Unknown Speaker : 0:07

Everybody, welcome to the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I am your usual co host, Timothy Peterson. Isaiah Bollinger, who is CEO of trellis is unable to make it today. So I'm going it alone and I hope that's going to be okay for our viewers and listeners. But it's a pleasure to have you so just a word about the podcast in general. We decided to launch this a little while ago, because we felt like there was a lot of talk about b2c e commerce out in the podcast universe. And I've worked in b2c as well so many of us, but not quite as much talk not quite as much conversation with experts in b2b e commerce. So we felt we'd be filling a gap filling a need and getting some great folks into to chat. And that's what we're going to do today. Before I Introduce the today's guests, I just want to give a quick word about our sponsor, we're very happy to work with punch out to go. They are a global integration company specializing in connecting commerce business platforms with E procurement and E RP applications and punch out that goes I pass technology seamlessly links, business applications automate the flow of purchasing data. You know, with their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexities. They're really great partner of ours. They've worked with Charles before, and we thank them for their sponsorship. So punch out to go. Now I'd like to introduce today's guest. We have Steve angle Brecht, who is the CEO of citation and I'm going to let him give a little explanation about the company and then himself

Unknown Speaker : 1:51

and then we'll kick it off from there.

Unknown Speaker : 1:55

Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. And hello, Isaiah. Sorry, you couldn't make it today. I'm sure you'll be catching up on this later on. I'm Steve anchorite. I'm the founder and CEO citation. citation is a software and services firm in the e commerce space. And we are specialists in a relatively narrow but extremely important aspect of e commerce, which is e commerce content and data management. So we have built a practice around some very important aspects of the e commerce data modeling and the various flows of content and data through the enterprise. That includes taxonomy, the product data itself, so your product level information, site search, and also e commerce SEO. We are headquartered outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. But I'm joining you today from my summer cabin in upstate New York. So hence the rustic background. That is that is really where I am. There's a lovely Lake over here that we're going to go and take a dip in later on today. But thanks again for having us. Excited to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

Unknown Speaker : 3:00

You know, it's really great to have you.

Unknown Speaker : 3:02

So I'm gonna ask us a

Unknown Speaker : 3:04

quick question for a little bit more about your background, what led you to found citation? What kind of work did you do before and what brought you to create this business? Yeah, so kind of a unique founder story, I think, in that, you know, citation is growing very quickly in recent years but wasn't founded particularly recently. I actually started citation all the way back in 2001. It was right when I got out of college. So I graduated from Cornell as a computer science graduate in 2001. My first day of work was September 10 2001. So I had a, you know, a strange and terrible and, you know, different sort of first week and within five weeks, I was laid off from that first job, along with about 30% of that company. I had done some moonlighting some freelance work while I was a student at Cornell building some websites, my goal had always been to start a business. And I decided all the way back in October 2001, that that's what I would do. So I took the money from the few weeks that I had worked plus my severance package, and I went and started citation then, over the years, the businesses has changed and grown. Initially, it was a web development shop, I got into building some interesting e commerce applications, decided to go back to school 2007 to 2009, got my MBA, and then moved firmly into the management consulting space, and found my way into really positioning the company and the gap between business and it at large retail, distribution brand and manufacturing companies and found that space to be interesting and lots of opportunity there. I think because there's so many big challenges. There's so much opportunity with respect to To how important it is to create a structured data experience for your end users. companies want to invest heavily in it because I think they realize the importance of it. But we have found that large companies tend to fall into bad habits when it comes to product data. So we've really positioned citation. As a company that can help us we bring some strategy, we bring some data and analytics offerings, and also a Systems Group which does some, some solutioning, some design, some custom work, some implementation work with some of our channel partners, and we help our customers to become more efficient, more proactive, more customer focused in their collection, storage, enrichment and publication of product data. So our listeners have heard me bring up some of these examples before but I'm going to bring up one in particular right now. So model some of my friends Early career was helping catalog businesses and retailers first get online. Right? So it was that, that very exciting, you know, first com boom era where people were just trying to figure out how to do that. But it leads right into, I think, a very hot topic for today, you know, product data is, as you just mentioned, you know, where, you know, where things are coming from different sources. Now, different types of data, it's a lot more data. I mean, I remember, I think you can correct me if I'm wrong from your early memories of this, but I used to see files that were basically these like two sentence short text files for a product description, and then there'd be a single image. And then, you know, there would be like some other, you know, back and coded, you know, number you know, UPC or whatever it was needed at that time. then there'd be separate files for like call centers, you know, or, or something else. So tell Just a little bit about, you know, this this data and how you see it today and what the challenges are. I think that's something I'm very interested in. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I think you're really, really getting at one of the hearts of a major movement, if you will, in the b2b world today, which is a term that's tossed around too much, but it's an important one, and that is digital transformation. Right? I think b2b companies generally are later to this party than b2c companies have been, I think, you know, Amazon, eBay, Google, Apple, you know, these, these mega brands that are largely consumer facing, have driven so many expectations around what people want to be able to do online.

