In this week’s Master B2B Friday 15, Andy & Brian:

• Give a recap of their experience at the B2B Online conference in Chicago.
• Plus, they discuss what the latest Forrester Wave of Commerce platforms means for industry.
• And would you rather work with Gen Z or Gen X co-workers?

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Brian Beck: Andy Hoar, welcome to Friday 15. Everyone, this is Friday 15 on May 10th. And a busy, busy week this week with lots of reports from the field. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar, and we are with Master B2B, the leading most-trusted community for B2B E-commerce professionals. We did some good traveling this week and lots of good stuff to dive in on. So let’s start with some breaking news. (upbeat music) I love that. Here we go. So Andy, this week, Forrester Research released the Forrester Wave for B2B quarter two, 2024. Lots of platforms on it. This came out while we were at the conference. Lots of vendors talking about it. I didn’t hear as many practitioners talking about it, but interesting nonetheless. Do you see this? I’m sure you did.

Andy Hoar: I did. Yeah, and reminding me of the old days. I got the DT’s a little bit because I used to do this wave report. And one of the things I did when I left Forrester to start Paradigm wasto reimagine this report. In fact, there’s been much written by people in the last couple of years about these reports, Gartner, Forrester, et cetera. And I think my issue with it, and by the way, Joe does fine research. There’s a lot of detail in here. But my issue with the wave and the Gartner Magic Quadrant is that it’s kind of a loser/leader metaphor. Either you’re a leader or you’re a loser. So everybody fights for the upper corner and everything else gets lost. And by the way, as you pointed out, only the vendors always seem to care about it. So I came up with a different methodology and I’m in my sixth year of doing that. And in a couple of months, mine will be coming out, but just very briefly, how mine differs from that where I think I’ve resolved some of these issues, is that I’m not looking for decathletes here. You can’t get a composite score up in the leader category, which is what we always found. Every year IBM would be in the leader category, even though they weren’t great at anything, they were good at many things, but not great at anything. I like to double click and get deeper. So if those of you can see this on screen, you can see that I cover 12 categories and you can get a gold medal, silver medal, bronze medal, or no medal in 12 categories. As a result, what you end up seeing is what’s on the next slide, which is you can dig down into a particular area. So if you’re looking for a company with a strong promotions engine or a great partner community, you can find out who’s really good at that and buy according to that, because some things people don’t need, but that all factors into a composite score, which puts the decathletes in their upper right hand quadrant, when in fact people are looking for the world champions in each area.

Brian: I think it’s very practical the way you’ve broken this out, and very useful for practitioners as well. By the way, for those of you on the podcast, what Andy’s referring to, because you never said the name of it, Andy, is the Paradigm B2B Combine. So Paradigm B2B Combine. So look for that in a couple months.

Andy: By the way, I do it for both the mid-market and the enterprise because the solutions are different. I don’t think it’s a good idea to aggregate them all together. It’s like putting all the cars into one big category called cars, when in fact, if you’re looking for a truck or a small car, or whatever, they’re different. And so I think you’ve got to get more granular about these things.

Brian: Andy, for doing that. So let’s get to our report from the field, Andy, you and I were at B2B online Chicago this week. It was packed, man, there were a lot of people there. I think bigger than maybe they ever had. It was at the Marriott downtown, Chicago, over the course of three days. Lots of great networking. We had several dinners at the show, where we brought together the leaders. We got all the speakers for the most part, Andy, to our dinners, a lot of the luminaries joined us. And just really for some great conversation, and networking too. It’s great when you get folks into a room. When I was at my dinner, I had a whole host of, at my table, VPs like Stacey Hanks, was sitting at my table with me, Adrian Hartman from JJ Keller, Alexandra Lloyd from Altec, Rima Westermeyer from Schneider Electric, Carlos Camacho from Bausch & Lomb… And you know, it’s just a great group of people and the level of conversation was fantastic.

Andy: I think this is where the real magic is at these events now. I’ve often been told by the practitioners, if we want to meet a vendor, we’ll reach out to them. There’s lots of ways for us to find them. And people were telling me at B2B online that they were saying they’d get better traction, better traffic in the hallway, outside of the exhibit hall, than actually in the exhibit hall itself, because practitioners don’t really want to go into the exhibit halls because it’s a feeding frenzy. You walk in and there’s a light that goes off, I’m joking. And there’s a target on your back and everybody wants to talk to you and scan your badge and then get you in their system, et cetera. Why would they subject themselves to it? But they still have a need for solutions. And we think actually this format with dinners and meetings and informal approach to this is maybe a better solution to doing that because when you sit with somebody, you say, yeah, I’m really struggling with my data and they go, well, what are you struggling with? And you just talk person to person. I’m not saying it’s the only way to do it, but that’s why people like our dinners, it’s fun, it’s interesting, and you get to know people as people.

