This week on the podcast, Andy & Brian talk through the pitfalls and best practices when hiring a system integrator.

They share some of the red flags that SIs say they look out for when working with a client (Biggest?  Inadequate buy-in from senior management).

As well as red flags from practitioners (Biggest? Inadequate experience working with B2B companies.

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Brian Beck: Welcome to the Friday 15 with Master B2B. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Mr. Andy Hoar, my partner in the Master B2B community. And we’re rocking out this Friday. Getting to the end of summer here, Andy. Labor Day is coming up. Exciting times. Lots still going on in the world of B2B e-commerce. Welcome to Friday.

Andy Hoar: Yeah, apparently there was a sale on blue shirts because we’re both wearing them today.

Brian: Well, we tend to do this all the time. Even in our image here in our Friday 15 logo banner, we’re wearing the same shirt, it looks like. So, yes, we think alike. No, we don’t. Not all the time. We look alike. No, we don’t. That’s okay. Well, Andy, I know you follow the news, as do I, and the FTC has been pretty busy. In our breaking news, what the heck is this? FTC bans fake online reviews. Inflated social media influence. The rule takes effect in October. So, Andy, we are going to get rid of all fake reviews. The FTC is going to enforce this globally. Apparently, they’re opening offices in Bangladesh, China, and all these other places. I don’t know, man. What do you think about this? What’s this all about?

Andy: You know, as soon as you pass a law or establish a rule, it automatically works. So we’ll look forward to this working as well. But on a serious note, I think it’s interesting that there really are four conditions they said in these articles about what the FTC is doing here. And one is that they’re going after the demand side of the equation, not the supply side. So people are going to be generating these reviews, but they’re going after companies that actually post these reviews and knowingly post them and don’t take them down. So we’ll see how that develops, but here’s some of the conditions. One is you can’t knowingly buy fake reviews or use AI-generated reviews claiming to be real. That’s going to be a big problem. This is a big one too. Company insiders must identify themselves. We know there’s an epidemic of company people who promote their own products and use their personal accounts or whatever – now that’s going to fall into the net if you get caught doing that that could be a big big problem. Companies cannot claim their own websites as independent references. There are companies that do that – divisions or sister companies – you know so they won’t be able to do that anymore. But this is my favorite: They can no longer threaten negative reviewers. So apparently if someone posts a negative review, you can factually disagree with them. But if you say, if you don’t take this down, then we’re going to fill in the blank. Apparently you can’t do that anymore. So we’ll see what happens.

Brian: Or Jersey style, break your kneecaps. I don’t know, man. That’s my home state. New Jersey. Gotta love it. This is fascinating. So they’re going to use AI to track this. So what do we got? ChatFTC coming soon? Is this a little AI action from the federal government?

Andy: Well, you and I both know that this all comes down to enforcement and you can’t enforce this. So good luck. But it will, you know, a few demonstration cases here and there, a few big lawsuits, a few big fines, and it’ll scare some companies into doing something. But by and large, this is impossible to police.

Brian: Well, I mean, just look at Amazon. It’s a huge problem on Amazon with all these people gaming the review systems. A lot of companies coming from abroad or sellers coming from abroad just gaming the system. Amazon itself, which is one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in terms of using things like AI to manage this, and they have a lot of people focused on this as well, trying to eliminate this problem. Even then, it’s hard for them to enforce it. So anyway, this is great. Maybe this will give some more kind of fodder and ammunition to companies like Amazon to clean it up. But man, this is a big problem. And I appreciate the FCC doing this, but it’s going to be quite a bit on the enforcement side. I agree. All right, well, let’s get to our topic, because it’s a really rich one. Today, we’re talking about: What is the best way to search for an implementation partner when rolling out a B2B e-commerce platform? Andy, I have lived this myself. This is a big deal and a challenge for practitioners to find the right partner, because frankly, the partner is so important in this process. But frame it up a little bit for us. Who’s involved in this process here?

Andy: Well, it takes two to tango, right? So there are two parties involved here. There’s the practitioner, which is usually a manufacturer or distributor who needs to select a systems integrator to implement a platform. And there’s also the systems integrator who actually has to do the work. And we tend to focus on one or the other. And so for purposes of this discussion today, we wanted to talk to both sides and kind of like in the spirit of the husband and wife and each side’s got an opinion on the other we thought let’s see what they have to say about this. I was thinking through this myself as I was putting the slide deck together – I thought, “Who do I know who would be able to kind of speak to both issues and represent sort of how this world works?” And then it hit me. I do know somebody like this.