Unknown Speaker : 7:47

And many business customers are frustrated because they expect their business trading partners to be able to do the same thing. A great example would be the completeness and the quality of the product data like you're talking about. Excited Search is another great example of being able to type in with a natural language search of what you're looking for. Whereas many b2b companies today are still you know, they're still basically only able to support a lookup function based on a part number particular brand. So, you know, I think what this gets into is that journey from catalog, distributor or catalog brand, and we've done a lot of work in the automotive world. So that's a great example of that so many of the distributors in the automotive world you know, big thick catalogs with just table after table of what part number goes with what car what your MC model engine, but that journey has been to go from paper catalogs to a digitized version of that paper catalog. That's just, you know, put up online that people can download and interact with to an actual interactive catalog online, them to the ability to take an order online, and then actually getting into a true e commerce experience. And now we're starting to see The really exciting part, which is when you go from, I have a website to a website is a core integrated part of our selling and service model, which really is, I think the the goal where b2b companies should want to be, which is that, no, your e commerce experiences are not a bolt on to your existing way of doing business with your salespeople that are out in the field, but rather a integral part of an omni channel experience that really enriches the full cycle, including your customers that want to order through a salesperson. So So, you know, I think this, this ties in with, you know, process because this is one of the things we were, you know, sending questions back and forth about before. I mean, I think, you know, when I, in my conversations with people in b2b and I've worked with a number I work with JC Whitney, for example, when I'm thinking of parts, you know, and how these, you know, various things, you know, have to get done today. It's the experience that's that's missing and getting that process right. So that the end consumer for b2b right or b2c can have a similar experience. Right. I think that's that's a way to put it. You know, one way to put it because b2c seems a little bit further ahead in a lot of these areas. I think, consumer, they're more of those consumers. I guess they've demanded it earlier. It's hard to it's hard to say why but you've taught let's talk a little about that process. Like how do you walk us through that to get them to where they need to be? Well, I have some thoughts on why that is right. Why b2b is different first. So I think many of the things that we as individual consumers, you know, shopping for ourselves or for our families, the things we're buying are largely things that we know and we're able to shop you know, the things that we are shopping for, by name, you know, we're looking for the latest iPhone, we're looking for the latest laptop or Or, you know, whatever it might be. So we're able to go and largely search on price, right? We can go out and we can find where we want to get it, but we know how to ask for it. And then it's really just a validation of, yes, that's the thing that I want, and then I can buy it.

