Unknown Speaker : 0:07

Welcome to Episode 16 of the hard truth about b2b commerce. I'm your co host Isaiah Bollinger of trellis and I'm here with Tim Conway. I'm Timothy Peterson. I'm a client advocate for trellis in a b2b and b2c e commerce aficionado. And I'd like to tell you about our sponsor, our sponsor is punch out to go. And they're a global b2b integration company specializing in connecting commerce and business platforms. With e procurement and DRP applications. Punch Out to goes I pass technology seamlessly links business applications to automate the flow of purchasing purchasing data. And with their solution, you can immediately reduce integration complexities for punch out catalogs, electronic purchase orders, e invoices and the like. And once again, thank you to our sponsor. Really appreciate it and well Welcome to another episode of the hard truth about b2b e commerce. I know it's weird to feel like we're on episode 16 I feel like we just started this thing. So yeah, it's really exciting to have our guests Richard, Richard Kelly from one 800 battery, which is also, I guess you would call it part of market ring, which is the underlying technology. So you've been in kind of E RP, you know, b2b e commerce, you know, you've been in technology kind of most of your career it sounds like So tell us a little bit more about how you got into one 800 battery and market ring. What is that? Because I think a lot of people don't you guys are still fairly new, right? So Sure. So for over 25 years, I've been in enterprise software. I started warehouse management systems, managing inventory and stuff like that for brands that are dead like warehouse entertainment, remember the warehouse stores or even Circuit City and then Doc Martin shoes, we implemented there and I went up to Doc Martin for a period of time. And then later I left and created a partial distribution system. So I turned I created the first windows multi carrier, multi site EDM API enabled pack station with Bill of ladings. and stuff like that we were on the forefront of doing a ship station literally 20 years ago, that grew into an ER p software company that we supported manufacturers and distributors at a global scale, such as Canaan filters and L'Oreal at NYX and different things like that. So I really started in the back office as far down as telling people what to start on the the work to pick how to pick it, how to fulfill it moved into supply chain forecasting and a global allocation of the global and just continue to move through the operations were ended up with a large scale e RP system. That RP system was that installed in a number of distributors for the battery market in the United States. And that got me into the battery market in the early 2000s. We launched a A platform and an e commerce family that at one point probably 20% of all the batteries that were going online at states were going through our funnel that included integrating configurators into Best Buy and Dell and different things like that. I sold that and exited that business and then got back into the market when I was able to procure the one 800 battery phone number which took a long time that's its own story. It's an incredible story involving Israelis and foreign countries and and everything else like that. But I was able to get the access to the one and a better phone number. And then I've been launching this platform on that and then what our platform does is it takes last mile local providers and delivery people tactics and makes that a commodity so that we can take a brand like a any battery and ac delco a belva Lane a Interstate Batteries that we can connect the brand to the consumer interface to dealers and interface the last mile service providers such as roads sight and everything's like that. So we've created a platform that any product can be value added by any person in the chain. So some pretty incredible stuff. Awesome. Wow. So quite an evolution into into e commerce. And I love that you have the E RP background because I think that a lot of the complexities of b2b e commerce and why it hasn't really evolved to where it needs to go, I think is because a lot of people are still kind of stuck in that DRP world, and then they're like, how do I how do I get this into e commerce? And that whole shift has been, I think, very challenging for a lot of people.

Unknown Speaker : 4:36

Yeah, for sure.

