Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18

Happy Tuesday, everybody, I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist with BWG Connect, and we are a network and knowledge-sharing group, we stay on top of the latest trends and challenges whatever shaping the digital landscape, we want to know and talk about it. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand the digital space. And we'll also be doing at least 100 in-person small-format dinners across the US this year. So if you happen to live in a tier one city in the US feel free to send us an email, we'd love to send you an invite to these dinners which are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion on a certain digital topic. And it's always a fantastic time, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands that's how we stay on top of the latest trends, but love to have a conversation with you. So feel free to drop me a line at tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to learn about. And it's also where we gain our resident experts such as the panelists who are with us today. Anybody that we asked to teach the collective community has come highly recommended from multiple brands within the network. So if you ever need any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best and we'd love to provide that information to you. Also note if you have any hiring needs, we do partner with a talent agency Hawkeye Search formerly BWG Talent that we can put you in contact with as well. A few housekeeping items. First and foremost, we want this to be fun, educational, conversational, put those questions, comments into the chat or the q&a. And we will be sure to get to them as we move along and won't be moving fast. So today is a 30-minute segment. So we will end at that 30-minute mark. So with that, let's rock and roll and start to talk about B2B commerce evolution, how to align data insights with open SaaS commerce, the teams at BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Nisum has an awesome partners and friends of the BWG network. So I'm gonna kick it over to our panelists. If you need to introduce yourself, that would be lovely. And then we can dive right in. Thank you all, and let's start with Paul.

Paul Dabrowski 2:17

Thank you, I appreciate that. So I'm Paul Dabrowski. I am the Senior B2B Channel Manager at BigCommerce. And previously, for the past 10 years, I have built B2B eCommerce and tech companies that have spurred essentially, globally and digital transformations for predominantly a $12 billion enterprise Atlas Copco through a marketplace initiative that I just merged with them serving $3 billion worth of their segment. And just recently joined actually BigCommerce in the past. Like two months now. So it's been great. Fresh member of the B2B team, I work alongside Lance Owide, who's our B2B General Manager, and also then work with the product teams, and also sales marketing enablement. So across the organization primarily for our tech agencies, and our tech partners, serving our enterprise mid-market merchants in the B2B space. So I appreciate you guys having us today.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 3:33

Thank you so much. Martin.

Martin Lewit 3:36

Good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining. My name is Martin Lewit, I am the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Nisum. And for about 6 years years, I've also been with Nisum. So it's been a long journey for me, I did spend not all those 10 years in the same role. So I've moved quite around, has been quite a bit of time in Latin America as well. And now didn't cover development for the past couple of years. Part of which is during our China partnerships, and that's how we got to meet. We're good friends BigCommerce and Feedonomics. And resume as an IT consulting partner, designed some builds digital commerce platforms. I gotta say it's been a fun ride for last 10 years in the industry that's ever changing and ever evolving on never at all. So happy to share with everybody.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 4:25

Excellent. Thank you so much. Patrick.

Patrick Hentschel 4:27

Thank you. Yeah, my name is Patrick Hentschel. I'm VP of Business Development for Feedonomics. And if anybody listening in, doesn't know much about Feedonomics, we were actually acquired by BigCommerce two years ago at the end of 2021, as part of BigCommerce's omni channel strategy, how to win in the omni-channel landscape. And we'll talk more about that a little bit later as it relates to b2b specifically. But my team now is really focused on taking the technology that we've built largely to serve those kind of omni-channel opportunities and extending it into other areas. And so we've seen that there are a number of situations where B2B merchants are struggling with managing data, data quality data variability, and a number of different contexts. And we think Feedonomics has the piping, potentially the solution to help there and consult on your technology stack. So I'm super happy to be part of this conversation. And thank you all for making the time.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 5:24

Awesome. Thank you so much. Reminder, question comments, put them into the chat or the Q&A, and we will get to them as we move along. So I'm going to start with Martin, because you always have a wealth of information, and especially about trends. So what kind of trends are you seeing in the B2B market when it comes to digital eCommerce?