Unknown Speaker : 11:14

I think apparel is another great example. That's so heavily driven by digital assets, right? Buy product imagery to say, yes, that looks nice. That looks like what I want, do you have my size? Okay, I'm going to get that. But in the b2b world, so much of what is being sold is it's not something that's easily described or shown in a picture that really needs to be defined by its product data and in particular, technical attributes. But it becomes very, very important to think about fitment and size and material and the, you know, the finish the threading, whatever it might be about that particular item. And until that end user, that business shopper actually has that thing in their hand. The data is the product, that's all they have that they can shop, right? That is the store that is the product, it's everything. And if they can't find it, or they can't understand it, or they don't feel comfortable pulling the trigger on making a purchase, because you haven't given them that element of, of trust and knowing that you actually have what you're telling me you have, you're not going to get the sale. Right. So it really is a it's a totally different equation. That plus you know, we shop as consumers, right? You can convince me to buy something that I didn't know I was I was going to buy whereas a b2b customer is buying it because they have to right as part of their job. Right. So they they are demanding a much more elegant, efficient experience to make me feel comfortable to know that you have the thing that I'm looking for. Show me the price, let me know when I can have it. Make sure you have enough of them that I need to buy and let me go about my day because Cuz it's part of my job to buy that thing. I'm not shopping for fun. Well, one of the challenges and I'll give you a real life example because I, I like to quiz people I know who are, you know, various types of business people and just see, you know, what's up in their lives and what their challenges are. So I know someone who is a plumber, and he turned his plumbing business into an irrigation business, you know, sprinkler business, and it's quite big. I mean, he really does a lot of work and a lot of people working for him. And he's constantly getting, you know, parts, right. So, so I said, Well, how are you doing this? What's happening? He's like, well, I would prefer to do it mostly online, right. And he makes that very clear he would prefer but he said in a lot of situations, if he doesn't have an exact part number. He needs to go into a, you know, a warehouse of some sort and talk with a person and show physically show This particular item and say help, right? And he said, but he doesn't want to do that, right? He's a very busy man with a very sophisticated business. Otherwise, you know, the way he markets it and how he gets customers in and how he handles customer service and all these things. This is the piece that's not yet sophisticated for him. Right? He needs that help. And he's like, Well, why isn't it happening? I'm like, I don't know. That's a good question. Why hasn't? Right? So yeah, it's a perfect example of the problem. So I think this is a good example of where b2b would be different too. So think about got that exact example. He's got a, you know, a sprinkler head or something that he needs to try to replace, he pulls off the one that's broken, and you can see, you can see a manufacturer name and a and a Part number on it. So he can go out and look for that, but very likely, you know, in many lines of business, again, automotive is a great example. There may be an OEM manufacturer of that particular thing, but there might be countless aftermarket providers that sell it. As a different model number, right? So then you're getting into at least two, maybe even three data sources that need to all come together and work together in order to help that customer find what they're looking for. What is this thing? What unit or model or product family or parent part does it actually go with? So the fitment data, and then this cross reference data of OEM to aftermarket so that I can actually find something that you actually have recognized, I can understand, will this actually fit my particular application? So you can see all the data that's involved here quickly becomes so complicated, there's just a huge amount of a to manage, and this is why it's crazy to me. But so many b2b players today, are still trying to manage all of this complexity in their data with ad hoc manual processes, you know, Excel, it's all Excel. Now. So how how I'm going to just, you know, move some of these questions around a little bit. So how should they manage it, right? I mean, again, I know a lot of this, our listeners may not how should they like what is optimal? Like what would cause success, right? For a b2b player, you know, who needs to get all this organized?

Unknown Speaker : 16:14

Yeah. So I would want to work backwards from what is the experience that we want to enable with this data? Right? So we always talk about the the three things that we're always after with any aspect of our work, whether it's a consulting project, and implementation, some data works and product data, quality work, whatever it might be. Three things So number one, we want to be customer focused, right? So we're thinking about the end user experience. are we serving them? Are we giving them the information they need? Are we identifying and solutioning the information needs of the end user? Secondly, we are creating executive visibility, right. So we're hoping that that team leader, the executive that company sponsor to see And understand, where's the opportunity? Where do we have inventory flowing through the system? So inventory in the sense of being stuck at a particular station or, you know, a backlog being built up a bottleneck that needs to be addressed. Right. And finally, that