Unknown Speaker : 4:39

They, I suppose one of the things that that comes to mind is, you know, you work with a lot of manufacturers and distributors, right. I mean, so we are at the center of that world. Right. So what are you seeing in terms of e commerce for manufacturers and distributors today? Yeah, well, like everybody's seen a huge push because of the pandemic and the crisis. Through a focus on e commerce, it's not something you can just do overnight or throw up a Shopify site. Think that you have e commerce that's absolutely especially b2b. We'll get into that some details later, maybe later. But it, that push ends up being two strategies right now. And it's a real bad strategy. Sometimes, if they're either going directly to Amazon, that's their e commerce, I think that's a very big danger to the brands of not controlling the consumer experience and a consumer availability brand, just pushing it to Amazon for various predatory reasons. And then or they go to a D to C direct to consumer strategy, and that has the potential to pre channel conflict and doesn't leverage the existing relationships with a retail service provider. So they go to DC b2c, and name of, quote unquote, margin that hurts them and if they go to Amazon that hurts them potentially even more. So I think that they have to have a different strategy a cohesive holistic strategy for b2b and b2c? Gotcha. So you feel like there's kind of a missing, you know, they're either going to extreme by going straight to consumer or kind of saying, Hey, we're not going to bother with this in the sense, we're just going to ship it all off to Amazon and let them deal with it. Yeah. And there needs to be kind of more of a middle ground approach and maybe doing would you say it's more doing a little bit of the to see something like kind of a combination of these things? Or how would you I think it depends on the channels, and they're given products and verticals. So it can be both, but the on the b2b side, they tend to make that a secondary side. I think the b2b support on most distributors and manufacturers is like, the user experience is bad, the implementation is poor, they accept the call and purchase orders. The configuration we'll talk about a little bit later, is poor, but I think the b2b needs to be focused on just as much as the b2c from a distributor manufacturer and part of that focus on the b2b aspect. also enabling your quote unquote, where to buy is not just an address, it's actually a resource that you can leverage. That's why we built our technology. Gotcha. I see what you're saying. Cool. Um, so yeah, there's a, there's a lot to get into. And I hope people go and check out your guy's site to see what you guys are doing at one 800 battery. But let's talk a little bit of the platforms, because I think that ties into what some of these problems are. And I think that's part of the problem is that, I think part of the problem is also that the platforms have made it seem easier than it is. And they've commoditized things where they're like, Oh, just, you know, set up Magento or set up Shopify set up, you know, and, you know, there's a lot of platforms out there, I'm just naming some of the popular ones. And people kind of think, Oh, you know, just pay an agency, you know, 50 grand, or, you know, some modest sum, and then that'll solve their kind of problems. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about why you I mean, there's a reason you guys didn't go out and Use a Magento or shop you guys, I believe you guys kind of pretty much custom built your whole whole system. And we got lucky in the confluence of a certain set of technologies. So we did try when we started that out, as you know, we tried Magento, we tried nopcommerce, we try Shopify, we tried big commerce out of the box, and we broke all of them. So the problem with ours is the categorization requirements and the URL deep linking requirements, and the sheer number of locations and product flexibility requirements, and fitment and labor, all these different rules. We just just could not even get a site to start like some some loads would take an hour just to build the site up. So we broke into some scale of data on our side. So we got lucky, headless. And so I'm a big believer in headless because what that does is it separates the stacks that you can create the user experience that you want, and integrate into the given carts that you want. So we can integrate into Shopify, we've had integrations into big commerce already, but we're not leveraging They're forced delivery system and service and systems, we do it straight, headless. So we leverage Amazon cloud, we leverage other API invocation of a whole bunch of things. And that ended up opening up a tremendous opportunity for us.

Unknown Speaker : 9:15

Yeah, I'm a big believer in headless as well. And actually, our new website, trellis coach, still, you know, still got work and bugs to fix it's only been out for about a month is actually view j. s. It's a headless front end and WordPress back end, but we actually have plans to bring in, we have a Magento store that's kind of more of an operational tool, and we're going to bring that ends make it a better user experience for some some stuff that we might push for more transactional things that we do. And so yeah, I totally agree. I think cableless actually, I think one of our previous guests being might have been Justin, Justin Finnegan, who he wrote one of the larger Magento or just ecommerce agencies, they do a lot more than Magento. But, you know, he was saying that what's interesting Thinking about headless is that it actually has more applications to, to b2b in a lot of ways it has almost more value in a b2b context. And it doesn't be to see because b2b has so many different systems and potential systems and complexity that in some ways, it's almost more valuable for b2b. Whereas historically, b2c has been the ones usually adopting these newer technologies, but maybe this this might change in the b2b world, hopefully. Yeah, for sure. I mean, for example, we integrated real time delivery apps from from different providers and stuff like that in a matter of I don't want to tell anybody how quick it was done, because this is really that quick, but by having a segment of system with order dispatch, and so like when our headless comes in, we run it through an order dispatch router based on Amazon Sq s. And it will take it and then be able to flick an order here to a retailer via phone, flip to one over here via email flip this one directly integrated into delivery app, click this one over here. And fire off an EDI purchase order for hub spoken pickup. So by having headless technologies and putting out middleware in the, in the process, you open yourself up to the, to an almost infinite flexibility. And we'll talk we'll tell you later on when the other questions, I think you've pre sent us on some of the features that we implemented a b2b 20 years ago. So they're still trying to catch up. So once they catch up, it's going to be great for b2b businesses, and it just rewards the consumers at the end. Right. Yeah. And we could certainly dive into some of that now. I mean, because you mentioned real time delivery and, you know, delivery and expectations, right. I mean, I think that those, that is a wonderful term to use when you're thinking about, you know, e commerce in general, b2c, or b2b like expectations, right. So yeah, so So let's talk a little bit more about, you know, real time delivery and some of the things that you've done in there, you know, the details. Sure. So as you saw that I come from a dprp background, and we were solving with automation and optimization and storage. execution of ETS allocation all these different processes to really get to one question is, what do you ship? When do you ship it? And how do you communicate that to thing so we can take for example, one of the larger furniture customers in the world using our stuff, we can take an order from from them and go, Hey, we can't have this for 45 days because we know we've got to make it move it to Vietnam, Vietnam to the US or in part of it in the US. And we need to do the dresser because the beds missing so it can handle assortments and stuff like that. So by getting the ability to do an ETA to a customer, you reduce your customer service issues and you increase their expectation. So you're basically being honest with them, not saying hey, I can get this to you. Now, I might be able to give this to you in 45 minutes from 100 batteries standpoint, we've done this by kinda like an Uber like process, we've stepped back from the provider and the location and worked backwards. So we know if there's inventory available or not, but maybe they don't support inventory so we know their dwell time a week. A manufacturing term, but we use our lead time of, hey, how long will it take them to get that. So we'll show an ETA to the person during the project process before Checkout, that we can get that battery to you within 90 minutes or 80 minutes or 45 minutes and adjust for traffic in real time, all these crazy things, by the benefit of using headless when it's all said and done. When you give the expectations to the consumer, and you're focused on just capturing eta, like data, is, you go a long way to improving the processes.

