Master B2B’s Brian Beck, Znode’s Tom Flierl and Avalara’s Brian Kelly enjoyed a fireside chat with Shannon Zonca, the Senior Director – Contract eCommerce at MillerKnoll, and Rob Richardson, the Senior Digital Product Manager at MillerKnoll, about how a manufacturer can grow its digital business without creating issues around channel conflict.

In this new interview, you’ll hear more about:

  • How a manufacturer can take advantage of their dealer network to grow their online sales.
  • The opportunities – and pitfalls to avoid – of growing your digital business internationally.
  • How to use your customers and distribution partners to help create your product roadmap.
  • Why “share of wallet” may be the most useful metric to take the temperature of your digital business. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Beck: Welcome to the Master B2B Fireside Chat Series. My name is Brian Beck. I’m the co-founder of MasterB2B. We are an e-commerce community and thought leadership series for professionals at manufacturers and distributors throughout the world. We have a great topic we’re going to be talking about today. This is more of a panel than it is an individual chat, but we have a great group of people here. We’re going to be talking about enabling new growth channels with digital tools, the what, why, and how for B2B manufacturers in particular, and we have some great folks with us today on this topic. Our first guest is Shannon Zonca. Shannon is the Senior Director for Contract e-commerce with MillerKnoll. If any of you are sitting on an Aeron chair, you know what MillerKnoll is. Shannon, welcome to the program here. You lead the business side for this global commercial furniture manufacturer. Tell us about what MillerKnoll does and welcome. 

Shannon Zonca: Thank you. Great to be here. As you said, we are a global furniture manufacturer. Many people may not be as familiar with the term MillerKnoll. We were formerly Miller and acquired the brand Knoll. So like you said, if anyone is sitting in an Aeron chair, you probably have seen one of our products. We’re really known for our portfolio brands and all of the spaces that we support. We are also known for our research and innovation brand heritage and we’re also a B2B and a B2C company. So we sell through authorized dealers as well as direct to consumer channels, retail stores, etc. 

Brian Beck: Very good. Welcome. And we have a colleague of yours, Mr. Rob Richardson, Senior Digital Product Manager at MillerKnoll. Rob, you’ve got, I guess, 20 years at the company. I see here you had a short stand at GE Aerospace as well, but a lot of your time at MillerKnoll, welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself and what your role is there. 

Rob Richardson: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having us. I’ve been with the company over 20 years and had all kinds of different opportunities. As a matter of fact, Shannon and I, when she first started with the company, we started on the B2C side. It was great. One of the other things that we wanted to just kind of lay out, Shannon just talked about our dealer network and that’s a real important factor to how we go to market too because we facilitate our dealer and customer relationships. So it’s a little bit different than some of the common B2B manufacturers out there, and we really put a lot of emphasis on and actually have a lot closer and intimate relationship with those customers, which is great. So we’ve got a really interesting program that we’re doing a great job of growing. 

Brian Beck: Well, that’s great to have you both here because this is really your experience. Next on our list is Tom Flierl. Tom is chief commercial officer with ZNode. I’ve known Tom for quite a few years now. He’s had a long career in e-commerce, advising companies. Znode does a lot really dovetailing with these opportunities we’re going to discuss today. Welcome. 

Tom Flierl: Thanks, Brian. Znode is a B2B commerce platform. There’s a lot of B2B commerce platforms, but we really focus a lot of our efforts in our product development in channel enablement, focusing on manufacturers that sell through dealers, distributors and giving them the tools to enable channels and even engage the end customer in the buying process. 

Brian Beck: Fantastic. Glad you’re here. Tom, thanks for joining us. And finally, last but not least, Brian Kelly, global solutions sales specialist with Avalara. Brian is an expert in tax compliance for companies going global in particular. It looks like you were with FedEx and Pitney Bowes for quite some time too, Brian. Tell us a little bit more about Avalara and say hello. 

Brian Kelly: Thanks, Brian. So yes, I spent some time in the international e-commerce world from the Pitney Bowes days to evolve into the FedEx days to now with Avalara where most people know Avalara as calculating those complexities of US tax. But we’ve expanded our offering to also offer landed costs for duties and taxes for all global-type transactions, understanding those harmonized codes, understanding what those tariffs should be. So we’ve expanded that complexity, not just for the US, but offering that to our clients to take those complexities out of global transactions as well. 

Brian Beck: That’s great, Brian. We’re going to talk about global later. I see also that your parents got your name right….Let’s dive in. So everyone here knows that B2B buyers really expect a seamless digital experience across all different channels. I want to direct this first question over to you, Shannon. What are some of the new opportunities that have emerged for B2B firms to use digital tools and approaches that go beyond traditional e-commerce? When you think about digital, everyone thinks e-commerce. What about beyond just the e-commerce channel? Can you talk to us a little bit about your experience and how MillerKnoll used tools in other areas?