Unknown Speaker : 17:19

started gonna be a good opportunity to

Unknown Speaker : 17:23

this is life people. This is how life works. Right? Right. Right. So And the third thing would be that we are data driven, right, that we are trusting the market that we are using our analytics using, the data is flowing through the system. We're not trusting our gut instincts, but we're actually looking to see what information is available. How do we need to mark it up, store it integrated into our technology stack to make it serve those two important experiences for the customer focus and for the internal executives, users to have an understanding of where It is. And if we can achieve those three things, then we are helping to create a more proactive model where the data is driving the efficiency, the data and the systems and the data models become strategic assets to the enterprise, rather than cost centers or commodities, that things that we just have to do. And I think then it's a lot easier to connect that to what are the systems processes, tools, people, documentation, etc, that we need internally to support those things? Right. So not surprisingly, a big part of what we do sits inside what you would call Pim, Product Information Management, sir, but I think that term really is another one that's overly used and i think it's it's too frequently confused with software. Right? There are Pim systems, certainly that is software, but Pim is a business process, right? And it's all about understanding and documenting and really Having a clear strategy in place for how product information is flowing through the organization. And it's everything from your your data governance, to your vendor management to documentation to process design. Certainly, it's about identifying who are the key players, and where do they sit in the process. And making that into a scalable plan where you can, you know, introduce additional resources to bottlenecks in the process to make it more scalable. It's a deep integration plans are really having an understanding of how those systems fit into the overall enterprise architecture and how data flows through them. And change management and its long term adoption of those platforms, making sure that you can support the organization as it moves into the future. And very importantly, support any downstream systems that may have very firm requirements about what data and how that data is shaped when it comes out of it upstream systems. So those are all the inputs, right? That's what we have to solve as a solution. solvents and as business owners and as, as merchants. That's what we have to think about is how do we create a strategy around systems and tools and processes that helps us to get across the finish line. It's not about vanity of having the flashiest, fastest, no most expensive pen system, it is useless if you don't have the processes to support it. Well, you know, one of the distinctions I've heard and I didn't come up with this, but actually I've started to use it as really kind of being both soft and hard when looking at product. Meaning that the hard is everything that is, let's say, process oriented or, you know, knowing that particular part number and where it's coming from and how it's being manufactured and all over whatever right? The soft is really, what are all of the attributes about this and what is it for right? Is it like going back to the My friend who has a sprinkler business This is like, well, what is it for is how can I search for this most easily? How can you know I get this when I need it as quickly as possible? Yeah, so those are the it's those two sides of a coin.

Unknown Speaker : 21:13

Great example and I would go one step further and say, regardless of what we call it internally at the sprinkler parts company, what do our customers call this thing? How do they want to shop it right? How do they find what they're looking for? That's that's very important. And that's the difference between know internally how you're buying how you are storing and enriching that product data, which is the the what right is the what are we selling? And then as you turn in your face your customers in a digital channel or in a in a omni channel environment, then you're asking, How do I want to sell it? How are my customers shopping this right so we can think about leveraging things like the search engine right to build out a very rich experience around natural language so that we are we are Taking your friends words of what he wants to call that part, and get that into the search engine so that he can find whatever we call that part. Right? And it's those little things, it's those little, those little micro improvements across categories, brands, products, the experience, when you can have a program in place to identify an action those across your full assortment. That's when you can really lead to the point that you are building a an outstanding differentiated experience that creates competitive advantage. Right customers want to shop where it's easy to buy. Exactly and I'm so glad you you mentioned kind of the the terminology of things to it just as an aside I mean I I also work with like people in fashion and beauty, health and wellness, a lot of other categories, a lot of categories. And what's funny is that in recent years, I you know, because of the since the rise of social media, if a consumer or a group of consumers are starting to call a product Something, whatever it is like they're nicknaming it, they're calling it something. Companies are now responding and renaming product, right? So they're not simply saying like adding it as an attribute somewhere or adding it as some sort of marketing note. They're actually renaming it. So that happened, I think first with companies like Nike, you know, renaming sneakers, because they know that people were saying certain things about certain models. And they said, Okay, we're just going to do that. Why should we stick with what we did, we're going to do what the consumer wants. And I think that's the same for b2b, it really needs to be a one to one connection. Yeah, and there are countless examples of common misspellings. There are differences regionally of what we call things here versus how they're spelled or shopped in Canada or in UK or in Asia. We as merchandisers need to be aware of those who are at least have a process to help us identify those because they really do matter. Right, that helps us to create a much richer, more personalized, lower friction environment to help our customers find the things that they're looking for. So we talked about, you know, customer focus, executive visibility being data driven, critical things, I think, overall, right? They're just critical things for success. So, so, you know, tell me about maybe if you want to even give an example, about a successful, you know, business that you've worked with, or a project that you've worked on, it's been a real wild success. Sure, yeah. So our portfolio of customers really ranges from the mid market up into the enterprise space in the fortune 500 space. And we've got a really interesting mix of some real retail categories, you know, things like, you know, musical instruments, and then getting into some omni channel experiences with companies like Got staples. So staples us is a great customer we're working with today. That's a really good example of an omni channel player where, you know, we as consumers know them as the big box retailer, but there are a huge amount of business that they do and the government side and on the b2b side. So there's a lot of complexity that comes with the data, right? That's all the parts another good example of we know them as the, you know, five 6000 retail locations across the country, but they have to sell so differently to their dealers to their garages, to the government to fleet management and fleet maintenance companies, right. So all of that involves the small manipulations of the of the continents, they flow through a good example where we really had to touch all the different aspects of the product data in order to help create an improved experience would be