Unknown Speaker : 13:35

It's a great summary explanation.

Unknown Speaker : 13:38

One of the no and that's, that's I think our listeners are gonna really appreciate that because I it was a great explanation that all of us are thinking. So the thank you for actually, you know, putting that out there to the world and sometimes we're, you know, clear way. But one of the things that you you've mentioned, you've mentioned Uber a couple times, can you talk to us a little bit More about sort of the the driver app and a little bit more about what has happened over there. I'm just curious about it. Sure. Yeah, I know that real quick. The thing about Uber is, it's really good about giving you the once you've booked the order, or once you've booked the ride, it gives you a lot of interim status. So we did the exact same thing. As we booked the task or the or the thing, we're letting them know where the driver is without having to download an app. So they can just click a link and it'll just be texted to them SMS when the driver gets close to do the delivery or install it text them, hey, those drivers almost there. And then we obfuscate the four people that I've learned obviously it's not as common word but we discussed we, we make it private the communication that the driver can communicate with the delivery and vice versa and make that in a private fashion using Twilio and different things like okay, so that that consumer is always being updated, but not over inundated, not spam. Not email, whatever it is, we found that SMS is the best format for mobile delivery and install because it has 100% open rate, and more so close to open rate, right? And they're going Oh, good. Now somebody's coming to me. So they're not making another call to the call center. Hey, where's my driver, whatever, because they can see it themselves. And so we took that into our last mile tactics when we we started going down. So, you know, and Isaiah may have a follow up here, but but I want to eventually tie this to the next topic, because you already identified like success and failure here. Right? Yeah. Let's let's put that over a park that for a second as they did you have a Yeah, I just wanted to, uh, you know, expand on this. I mean, it does tie into success and failure. And I think that that is kind of the crux of what's failing and b2b right now is that b2b like people buying in general, whether you're a business or consumer, your expectation is that you're going to something closer to an Amazon or Uber like experience, right? You're, we're used to doordash or all these things, you can go online quickly book an appointment or, and when you're not getting that experience, it's it's kind of frustrating. It's not like, literally, you know, me and my girlfriend are going through insurance process and it's so frustrating to get a quote like it's been when talking to the companies, I'm sure there are more automated things we could have used. But when you're talking manually, it's very frustrating. The quoting process has been fairly slow and frustrating. And I think that's what's kind of missing in b2b is that right now, things are still stocking calls or these very old school buying processes and not enough of it has kind of moved into that real time down delivery expectation. And I think a lot of that is because it's either stuck in the AARP and then they have to make this massive investment in e commerce with a mask destroyed from the eirp. So I'm just kind of curious about Kind of circling back to that a little bit like, what for that for the average company? Like what would you? What would your advice be? Because you know, a lot of these let's, let's use the SMB example, the average, you know, $50 million distributor that's not, you know, that can't just throw a million dollars at their ecommerce site are $2 million, you know, their margins aren't high enough to meet other than use our technology and go to market risk that later but the Yeah, maybe they should just talk to you and look at the trellis on the UI and the front end the consumer experience all together on a tech and you'll be you'll be up and running. is one off you cannot live in imagine so. The interesting on the question there is

Unknown Speaker : 17:52

it's breaking everything down to this little component. So they silo it into how they can see the world and we've been always very different thing. But enterprise software development company for 20 years and everything else like that is the same process. We have gateway processes we like to call them and it depends on what they are for allocation for purchasing for customer service for all these different things. And the important is, is that's just a point to hook into. So be hooked into API can be hooked into eirp, it can be hooked into e commerce. So for us to do a delivery experience, I don't need e commerce to do that. That's a separate component. So I can have my e commerce system, be my P system, dispatch the order into the same funnel an API system that the e commerce would to route the order and do the delivery experience so they can actually step what's important to business. So some businesses, it's important to do b2b e commerce. And those businesses are going to be things like large catalog selection, product assortment, so on and so forth, that it's hard for the for the business to business user to look in order or see the visibility or See the marketing or maybe the materials or whatever it is. But you're b2b businesses that they only support 10 products.

Unknown Speaker : 19:05

Yeah, there's nothing.

Unknown Speaker : 19:06

But that 10 products can be enhanced with delivery technologies. So I would silo each little business benefit into a little component. And that's what headless comes down to. This isn't some fancy, it's also overly fancy term. But all it is, is, hey, we're taking this component, and it used to be the front end. And then we're saying we're gonna make these other components, and then they're all going to start to work together. And that's the benefit of react technologies. You use view we use Next Gen. Yeah, well, we actually do use a lot of react. It's just for we chose view for our website.