Brian: Kudos to Ryan and Frank at WBR too. They’re doing some things that are good at that event to try to facilitate that. I was a VP of E-commerce for years, I actually would get a lot out of the vendor halls, but I always want to take it in doses? Where I’d go through, and what I would do is I’d look for the vendors or the solution providers that I’d never heard of because I want to understand where the investments are going. These guys are all VC-funded for the most part? They’re investing in areas to solve problems.

Andy: It used to be the only way to get the information was to see somebody in person and meet them at an event. There are people, I’ve seen this with my own two eyes, where there are practitioners who’ve gone up to booths, and there might be a junior person at the booth. The practitioner knows more about the product than the junior person did. The vendors need to rethink their approach. Again, I agree with you that they do it well at B2B Online, but I think, you know, the Shoptalks of the world have shown that maybe there’s a different approach to these things, but we go with the practitioners and what they’re looking for, and what they’re telling us is, don’t call me, I’ll call you, to large extent.

Brian: It is the show that people need to be at for B2B in terms of a conference. So some key themes we pulled away from the event – these are some things that we noticed in the sessions. We heard in a lot of our one-on-ones, we met with, gosh, over 100 people at this event, and a lot of them are practitioners, but also we spent a lot of time with vendors. These are some of the things we heard. I’ll go through these for our podcast listeners. Data is still a mess. PIM is foundational, but not the complete answer. One of the folks, this is from some folks from O2 Commerce and Bloomreach, Andy, who we both met with – choosing a PIM can help, but you have to change the organization around it, quote, quote, it’s a new tool, but you have to change how you work, and this is coming from the vendor side. They’re saying, hey, we can provide the tools, but the practitioners are saying, that it’s not just about the tool. So that’s one theme we heard. Channel conflict was another, continuing to be a barrier in e-commerce, to ecommerce investments, particularly amongst manufacturers, and I moderated a session about this, and it was a clear theme. Investments in digital are picking up versus last year. We heard this from a lot of vendors, which is important because they’re the ones getting the dollars to build these systems and things, but caution is still there. We’re not quite at the same rapid pace, it doesn’t seem. The AI buzz is the other thing, and it was a lot of talk about AI. The buzz part, we feel is kind of starting to wear off, but we’re getting real use cases. Steve Martinez, VP of Digital Solutions at Univar, we met with Steve, just as an example, he said on his panel, “Don’t think of AI as a tool, think of it as a supplement to what you’re already doing.” So it’s almost a change of mindset in how you’re thinking about AI as it’s not a solution, to it’s not a panacea, it is something that, can create organizational efficiency within your company.

Andy: I’ll just make one quick point about this, on the AI set of things. I’m starting to see this, and I’ve seen some things that some of the search vendors have shown me that, AI in the form of a chatbot is now starting to display some of the search capability. Because if you go to a website and you go to the search box and you search for something, that’s one path, but you can also now talk to an AI infused chatbot, ask a question and get an answer back. That’s basically an alternative to search, which this is one we’re going to watch, because in B2B, imagine if you could productize a chunk of that content, educate a bot, have AI do a lot of the answering. I saw something the other day that made me think, my prediction about death of a B2B salesman, this is more evidence of that. I saw a chatbot that basically replaced a salesperson, not the warm and fuzzies, not the, potentially the obscure kind of edge case scenarios, but for the vast majority of questions people have, it can answer it using AI. And I think that’s going to be really important.

Brian: That came up, and one of the panels, Nils Olsen is the CCO, the chief commercial officer at Tacton, which is a manufacturer, I think. He said, “Generative AI is great, for the first step in the journey, discovery phase it’s really helping with that and helping customers to find out the product that will solve their problem.” So I think there’s something to that. Where AI is starting to really penetrate, maybe even take, quote unquote, maybe visit shares the word to use, but share of the time on site from traditional search, it’s interesting. So we had this debate, Andy, Team Modern versus Team Traditional. What was the core of this debate? What was the question here? This was a funny one, and fun.