Unknown Speaker : 25:57

such a large electronic components distributor here in the US. They're called premier for now, actually a UK based company, they are a $15 billion company now merged with AP net, which is also in that space but out of Europe, a really interesting company, huge complexity, huge amount of product data and millions of skews, you know, thousands of categories. And then in some cases, hundreds or even more of attributes that need to be attached to different parts and products that live inside those categories. So a really good example of thinking about, you know, how hard it is to shop something when all you have is the attributes, right? So we really need to identify what are the attributes that are most important, most critical at a category level and help those to be shocked. So this is a good example because it really touched all aspects of what we do. The work that we did with premiere for now, included, work on the taxonomy, so not just the customer facing names for the categories, but also the attributes that lived inside different product families that flow through those categories. We asked ourselves, are we calling this what a customer specified to be called? Are we collecting enriching and displaying the right information that they need to make a decision? So thinking about the search and filter experience, the Browse experiences, you get to a category listing page or a search result page, you know, what are the actual choices that show up that I can interact with to take that large search result and bring it down to a smaller set that I'd actually consider for purchasing? We got into lots of interesting opportunities with their site search engine. So they're a good example. They were serving the same market but different geographies. So in the US versus in the UK, and finding things like you know, in the US, we called a wrench and in the UK, they call it a spinner. Right? It's a perfect example. You just have to know when you have to find it and map it in order to make sure that we can serve both groups. Or Little things like understanding the audience, right? An engineer shops differently than a corporate buyer. Right? An engineer might shop heavily on attributes. So we found, for instance, that when they were shopping within resistors, or capacitors, they would have a very shortened way of looking for certain critical attributes, you know, the resistance or the capacitance, for instance, is really all they care about, they would just put that in, right, we need to know on our side that when they put in that attribute value, they're asking for a capacitor or a resistor, and know that we can interpret that and give them a good result. And then we did a lot of work getting into their e commerce, SEO. So using all of these tools at our disposal, the taxonomy, the product data, the site search engine, then we look to see where's the traffic, where's the opportunity, what our competitors doing, were there, whereas there are greenspace in the market that we can put up to Some content or put out some landing pages and go after these unmet buckets of demand for people that are asking for these things. And this led to a global program that, you know, thousands and thousands of data points integration points that that went through all the different systems as a flow through. But this has resulted in a global SEO success for the company to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars annually in additional sales that they can attribute directly back to those improvements to the demo.

Unknown Speaker : 29:33

I mean, one of the things I think he just brought up to that's, that's fascinating to me, as a lot of businesses only realize that they have a particular customer following when they start getting into this sort of a project or series of projects right when they get the process down. And they're looking at these things in detail and an example. You know, I'm going to ask my listeners or listeners to forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's homesense which is also part The Marshalls, TJ x family of businesses, I think home census one of their brands, but what they found out after they were doing some sort of a project digging into categorizing the furniture and accessories is that a lot of the furniture they were selling, they were, were really for people who wanted to do staging, you know, like realtors, who were staging, you know, for whatever or for offices that were staging. Or they were, they were wondering like if they should get into furniture rental because people were looking to do this. So it was stuff that they had no idea about. No one was really knock on their door saying, Can we talk about this? It was really all based on how people were searching, how the terms were being used, and then studying it all in great detail. It's like, Oh, well, if we recategorize these things in a particular way and represent them in a different way. Then all of a sudden these people are being seen Serve? Well, we have a whole new customer base. It's a great example. Yeah, great example. So we're really getting into personalization or like a mass customization approach here where we're helping to identify a persona, right a target group of who is involved in our site. And what can we do to present them with a an e commerce experience that is more aligned to how they want to shop? I mean, that is a absolutely perfect example. In the auto parts industry, we think about like a job or you know, do it yourselfer versus a small business owner. We've worked with you know, some Pickup Truck Accessories with a group called hundred accessory system in North Carolina. So for them, we think about the, you know, the hobbyist, the kind of the coolest suburban dad with a pickup truck that wants to get the light bars and you know the toys on his truck versus a guy that uses it every day. for work, that's a, it's a different customer, they're going to be looking for different things. So that can be a very powerful way to inform the merchandising strategy and approach the touches everything from your data to your design to your messaging, and your digital marketing channels as well. So, let me just leap into this because we, you know, b2b and b2c, right? I mean, I think it's always important to talk about, you know, the two sides of things because some businesses do both some try to just do one and not the other. But, you know, it has seemed until recently, I would say the b2c is often been ahead of the game in a lot of tech and tools and experience, customer experience, you know, just thinking about how things should be so even just mobile, for example, or being part of the social media world, a lot of b2b players kind of waited right. So What do you think? Is is a really hot things that B to B players should be considering that are big successes for b2c players? Yeah, great example. So, you know, thinking about the way the world has changed here in the last six months, I think really informs a lot of this as well. Right? So we've seen the consequences now play out in graphic detail of what happens when you're a company that is dependent on people physically coming together to the same place are no longer able to do that. Right. And there are retailers that are going out of business as a result, there are countless companies in the service economy that have suffered heavily because of it. And it's really interesting to see now, when you have a huge shock like this that hits both the you know, the supply and the demand side at the same time and just, you know, shuffles everything