Unknown Speaker : 19:37

It doesn't matter does

Unknown Speaker : 19:39

JavaScript It doesn't matter. Yeah. But but by but by having each thing as a component, you can interface that component wherever you want. So if it was me, I would look at my own b2b business and say what is value added to me? Like for example, my son in law owns a trucking company. Their biggest customer is peloton we're even talking about right now. So it's peloton does route delivery, they deliver their their their cycles, stuff like that. So they're only really delivering three SKUs or whatever. Yeah, they have the same problem of delivery at scale and the broken apps that they use, they use a couple of one, I will name them because they just have bad experiences for the operators. Yeah, yeah, harder for them. We should be easy for the operator, make it easy for the operator. That's another key on the technology. You make it easier the operators and the data entry people and the customer service people, they'll use your tool, which is why SAP and MRP systems are so difficult to use in those aspects and they push them through those funnels. Because the the user experience the operator experience is so hard. So when you focus your strategy on the tech you have to think about three things. You have to think about your customers position. You have to think about the the external operators position and then your own internal operators. And if you can publicize that and go I'm making experience cohesive for all three layers. You'll get 100% adoption of your technology. It will be so easy They won't even they'll forget they never had. And that's what's technology is successful in any business. Yeah. And so to kind of summarize you know, for the companies that may be on a limited budget, it's like you said it's distilling that down and looking at the problem. So you know, if you have a million skews, it's very different than the problem of I'm peloton I have three skews and it's more of an operation logistics problem. And then maybe focus in the areas that you can kind of afford to chip away at and I think that's part of the other problem is that people they kind of maybe trying to do everything as an all in one and they could go and more of an agile format maybe start with you know, product data if it's a large catalogue get that solved so at least you can see the products well and then maybe chip away at the delivery component work start to kind of solve these problems. iteratively

Unknown Speaker : 21:46

Yeah, baby steps.

Unknown Speaker : 21:47

Yeah. Well, you know, you you hit on something here that has come up in most if not all of our episodes is that you know what, the way that Isaiah just put this about the all in one The all in one is a fantasy for most businesses that I know of whether they're B to B or b2c or a combo, it really is a fantasy, you'd have to just have that straight line, you know, or there's nothing really that disrupts that straight line or for that to work yet. So it is the baby steps. I mean, to pick up on what you just said, it's just saying, okay, what's next? What's next? What's next, you know, and like getting more of that stuff done, and getting more successes as you do it. Yeah. And it's amazing how that works about. I've had zero failures in the European implementations in 25 years. I think I'm the only European software company can say that, can we

Unknown Speaker : 22:39

can we like, like, put that quote somewhere.

Unknown Speaker : 22:46

I like that.

Unknown Speaker : 22:47

And we've had tremendous benefits, like we've taken manufacturers that had 30 DAY PLUS lead times down to their date, their lead time being a day. And that's just about optimizing the components and they started with partial distribution, and then moved into inventory control. So there are strategies that you can use for VRP implementations. One of the big issues on that, especially as a consulting firm we both been in the service side of consulting, is that

Unknown Speaker : 23:11

the

Unknown Speaker : 23:13

the management either doesn't have to buy in from the sea level. And more importantly is you get end up with all those consulting and all this work and all this needs analysis and stuff like that. I always think that's overdone and over sold and waste a lot of capital that could be used on good solutions. As you can monetize and break down, hey, we're going to get to this milestone and this milestone is going to be implemented. It's not going to be on on the to do list because if you don't implement that now, then you can't do step two. So one of the big things that he said was product data. Most small businesses and even big businesses they might be worse, are terrible at their product data. That is the lifeblood of the internet is the lifeblood of your business. You have to take that seriously. It has to be its own department that has a hub and spoke that idea with purpose. product data. And I deal with marketing data. And I deal with pricing data. And I deal with inventory data, that if you put product data culturally, as the forefront of your business to start with, you will all the other things you want to do from b2b to b2c to DRP, all that stuff, they all become much easier. So make sure that product data isn't entering your stuff in a spreadsheet or having things for product information management. It's probably the single biggest barrier to success when you start the process. And then there's other barriers later, but that's the biggest one from my perspective.

Unknown Speaker : 24:32

I agree.

Unknown Speaker : 24:34

Well, yeah, because it's so core. You know, I A lot of my work is marketing work in addition to you know, the other aspects of what I've done over the years and I have to say product is is at the core of everything, I've gone off and gone to businesses and say okay, we need to go back to that step you like how are we defining this product? What are all the attributes of the product? Where is all the data and the attributes? Why is there only one entity profit, it's, it's, it's something you have to go back to if you haven't done. So I just did a manufacturer two years ago that you would know publicly, they're, they're a household name for automotive part in the aftermarket, like you see their sticker on every car and every event, right?

Unknown Speaker : 25:17

They know they didn't

Unknown Speaker : 25:18

have their own data, a lot of fit their own vehicles that have a digital format. So we were able to go and get that data for them during the implementation by using the internet it is scraping the data and then going through a whole process and even actually using a little AI training bots but but go and say hey, we've reassembled your product data in digital format. So when you think that you can print a catalog and a printed catalog becomes your Bible, get they will start at 1920. So that might be part of the cultural reason but you're you're late to the game and that's that's really important. nuanced, but I guess we got the next questions, I'm sure.

Unknown Speaker : 25:54

Yeah, yeah, we're getting we're doing good right.

