The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce
This podcast is all about B2B eCommerce with a focus on helping manufacturers and distributors modernize their businesses. B2B is a different breed of eCommerce and it needs a different breed of Podcast. We get into the nitty-gritty of integrations, adoption, platforms, data and so much more regarding what makes B2B difficult to make successful for eCommerce! This podcast is hosted by Isaiah Bollinger SVP of https://zaelab.com and Timothy Peterson who can help you with all things B2B eCommerce.
The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce
Billion Dollar B2B eCommerce With Brian Beck of Enceiba
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Brian Beck and co host Isaiah Bollinger dive into the nitty gritty of B2B eCommerce and why we feel there is so much left on the table. The opportunity is literally billions of dollars, hence the book Brian wrote, Billion Dollar B2B eCommerce. We discuss eCommerce platforms, integrations, and what it takes to scale B2B eCommerce. Brian Beck is a true thought leader in the space that has been in the trenches himself as well as advised many companies so he knows what it takes to grow a B2B eCommerce business. If you don't know Brian Beck and your into B2B eCommerce its about time to learn from one of the best.
Welcome to Episode 11 of the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I'm your host, Isaiah Bollinger. Unfortunately our co host, Tim is not with us today, but he'll be joining us back shortly in the next episodes. Before we get started, I want to just make a quick shout out to our sponsor punch out to go who has been great for us and great for the b2b industry. Punch Out to go is a global b2b integration companies specializing in connecting e commerce platforms with E procurement and er p applications. They are a high pass technology that seamlessly links business applications to automate the flow of purchasing data. So with their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexity. Specifically with punch out catalogs, electronic purchase orders, invoices and other b2b sales order automation documents. So if you're in b2b and hopefully you're in b2b e commerce because that's why you're on the podcast, you should definitely check out punch out to go. So I'm really excited today to get you know, a guest that I think everyone in the b2b e commerce industry should know which is Brian back, actually have his book sitting on my, my nightstand I have to admit, I haven't read it yet, but I promise I will read it. Um, I got some work to do there. Um, so yeah, you've been in the b2b. You've been in the e commerce industry for a long time. It's, I think you mentioned you kind of morphed into b2b over time. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? And
Unknown Speaker :yeah, I say, Hey, thanks for having me, by the way, and, and by the way, I know punch out to go pretty well too. So of course player in the in the industry. Yeah. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to, to be here and talk about some of the things in my book and some of the things I've seen day to day and in the b2b world and no worries, you haven't read it. It's 400 pages long.
Unknown Speaker :Fast it, the hard part is starting, once I start, it'll all be done in like, a couple days or a week or two. It's the starting part. That's the hard part for me,
Unknown Speaker :right will do me Do me a favor and write me an Amazon review. But I like it.
Unknown Speaker :I will need to be honest. I gotta wait till I read. So
Unknown Speaker :I appreciate that. And yes, and so So to your point. I've been in the e commerce field for for quite a while. I mean, just means I'm old. Or I started when I was five, the so 20 Gosh, almost 21 years. It's crazy. How much time flies and yeah, I started in e commerce in 1999. Right around you know, when Amazon was a few years old and.com
Unknown Speaker :bubble.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to think back and reflect on my time and dirt. And during that time, you know, I was, I was, I have all kinds of roles. I was a CEO CFO, VP of eecom. I was also, you know, a brand marketing, digital marketing and merchandising on the web and technology and all these different aspects, most of it in the b2c side, right? So, you know, think about where, where the world was 1520 years ago was all these consumer brands were trying to get into e commerce and it was a new thing. And, you know, was it gonna work and we tried a lot of things and we tested things and we failed a lot. Right? I made every mistake in the in the book. Yeah. And, and, and we learned right and fortunately had some really great successes too. And I've built some pretty large businesses on e commerce and you know, that, you know, about five years ago, one of the things that I realized I started doing some work with I left to Doing the day to day running of e commerce, which I had done for 1617 years, and got into b2b and started working with companies that were traditional b2b sellers. And there's a lot of parallels to where we were 15 years ago with e commerce in terms of, you know, the opportunity they have, and also the, some of the same challenges and evolution of the organization and thinking and alignment of the organization is differences, clearly, but but then, you know, and Isaiah, you're seeing this kind of parallel
Unknown Speaker :to where BTC was a little while ago,
Unknown Speaker :very, very, very, very much so. And, you know, like we were, we were talking about, you know, before this, the exciting thing about b2b is that the the transformation when they go through it, it can be even more impactful than b2c because, because the digital channels and everything you do with digital cuts across every aspect of a b2b organism You get efficiencies, incremental revenue, higher gross margins. It's incredible what happens. So, like we were chatting about I say, I know when I was getting into b2b, you know, four years ago, five years ago, I said, Now my clients would say, hey, I want something to read.
Unknown Speaker :I want to learn about it. How do I learn about this? Let's say I, I don't have anything to give you. Yeah. So I wrote a book. I wrote a book i thought was gonna be easy, right? And,
Unknown Speaker :you know, now they have two things. They have a podcast and a book.
Unknown Speaker :Hey, yo, man, that's right.
Unknown Speaker :I mean, it's, you know, it's three, three and a half years of work to put this out, but, you know, obviously, doing other things at the same time, but that's why I wrote it really to give give b2b companies a playbook right to to move into e commerce and digitally transform their business. Yeah. So
Unknown Speaker :that's awesome. Yeah. So tell us a little bit. And now you've done so many different things. can tell us a little bit about in Seba, as your Yeah, I'm saying that right is that yes, that's that's it for now. So yep. So tell us a little bit about that and how you kind of got into that. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :sure. So, so so I, you know, in addition to writing a book and doing some ecommerce strategy work with, with with, you know, leading b2b players in Seba A few years ago, I had some partners that I work with that other businesses that had worked with me on building out Amazon programs. And so the is a part of our overall ecommerce strategy. And we saw a trend in Amazon where Amazon is really charging hard at the b2b market. Going back about five years now, they started something called Amazon business. And it's become the fastest growing part of Amazon. It's faster growing grew 110% I think last year 16 billion in revenue is a sanity check. It's not
Unknown Speaker :16 I remember when I went to 10.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, and then RBC Capital Markets, which is a wall street bank, investment bank, they came out with a projection last December that said it's going to be 52 billion in four more years. I believe Really?
Unknown Speaker :I mean, we buy I mean trellis, we have a company account. We're buying all the time from Amazon. I mean, monitors keyboards, like little all the little accessories that are convenient and pretty cheap. And it's just the convenience is just so high that it's hard to not do it.
Unknown Speaker :Well, and that's actually it. I mean, all the the the folks who are in business today are all Amazon natives, right? All the people that are coming into procurement roles, b2b companies, buyers, users or product. They're all Amazon natives. In fact, the stat is that in four years, by 20, I think it's 2025 75% of the workforce globally will be millennials. Those are people born Canadian in 2000. So this is, you think about that, right? These mean like your business side. Uh, you know, you're you don't want to go and 15 different places and pick up the phone or God forbid, send a fax.