Andy: We departed from our usual topics here, and decided to be a little bit more entertainingthan usual, and it was about this idea of generations communicating with one another. In fact, if you look at some of the data around this, you’ll see that there basically are six generations co-operating in the workplace today. We just focused on four, but the four are baby boomers, they’re like 60 to 78 years old today, Gen X, which is most of the people in senior management, 44 to 59. They’ve got millennials, they’re 28 to 43, and then the last part is the Gen Z group, and this turned out to be kind of everybody against Gen Z.

Brian: Look at the stat, Andy, 74% of business leaders report that they find Gen Z more difficult to work with than any other generation. “This group tends to feel entitled and demonstrate a lack of effort motivation, productivity”, my goodness. That’s from resumebuilder.com survey in 2023.

Andy: They’ll tell you that it’s because they’re not motivated, they’ve got to feel passionate about what they’re doing, there was a stat we showed, that we’re not going to show it here, that had something like 59% of Gen Z years felt tired of worn out at the end of a day of work, where there’s only 35% of baby boomers. I remember we joke that either one group is either really soft, and the other group is really hard, or the older group just has a different perspective on work, and the other group has different perspective on work. We’re not quite sure what it is, but it does create a conflict where twice as many people feel worn out at the end of the day, do you imagine what that’s like for the older group, the baby boomers, who were saying, hey, we just got started, it’s only five o’clock, you gotta work till seven, they’re like, no, I got a whiskey tasting at 6.30.

Brian: So this was our main stage debate, folks, so as you are listening on our podcast, where we actually asked the audience to vote on, which approach was better across a couple of different questions, we’ll get to that in a second, but one of the funniest things we talked about was this Gen Z speak, we actually had several folks who understood Gen Z speak, I don’t understand it, but here’s a quick quote, it’s so funny, Stacy Hanks read this, she’s a VP commerce at SureWorx, and she read this on stage, so she asked one of her friends who’s a Gen Z or to give her some Gen Z corporate speak. So if you understand this, Andy, “Corporate America can be low key be slay if you’re on your grind set, ready ain’t going to make itself, and on everything you gotta work hard, no cap.” What the heck is that?

Andy: No idea what that meant, none whatsoever, and everybody laughed, but this should show you, they have their own dialogue, built out of texting and social media where they shorten everything and try to be different with the language. Language evolves, it always does, it always will, but boy, to look at the English language and see this conglomeration of words that mean nothing to us was a little bit disturbing, but it was fun, it was fun to do, and some people knew what it meant.

Brian: Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and we actually asked these questions and got some results, the questions we asked, it was a sweep for Team Modern, is what we call it, but the questions were what approach is better to evaluating performance of employees this year in 2024, which approach is to working styles is better, which approach to business communication is better, and across the board people said, “Hey, we’ve got to adapt to this more modern style.” We talked about it across many different elements. So it was a lot of fun, and the audience got into it, and everybody voted, we had hundreds of people, and the audience was great. So one other thing I want to mention is, I did this panel, Andy, on demystifying marketplaces, and I talked about this a little earlier in our Friday 15, there’s so much confusion about first party versus third party marketplaces, people think about it in the context of Amazon, versus running your own marketplace, versus selling on a third party marketplace. So I had a great, great panel, and the key takeaway of this was really channel conflict. And there’s still this pervasive fear of channel conflict, and it’s manufacturers, it’s distributors, and one thing that came out of it was, hey, we can use marketplaces as a way to mitigate that, if I’m a manufacturer, drive traffic to my channel, but there’s also a fear of competing with the channel, and preventing manufacturers from doing some of these things. So it’s a fascinating discussion, but the overall theme was there, and there’s a lot to unpack here, but it was a really good discussion.

Andy: We conclude here that companies have an archaic mindset around the way a marketplace operates. They see it as competitive, and it’s all internally, operationally focused. Can we make this work internally? How does this work for our partner channel? And what’s never, ever said first in any conversations is “What do customers want to do?” “Where do they want to buy?” And if you flip it around, and really diagram it from their perspective, I have very rarely seen examples of large companies, especially brand manufacturers, who didn’t have a really good argument for participating in and running in many cases, their own marketplaces. We can talk about other areas where it might be different, but just to swear off a marketplace because our channel doesn’t like it, very, very rarely is that the better case for B2B buyers today.

Brian: I spend a lot of time with Amazon through my company Enciba, but where we work with B2B companies on their Amazon strategy, the language that’s used by Amazon business, and the people that work there, it’s a contrast – it’s all about the customer. It’s all they talk about. And so compared to talking to a distributor or manufacturer, the customer is almost secondary to our internal concerns and alignments.