Unknown Speaker : 26:03

So we kind of tied into the b2c stuff by Tim, I think, yeah, let me kind of weave some of these things. Because we're, we're covered a lot of great ground here. And that's really what our listeners are here for interviewers to hear for they, they want to meet great people, like you have a lot of success, right and really have your finger in a lot of different, you know, blood different places, you've been there, you've done that, and you're offering them you know, a lot of great tips here really on, on how to view things, right. So, for me, I always go, I love going to two different, you know, kind of sides of the coin. It's like a success and failure, which we've been talking a lot about, but really b2b and b2c. And you know, it traditionally I would say are in the last however many years, I would say that the most innovation was coming b2c to b2b that may be changing or a lot of things are originating and b2b today, but you know, What do you what do you see about this? So like what angle? Do you come from DC a lot of innovation still happening and b2c, the b2b hasn't quite pulled from yet, or what do you think? No, actually, we, you know, we since we were European back office, we had b2b functionality. I'll give you some examples of what we did almost 20 years ago, is the b2b has to have more business rules flexibility because they're handling more spots in the chain. Everything from we were doing blind drop shipping and of 20 years ago, a third party freight billing, packing slip customization, product, private labeling on demand. We've supported that for a long time, contract pricing, multiple price levels, multi warehouse support, allocation, and eta, which we talked about earlier, which I'm a big believer is his allocation eta, if you have a true allocation eta system, not a min max are not something that you're literally saying this order will get this product, you can go a long way to improving your etn operations. multiple users on an account, SKU lookup by by your SKU, not the not the, not the b2b SKU. So you're just putting in your own catalog, you don't have to think about it, order import versa, at API's or, or, or spreadsheet import, there's a bunch of different ways to do that. There's so many different details and things that need to be done in b2b that we did 20 years ago, just because that's what it was required to get people to adopt our systems for those channels that we implemented b2b. And so that has to be more and more commoditized. And more and more thought about is all these little business rules, because what you ever see in any type of enterprise technology is there's going to be an internal resistance. So the internal resistance is going to be well, what about this? And what about that? And what about this and what about that, and you go, those little little checkboxes that the blockers have in the thing is usually because they're responsible for that internally and they don't want to lose money. Control. And losing control is not losing control. It's managing by exception instead of managing everything, just a little we implement MRP. We implement b2c we implement every every doesn't matter. What we implement is what we're looking to say we want 90% of everything, just just flow through. And then the 10% really does require human interaction. And every business is always going to have that even if it's 20. It's a Pareto, it's 8020, is spend your time on the 20%. That causes issues. Don't make 100% of orders or issues. So by having all those little checkboxes and adding your b2b flexibility, both europei external API's, whatever it happens to be, you reduce that that 100% down to 80%, down to 90%. So that you're only managing the exceptions. You can scale a business. I'll give you an idea one of them well, the companies we did, we started there were $16 million at 400 employees. They were barely making payroll. We left there were $250 million unsalted goldman sachs and and the reason that happens is the end they have the same number of employees.

Unknown Speaker : 30:07

Okay, that's interesting. That's

Unknown Speaker : 30:09

Wow,

Unknown Speaker : 30:10

that's it how often it doesn't but it does happen if you apply technologies and baby steps and, and all those little connecting dots so you can grow to as big as you possibly can imagine your market and technology was the 80% driver of they had a great brand that was dead forever Tuchman had the same issue when we went there. They had issues when we started, but the is by doing those little, those little things, you create a better operation and you can scale because you're only managing the exceptions. You're not managing. So So is it fair to say and I, you know, the way I look at it is that b2b it's your point in a lot of ways. They've been ahead and they still have very sophisticated kind of like potential none. It depends on the organization. They've got these You know, sophisticated grps and, you know, operational processes, what the problem is that's not visible to the customer. So going back to the concepts of heaviness, so it's like, I think to Tim's point is like is b2c. Really what the problem is, is that, you know, b2b in some ways is more advanced than b2c. But it's all behind the scenes. So you don't actually know what's happening. Like you don't know how they're making the order when you buy, you know, your, your, your desk or whatever, like you said, You don't know that it's going to Vietnam, and then all these places and all this craziness. So really, what the problem is, is that there's that user experience eta layer that's kind of missing from b2b, b2c has kind of started to master where, what they might be lacking some of the operational components that b2b has, for sure, that kind of a, I'm just trying to kind of sum it up that's, that's, that's a very good summary of what I'm doing. And that kind of leads probably to the to the last part of that is why the disconnect, and it's usually because of the They've siloed the teams, I'm a big flat hierarchy person so that they should all be doing, you know, you might be the expert in this subject, but something's extra. That's something. They all need to cohesively be working together to make everybody's life easier. And so he or the e commerce team is stuck under marketing and they're away from manufacturing industry. Yeah, I totally distribution people are stuck in that the CIOs are sampled for, for back office and the CTO is responsible for architecture like it's all over the place where they need to basically come down and say is, how do we make sure this all fits together like a puzzle, because it is a complex puzzle. So those rules are in the European system, and they're handling those things. If you're handling over the phone, you can codify it one way or another. If you don't have the tech, you can build a tech or by the tech. If you have it in the tech and it's stuck in there. It's on the b2b you could you need to expose that because all business problems come down to two problems only to communication and information. So if you saw the communicator problem, which b2b is nothing but a communication tool, you saw the information problem, you've got a long way of making your life easier, and making your customers life easier and your internal people lives easier. Gotcha. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I one of the reasons I love ecommerce, is because I truly believe like if you're doing it, right, it's kind of the intersection of all departments, right? So if you have a good ecommerce department, they should be talking operations and fulfillment and then talking to sales. And, and that's what I think is your point where it fails is that what happens is e commerce, you know, gets lumped under it or it gets lumped under marketing or gets lumped under one department. And then they're just, they only care about that little thing that the department cares about. And then it doesn't really become very successful because it needs operations. It needs customer success and customer service and it needs everything right like it is it's your business.