Unknown Speaker :No, no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're probably online stream example of how fast can we quickly order it and get it and we're over 50 people and we don't have one assistant, we don't have one. Right, one like bloat like, because we do everything so efficiently. You know, I'll make an Amazon purchase, you know, our CEO will do stuff. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker :I mean, the world's changed man. It's in and nl and this. So you guys are unique in that you get it? You're in the tech business, you know, yeah. Business, buying from other businesses using e commerce. What a lot of the traditional b2b companies don't realize is that this is happening and this dynamic, or they might realize it, but they don't know what to do about it. Right. So yeah. Should they get onto Amazon? Should they, you know, should they launch e commerce, you know, and that's By the way, what NC ba does. We run Amazon programs. You We're b2b companies. Yep. And so, you know, and there's there's huge opportunity there because in for a manufacturer, for example, if they're differentiating on product, that's what makes them special, then this is really just a change in their in their distribution method, other selling channels. But there's still a lot of fear there. And the problem is, if you don't embrace it as a brand, if you have any kind of brand b2b or b2c, if you're not embracing Amazon, you are in terms of at least getting yourself in a controlled presence there. You're at risk of being relevant to that millennial who's now going on Amazon to buy your product. I mean, if you search on a, like you're doing computer monitor, and 70% of product searches happening on Amazon, now, not Google, you go to Amazon type in computer monitor, if your product isn't there, you're not in the conversation. Yeah, well, you don't have to sell everything on Amazon. But you know, the point is that you need to have an Amazon strategy, right? Yeah. And that's why you've heard of it.
Unknown Speaker :You hyper focus on Amazon for b2b, which is, I think, super interesting because just most people think about Amazon for b2c, and that's where they don't realize that Amazon is gonna be become this big b2b player. And now is a great time, I think, to get involved in that and tap into that huge growth, as we've been talking about. A lot of this is manufacturing, but distributors should be talking to you too. They should be. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's an interesting, you know, model. We can chat about that for a second if you'd like to. The So, you know, a lot of we work with both manufacturers and distributors. And a lot of distributors will be you know, the initial reaction is I'm not going to touch Amazon. Yeah, because it's it's competitive. It's taking share I, you know, and these things are not untrue. However, if you're a distributor, particularly the Amazon business, there are real opportunities and approaches you can use to capitalize on Amazon's voice All right, while also sort of protecting yourself and your channels, and your traditional suppliers, like for example, we work with several midmarket distributors. And they, what we're doing with them is we're going to they're, we're taking number one their private label lines and bringing them on time. Yeah. Number two, we're going with them to their suppliers and saying, suppliers, let's let's be your Amazon department, right? Let's help your Amazon reseller. And a lot of manufacturers like that, because they don't want to deal with you know, they don't want to deal with small orders shipping or tax Nexus and other things. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker :And they've already got the distributor relationship. So right, right there. It's just more for them to do with them. And hopefully that goes well. And that makes a ton of sense. And I'm a big believer in you know, it's the omni channel approach, you know, you got to kind of, you can't put all your eggs in one basket nowadays, like even you know, if you try and do everything one way like COVID something's gonna happen, right? Like, you know what I mean, we all saw With COVID how many people weren't expecting that? And what's the next thing? You know, that's gonna happen in the next 1020 years? You know, it's gonna be self driving cars, like who knows what's gonna
Unknown Speaker :see, but
Unknown Speaker :yeah, no, it's amazing. And that's one of the chapters in the book is our digital future. It's chapter 12. Oh, nice. I talked about that. Those kinds of things, like some really interesting case studies in the book, like what Bosch power tools is doing with Robert Bosch with with Internet of Things and what Illumina is doing with bringing real personalization through their equipment, their genomic sequencing equipment manufacturer, fascinating industry, by the way, and one that's very relevant for COVID because it's their equipment for resourcing
Unknown Speaker :and coming up with vaccines and things so it's, yeah, it's it's an interesting world. And yet, speaking of COVID eyes, I you know, that is the loudest call to action for b2b e commerce. I know in our lifetime, certainly for sure,
Unknown Speaker :for sure, because you're not down to local Right, you know, warehouse or you know you want now everyone's at home, they want that efficiency, they want that convenience and there's so much innovation that needs to come with that. So so we have so much I mean, I think we might need to do like five podcasts there's a it's gonna be hard to get to everything and that's the goal as well we'll eventually hopefully bring people back as this grows and let me go back it we get more people but um, you have this concept of billion dollar ecommerce. I think that's in the book. And it's obviously part of like kind of your branding and things that you've talked about. So can you explain like, what you've seen and what got you to think like, what how did that Where'd that come from?
Unknown Speaker :Well, it comes
Unknown Speaker :to Amazon.
Unknown Speaker :Only right? Excuse me. So it comes from the fact that you know, this really is number one. What the customers demanding from their b2b suppliers. So number number one, it's it's really if you're doing if you're listening to your customers, which every business needs to do that that customer is asking for e commerce and digital from you. And so the story of this book billion dollar b2b e commerce, right is, is really about helping companies understand what they need to do to get into this into this market and to meet their customers needs. And I believe for many companies, it actually is a billion dollar opportunity. I mean, I have
Unknown Speaker :32 Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :you know, and, and it's not just the big guys, either. That's a big misconception, right? I mean, so Okay, so Illumina, right is a big guy, it's a $3 billion company. They're going to be doing 50% of their volume via e commerce. Wow. Then within within the next year and a half, two years, 50% guys of $3 billion. Okay, so think about that. That but that's a big guy. Right. I also have case studies and stories about companies that are not huge guys. But they've added distributors to that have that have integrated e commerce into their business. So for example, there's a company it's not in the book, but I interviewed them company called Bay fastening systems that they they are a small distributor, you know, in the range of, you know, a mid market. They they doubled the business over the last five years. Wow. And they attribute it to ecommerce, their e commerce and they
Unknown Speaker :can become a billion dollar ecommerce. I mean, potentially,
Unknown Speaker :yeah, they're a traditional distributor, there are fasteners, I mean, this is not no fasteners is a very commoditized business. Yeah, what they did and what all these companies that have profile do is they make the buyers job easier. And I mean, I say you guys live this, you build this every day. Yeah. So you see it yourselves. I mean, when you make the buyers job easier and faster, that you succeed You get incremental revenue, you build the share of wallet from the current customer, you find new customers, I got a story of a torque tools manufacturer in the book company called mounts that they they will they sell their their torque tools and that's their also mid market company. They're not a billion dollar company. They they watched e commerce a few years ago. And they used to sell their products only to like Boeing and these other they make torque measurement tools. Right. So you got to get the right torque on an airplane. Yeah, important on the nuts and bolts on airplanes, but they they started selling their products in e commerce and they and all of a sudden they're getting orders from bicycle repair shops and by bicycle enthusiasts. Yeah. Because now these people are finding their products on a whole new market and market. They didn't know it existed. And yeah, you know this is that's one of
Unknown Speaker :the things that we've been talking on the show is I and I believe pretty strongly that the lines of b2b and b2c will start to blur and Cuz a small b2b customer could almost be considered a large one either see customer, like a premium b2c customer that might spend 10 grand on clothes is the same as a small b2b, you know what I mean? Like there's lines start to blur and you kind of just need this scalable ability where small, medium, large customers can buy from you, and kind of open yourself up to all of that there might be nuances to the way that you sell to all of them online. But I think the lines are going to start to blur a little bit
Unknown Speaker :without 100% agree with you guys. I mean, the whole chapter about stealing smart from b2c?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. Which is kind of what so we're, we're gonna hopefully we're touching on all this stuff. Because there's Yeah, there's so much to talk about. But yeah, that's, yeah, get into that cuz I want to hear more about Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :well, I think Sure, and I think
Unknown Speaker :without giving away the whole book, you know,
Unknown Speaker :I can't read 400 pages in an hour. So
Unknown Speaker :the the The key here is that the b2b buyer, their expectations are set by their experiences as b2c consumer shoppers. Yeah, right. So I hundred percent agree with you, you have to meet that expectation. You know, I joke around and sometimes when I give talks now show a green screen, you know, and and, you know, like the old green screen terminals. And I say this is what a lot of b2b companies still think about as e commerce, they put a plug in of their eirp up, you know that that's that where the there's no pictures of the product, there's no navigation, you have to type into a search bar the skew number to find the product that is not ecommerce guys. And so, you know, what we have to do is meet the expectation of that b2b buyer and reflect the experiences of a that again in a b2c site. That said, there's also a lot of differences because you're buying on terms or sure no, you're shipping in different ways. You've got to you got special pricing? I mean, you know, this stuff, you build this stuff? Oh yeah. Like you don't get into, there's so many.