Brian: Who is it, Andy?

Andy: His name is Brian Beck. The good Brian and the bad Brian. Come on.

Brian: Which one’s good? Which one’s bad?

Andy: Brian, the practitioner who worked at HarborFreight Tools and PacSun, where you’ve had some of these experiences selecting an SI. And of course you’ve also gone over to the other side where you’ve been the SI and for fun and for people on the podcast, who can’t see this, we flipped Brian and put devil horns on his head there to illustrate the SI in him. No, we mean that as a joke, obviously, but I wanted to have you be the emperor from Star Wars and have you go to the dark. That would have been funny. Your face. So anyway, I struggled with that. And my graphic skills are somewhat limited. But I think people get the point here. So, Brian, we’re going to go to you a bit here. No pun intended. We go through.

Brian: Well, you could have used ChatFTC to do my image there, Andy, with the evil emperor.

Andy: You like how you switched it so you’re facing it a different way like that?

Brian: That’s pretty good. And I don’t know why you made the SI the evil side, man. Come on, Andy. So to your point, Andy, I have done both sides of this. I spent a long time, 17 years as a practitioner, and I spent about three years working at Guidance, running their strategy practice. And Guidance is a systems integrator. So I have selected, gosh, I’ve done probably five replatformings as the e-commerce executive. And during the course of that, I probably worked with hired, fired, everything else. I don’t know, 15 different SIs over the course of that, maybe 20. And so I can tell you firsthand both sides of this and how challenging it is. But let’s talk about what the systems integrator does and then why it’s so challenging. So the systems integrator gets in and they help you. It’s one thing to select the platform, right? That’s a critical piece. You need to select the right e-commerce or whatever platform it is. But frankly, the day-to-day work, and I lived this as a practitioner, the day-to-day work is really up to the systems integrator to get in and configure it, to customize it, to integrate it. So they’re doing documentation of the system. They’re doing maintenance and support after it goes live, testing, et cetera. But everything on the upfront is really a lot of the work. And this is where you really get into the meat of the relationship, honestly – it’s systems design, it’s selection of components, it’s integration with your ERP systems, with other point solutions you might have. If you have systems of record or order management, if you have systems of record for things like product information or content. There’s a lot to do here. And what I’ve learned along the way is that the systems integrator who becomes your partner in the effort. And you have to select someone here who is really going to see you through some of these unforeseen things that occur – always occur during a rollout of a system. There’s always things you don’t you don’t know so the systems integrator really is your partner even more so than the platform is in my experience. I’ve run businesses on Salesforce and HCL and Adobe Commerce and Shopify and all these different platforms and so it’s a common issue regardless of platform.

Andy: I think this is the nuts and bolts and the part that’s not here, actually, which is maybe the most important part, is the upfront part about the requirements gathering and understanding what a company is in need of. Because sometimes they say they need to do one thing. You get in and realize it’s actually not that at all. We need to replace our PIM. Well, it turns out they have a data problem and it turns out they don’t have a digital strategy or they don’t agree on the digital strategy. So all of a sudden it goes from being turning knobs to figuring out strategies. So it gets complicated. There’s a lot on the heels of which is why it’s that much more important that you get this right on both sides of the equation. Because, again, the practitioners are the ones paying here. And they got to get it right because they have maybe the most to lose. But the SIs also don’t want to get involved, as you know, in a project that goes the wrong way, goes off the rails. These things end up in lawsuits sometimes. You know, there’s a lot of bad. So it really is important that there be a match. So how do you do that?

Brian: You’re right, Andy. At Harbor Freight Tools, when we rolled out e-commerce, we used three different SIs in sequence. We ended up with Guidance. That’s actually eventually how I ended up working there. But if you make the wrong decision, it can set you back time and money. So we asked our LinkedIn audience, what’s the best way to search for an implementation partner or a systems integrator when rolling out a B2B e-commerce platform? And what’s fascinating here is the number one answer was word of mouth at 52% followed by asking the platform provider for their recommendation – meaning the software company.Less important in terms of searching was shopping at a conference at 13% or searching online at only four percent. I think this speaks to the importance of the reputation the SI has in the market. The fact that when you’re at a VP or director of e-commerce level, when you’re looking for a partner, you’re going to go to your peers because that’s who you trust for unvarnished opinions. And that’s actually one of the values of our community. And we bring these people together so they can ask these questions on our Forum and other places. But I think it’s actually really more about multiples of these when we ask some practitioners. I think we got some feedback. You have that in front of you.