Martin Lewit 5:43

Oh, thanks for the question. It's interest right now in the b2b space, or C. And we've been seeing this for a while. It's a big, big shift, right? A big shift. So we're more online or more digital commerce and a big shift towards enhanced digital experiences. So what companies are doing, were embracing the eCommerce platforms, not just for the transactional piece of what you can achieve. But as an end to end solution. There is a growing demand for personal experiences for streamline procurement processes, especially for a driven analytics and where data can take us. And this is navigate district. And what we see is a convergence of technology and customer centricity shaping our b2b and eCommerce forward. Right. So I think that's important and so it meets all these trends is what is the current situation that we're we're facing and that's an accelerated transition for more online or eCommerce it to me, beyond our mainstream or traditional b2b eCommerce growth in eCommerce or Asia is, has been outpacing our normal commerce not as fast outpacing our offline commerce. And on the spine is what we see some manufacturers and b2b industries facing charges, Indonesia already, right. So I'm not even someone leaving behind. And what we need to figure out is like, how do we get on a major train that will continue right, so the end to end, our tailor our b2b experiences, your customer centricity, your personalization that allows you to move those experiences forward and embracing an escape scalable solution is something flexible, that allows those b2b business models right.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 7:32

Awesome. Paul you wanna add anything?

Paul Dabrowski 7:34

Yeah, absolutely. So just to add on to that, you know, at a macro level, we're seeing that PDT online sales account for 70% of all b2b sales today, versus offline. And where we're going from now to 2030, it's expected to outpace offline traditional sales channels over the next, you know, 510 years. So, you know, by 2030, it's expected that we see b2b online sales at 39% of that pie. And that's pretty critical, you know, speaking to the ones that have to go on lock budget, you know, in these kind of climates, economic conditions. You know, you want to be sure you're betting on the right horse right in the race. And so online b2b sales are projected to grow at 20% CAGR versus the stagnant, you know, offline b2b sales trailing essentially at 2.5%. Then, you know, online, b2c sales is advancing too, not too far behind at 12% CAGR. But offline, b2b, b2c sales are kind of inching along at 1.5% Then we have this like shift in buyer preferences. And, to be honest, this is already happening. Before you know the pandemic, for the pandemic definitely accelerated the shift towards digital. So more b2b buyers are utilizing online platforms, at every stage of the buying journey. For instance, identifying new suppliers 87%, up from 78% pre pandemic, placing orders 79%, up from 70% Three to pandemic reordering. 77% up from 72% evaluating new suppliers 74% up from 60%. So businesses adapt, they need to validate and communicate the ROI of the eCommerce investments. that's paramount, you know, cost opportunity, right? Not all growth is the same guys. And you got to know that because, you know, if I speak pandemic first I can't there are a lot of companies that grew but didn't do it profitably. And for instance, you know, shipping margins got out of control for some companies, and they got themselves into trouble, you know, but anyways, I digress. The things that challenge internally, these companies they gotta overcome and unlock that budget for digital investments. And legacy tech right now is what we see As a major growth blocker. And there are three main challenges that we see businesses face before migrating to big commerce. And that those are operational inefficiencies, website performance issues and poor customer experience. So, essentially, what we're looking at overcome and achieve, you know, that strategic growth businesses, you know, have to look at that free cloud monolithic system, those dated ERPs, that maybe are end to life that are not being supported the CRMs that are disconnected the PIMS, you know, that aren't in place today, that traditional SaaS, that where they did this custom bolt-on solution, they want to combat that, because essentially, it's contributing to 30% of operational losses. That's what we see. And when they do end up sunsetting, one piece of legacy tech right now, just one, they gain about in cost savings, 20%. You know, in cost savings, which ended up potentially propelling what, in most cases, ends up paying for your eCommerce project moving forward. So again, just speaking to those people on our budget, you want to then look at the elevating the customer experience, because this is where the growth happens. And so there's a cost savings element on legacy tech sunsetting, one piece, but then on combating that customer experience, creating, you know, great customer experience to go unlock that revenue gain. And that's where the the two big pieces are that we see. So I would say that adding, like to the points, you know, that Martin said open SaaS commerce is not just a trend, it's becoming a standard, the flexibility it offers and integrating with various systems and the scalability to grow with business needs are paramount. We're seeing businesses leverage open SaaS to create more personalized and efficient customer journeys, which is crucial in today's highly competitive market. So the ability to quickly adapt to market changes, and customer preferences is a key advantage of open SaaS platforms. At BigCommerce, we serve over 60,000 merchants and 120 countries 9000 of which are enterprise clients to the tune of $100 billion-plus merchant sales, the complexities that these organizations face and you might as well is on the product data, you know, going from ERP to PIM to, you know, extrapolating that out, you know, into these other feeds, like the eCommerce or, you know, marketplaces and beyond, at scale is too difficult for companies to manage. And so our partners, and our colleagues at Feedonomics are they're dealing with that day in and day out. And doing that the best I think, in the industry. So in that in the b2b space, for this perspective, it is table stakes, because if product data is wrong, then that's your buyers not transacting, they're just not able to make that purchase, because ultimately, they could lose their job if they do purchase the wrong thing. So I turn it over to Patrick, you know, to speak on how he's saying this.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 13:10