Unknown Speaker :Let's get into pricing a little bit because I think pricing is interesting. And I think I think it's gonna have to kind of adapt and change. So a lot of companies I think struggle with b2b e commerce cuz they're like, oh, like login for price or, which is fine, but or, you know, everything's request to QBO. And right, you know, what are you seeing with pricing and have you? I don't think there's a blanket statement, but are you other certain recommendations that you're making with pricing for customer?
Unknown Speaker :Well, I think and you know, that the pricing is a very complex topic, I think the foundation of the discussion should be understanding that the world is changed and the buyer, just like we saw in the consumer world, the b2b buyer has more power and transparency than ever before. They have the ability to See pricing, find out product information, they have multiple places they can buy products. It's the traditional, you know, sort of supply chain any, any in traditional b2b, you know, you had manufacturer or distributor or customer, right? And as offline. Well, today, you got this, you know, that middle piece there, the distributor has really evolved. And so that consumer that business buyer has more power than ever. So when you think about pricing, you know, there's there's the there's the traditional way of thinking about it, which is I'm only going to allow certain customers to see pricing. And there's not one answer and one answer, right, I'm only going to share pricing in a private setting and it's going to be closed. And we're not going to so what I'm seeing happen with a lot of categories is that manufacturers distributors are now opening up to share pricing more readily on e commerce sites. But there's there there's layers of it, right so I see what I see. see happening is you may go out within a map, minimum advertised price or an MSRP, or some kind of list price on your website publicly available, but then allow your customers to see customer specific pricing log in for a special price that they should. Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. I think we have to continue to accommodate that. Because ultimately, and that, and by the way, that has to be aligned. Right? So if I'm a sales rep, and I negotiate a price with a customer, that price needs to not only show up when I call my sales rep to place an order, but it needs to show Yeah, that's
Unknown Speaker :I think that's a big issue is that people aren't using the website because they think they can call and get a better deal. But if you align that, yep, you know, and that's, I want to get into the sales rep stuff. But let's because otherwise, I want to make sure we still touch on some of this. topics. Actually. Last thing I want to say about price, though, is I do think that there's going to be a trend where and I'm I I believe very In this that, at a certain point, I think the the value of convenience and ease of use becomes more important than price. And I think historically b2b companies that I've tried have competed too much on price. You know, it's so hard
Unknown Speaker :to read the book too. So that's a I mean,
Unknown Speaker :it sounds like you wrote it. I say I have I have a chart here. But I have a that exact what you just said, I have it. I have a graph in the book, the number one and two reasons why customers buy via e commerce, convenience and sit in saving time, right? Yeah. Number one is do not price they're not looking at other price.
Unknown Speaker :Well, because time is money. And a lot of times, you know, if it takes me an hour to order, my value might be 50 100 bucks and the 50 bucks I'm gonna save from you isn't worth it, or, you know, so. I'm totally totally, I think we're on the same page there. And so, so, um, you know, I think we touched a little bit on COVID did we in terms of the call our camera bells before
Unknown Speaker :it here yeah we did a little bit of a wake up call I mean that's you know that is a wake up call you got to pay I mean if this is this doesn't and you know the interesting thing is the companies Isaiah that are prepared digitally are winning share just look at I just read recently watch goes for I think
Unknown Speaker :I saw it goes yeah earnings
Unknown Speaker :yeah and in what do they attribute it to this is they're selling hv AC contractors right which are which are one of the one of the categories which is more hesitant to use digital channels because they you know, they like the physical branches. Yeah, like going to the branch and you know, that's
Unknown Speaker :like a cultural thing. You know, it is
Unknown Speaker :it is right but but their their results and they're up I think 8% overall year over year and their e commerce is off the charts, but a lot of it was Because they get they're seeing 100% increase in usage of all the mobile stuff they put together for their wow people and think about I mean, and also they also attributed to the omni channel stuff, right? Yeah, buying online and picking up at a branch. So you want to go in the branch and also going to having it shipped to job site. So yeah, you know, there but they invest started investing, you know, six, seven years ago.
Unknown Speaker :So yeah, they've done a great job and they're, they're definitely ahead of the game and taking care there you got, I think that's a good way to look at it is, you know, and actually, that kind of ties into success and failure because I think a lot of companies fail with this stuff. And then they kind of don't know what to do like, you know, you fail and then you're like, Oh, crap, like you do I want to put more money into something that's failed or maybe your project failed or you thought you got it up and running it took too long or that's not really getting much results. Um, and I think that looking at those you know, Moscow's is is good cuz you can get some inspiration from them, but I also think that it can cause failure because you're like, Oh, I want watsco. And you're like, a small little distributor manufacturer. It's like, yeah, you gotta walk before you are crawl before you can can run, you know, the crawl, walk, run. So can you talk a little bit about success and failure? And I think there's something to that and b2b with making sure. You can't go from zero to Granger zero to Amazon like
Unknown Speaker :that. It's really true. I you know, and I think for sure, and you know, one of the things about e commerce is number one that we've, we do have a precedent for it. In other words, we have 20 years of b2c learnings to pull from so there's you don't have to necessarily test and fail on things that have been proven we, I did that, you know, a lot of us did that 15 years ago. You can learn from that. So number ones, there's that but there's, you know, not being afraid to fail but learn and learning from it. I mean, that's if we take nothing else. away from the story of Amazon that, you know, they they test and fail things. They had an earlier version of their b2b site called Amazon supply.