Shannon: Absolutely. I’m happy to. So as Rob and I mentioned, we sell through an authorized dealer network. And when you think about contract furniture and furniture for office spaces, hospitals, universities, you often need somebody to come in and help you think about that space and help you design your floor plan for how you’d use that space. And a lot of our customers have e-procurement strategies. So in our model, what we’ve really focused on with MillerKnoll is building punch out connections with our customers and pulling those orders over to our dealers. So we allow quoting, we allow orders and invoicing to flow back and forth between a client’s e-procurement platform, our e-commerce platform, and then ultimately it’s the dealer that’s helping support that business. So it is a little bit of a unique model, but we found with our large customers, that is a key way that we need to be able to engage with them in order to support their business. So that’s been an area that we’ve really invested in as an organization. 

Brian Beck: Got it. And I know Rob, you were, I’m sure, involved quite a bit with that for me more from more on the technical side, is that right?

Rob: I kind of sit in that hub in the middle between the business team, the development team, and also our sales organization too that has some input to play off a little bit further. One of the things that we implemented about five years ago was a homegrown request, a quote capability, which is so amazing and needed for our large clients. And it wasn’t about something just pulling off the shelf too. We knew conceptually what we needed to do, but we had to take it to the next level. One of the things, especially because we have this close relationship with both our dealer and the customers we serve. We listened to some of their needs, and we listened to some of the unique aspects of the processes they use. It came up with a system that actually works pretty slick, and it actually increases our capability and throughput of borders through this capability. 

Brian Beck: We talk about the ROI of these things too. So you were talking about things that were not necessarily e-commerce, obviously the e-procurement, punch out, things like that. You know, we think about the R in the ROI – Return on investment. E-commerce incremental revenue is often leaned on as a metric, but when you think about the ROI, how do you guys quantify them? How do you think about them? 

Rob: One of the key things that I always tell everybody about our program, if I can spin that R from ROI to more on “Relationships.” We have to have strong relationships with our customers. And part of the way that we do that is we’re very empathetic and we listen to what their needs are. We listen to what their problems are. And if need be, because sometimes our customers and our dealers don’t have the technical acumen that our group does, we’ll get people together, including our servicing providers that we work with, to sit down and literally talk with a customer over a simple phone call and walk through their needs. By setting up that connection, they’re more open to us. Having those interactions again and again, we learn more. And it helps us to stay ahead of any issues. That happens from time to time, but also to look at our rise and emerging needs are for our customers. 

Brian: Shannon, you were talking about some other KPIs that you guys use like share of wallet, I think, was one you mentioned. You want to expand on that a little bit too?

Shannon: Yes, absolutely. This capability, we look at not only as driving incremental revenue for us, but it’s really helping create that stickiness with our clients and our dealers. And we call that share of wallet. So there’s customer share of wallet and dealer share of wallet. When we provide this capability, we make it so much easier to do business with MillerKnoll and do business with our dealers. So it makes our clients less likely to want to look at a competitor and more likely to stick with our brand. So we really, really see that as a big value. The other thing that this capability provides us is the opportunity to reach more markets and more segments of business. We have some of the segments of business that we support where this is table stakes in order for them to do business with a furniture manufacturer. So that allows us to ensure that we’re able to meet the needs of that customer segment and provide the capabilities and how they’re looking to transact. 

Brian Beck: Tom, I want to go to you with this next question because what we’re talking about here is enabling channels, finding new ways to grow. I know that Znode has quite an extensive history of helping manufacturers to enable channels. You mentioned in your introduction. Could you speak to that a little bit and talk about the value in doing that?  What’s that opportunity to help manufacturers grow and by growing their channel? Can you speak to that?

Tom: Sure. Absolutely. There’s recently some research that was released on Digital Commerce 360. It talked about the top three initiatives for e-commerce for manufacturers. Number one was storefronts, which was somewhat commoditized as we all know. And I think manufacturers are just testing the water with selling direct or selling aftermarket parts, whatever the case is. The second was portals. And what we’ve seen is a lot of demand for portals and particularly, you know, portals in 2024 are a little bit different. We recently released what we call the commerce portal where salespeople can log in. They can manage projects or programs similar to what Shannon was talking about. They can actually route orders before sending it to the ERP so it has to go to a costing department and engineering department, etc. Or maybe they’re bringing in products from outside and it has to go through procurement and they can flag those orders. At the same time, they can manage quotes. Channels can also log in. They can request quotes. Those are the typical B2B workflows that haven’t quite been digitized up until recently. So the other thing we’re seeing a big demand for is we recently released what we call B stores, the middle B and B2B2 commerce. Again, we have companies that have dealers and the dealers want to be able to stand up their own store because maybe they don’t have a big enough operation to manage their own e-commerce. The manufacturers are actually allowing the dealer to stand up their own store, pull down their catalog, control their price list, control the experience. I think you call it federated commerce, Brian. That’s one of the old school names up for it. We’ve seen a big resurgence for this ability to allow smaller distributors and dealers to manage their own store without inheriting all the costs and complexity that go with it. 

Brian Beck: That’s fascinating. So I imagine as a manufacturer if you’re enabling your distributors, your dealers, etc. with e-commerce capabilities..This whole thing about channel conflict. I know we talked a little bit about this ahead of our discussion today. Does that help mitigate channel conflict where the manufacturer’s selling direct and undercutting the dealer or distributor. Any thoughts on that? 