Unknown Speaker : 33:54

One One thing I

Unknown Speaker : 33:55

would say to Rich's that you you, you seem You seem like so on target and the way that you've like crystallized a lot of these things that, you know, we've been talking about and we you know, we're all challenged by and working on and you know, see the successes of, I really love your approach and boiling the way you boil it down. Do you have a series of ebooks or anything? No, but you know what, I should write a book. I really think and I don't say should a you've got you've got it like compartmentalised in a really good way and you've got the credit and that history, right? All these decades that you've seen it all. I really, really like you know, the way you put a lot of this information out to our listeners, they're gonna appreciate it, you should do more of it. That's what I got very lucky, is I start I dropped out of college and went to the software house management software company and 18 and a half years old, so I've never done anything different. So I've been focused on you know, we Mikado Billions of dollars in business I grew up in it. I didn't know any different. And I having access to the data pre internet, like, where you can write the database queries before there was even really, I think, Oracle version two. But the is it just gives you a different perspective because as that data is funneling through, it gave me a wide lens of how do i a control the data? Because as you get more and more data, the more and more opportunity you have, that's how I built the application businesses, but it was really just, you know, whatever higher power in the universe that you believe that, basically, I was going to med schools. Well, my plan was, is they literally took me out of that and said here is this thing and self learned self taught, self exposed and it was just luck. And it came down to common sense. And asking a question, why, and then how. So every time it's like, well work this way. And I go, Well, why does that doesn't make any sense. We can do it. There's a metal in different ways if what do you think it is? And so I've had hundreds, if not thousands of people's give me their input on how they saw the problem, what that problem was, and then I'd have to boil that down and break it down to a component so that I could have a developer work on it as well. So bridging the technology, bridging the business, bridging the user and bridging the data, all those things came together. And and I started at such a young age that it helped crystallize all that stuff over decades.

Unknown Speaker : 36:26

Wow. Yeah, that's, that's pretty impressive.

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And, and speaking of all that knowledge,

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you know, I want to just get to admit, you know, we're actually getting through everything which I'm impressed that we were able to get through it. That's a testament here you're concise, but But yeah, I guess all answers is going back to kind of the the b2b complexity. Um, for a lot of people, I think in b2b, they they overcomplicate it, and then I see two problems. I think sometimes they either overcome It or they assume it's too similar to B to C, because there are differences, right. And we, you talked in the RP side, you talked about that with like, multi company accounts. Corporate accounts is like one of the most common things in b2b e commerce that most people aren't using, like most companies we talked to, you aren't properly using corporate accounts for b2b commerce. So I'm just curious to hear what you think some of the key things specific to b2b that you would do if you were like, you know, let's just want to keep it a little bit simpler. And let's pretend they don't have your amazing technology. And it let's just say they had to build just kind of more basic b2b site with, you know, 10,000 skews something kind of in the middle of the road, kind of there with a b2b experience. What are some of the features that are different, not just buy an add to cart and you get your list price because that we all know that? Probably not. It cannot be list price. Well, that's the purest, what I would do is the customer with two things. I would do if I was on the b2b to make them feel as part of the process. First, it all goes back to culture is you have to have C level buy in and understand that has to work, like culture is a big differentiator for success and all these aspects. So, get the cultural stuff down, get the get the up open honesty in the team and then move forward. That's the first thing like you're going to make hard decisions. And hard decisions require honesty. The first thing I would do on the b2b stuff is I would focus on the corporate accounts, I would make that their ship twos are integrated automatically their multi ship two thing, I would make sure that their pricing because pricing could be complexity, geolocator pricing, facility pricing, contract pricing time to pricing for this month, it's it's a, you know, pain that it's $50 off whatever it happens to be, I would make sure that you're pricing into your b2b is 100% of the time the pricing that you're going to give that to your customer, because if you do show a list price becomes, oh yeah, you don't have to you don't have to sell me on that I'm but I totally. So pricing. Pricing is number one. So if you're communicating and then then the final part of that would be letting the customer edit their own ship dues and get them to not buy anything. They own that data a little bit, right, yeah. And make sure that they can put in their own SKU, so that their own SKU plus their own pricing makes them feel like they're part of the process because they're not having to look it up. They're not having to do any goofy thing they can put in their their part number might be VA b 1234. And your internal SKU is oh three dash 2630 because you got different systems. Go ahead and make sure that you do for your b2b customer, what you want done for you. So it's a simple mantra, you know, it goes back to Biblical things, do to others that you would do unto yourself. So make sure that your execution is what you would want them to do for you. So if you put yourself in their shoes, go But I would really like that to work that way. Do it without excuse without delay and without nonsense. That's what you have to do. And I think that goes a long way to changing the mindset, culturally operation with execution. I totally agree with that. But one of the things that I think is sometimes a hindrance to this is is partly the headless the lack of headless because if you have to integrate er p prep, like, one, one problem we see is if you have two pricing, let's say you have pricing in your er P, and then your pricing in the econ platform. The econ platform is going to display the pricing, right. So there's a few ways you can do this. We've actually had it automatically display the ER p pricing using API's. So it just automatically pulls in. That's the way but the problem is some people's er keys are so old. And the API's are so bad. They can't do a real time lookup on their API on their price API. So other than choleraesuis our technology is pricing doesn't change that often. So what you have to do Then is build an extract import and then extract import it into a public cloud database and extract the data you could do that like literally that project sounds like complex to everybody that's go wow our pricing stuff up so slow we can't do that you don't have to real time call the European you build a gateway and that project that you just said there as measured in days or hours to be honest with you so you can extract data 100 different ways it's Yeah, you can schedule that and you can build that price engine in a shorter time than then upgrading then then upgrading the RP right because I