Unknown Speaker :I remember that I remember that. Yeah. So they did test and fail. They try different say, and they realized, which I also think is important for companies to learn from. There's a reason Amazon consolidated down to one site and a lot of companies still have a separate b2b site, which I think generally is a mistake. Maybe not always. Yeah, but they did consolidate down to one.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so I, you know, totally, and that's, and the reason the reason they did it was they learned a lot from supply. I would say, you know, so companies need to be open to learning, right? I think number one b2b companies, but you to your point, I say you can't, we can't solve them. You can't build Granger in six months. So understanding what the key things are to build and prioritizing them and understanding what features are important. This this all this all ties to the importance of Understanding your customer, and what they need from you and talking to them and involving them in the process. I mean, the most successful stories I have in the book about companies that have really capitalized, you know, like the aluminous of the world and others, like the big fasting I mentioned, they understood what their they involve their customers from the very beginning, in that whole process, prioritizing what was important to them, not reinventing certain things, learning from b2c, but then also making sure that they involve the customer, even through the launch process. And they even expose their site to a small group of customers in many cases, and not them, let them gave them feedback, give them feedback before they even roll it out to the whole,
Unknown Speaker :like a soft launch, you know, get start small, I think that's smart. Yeah. And start with maybe some of the key things. So in terms of success and failure, you know, kind of touching on the next topic to what, how important you think platforms are two that do you think that sometimes he will choose the wrong platforms and that causes Do you think that's a big piece of failure or it's more that execution platform doesn't matter so much. It's more about execution. I can well my person, I mean, having re platformed or platform businesses myself personally as CEO, CEO, eecom guy,
Unknown Speaker :for I've done it myself probably five, six times and then helping other companies do it for, you know, probably three dozen times over my career. It's the platform decision is, is important. It's also about we know what you guys do, right? It's also about the partner that you bring in to help you and making sure there's a good cultural fit, but I've made the mistake Personally, I got lots of worse stories. I mean, I replatform one business twice, twice in about 18 months. Wow. It was and it wasn't, it was about a gosh, it was I think it was 10 or $15 million ecommerce operations Was it
Unknown Speaker :because you chose the wrong platform and Okay, so you do think that is pretty important to make sure You get the right class?
Unknown Speaker :Yes. I mean, look, if you do it right, you can live with that platform for 10 or 15 years or more. So, yeah, I mean, I I strongly that I have a whole chapter in the book, of course, on platform selection, and, and making sure that you're being thorough in that process. And a lot of it, too, is not only about a list of features, right, because a lot of platforms have a lot of good features. But number one, do they have the right features, but do they have the right flexibility you need? Right? Yeah, think about, you know, that and that differs. If you're a manufacturer, I have the example of Bosch in the book, for example. And they're they're using headless commerce approaches to internet their, their, their equipment in the field. There's other companies doing that there's machine tools companies doing that with their machine, you know, their their machining equipment. And, but if you're a distributor, it's different, right? I think about you know, like the Granger's and fasteners and mscs that have, you know, lockers in the attic customers. facility internet enabling those lockers with Yeah, reordering and replenishing, and what's being ordered, and you know, that all that stuff, and understanding what the customer needs. So the platform is foundational, all that. And the way I think about a platform is, is really the platform should serve the the goals or the objectives and the business model of the business. And they really weren't what makes them great. So I recommend the businesses that we start there, and that they start understanding those things first centered on the customer, then build out and do a careful selection process with the with your platform, so make sure the platform is going to solve their customer needs. And that makes sense.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. So will you. Yeah, I was gonna say would you, you know, I think a simple way to sum up because I like to try to cover all the complexity quickly. But a simple way to sum up success and failures that, you know, initial strategy making sure you have the right internal people. I think that it is important to have good internal people that understand this That's a big part of failures, they just some guy go Go figure it out who's like not ready, or maybe he's not the right guy. So you got to have the right internal people. And then once you've kind of figured out that customer journey, maybe you hired an agency, but I give you, you know, help you help you with strategy, then select, you know, the platform that's gonna work for that. And I think that the platform, like you said, it has to have flexibility, because the platform's never going to do everything out of the box, usually, like, there's gonna be extensions or customizations and down the road, right, and you don't want a platform that can't accommodate that in two years. And then you have to replatform you're like, crap, I just reply. Yeah. And you have to re platform every two years, because trust me, you don't want to replatform too often because we both agree, that's gonna be a nightmare. And then I think, like you said, having the right agency partner, because you're probably not gonna want to do everything yourself. Would you say that's kind of a good way to sum up some of the key areas of success and making those right decisions along the way.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, I think There is a certain yes i think is a great way to sum it up I think there is a certain minimum level of understanding you need as you go through this process and and it's understanding what the customer needs to eat one of the biggest mistakes I see companies making in b2b e commerce is they don't think about they think about e commerce in a bubble as his own channel. And then he talked about pricing before. You know, if you just if you put up a website, and it doesn't meet the customer's need, the customer doesn't think about your e commerce and then the rest of your business. Yes, they think about us.
Unknown Speaker :It's funny you say that because there's the supplier that tries to sell us so hard that you know what they're like, you know, advertising to us. And the reason we never went with them is because their e commerce processes too inconvenient. And I think they you know, they come in with catalogs they're trying to, they don't realize that what they should be pitching us on is hey, you know, we're a great supplier and here's this great portal to buy from our business easy right?
Unknown Speaker :In past and present, you're probably talking about maybe office supplies or something like that. Exactly.
Unknown Speaker :They're like kind of a conglomerate, but they do stuff like office supplies. Yep.
Unknown Speaker :Right. And but that I mean that but they are single source, which is great, but they're not. They're not enabling you to the buy in. And the you know that. So the, you know, the biggest one of the biggest mistakes is you don't show the pricing that the customer expects to see on the website. They put up a single price and all Well, yeah, we can adjust the pricing later. And then they'll get any use of the website. e commerce. Yeah, it's crazy. It doesn't work. They shut it down.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. It's like it's because Rosa wanted
Unknown Speaker :it that they did wrong.
