less invested in the business, you know, or where they're just, you know, it's they're having a problem enforcing Matt, right, or you know, the channel making the channel, really the sales team is retiring. The channels have evolved beyond the business's ability to keep up, they have a lot of valuable collateral, they have a lot of good, you know, supplier relationships, they have good long term customer relationships. But it's they're maintaining decline or managing decline, right. There are a lot of businesses that are today in the b2b space in managed decline. And I think you're going to see some m&a activity, continued m&a activity around that, around that space. But you will also see on the flip side of that an enormous amount of investment in digital transformation there because there is clearly opportunity. Not everybody wants or can't just buy their stuff from Amazon I mean, that's, that's not it's not the right answer for a lot of companies. And so you know, there's going to be more consolidation. And I think you're going to see the platform. worse. We see this today, right? Magento came out with two dot two with their whole big three, you know, that was a big,