Unknown Speaker : 41:36

don't upgrade the European tour you really need to

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as a European guy.

Unknown Speaker : 41:43

It's a basically is a typical reference about Do unto others but it's so so clear and so direct. Again, I just give you a lot of kudos for this because again, it's there is something about how people overcomplicate or the challenges that are Real that they get so mired in and confused and, and I love how you just cut right to the chase I can you know, I can hear the angels singing in the background. Yeah, I actually live next door I live on the ocean here and next door is the biggest church in our area. So that's why Kobe Bryant got married there. Let's so that's how crazy doesn't I live right? Well, I can I can hear the praying on Sunday literally. Wow. I love the honesty though i love i think that that's what we need more of that in technology and in the work that we're doing is I think, I think people part especially I think what's happening in b2b you know, just to digress a little bit. It's just, I think a lot of these, you know, companies are kind of, you know, they don't want to admit it, but they're scared because Amazon's coming and taking all their business and they don't know what to do and I think we need that's what that's why we started this podcast like we're just trying to get you the honest, unbiased, like, you know, Charles does certain services but I'm not trying to sell anyone you know, aren't platform's are just trying to give them the honest answers the

Unknown Speaker : 43:03

hard truths that you're

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setting the hard truth.

Unknown Speaker : 43:09

Right, the hard truth. Yeah. It always goes down to culture though, right? So it's important to break those silos down and get management and ownership to go play should just work that way. Right? So I think that's what's set my whole career apart from day one. And early on. I was like, I wanted to get fired. I wanted to go back to college. I didn't want to be working 15 hours a day and having all this responsibility everything else like that. So I kept on challenging the narrative. Why shouldn't work that way? Isn't that just common sense like it should just be automatic. On the surface we have all this computing power, which I thought it was amazing back then. Which the iPhone has a 10,000 times export power today. So the ability to do it today is easier than when I started 25 years ago. So the it there is no excuse There is no, like pricing, whatever it happens to be, there is no excuse not to do it today, not to do baby steps. You don't have to go crazy and implement SAP. You don't have to go crazy and do whatever. But you can take a baby step and just baby step along the way. And that's all it takes is an incremental improvement every day you're doing something different. I agree with you. I think that that's a cultural issue. I think that part of what we also want to achieve with this podcast is change the culture in an e commerce and especially b2b e commerce because we think it's there needs to be that cultural shift, because it's, like you said, it's the ability is there. It's a cultural issue. I think, tech people tend to overtake and complicate things. Some people tend to oversimplify it. Some people tend to just be drama and they're just negative and pessimistic by nature. My nature is very positive. I think the world is better now than it was 20 years ago. I think it's going to be better 20 years from now, for my raincoats and everything else like that, then it is today. And it's interesting when we talk about Amazon and how they're think Amazon has some glaring weaknesses that we won't go into now, but they don't even know they have them. And the pendulum of life is always swinging. So you have to make sure that you're always thinking ahead on those little things, culturally, thinking about those little things ahead, business wise, and how as things become componentized, and easier and easier and easier, it's easier to stitch together competitors. I'll give you an idea. I believe one of her batteries can be the biggest battery company in the United States in the next five years. We don't need we because we have a different mindset. We're not taking 20 years to build out supply chains. We're not taking doing anything. We're just taking smart strategies and smart things and connecting it all together in real time at scale. And that is going that can be done in so many different industries and be done for the brands themselves. We have a slide in our deck says you can be the own marketplace for your own products, so that you can control that thing. If you farm that out to Amazon or you farm that out to thing, you lose that experience of the brand equity that you've built. So by by taking a different mindset going this is we want to put ourselves out there, and we want to take these little baby steps. That's all it takes to start a company. And that's all it takes to build a b2b site. All it takes is just the guts to move forward and the self honesty to to get to the devil in the details. Yeah, no, that's that's very true. Well, I know I know, Tim, you got you got we both got stops coming up. So that's a good idea, right? Yeah. No, I was great. Yeah, absolutely. Perfect. Yeah, the rich killer sermon from the church. Yeah, I love this stuff. And I think yeah, this is amazing. I think. I think it's important to have that optimistic positive view instead of all we're all gonna, you know, work for Amazon one day, like you said, a lot of these companies have weaknesses and, and a lot of times, the bigger They get the more weaknesses they have because the backlash is coming and people are believing in some I'm a big believer in local sustainability local economies creating value add for your fellow man in your own community I'm very altruistic and i and i think that Amazon's predatory tactics and just being ah doing what they're doing is going to hurt their brown it already has with they decided what's essential goods, they prime all of a sudden didn't work anymore even though you pay for it right it does all of a sudden, no longer today delivery during the supply chain resiliency break down their supply chain didn't break down. The just, it's just important to to though that people like people, and when they like people, they like their neighbors and they like their neighbors they like the local store they buy from and by enabling that from the b2b guys to the retailers at scale and as well as taking that as a mantra going from To create a better America, a better city it all starts with just your little your little Nexus. And that's my my final survey.