Unknown Speaker :Oh, man. Oh, it's funny. So I'm a real quick to continue on the platform. So I think it is important. We obviously have a lot of experience with Magento bigcommerce. And Shopify seems like Magento is doing pretty well. With b2b. I think big commerce is growing in b2b, and even Shopify too, but those are kind of like the popular ones that People see, I think most people when you're searching ecommerce, you're probably gonna find Magento Shopify, and yeah, big commerce. But outside of that what are you seeing any others that you, sir think are doing a good job or should people should take a look at that you think are worth in the b2b space? A lot of it depends on
Unknown Speaker :what kind of business you are and what you need. And how do you have any For example, b2c crossover, do you want to sell the consumers as well? Yeah, V's have that. And so the platforms, the three you just described are a great fit for different situations. You know, I will have a long history with magenta by the way I was. I ran e commerce at Harbor Freight tools. We were one of the early high volume companies on on Magento back in 2009 10. So know that platform quite well. But the and the others too. So other platforms. Yeah, I mean, there's look there's the good news is In b2b, now, there's a lot of different platforms you can choose from. The bad news is, and b2b. Now, there's a lot of platforms you can choose
Unknown Speaker :from. And you can make a bad decision really easily.
Unknown Speaker :So you really do need to carefully evaluate your options. Look, there's a lot of there's a lot of platforms, emerging platforms, like like z node and V Tex and others platforms like elastic path, commerce tools, there's big enterprise traditional enterprise full stack platforms, like what used to be IBM WebSphere is now with HCl, you've got SAP, you've got Salesforce, which is which bought cloud craze for their b2b. So you've got a long you
Unknown Speaker :think these are all somewhat vile, depending on the situation. But
Unknown Speaker :yeah, they're all I mean, every every every cup, every platform, and I'm talking to you about, you know, epi servers and other one. They just bought my insight, right. Yeah, I think that's one to look at. Sure, so there's there's a lot of all these platforms have have great capabilities in different in different types of applications depends on what you need your budget ranges important. There's that, you know, when you think about, there's about 10, different sort of initial cut criteria you want to use to narrow that that big universe, which is, you know, really, probably 2025 platforms
Unknown Speaker :down to it is really important because, you know, you can't get hybris with like 150 grand or 100 grand, like the platform itself might cost that, like, I think what people don't realize it's like, you might have a platform costs, you might have to host it, plus you so you might have to hire an agency, you might have to get internal talent, like there's a lot of like, it can add up and it's usually not just the platform costs, it's all the other costs. So you should really try and get a sense of like, what is the average, you know, agency cost or Yeah, rates and how many Yeah, is it a thousand hours? Is it 10,000 hours? How big is this project? You know
Unknown Speaker :that that you mean, you guys do this? I mean, this is your business, you know, this, you know, but it's it's about the it's about the development deployment, the design of the site, the integration, getting the data ready. But when you're at the first cut of figuring out where to, you know, what platforms are in your universe, budgets important. What is the company's focus? Right? I mean, are they focused on b2b or b2c? Or both? You know, that's important. How, how many resources are available in the marketplace to develop on it both, you know, agencies and systems integrators like you guys as a man also people you can hire internally, right, other people available in the market, or is it that that platform just develops itself and it doesn't have much of a community and I always think
Unknown Speaker :that's a big risk because then you're basically like, if that doesn't work out, where do you go, you can't switch agencies, you can't right switch,
Unknown Speaker :you know, it's just a consideration. It's right for some companies. And not for others. You know the if you think about you know, like for example like NetSuite has a front end ecommerce, the RPS used by a lot of companies, sometimes it's it's a front end experience isn't necessarily that demanding.
Unknown Speaker :Could be a good fit. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :good fit because guess what the pricing works really well.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. Don't worry about a third party integration and go, you might have some other cons from certain things, but you can live with those cons, you get enough pros, that there's always gonna be cons and pros and I think that's what people don't realize there's no perfect platform. I've been searching I've been searching I've shown you.
Unknown Speaker :My my single piece of advice it is don't rush it and get someone by your side who can help you make the decision and go through a process. Do not rush it. I have made that mistake. I've replatform twice. It was horrible. The Business Growth stopped because we were focused on doing nothing other than replatforming.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, which is really not growth because you want to be on the plane. Form tweaking it making it better proving it happens. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Let's Let's change gears a little bit because you have a lot of experience with the the marketplaces. We talked quite a bit about Amazon. And what else are you seeing out there? Like do you think that there's a way that companies should be looking at the marketplaces as a as an omni channel approach and like a champ? I like channeladvisor as an example, because they can get you on them. There's other ones out there. They're not the only solution out there. But how do you see that for b2b?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so so thing a couple things. There are a couple angles to marketplaces in an international markets outside the US marketplaces in the US, but in b2b are huge. They're the places where a lot of you know think about Alibaba and you know, all the things that they're doing. Yeah. b2b and supply chain and a huge huge an e commerce and with a lot Have the volume gone through there. So when you think about number one, if you're going to if you're going to be in digital and have a blended strategy, marketplaces like Amazon business, also vertical marketplaces, vertical industry marketplaces, Honeywell has one for aerospace, for example. You want to be in these marketplaces, and allow your product to be discovered, right. So it is, I argue that, depending on your business, if you're a manufacturer, you certainly should be in these marketplaces, because you need to remain relevant to your customer and searches are going there. Right? Yeah. When I was on business 70% of product and you should
Unknown Speaker :want to own that to some degree if you just because I've seen some companies that are like, oh, whatever my luck, they don't realize they just send it off to someone else without being involved in it. And that could get out of hand pretty fast. They're not paying it. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :exactly. The other thing I'm seeing Isaiah is that a lot of b2b companies, distributors And manufacturers are actually looking at launching their own marketplaces. Yes. So you've got you've got platforms out there like like miracle and V Tex and other of that, yep, will enable a company to launch like we're actually going
Unknown Speaker :through discovery process right now and hopefully going to be going to be launching that for for a company. This is I think, a really important question though. So I think that's getting ahead of the one of the the cart before the horse. Because I think if you're if you're like, that's Ground Zero, you probably shouldn't launch marketplace. Your own right, like if you're, you know, you do like, not even a million bucks online. Probably not the right time to launch smart. Why would you say, you know, there's no perfect answer, but when do you think you should start considering a marketplace?
Unknown Speaker :No way it kind of depends on your business, right? I mean, but I would say that you do want to have the foundations of e commerce in place. And let's you know, let's take the example of a distributor if you're a mid buying a
Unknown Speaker :distributor is a good one because they're trying to get there kind of thing. Trying to be in lots of many places, you know
Unknown Speaker :selling right? Right. So you ought to be first my point of view midmarket distributor, you ought to be making sure you have the foundations in place for e commerce before you launch a marketplace. In my opinion. People underestimate the differences between you know, e commerce and marketplace and the complexity of launching a marketplace and managing a market. Yes, it's a different animal in many ways. But if you have the foundations of e commerce first and then it's that makes sense. I mean, the distribution model, a lot of it is about a one stop shop for your customer like you were describing with your, you know, the office supplies companies selling whoever they are selling you on products for your business. They're not ecommerce enabled. It's not a one stop shop. But you know, traditionally they've done well, because they are a one stop shops. Why? Well, so a Granger is done well, it's why you know, a lot of these staples is historically done well, because you've been a one stop shop now. Now part of the business model is having a lot of assortment marketplaces can help you get a lot of assortment and you can build it in on top of and with your ecommerce site or like
Unknown Speaker :crowdsourcing products, kind of like you don't have to do.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, but you know, and
Unknown Speaker :so companies like commerce hub, I don't know if you know, commerce hub, I've done some work with them, they, they can supply it can help you extend your assortment and manage that whole dropship piece. Right? So, but that if you're not doing that, well, that whole management of dropship you're screwed.