Unknown Speaker : 33:58

the the opportunities that fall out This are going to tend to come on the, the, you know, the b2b is the distributors, brands and manufacturers who are able to adapt, right or who are who have already invested in the capability to sell and deliver virtually, right. So, now a really good example thinking about even even small businesses who have been smart enough to shift the way that they are selling virtually in real time, right, leveraging things like delivery services, or curbside pickup and all these and just you know, the way that people have had to improvise and adapt their businesses, virtually overnight has been amazing. And some large companies have done it really successfully too. I mean, look at the way that the target really pulled off a very quick pivot to be able to do local pickups and do e commerce sales. And that like a buy online, pick up in store sort of environment, but you know, basically managing that Last Mile, you know, being able to have you just come and pick up your stuff from a local target. No, they ended up with a huge ecommerce numbers that was like, you know, it was like the equivalent of having a Black Friday, every day for months. Right now much of that shifted from there in store sales, of course. But still that didn't shut down completely. Right. So good examples, I think are just thinking about how companies are investing in the way that people want to shop or need to shop today. Right. And that definitely flows through to to b2b customers as well. I think making those smart investments in experience, again, always thinking about the the end user, what are their needs, what are they looking for, what information do they need to shop, whether that is no images or PDFs or, you know, filters or whatever it might be on the website that's going to help them figure out what they're looking for. I think if you can give them the confidence that You have the best and fastest and the cleanest shopping experience that helps them to do their job. And let's then move on to the next thing knowing that in order to worry about it, that's your opportunity. The next piece is definitely thinking about different channels. Right. So where are your customers shopping? Got to talk about Amazon, right and other major marketplaces that are out there. I mean, there's a huge amount of activity out there right now. Amazon has captured a huge amount, obviously, of the b2c market. They are growing very quickly in the b2b market. That is one of the largest places where people are going to search for products and categories. They have, you know, they're becoming much more sophisticated, I think now with how they're helping people to use some of their tools to do a better job of merchandising and pricing in those b2b channels. That's another big opportunity. So generally a marketplace strategy. And both of these are completely driven by data, right? That you need good clean data, to differentiate yourselves to participate in those marketplaces. You know, even something as fundamental as mapping your categories to Amazon categories is challenging, right? These are big catalogs, you could have hundreds or thousands of categories, and Amazon calls it something different. So you need to have an approach that will scale to be able to do all that. Being able to work through those problems today. Those are big pieces of an overall puzzle that go into the modernization and digitization of the b2b Enterprise. They are not in another transformation, but they are important pieces of it. Well, you know, you you brought up so many, you know, so many interesting things in your answer. I really love it. I think our listeners love it to you know, I'm a big fan of target I have to say and just you mentioned that made me smile. I feel like they've done so many things well, in recent years, and especially during this crazy time under under COVID-19. I mean, one of the things that surprised me, and again, there is a b2b application in here, we just had to figure out what it is, is that I, I placed an order online for my local target, I was given three choices, I could have had stuff shipped, I could have picked up in store or I could have had curbside delivery. Right, those three things I think were the choices. I selected curbside, and it was like some folding chairs or something, you know, nothing shocking, or, you know, particularly unusual. I just got something like that in what they did is they they questioned my choice of