Unknown Speaker : 48:07

Your publishers

Unknown Speaker : 48:09

ready your books I want. You help me ghostwriter? Yeah, so we kind of we kind of got into that last thought on what is that? What is this coming decade for b2b e commerce and I think this is the timing of this is great 2020 right I think 2010 to 2020 was kind of like the b2c you know, revolution and now you saw with COVID it's now it's into like a 30 40% Online b2c, but I think b2b we're kind of in that we're in an earlier stage of that evolution. So I'm just kind of curious, what do you see is I see things getting easier and I always believe in the power of Moore's law as everybody knows computing power. I also have a I have some laws of myself Kepler's laws is the data keeps getting available, so that whatever it happens to be written, Time, everything else like that. I think the next interface will not be web, it will be voice that you'll go, I need XYZ to the thing and the phone will automatically take care of all of the interfaces that we're talking about. Cut the order at the right price, send the driver with delivery and everything else like that. And we're building our entire technology stacks from from internal search technologies into total voice technology. We're building our entire stack to see that long term vision that everything will just be Hey, I just like Star Trek. Star Trek is so far ahead. Your computer I named it as a boon. That's all done for you. Right? That is we are aware we had AI allows that for conversational, all the little glue technologies are coming into place that our grandkids might not even need a web browser because they can just say it'll happen. Yeah, it's funny because that might be the most advanced answer referred yet. I think. I think me and Tim are like everybody talks about nonsense, and almost big picture fluffy thing yet. Gotta get Dirty you've got to do the hard work and that's that's that's that's no yeah that's awesome so there you heard it everyone built build the infrastructure so that one day when you will need it yeah bill but but that when people ask for your thing you come up with I think Gary Vee talks about that it's like when someone asked for soap or whatever, you know you want to be the one that's that comes up right on Alexa it'll be smarter than it'll know what soap you like based on your skin type and your and your age. Like it'll be so smart that it'll just go Wow, that was easy. I got the soap does for me because this soap dries my skin and this soap doesn't. So when you're thinking about the devil in the details at scale and not generic, it will allow you to be ahead of the game. Wow. Well, I think everyone's mind is blown right now. So

Unknown Speaker : 50:52

So

Unknown Speaker : 50:53

call us, Duff. We'll help you.

Unknown Speaker : 50:56

Well, thank you so much. This is awesome. So For everyone that wants to get in touch with you, I believe it's one 800 battery or just email me I'm on LinkedIn. I actually prefer business to this because contacts on LinkedIn, I love LinkedIn as a platform. I know some people don't I do I like it as my business platform. It integrates into my CRM. So like that that makes it easier on me. But it's it's Richard at one 800 battery calm and with no hyphens just Richard one 800 battery calm. And again, LinkedIn. It's Richard Keller, and you can even LinkedIn search, man, just add me I'm an open book I do men do angel investing also do mentoring of startups. Well, I believe I believe my localization is also about giving back is is saying, Hey, here's my experience. And if I had somebody in my life that had my experience, 25 years ago, I would be, I would have dodged a lot of bullets that I that I took him to the shoulder so that they just I'm an open book. It's a very simple thing.

Unknown Speaker : 51:59

And then That's awesome.

Unknown Speaker : 52:00

Reach out and I don't care if you're a college student that has an idea or if you're the CEO of Tesla. I don't find Tesla's he needs to call me. Ilan. This is this podcast. I want my call and listen to this podcast. I think we'll get some more. Yes, yes. Yes.

Unknown Speaker : 52:22

Thank you once again, and I'm gonna have to

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sign off

Unknown Speaker : 52:25

me up right now. But it has been such a pleasure. We got to get you on again. Yeah. This is awesome. Richard. I'm gonna I'm gonna send you an email and we'll be in touch. Great. Thanks, guys.