Andy: Theresa Kuske said – hey, this is great. Yes. Word of mouth. But you have to do all of these things. You’ve got to ask people, you’ve got to put together a process for review, et cetera. And Matt Ekman from Great Northern Equipment said, a referral is really critical, but you also have to have an RFP, RFI process in place. So, I think the answer is there’s maybe a superordinate answer, which is word of mouth. But embedded in all this stuff is you can’t just take somebody’s word for it. You’ve got to go vet it yourself and so there’s a lot that goes into it – but our question was “how do you search and where do you begin” and I do think word of mouth is where people begin. But it’s a bit circular too because you may start there but how did you get there? And so you’re right – communities matter.

 

Brian: We see it on our Forum where people ask questions all the time: Hey what do you think about this SI or how should I find someone or who’s done work on this platform? But we also wanted to get feedback from the systems integrators, Andy. So you talked to a couple of folks here and got some interesting stories about implementations, about how companies are selecting. What did they say?

Andy: Well, so we put the word out to everybody and we heard back from these four. I’m sure there were many others who would love to have gotten back to us, but maybe next time. So Techmates Group, American Eagle, Avatria, and Luminos Labs all had something to say about this. What we did was we distilled all of their thoughts into a series of what we consider to be red flags from the systems integrators’ perspective, red flags from the practitioners’ perspective, and then some best practices. Let’s go through these quickly. The red flags that we heard from the SIs were, and I’ve heard this many times myself – run, don’t walk if you’re approached by a practitioner that has inadequate buy-in from senior management. We’ve seen this. Is anybody else on board with this? Sure. And then you get there and you find out the CEO doesn’t even know this is happening, right? That’s one. Two, unclear project goals and definitions. So you get scope, budget, and timeline creep. Yeah, this is another one. The really savvy SIs have figured this one out. It’s the first thing they do. They figure out why are we here? And then they figure out realistically what we can do. And because they got to scope it and budget it, right? Because there’s nothing worse than coming back and being way off on those things. Three, too many competing priorities. I’ve seen this myself with companies that they’ve got eight projects going on and they’re like, oh, let’s add another one. Let’s go ahead and implement an e-commerce. I know companies right now that are doing PIM implementations, ERP implementations and e-commerce implementations. And the same team is doing all three of them. So that would be something an SI is like, hey, you know, maybe we should wait on the e-commerce thing. Fourth one, inadequate progress tracking. That goes on too, where it starts off with a bang, but then nobody’s really in charge, not really monitoring things, and it goes off the rails. And then the big one, There’s no planning for the after-the-fact, the training part, the organizational change part. So maybe let’s say you implement the e-commerce platform, but then the sales reps jobs are impacted, or the customer service is implemented. And it’s like, oh, forgot to put that in the plan. So SIs know that you’ve got to watch out for those things and ask those questions up front.

Brian: Just a quick comment from an SI’s perspective. One of the red flags I would always, when I was at Guidance, a lot of it was around timeline, right? People would have unrealistic timelines and not understanding what they needed to do from their side. To me, that was the biggest red flag from an SI’s perspective in working with companies looking to roll out e-com. But practitioners also, there are some significant red flags here that we heard.

Andy: Ultimately, they’re the ones who are paying for this. They’re the ones who need to be satisfied with the experience. And we saw five. These are not exhaustives, but five that kind of bumped up here in the world we live in. One is that a lot of SIs have limited experience in the B2B space. They had B2C implementations and said, yeah, it’s all the same. You just change the B to a C and C to a B.

Brian: These are red flags that practitioners see with SIs, right?

Andy: Another one is that if an SI, from a practitioner’s perspective, has kind of an inflexible working style where they’re very rigid. That’s not a good sign. Another one is failure to communicate clearly and regularly – this happens a lot where the SI starts off with a bang but then when they get into the meat of the project and they’ve got six or seven other projects that those teams are working on too, and then unless they have a really strong project management component you know they stop communicating and when you stop communicating regularly and clearly things really fall apart. A big one that the practitioners pointed out was you’ve just got to like these people. They have to gel with your team because they’re an extension of your team. And so you wouldn’t hire somebody you didn’t like to work for you. Why would you hire an SI you didn’t like to work for you? And this is a funny, interesting one that I heard from a couple of people is that it’s a red flag when an SI is particularly defensive. You challenge what they’re telling you, right? You ask questions like, well, why are we going in this path or why are we going on that path? And if they break out the, “hey, I’ve done this many times before.” This is the first time you’ve ever done it. They may actually believe that. They may actually be true. But you can’t approach a practitioner with that kind of language. You have to say, hey, I understand your concern. Let me explain to you why.