Unknown Speaker :Because Yeah, you're
Unknown Speaker :having a bad experience to your customer. So you shouldn't rush into it, it should be careful and understand what you're doing. I advise companies to think about, you know, making sure they have the foundations first but but you know, it's really fascinating some of the results that in Granger actually is a great example this when they go out and expand the assortment and do it with this dropship model. And they actually, you know, like, like I was describing the commerce hub enables, they will, they will help to really grow the top line of the revenue of the business. Granger I think last was last quarterly results talked about a 19% growth rate and that and they attributed A lot of it to the expanded assortment that they brought in through this drop shipping program. Yeah, so so it's and that's really that's a marketplace type approach. But you have to make sure you're managing those sellers and marketplaces and how the products getting to the getting to the customer. Well, and obviously Amazon Alibaba and others do that really well. So
Unknown Speaker :yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, so we talked about b2b learning for b2c. So I think we can kind of skip that a little bit. But so what you know, let's touch more on the differences in b2b. We talked about pricing, I think it's a huge difference. It's not just a one size fits all price, with discounts. But what else do you seeing are some of the key features that are seeing not not like a one off but something that you see kind of pop up. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :wait all this this this quite a few differences, you know, under the under the surface I think, you know, the foundational difference is that in the consumer b2c market, when you're shopping for apparel or a lifestyle type product, you're looking in some ways it's fun, you're looking to identify with the brand. It's an adventure, it's, you know, yeah, I mean, oftentimes you're spending more time on a site where you're immersed in the, you know, different aspects and you're comparing products with b2b you got to make you got to make the buyers job easier and faster, right. It's about efficiency and b2b. I mean, you said it yourself. And the stats show it that you know, if you're doing that, well, the customer ops even pay you more for the product.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, the foundational difference a convenience and efficiency. Yeah, they go
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, yeah, the foundational
Unknown Speaker :differences that is the shopping intent and then the journey, but then when you get into features, it's it is pricing, right like you described the pricing The levels will be different by different customers. In many cases, you have to reflect that there's differences in payment methods and check it out. So sorter hang on purchase order requesting a quote as a common approach to, to for bulk purchase items. You have custom catalogs in b2b, you know, your customer might have a specific, a catalogue that you want to present to them a product that's, that happens less than b2c. There's also in some, in some cases, the number of products particularly you think about, you know, distributors we we work with, for example, Cardinal Health, there's millions of products in that catalog. There's, you know, these are, these are these are significant differences in how you bring the product to market and the importance of things like search product in product that's much
Unknown Speaker :more complicated when you're talking about a million products. How do you design for that? How do you support that with the catalog and then the site isn't crawling so slow, because it's got a million products in it? One that's very simple, but kind To overlooked as corporate accounts, I mean, Shopify, you know, you're not going to get corporate accounts out of the box, actually gento not out of the box on open source that they added that to the Enterprise Edition. So a lot of people don't realize, Hey, I don't have corporate accounts because you didn't pay for the Enterprise Edition or whatever the commerce cloud, I don't want to get in trouble with a magenta because they, they've changed the name a few times. But corporate accounts is kind of a fairly basic one. But I think it's important because that you have that holistic level like, trellis we have a corporate account that I could give an account to someone and then you kind of can have like order permissions and projects, actually, yeah, Isaiah, that's
Unknown Speaker :a great point. It's understanding the workflow of your customer and how they buy and so in the case of, you know, again, the example of alumina in the book, I use them a lot. What they built into their shopping process was the ability for the researcher, the person using the equipment in the in a, in a lab in a research lab to shop the product, but then they don't actually have permission or rights to buy.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, they but they're not the budget guy like they're just not
Unknown Speaker :the procurement team, right. So they have the ability to send that to the procurement team what we need. And then the procurement team then then puts the order together through e commerce, and it gets additional permission to buy it. So there's multiple steps in the
Unknown Speaker :and all that rolls up to potentially one big company so that there's a level of potentially above that. Yeah, I think that's pretty much everyone in b2b, I think should have some flavor of that. There might be some weird exceptions, but some sort of corporate corporate functionality. I think you nailed it with the other stuff there. And then I think there's obviously lots of nuances on a case by case basis that can get then that's why I think the flexibility is so important because you're gonna something's gonna come up something with your business model is gonna evolve and you're gonna need to do a custom summarization. So.
Unknown Speaker :Right? Right and thinking about complex products, right and configurators. And the, you know, if you have a, you know, for example, I've done some work with a company called Gen alpha, which is an e commerce platform. And they and they focus a lot of their work on companies that make equipment, so vehicles, commercial vehicles, and the ability to shop based on that vehicles schematics and finding and going into the vehicle and identifying the specific part. So that's a very unique type of shopping that, you know, you don't find that and b2c necessarily. It's based on an understanding of the actual equipment and allowing the customer to get quickly to that. So those are very interesting and unique cases, that don't you know, that it only exists in certain industries, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, there's this complexity like that.
Unknown Speaker :Definitely a lot of industry specific needs. Um, so I think we kind of touched on this, but it's definitely I think we should try and distill it. For people that are newer to this or even even experienced, what do you think the the biggest ROI drivers are for b2b commerce? Like how would you pitch the valid let's say a company doesn't really have much or they maybe they have something but it needs you can tell it needs an overhaul like one of the two. And you think they need to make a $200,000 investment, whatever it is some some sort of substantial investment. How would you justify the ROI there? is really
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, great question. There's, there's really three things, three things that drive ROI. At least I bucket them this way. The first is revenue lift. Okay. In revenue lift, it means because you're making the buyers job easier, you're earning more of that buyers, buyers dollars through them, they're buying more, maybe they are buying more from you. They're buying more of your catalog, you're automating the process of presenting them with products based on data that they might not have even known existed. Bingo. So revenue lives and the other part of On the left is as I was describing, with the case study in the book, with mounts, finding new customer segments that they didn't know existed or would want them. So you're reaching new customers based on people finding you on Google or Amazon or wherever you're reaching your customers. So revenue lift is that so there and that's powerful to this revenue shift. So lift shift, shift, one shift is, is you're putting your, your, your products, you're selling them through a more profitable channel. So I have an example in the book of a company that has gets 50% of its revenue from e commerce or $500 million company 250,000 is coming from the eaters
Unknown Speaker :million, million sorry.