I'm sorry, Patrick, it definitely a friendly reminder, questions, comments put into the chat, the q&a. Thank you.

Patrick Hentschel 13:16

Yeah, thanks, Paul. You've covered a lot of I think, really important ground there. Some really great insights. I think the key, there are a few areas I want to kind of double click on but a framework that we use, sometimes phenomics is systems of record and systems of growth, thinking about like ERPs, pens, bonuses, all the stuff that's kind of moving the data around behind the scenes, back office, critical systems, right. And then you've got these other platforms out there. marketplaces, advertising channels, like Google Shopping, email, messaging platforms, dynamic remarketing, all of the things that are designed to drive more sales, often in a DTC context, granted, for sure, you've got the platform like a big commerce sitting somewhere in the middle there. And they're kind of a system of record, and a system of growth, right, in some very real sense. And so that's why a lot revolves around this type of system. And so when you think about your feed and omics consent, potentially as a solution, we can help. We can help B2B merchants work through some of the struggles associated with getting messy variable data into whatever centralized system of record they care about. Right? So if you're on a PIM, if you're on big commerce, let's say any real any system where you're getting data from different vendors, drop shippers, manufacturers, all of that variability is a headache, and some of them are sending Excel files, some of them are sending XML files. The key there is to be able to streamline and organize and create clear data pathways that remove the headache from from your data management teams. Right. And so that's that's one area that we could look at all devising systems of record. And I think, you know, going back to the original question, what are some of the trends that we're seeing, I think that there's that b2b businesses are taking the more technology first lens to how they can clean and optimize all of those more upstream processes. I think the only other thing I'll add, when you think about what happens sort of downstream from the platform, is you can surface your data across all these other systems as well. And again, these are typically maybe thought of as more b2c surfaces here, your most b2b merchants aren't thinking about how to convert on Google Shopping, that's not really the primary consideration, right? The different sort of sales workflows in place there. However, I will say, and I was just talking to somebody at a conference recently about this, you have to look at where your customers are going to find you. And so if a potential new buyer is going to consult Google, when they're thinking about how to identify a new b2b distributor for whatever kind of product segment, they care about janitorial supplies, electronic component parts, whatever the case may be, you can't necessarily just think of that exclusively as a b2c channel. Because they're still going to go to Google and you know, look for a particular component part or look for a supplier that can help them with X, Y, or Z. Wouldn't it be beneficial to have an ad there, like a product listing ad, whether they buy it or not, or whether or not that drives direct conversion, they click on it, they find you that way. And then maybe they become the best customer you've ever had over the next 510 years buying wholesale from you. So I think the key and the last thing, I'll just leave it for this point of the conversation is just, I'm seeing more and more businesses think creatively, and certainly in an ominous we're trying to spur that kind of creativity, how do you leverage all of these different channels that are out there now in the space to actually drive growth for your particular business?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 16:49

That's so awesome. All of it. So exciting. I started my career in b2b eCommerce 10 years ago, and none of this was talked about it was like, we knew we needed to do something for that person who is a consumer at the end of the day, and wants to shop b2b like they do when they're direct to consumer and looking for their own personal items on a website. So great, cool. Questions, comments, put into the chat q&a, and we will get to them when I pop over to Paul again. So Paul, we were talking about the open SAS approach. Can you elaborate on that, and how that empowers a business to innovate and adapt quickly, and how this positions them for success in today's dynamic market?