Brian: No question. And this style, the culture fit is the most important thing. When I was a practitioner, I would always look for that because ultimately you’re going to run into problems and challenges as you roll these out. This is highly, highly complex stuff. So what are some of the best practices? We came up with a bunch here in terms of selecting an SI. So this came from our conversations with everybody and our experience as well.

Andy: We’ll go through these quickly, but I think one is to talk to references, ask hard questions about technical expertise. You and I were joking ahead of time that we’ve heard the same version of this one story many times about how one company came in, claimed to have expertise in a certain area. They were kind of faking it until they made it. The practitioner didn’t know about it. They did a bunch of workarounds, delayed it. And then when they had a third party review of the code, turns out, whoops, presto, they didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t write in this code, this particular language, and they mucked it all up and then somebody had to come in and fix it. Another one is the culture side. I know a client right now where they had misgivings about the SI they were hiring, but they went with it. And they didn’t trust their gut and they don’t like each other. And so they’re too involved in the project at this point that they can’t get out of it. But essentially where they are right now is stalemate. They don’t like them. They don’t hate them. They’re just somewhere in the middle. You can do better than that. So ask the tough questions. This is when you and I’ve talked about before, – get to know your team at the SI. Well, who cares about the SI? I don’t care that it’s Accenture, Deloitte, you name it. I care about the team I’m working with. So those guys could be great or bad or vice versa. What matters is the team you get. And so make sure you get that team before you sign any contracts.

Brian: Nick Ostergaard from Toyota left this comment – “A practitioner needs to own it all. The SI will cycle out people and eventually leave. The practitioner needs to build strong relationships and treat the SI as part of the team, but can’t outsource ownership to the SI.” Nick, thanks for that comment. It goes right to that point, Andy, about getting to know your SI team well. They become a part of your team. So that culture thing is the most important. But go ahead.

Andy: Great segue to the next one, which is the most important person at the SI, almost without fail, is the project manager at the SI. Because to Nick’s point, they’ll cycle out people, but the project manager is probably the one person who sticks around and that’s the person who controls the timeline, the budget, et cetera. That person has to be especially strong and your team has to get along with them. I’ve seen projects go off the rails when they really like the consultants, they like the strategy. but the project manager doesn’t gel and it goes nowhere. You have to jointly create these project plans to Nick’s point. The SI can’t own this thing. Ultimately, the practitioner has to own it, but you both have to do it. These milestones, by the way, that you set up can’t just be things that you blow through. You have to have honest post-mortems and you have to treat each milestone as an opportunity to see are we going on the right track because pretty soon if you’re not you’re going to get way off track. You mentioned something about expecting and embracing trade-offs.

Brian: You’re going to get into a situation in these rollouts where we’re going to run into something that’s unexpected and when we run into that what do we do about it. This is why the relationship and culture match is so important. Because as a practitioner, you may have to trade some functionality out to meet timelines or to meet budgets. And so you have to have a very open and transparent relationship where you can really honestly discuss these trade-offs. Because trust me, I’ve done this so many times. You have to allow some room for this, even in your timeline and your project plan, because it’s going to be more complicated than you think it is.

Andy: Like Mike Tyson used to say, everybody’s got to plan until they get punched in the face. And that’s exactly what happens with these projects. It’s a great strategy. Everybody agrees on it. And day two, something goes wrong. And then it’s about embracing the trade-offs, budgeting for the inevitable surprises. And this is the last point I think is really important. You should really want your SI to be proactive. This gets lost a lot of the time. Oftentimes the selection process gets to be grueling and finally they’re like, OK, we’re just going to go with these guys. We lock it all down and everybody’s just reacting to everybody else. That has got to be guiding you. So you want somebody who’s going to say, Hey, we’ve got some ideas. Let’s talk about how we can move this thing forward because the project’s going to change, right? Especially when you get into the trade-off stuff.

Brian: Absolutely. And you have to budget – I learned this the hard way – budget for inevitable surprises because you as a VP of Ecom, and your CEO and board and everyone’s approved, some level of budget to get this done. There’s going to be surprises, folks. Joe, thanks for your comment here, Joe Albrecht. I think he said it well here: Don’t choose an SI. And Joe is an SI. Select a true partner who will own the project as their own. And that’s where success will come from. You’ll need much more than systems integration to make it a success. How will you know? He’s saying, ask references about their experiences. Absolutely, Joe, totally agree with that. I think that you’ve got to go to your peers and that’s again, what our whole community is about.