Unknown Speaker :And they're there and they're, they're charging more on that 250 million. Wow, we get 3% higher gross margin. This is a commodity category. This is paid off. Okay, paper 3% higher gross margin. And why is that it's But that doesn't make any sense. It's kind of a hidden benefit. Well, it's because the number one, the call number happens to Joe, the sales guy saying, Hey, Joe, you know, can you give me some paper off? I'll hook you up. I'll give you
Unknown Speaker :There's no time cost there.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, well, you don't they don't need to. Right. So there's that. And then they can charge more because the convenience outweighs the price in the buying decision. And they have all the information they need on the website. When can I get it? What are the specs of the paper? How much inventory do you have? You know, what's the price?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, the exact specs,
Unknown Speaker :and I'm done in five in five less than five minutes. Whereas, you know, the other way around, it takes me a half an hour. So making the buyers job easier having to lift shift. The third eye is really about efficiencies and enablement of the organization. So if you think about here, it's not about firing all your salespeople.
Unknown Speaker :Okay, yeah, no, I agree. And I think that's part of the problem is they're like, oh, all the all the salespeople are going to lose their jobs and they don't want it. So they The Nope, nothing happens because if the salespeople aren't going to aren't on board, everything just doesn't doesn't happen. That's
Unknown Speaker :right. So that enablement piece, excuse me is all about making the organization more efficient by allowing customers to self service, right and go online to find out where my order is. I don't have to call my sales rep anymore, or the call center. I go online to get the information I need. I don't have to call you. What does that do to the sales team? Does it make him irrelevant? Absolutely not. It takes everything that they historically have done. It's not the highest and best use of their time
Unknown Speaker :and puts it in other channels.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, what I like to use, I like to call it as you can actually make your salespeople sell. And so taking orders and doing basic manual labor that the website can do or an assistant can do. They should be going out there getting new customers or building relationships or upselling. Big Big Ideas, not just go and make a couple more parts.
Unknown Speaker :Yes and reaching more customers and being more strategic with their cuts. customers and thinking about their business and other ways to bring value. salespeople are smart people that think about business opportunities and they they'll find new things. If they have time. They find new ways to generate
Unknown Speaker :business totally agree instead of just taking small orders, and you know, where's my
Unknown Speaker :order? Joe? No, taking that call go online.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, that's why he wants to. So we can actually sell I mean, we're, we're in we are, we have a very small sales team, the way that we're set up so we try and do as little of that kind of stuff as possible, the more we can be talking to young people and explaining the value of what we do, or consulting, that's where our value is, you know, not Yeah, not doing paperwork or whatever it may be. So, so what do you see is happening and I think there's a lot of things that you could say about this, but um, I actually, I think I posted on LinkedIn A while back was, you know, the retail apocalypse Yeah. You kind of a cheating here with the answer of this question, but do you see the b2b apocalypse coming? Because, um, you know, because they're not adapting like, you know what I mean? Like the the series of b2b and,
Unknown Speaker :yeah, it's funny you say that right? That's actually, the first sentence of the book is, is basically don't be Sears. I'm sorry, but I do I do use your case in here. And it's so you know, retail apocalypse b2b Apocalypse, you know, look, I think so for some businesses that don't can we coin that
Unknown Speaker :by the way, can you coin that and then you don't need to be. I said, anyway, the
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. So I think it's true. I think I think you have to move and you know, people use terms like apocalypse just you know, the scare. Yeah, right. I mean, it's the I see that in the papers and stuff. But I know that you know, but to get up and pay attention, I mean, a b2b problem has always been there not business has been just good enough and they're not paying attention. And you know, it's like, oh, I'm up 1% or I'm down a little bit, I'm fine. You know, I don't need to worry about this. e commerce thing is Seo. You know, I don't I don't think about that. Because businesses, okay, relationships are important. They are still important. But what I do see, though, that they don't realize is that their buyer base is changing. It's sneaking up on them Amazon businesses coming hard. You got you know, some distributors that are enabling e commerce and winning share from other distributors who aren't. So yes, 10 years from now. 15 years from now. The world of b2b is going to look something like the world of b2c e commerce and commerce in general. In like, for example, the department store segment, JC Penney just filed for bankruptcy Sears, I don't know it's the longest liquidation sale in history. So, you know, it's, uh, you know, they have bedsheets covering where there's no, you know, there's no yeah,
Unknown Speaker :there's I mean, it's sad. So the thing is, yes. Yeah, the b2b commerce is going to become a cornerstone. It's almost like in in time in the coming decade has to be this the focal maybe the central hub of your business. Everything kind of plays off of that kind of like how retail Now, if you're not ecommerce versus retail. I mean, aside from some really lucky store players, you're pretty much dead,
Unknown Speaker :you know? Yeah, I mean, again, it goes to what what Bezos Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon said, you know, 15 years ago, which is you got to we're not focused on our competitors. We're not competitor obsessed. We are customer obsessed. And they've remained so and and you got to you got to understand now
Unknown Speaker :I don't have any competitors.
Unknown Speaker :I'm kidding.
Unknown Speaker :But yeah, I think that's so true and the b2b buyer in the next decade, to your point is gonna be the millennial. It's gonna be someone that grew up with a computer. They grew up with e commerce, they do everything here. Yeah, they don't want to call in to find the order status, or find out the price they want to log in get. I mean, I think people are fine with those initial sales calls, getting on boarded. But once you're on boarded, you should be able to
Unknown Speaker :look the sales the sales team is and should be consultative strategic, you you Isaiah should call that you know your sales person who's helping you with everything around your office, and ask them questions that are more strategic meaning like how do I how do I configure this in my office or what what kind of how would you suggest I use these products together? Or Yeah, you know what I mean, like in the case, when should I yeah, that's right. That's right and on some of that is self service online, but there's always going to be a role and a big role for the human interaction and relationship. This is not we're not all going to become robots.
Unknown Speaker :That's not that automated. Yeah, I totally, totally agree. Really, we're just automating the very basic ordering process. If you think about it, like Yeah, yeah, pretty basic. And and we met in simple terms,
Unknown Speaker :and I would argue research and, you know, the service aspects, anything that is not really that doesn't require really the kind of layer of human intelligence where you can Yeah, you know, with that, without context, yes, the context and the expertise. Some of that is gonna move online to I mean, obviously, with, you know, with, with with information and how to use products together and compatibility information and all those things, yes. But there will always be a role for the human always, for sure, very strongly,
Unknown Speaker :for sure. I totally agree. So I think this is really important. Um, so what would you what, you know, what advice would you give for the CEO or let's call it not just the CEO, the, the the executive team that's making this ecommerce decision, they don't know what platform to get. They don't know what to agency to get. They don't know who to hire. You know, they're there. They know they got to do something. I think most people at this point know they gotta do something, but they don't know.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, you're right. You know, of course your softball me a question for my book, you know by the book. Right.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you. But buying the book and reading it should do.
Unknown Speaker :I think so. It's interesting. I have a in the book I have I have a sorry about that. Oh, no. Can you hear that? phone? I'm sorry. This is fun.
Unknown Speaker :It's okay. Yeah. So
Unknown Speaker :why don't we can actually probably edit this out? Let's wait for it to finish. Sure. Sure. Because this is the beauty of recording, right.