Unknown Speaker : 38:47

delivery, basically, they were saying, you know, or no, I said I said I was going to get it in store. That's it. And then they questioned it. They put a box and they said, Are you sure you don't want us to bring this to your car. Because it's kind of heavy, and we're going to have to put it on a cart. And we're going to have to, you know, you're going to have to wheel it out, and it'll be too much interaction. They really did this. And I was so impressed because it was human, right? And I wasn't thinking about like, Okay, I'm getting into the store, and it's going to be too big to carry off to find a car. They told me all that, right? And they said, No, you will want to do curbside because then we will just have it ready for you. And we'll put it in your car and then you're off you go. I love that. And I feel like, you know, b2b can really, really have fun with this over time and say No, those pipes are not something you want to pick up in store. We're going to bring it to your truck and just here for you, elite and Harris will happen right? It's such a great personal touch that they totally agree. Totally agree and to the I think from the customer experience side, to be able to have a really positive experience like that. You're now spreading that word and advocate For them saying, hey, what a great job they're doing. But that's exactly it. That is the that is the foundation of brand loyalty and brand equity of why you want to go shop at Target versus their competitors. Because you feel seen you feel appreciated, right? They're looking out for you. And one other thing that you know, you brought up as well, everyone's had to adapt, change, transform whatever it is for them, you know, over these however many months and one other thing that I was very impressed by our restaurants have decided to become grocers. And you may have seen some of this but we noticed this out in New York pretty early where, you know, restaurants had a lot of supplies and all of a sudden they were forced to close and they said well what do we do with it? So you know if they already had some sort of an online presence they retooled it and they said you know order your milk, order your vegetables, order your pasta, order, meet through us don't go to stop and shop or Kroger, come here. All right and I thought was absolutely brilliant. It just kind of immediately solved like five or six problems for these businesses, they had all of the stuff that they couldn't use, I guess, right, they thought they weren't gonna be able to use it. And then they said, Well wait, we already have these relationships. So however many months is less, you can continue to order these basics through us. And I think that's a great way to go. You know, it just makes you think you know, about what's possible. smart decision from management, you know, they probably save some jobs, they save some waste on their side, they're able to keep the doors open for another day. I mean, that's, that's what it takes.

Unknown Speaker : 41:38

So I'm gonna swing back to one other question,

Unknown Speaker : 41:41

just because, again, we usually asked us for listeners, but you know, like, what do you think is really the biggest challenge that you see, you know, across clients that you're talking to for b2b e commerce right now? What is what is the biggest challenge or are there really just a series of challenges? As we've already talked about, no question, there are lots of challenges and I think having a plan is really key to deciding, you know, with all of the unique inputs and all of the idiosyncrasies about your business. What are the investments you need to bank what are the the order of operations to go through but I would say the the biggest thing, the biggest driving factor you know, from the from the consulting side, and from the sales side, I'm always dismayed when we find a great opportunity and we see a huge amount of engagement from the middle tier of management, the company that feels very strongly and is obviously very personally invested in wanting to see an effort to digitize and improve and grow in the e commerce channel. And you know, that may or may not be our customer and you're frequently with a smaller shops. That's what we need to be selling to the the CEO and owner to Be able to make that happen. I think one of the biggest things that needs to be happening in order to really take this seriously is to recognize that this needs to be driven from the top. Right. This is not about building a website, it's not about launching a Pim. It's not about, you know, a new platform for search. This is about a critically important series of investments and projects in order to transform your whole company from the ground up. And, you know, even if that that owner, operators CEO, Israel is not a technical person, they certainly need to understand the business value of what comes out of those technologies and have a good team who can help to identify an action on those. So I would say the biggest thing from my perspective, is that strategic alignment throughout the enterprise or throughout the whole company that everybody realizes that ecommerce is not An it function. It's not a marketing function, it is a cross departmental function that touches every aspect of the organization, right? purchasing inventory marketing, ops in the in the warehouse, your pricing, every aspect needs to touch it because it's a completely different way of selling and it should be a major driver of change inside that company is a great answer. You know, one of the things that is just a funny memory to kind of underline this funny memory for me is that, you know, years ago when I when I was first working with some online businesses or businesses that were trying to go online for the first time, you know, sort of the Yahoo store era, you know, where people were trying to figure things out. I remember talking with a very large business, I will not embarrass here on this, this podcast, a very large business, a multi billion dollar business and They simply wanted their e commerce business to be treated in the way they were treating, let's say email, right? They wanted it to be this little line, where we have one person, and that is the e commerce person that we've all heard that it's like, oh my god, if I could go back and buy time machine reproduce that that whole meeting again, it would be astounding because, you know, it's it's change, but in some ways, things haven't changed. You know, it's that realization that that great ecommerce, you know, great success in e commerce is something that is your all in like, everybody is involved. And it is your business. It is not something you do with this little line with one first. And it's fiercely competitive, right? I mean, like, the clock is ticking for a company like that that's not ready to pull the trigger on trying to go through that that full process of creating an aligned organization and a question. strategy to make e commerce, a critical piece of how they sell and operate. You know, and if you're not willing to make that investment and that adaptation, a competitor will be and you're going to lose, right? It's fiercely competitive customers want what they want, the world is changing fast. You got to fight like hell, if you want your piece. You know, I want customers to fight like hell to get to you. Right. So I would like I would like you to just be inundated with new new business based on Thank you, I would like that to