Paul Dabrowski 17:32

It's a great question. And I'm excited to share how our open-source approach is specifically tailored for today's evolving b2b landscape. It's all about providing agile and scalable eCommerce solutions that meet the unique demands of businesses. So to put it into perspective, let's look at actually a transformation of one of our clients. mkm building supplies to the UK is fastest growing builders to merchant. And the largest now was actually founded by a 50 year old in 1995. He thought he'd only have one shop, I built the business on a single principle that product they sold was their service. And mkm, though faced a considerable challenge with their outdated online platform. This inaccuracy was not only a technical issue, it was a significant business problem, their online presence only accounted for a limited amount of their business revenue. And it didn't reflect their in-store service quality. So in the digital age, where the market is rapidly shifting towards younger demographics, M cam needed to modernize their approach. And they had to cater to an expectation economy, where consumers, particularly millennials, and Gen Z demand more from every purchase decision. To put it into perspective, if you were to walk in before, you know, they migrated to Bigcommerce, to one of their their stores. They historically, were telling customers, their core customers not to use the online platform, you know, to go directly to them. Maybe this resonates with somebody as well. But essentially, there was a huge discrepancy. And so through NPS scoring, they found out that they were hard to do business with and that in the next five years, 45% of their core business was retiring. And so they were chained. If you hear them ever speak about it, they felt shackled to this end of life legacy platform that was seven, nine years old at that point, and couldn't now manage you know the business at scale. So our open SAS solution enabled will be even before the I mean Again, just on that expectation, they had this disconnect, where in store that is excellent customer service, right? And online, they didn't, the core customers never even use them. So barplot are right, the open SAS solution enabled mkm to address these challenges and can without an internal development team, no Dev Team, you guys partnered with system integrators, you know, just like Nissan here, and tech providers just like us, you know, big commerce, repeat and omics. And we implemented a headless you know, architecture that allowed for seamless integration into their systems. This approach brought several advantages API first, SAS commerce, right. This enabled low overhead, seamless system integration, the headless front end design through pure storefront in this case, that provided flexibility, significantly improving the customer experience, and personalized search and merchandising, you know, this enhanced content management, lifting restrictions and maximizing revenue, and advertising feeds like feed anomic, with localized inventory to maximize the return on adspend.

Patrick Hentschel 21:08

I'd actually love to jump in there, Paul. And just add a quick point, I think MCAT is a great example, is putting them on Google Shopping, and specifically to when Paul just said local inventory ads. So we're actually coalescing, inventory counts from various POS is from their brick-and-mortar locations. And we're tying them all together. And then we're sending them to Google and saying, here's the on hand inventory that exists at every end cam location. And so when somebody then comes online, and they search for a particular component part, whatever the case may be, they can actually see, oh, this location has x number in stock, I'm going to buy it, and then I'm going to pick it up in store and they get their needs met system, right, so you can either look at it as like the hub system itself, or you can look at the piping that connects your different systems, especially if you're talking about open SaaS, often you're gonna have multiple solutions in play. That's the beauty of open SaaS is that you're not forced to do everything inside of a constrained framework, right? Rather, it liberalizes access to have all these different systems, you still have to solve the problem of how you get these systems to talk to each other. So alluding to just a quick example from before, if you have a number of different drop shippers, manufacturers, vendors, whatever you want to call them upstream, how do you get that information into whatever your system of record is? And how do you optimize it along the way, because what we've seen is that a lot of these systems, while they're maybe good at hosting data, they're not really good at managing all of the different incoming inputs and streamlining them into a kind of standardized format. So what omics is typically doing for merchants in this regard, is we're taking somebody who's currently emailing an Excel file every week, and helping them get to a point where they're publishing a feed, and inventory is updated, let's say on, you know, a daily cadence as an example, and then streamlining that for all the data management teams. So I think that's, that's just, you know, those are few examples, I think the key is creating the core systems and the connectivity systems to make sure that all of the data is flowing in the way he wanted to.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 26:34

Very cool. Awesome. So, Martin, you're gonna take us home, you're going to tie this all together. Like how does Nisum and what you do bring everything that we talked about and tie together for your B2B merchant?