Unknown Speaker :Sorry, I should have I don't have an easy way to Oh, no, don't. Don't worry. We've been we've been on for a while now. So. Yeah, lots of times. You need a little break, you know. But yeah, so because I think it's definitely the SEO advice, but I think I would also kind of include it as because I think it's more It should be a little bit of a bigger group, you might need the VP of sales. I think you need alignment, right in the in the company. So what would be that advice for?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so I totally agree with you. I think, you know, number one, it's this, it is the CEO, but it's also everyone else, you need alignment, you got organizational inertia, you've got some folks in the organization that may not understand or are fighting against digital transformation, and whether they say it or not. And so I so I think, you know, the number one number one piece of advice and I have a case study the book about this. So I think the first one in there, it's from a company called Petra industries, which is a mid market distributor is to is to act without perfect information, you need to act and get started. And you're not going to create Granger in a day, right? or Amazon in a day to your point. So but acting is what's important and and this and below acting Is, is getting the right people aligned with with you on the bus. I call it getting on the bus. I love Jim Collins book. Good to Great. I'm going
Unknown Speaker :to read it. I haven't, but I should,
Unknown Speaker :you definitely should. He has he has a concept in there about getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus.
Unknown Speaker :So I love that idea.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, and just being very, very clear and forthright about it. And, and this that concept applies acutely in this with digital transformation. And particularly in a in a smaller mid market company where maybe it's family owned. Those things can be hard to do and challenging. But you have to confront the reality of what you're what you're dealing with and how your customer is changing. And so number one is act and number two would be make sure you have the right people on the bus with you. And if you can't figure that out yourself, hire somebody like me or somebody else who has experience in e commerce to help you make those decisions as a consultant or even or even hire them internally as your chief digital officer. Give them real authority. Not you're not you're 24 year old nephew who knows how to write code.
Unknown Speaker :I love how you said that because I think that's a big mistake is you need to hire someone that really has been there, made the plot replatforming mistakes, ya know, like you said you were talking about those nightmares. And I think we've all been there that awesome this side of the business that's been on the agency side, but you know, Ben, they're in the trenches and give them some authority. And that's almost like an executive, maybe it's a VP or director level, but I think at a minimum, almost a director level the way I would, oh, they've got
Unknown Speaker :they've got to look, they've got to report this way to do this, right. You have to break down silos, you have to change people's thinking. They have to be a sell it a visionary, someone who can sell, they need real experience. They have to align the organization. They should report to the CEO. They should have a CEO or VP in front of their name my opinion and they can be a director and flatter organization. Yeah, smaller
Unknown Speaker :organizations maybe don't have a VP Yeah. So
Unknown Speaker :But yeah, I mean, 100% of it. And when you don't do that it doesn't work.
Unknown Speaker :I love that idea of getting everyone aligned on the bus. Because from there, then in theory, they should be smart enough to either hire someone like you as a consultant or hire the right agency, they should. Because if, you know if you don't have that, that alignment in the right people, you're not gonna make the right decisions. And
Unknown Speaker :yeah, well, yeah, I mean, aside from not showing the right price online. The other major reason companies fail with e commerce is they don't align the sales team. And the sales team fights against e commerce. And so you have to have the alignment of the sales team. If you don't have it, your customers won't adopt it because the customer because Joe, the sales guy will say, you know, Listen, don't don't use this e commerce thing. Call me. You know, I'll give you the I'll give you the right price. I'll treat you right. That's the intention there is not bad. It's It's just that they're not aligned with the effort. And they're also not compensated in some cases from the sales that happen on e commerce. And that's an
Unknown Speaker :easy fix in my opinion commission. Almost associated with the we called it the corporate accounts, their account, maybe they sold them, maybe they brought them in whatever it is whether you can call them the account manager to maybe the account manager of that account. That's the sales tile. Right. I mean, I think that's an easy fix. And I think it's a bad excuse for companies to not do a good job with this stuff.
Unknown Speaker :100% agree. Yeah. So those are some of the gotchas that you know, I've learned and when you look at the most successful e commerce, implementations and digital implementations, they have that alignment. They've involved the sales team from the very beginning. And it's and the sales team turns out to be the biggest fan. Why? Because they're getting more commission.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, they can they can sell more and sell more when it wants to take orders when your salesperson like you know, because anyway, it's it's crazy.
Unknown Speaker :This is not Death of a Salesman people. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker :it's actually gonna keep their job. So you know, you don't we're letting the b2b apocalypse so Right. So I can tell you're, you've been really passionate about this stuff and learning this. So how can people get ahold of you and how can they find your book because I think you seem very willing to help people and it doesn't seem like you're out just trying to make money off everyone you're really trying you know?
Unknown Speaker :I wish I could tell you that the that this this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. It won't be because there's only there's only certain people that are gonna be interested. That's okay. It's not why this why I did it. I didn't do this to be you know this to become a billionaire.
Unknown Speaker :Even though it's, you know, billion dollars. You're making other people billionaires
Unknown Speaker :but to find the book, so hopefully you can see that Okay, yeah,
Unknown Speaker :we can see great,
Unknown Speaker :just about a billion dollar b2b e commerce put a.com at the end, and you'll find the book there. You can also email me at Brian at NC bas.com e ncei, va n c, e ai Ba and it's Brian at CBRE, calm. By the way, we took the name from the ceiba tree. It's a tallest tree in the Amazon rainforest. Oh, there you go. That's Yeah, so we help our clients stand out in the rain forest
Unknown Speaker :on Amazon. Right?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah. The Amazon rainforest.
Unknown Speaker :Anyway, awesome. Well, this was amazing. We're definitely gonna have to do another another episode and yeah, thanks so much, Brian. I'm couldn't couldn't be happier to have you on. So I just want to add one last thing for people. So listening to come back for Episode 12. You have someone in the trenches. Actually someone that I've known for a while now, in the scene is actually our first international merchant. He's from South America. It's pretty interesting. They're in South America doing b2b doing some really innovative stuff that I was pretty shocked to find out that they were pulling off. I'm sure to catch that Isaiah. Yeah, yeah. So I'll send you the info and he's a great guy to talk to because they And they figured it out on their own. They I you know, they figure, he just they just kind of figured it out. It's funny. He told me they started with Shopify, and now they've gone completely custom. But they're doing it in a way. That's pretty, pretty interesting. Oh, smart.
Unknown Speaker :And Brian, they're listening to their customer, I'm sure which is part of it.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
Unknown Speaker :That's awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure, Isaiah, thank you so much. And, you know, keep fighting the good fight. You guys do good work. And, you know, with the b2b e commerce stuff, and, you know, we all we all need people, you know, all of us need to be working together to train. Absolutely.
Unknown Speaker :There's so much out there that I think there's much more to help each other. We're not really compete. I don't look at it as competition anymore, because it's just like you said, there's so much that needs to be done. Not enough people to do it.
Unknown Speaker :That's right. I agree.
Unknown Speaker :Well, thank you. I really appreciate the time.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you. Thank you.