Unknown Speaker : 46:33

my direct human hair. So I'm just going to ask you to do another pitch again for a citation to make sure that people understand really what you do, because I think it's a great time listening to and talking about b2b commerce here. Yeah, thank you very much. So I'll answer the question in a slightly different way than I did at the beginning. So that might help people to understand a little bit our approach to helping customers to This ecommerce journey in this digital transformation journey has been to create an organization that's really broken into three separate but very tightly connected groups. And that is our professional services division. So that's our management consulting group, doing strategy work, lots of work with data governance, with process improvement with platform selection, really trying to answer some of the big questions of figuring out what is that overarching strategy? What's that three to five year plan look like for our e commerce and as part of our our digital innovation transformation. The second piece is also a service deliverable. But this is our data and analytics team. And that team actually sells the data modeling and the data and the insights as a service. So that's where we're actually doing things like working with our customers to build their taxonomy, right. doing analysis of Your taxonomy, your data model, your attribution, versus your key competitors. You know, taking into account what are your key suppliers do what is Amazon doing what's available, you know what's important to your customer, all of that. Getting into product data enrichment, Site Search, analysis, ecommerce, SEO insights. Also important to mention. So we have a platform of around that helps to deliver a lot of those insights platforms called Vizio. That is both something that we use internally to do our work but also is a platform that we license as a software as a service to our customers. And then the third piece is our technology team or Systems Group. And they're actually doing the implementations doing the integration work. There are our programmers and our implementers we are resellers and certified implementers for akitio. And salsify, which are kineo is an open source Pim with an enterprise Offering salsify also in the Pim space, they've got a slightly different take on it. They're a little bit more about product data syndication, but they've got some really powerful tools around workflow management that can help to virtually, you know, run the business or run those aspects of product data management, which is great. And then we've been involved with countless other platforms, right? When you're working in enterprise space, it's not just a handful, you don't only work with, you know, Salesforce or with SAP, very frequently, we are working with customers legacy technologies, right? homegrown solutions that, you know, nobody there any longer was actually directly involved with building out the particular solution. That's very common when we get into to big companies, right. So really, our approach has always been to be platform agnostic in that we can come in and help to assess the situation. Figure out where's the opportunity? What are the needs around around data modeling data quality, completeness, you know, whatever those aspects may be, in order to stay true to those principles, right being data driven customer focus and creating executive visibility. Ultimately, we are about helping our customers to grow and succeed. And I'll use it again fight like hell and comes to the Commerce world. Again, it is fiercely competitive. We try to position ourselves as the ultimate partner to, you know, have the talent and the tools and the services available to really help our customers shine. You know, see, that was fantastic. And I'm glad that it's recorded because I think that that's something people really latch on to. listeners, Steve angle Breck the CEO of citation. Thanks for thanks for a great time. I mean, I'm certainly learning every time I'm with some of our great guests, and this was no exception. It was really a pleasure. I appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker : 50:57

Thanks so much for having me, Tim. Really appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker : 50:59

Okay, so I just want to say sorry once again that we couldn't have our co host Isaiah Bollinger, CEO of trellis. He was unavailable today. He'll be back co hosting with me. In our next episodes. I also want to thank our sponsor once again, punch up to go. And thank you for listening to the hard truth about b2b e commerce. Timothy, Peter some take care for everybody. It's a pleasure.