Martin Lewit 26:46

You know, I was hearing Patrick Ryan's like, what you want to do, it's like, it sounds simple, right? You know, you need to be online. It sounds very simple, like, Okay, that's a train we know, for a few years. It sounds very simple. And we need to get there, right? And then you start looking at it. And it's like, all these different things that are coming your way. Right? So what do you do what brings it all together? He's like, putting the best of both worlds approach to get it right. The benefits of an open-source platform, headless platform, managing all your data, but then marching down with a consultant that you know, can really understand what's driving that, that eCommerce technology right? Listen, we've been over a quarter century proficiently beside them building digital commerce platforms, both b2b and b2c at the same time, it's less relevant. We've done it globally. You know, we have a comprehensive number of digital overhauls for multiple customers in the banking industry, in the retail industry, in the manufacturing industry, and so on, right? So you want to match those, those two capabilities. Because when you want to create those end-to-end solutions, you want to leverage the platform and create successful and seamless implementation. Right. So in summary, what you want to do is tackle the specific complexities of the b2b eCommerce, which has its own complexity, and find a way to make things run efficient, immediately. And again, back to my point from earlier, just because that's a direct-to-consumer conversion, so to speak. That could be your best B2B customer in the future, who's the person that needs that part? In a particular pinch? Right? They needed to service a particular client. It's I don't know about you guys, but I'm not like looking at my own plumbing, joiners or anything like that, right?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 22:13

I don't even know what's on the search bar.

Patrick Hentschel 22:16

Exactly right. So the person who's doing the searching is the person that's ultimately going to end up doing the buying on an ongoing go forward basis later. So it's important that you find them where they are, and that you're using all the surfaces at your disposal to do so. And I'd love you know, Martin, I'd love to hear your perspective on that also, because.

Martin Lewit 22:32

Yeah, and I think, you know, obviously, right, the b2c b2b, b2c, all of them tend to converge when you go on my right, everybody gets to learn from each other. But I think the interesting part of that point is, you know, we're talking about trends differently. We're talking about how this is going this way. And it's and this is the reason why when you can improve your customer experience, when you can improve your customer satisfaction, you can do it at a scale and when you can expand, you know, the benefits without naming them, you are transparent, right? I think that's what's driving the strain for and, and that merge that Patrick was saying between what needs to be tends to merge, right? I said b2b industry, we take advantage of a long road of eCommerce, those that are why we always say, you know, are ahead with a lot of walls start out with a lot of learnings that we came to the year.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 23:32

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. Questions, comments put into the chat. I'm going to move on to Patrick. And we're going to talk about data because I myself went through this and I know a lot of b2b merchants struggle with data quality, and cleanliness, and conductivity and how to get it across the system. So what are those solutions that resonate through feed and unexpected help with b2b merchant?

Patrick Hentschel 23:59

Yeah, absolutely. There are different types of products that one can kind of explore and looked at, I think in the b2b context, often, pins are considered and they're an important part of the technology stack or product information management solution for housing kind of all of your data in one central place. And then once you have it there, you the idea is that you can kind of have more direct control over the listings, and you can kind of give visibility and an access to those listings from other members of your company, for example. And so it's sort of democratizing access to the data within your organization. I think there's a lot of value to having a solution like that. I don't think that everybody needs a Pim. Frankly, I think there are plenty of merchants that can get by with very successfully and kind of leaner manner with just say, just Bigcommerce let's say as an example, because BigCommerce offers a lot of the same type of functionality that you might find from a pen. So you want to look for solutions. When you think about your system of record, you want to look for solutions that have good technology levers for handling the data within the platform. And I think that's critical. There's another piece, which is, what do you use to get data into that system and out of that scalable platform and do it in an agile manner that allows you to deliver value first and faster. I think that I was on time.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 28:31

That is awesome. Well, you guys, I put in your contact information because we definitely encourage follow up conversations with everybody. Today, Paul, Martin, Patrick, other teams from BigCommerce, Feedonomics, Nisum, there's a lot to unpack here. So definitely take down the contact information, reach out and have a call, it will definitely be worth it. And we'd love to have a call with you. That's how we get the contents for our future events. So feel free to drop me a line at tiffany@bwgconnect.com. So with that we are at time already I knew was gonna move fast and it's in. So happy to see y'all have a lovely week going into the weekend and see you on another event soon. Take care.