Shannon: Because we sell through B2B and B2C, channel conflict is something we’re really sensitive to. We have actually established a pricing model to ensure that on the B2B side, our customers are getting that volume-based pricing, and we’re really intentional about making sure for the retail customer that’s buying a single chair or a single item, that the pricing model is optimized for that. But in addition to that, our B2B e-commerce capability that we provide is loading the customer pricing in that the dealer has established. So it’s providing an added value to our dealers to make their lives easier with processing those orders, processing requests for quotes. But it doesn’t cause any negative barrier in terms of the pricing model. So, we’ve been really intentional in ensuring that we’re adding value to each of the channels, but making sure there’s enough space and delineation between those two channels that we can hopefully avoid channel conflict. 

Brian Beck: Tom, are you seeing the same thing with your customers?

Tom: We’re seeing channel loyalty really being the headline. We work with one very large supplier. It’s a privately held billion dollar supplier in a category in which they sell through a lot of many small dealers and distributors that don’t have their own websites. And there’s competition for bidding on programs. And in the past, those dealers would stand up their own small store on some kind of platforms and make it easy to stand up a small store for a limited period of time. But it was a lot of work for them, and they go to multiple suppliers. We’re seeing loyalty where now that one supplier that’s running this concept of B-stores – letting the dealer or distributors send up their own store – now getting all of the merchandise procured directly from them because of the ease of use and the ease of being able to stand up stores. So, I would say loyalty is what we’re seeing – loyalty and greater share of wallet.

Brian Beck: It’s interesting because I feel like in some ways there’s an opportunity for companies to use channel, and use digital to create loyalty like you were saying. Customers seem to be more loyal to channel – just look at Amazon versus brands. And we could have a whole separate debate on that, right? You have great products but being in front of the customers is important. Okay. Rob, did you want to add something there?

Rob: The other thing too is we’re always looking for what new next thing that we’re going to do. So when we talk about opportunities even with other customers we haven’t reached today that we are going to reach with more in these electronic channels. Keeping that dealer piece in the mix is important. And figuring out ways to make sure that they’re compensated to manage the field aspect of some of these customers. Once we get them on, we rely on the dealers to help service customers too. So there’s a good symbiotic aspect of when we talk about our future and our program to make sure we’re keeping the technology and the physical aspect that we’ve dealt with that we’ve had with our company for decades together. 

Brian Beck: I’m going to shift gears on us here. And Rob wants to stay with you and I’m going to bring you in, Brian, a little bit here because we talk about global. And how companies can leverage global e-commerce to move into or support international markets. So is it an easier path or a way to grow globally? I know that Rob in your case, you guys have established international distribution. So tell us about how you have used global e-commerce and digital tools to support your global growth efforts?

Rob: We know we want to expand this capability much, much more as part of our strategic plans for the program. We’ve dabbled in it a little bit because we wanted to make sure that we took it slow a little bit, understood some of the different nuances. Obviously you’ve got to deal with different currency, different languages. Some multinational corporations also wanted to look at all of those things and combine them into kind of a symbiotic view of information. So that just does present some challenges, but good challenges that we’re ready to take on and tackle. So as we’re building on our new platform, those are some of the things that we’re looking forward to to build in ahead of time. So as we bring on these larger organizations, we can hit the ground running. 

Shannon: Rob said it well for our B2B e-commerce business, but what I would add is that we sell both through the dealers and we sell through our B2B e-commerce channel. So we do provide some other digital tools to help with product discovery and understanding the breadth and depth of the portfolio. So those are tools that we do make available globally for our dealers, and they help that dealer take that order to a certain point and then as Rob said, we’re really trying to make sure that our e-commerce capabilities are optimized globally to support that business as well. 

Brian Beck: So Brian, I want to pull you in. We kept you silent there for a while, but I want to hear your point of view. This is because this is an area of true expertise for you. What do companies need to have in place and what do they often miss as it comes to going global? 

Brian Kelly: You mentioned something earlier about is global an easier play? And the answer is it could be. And if companies are prepared and they recognize all of these variations that we’ve already talked about, whether it’s business to business, whether it’s going direct to consumer. Whether it’s commercial furniture or going to an individual, all of those things need to be mapped out and understood because product variations, harmonization of products and clearing certain products to customs into certain countries will vary. As long as we outline what those products are, which countries we’re going to and who our customers are, whether they’re resellers or direct – the global product and the global process could be easy. I’ve seen a ton of customers jump into it and realize, wait a second, it’s a lot more complex than I thought. But it doesn’t need to be as long as you’re prepared. 

Brian Beck: What are some of those elements you need to prepare?

Brian Kelly: One, are we prepared to expand into 190 countries? Or are we looking to expand in certain regions? And if so, we need to talk about restricted products. We need to understand if certain products are restricted or are they just not offered because of the reseller or agreement? So we want to understand, again, the harmonization of those products. Are they allowed in certain countries because of the materials? So that’s step one. Step two is how are we calculating those landed costs? So you just can’t move product into another country. We need to understand who’s responsible for import duties, who’s responsible for import taxes. And if we set these transactions up properly on the front end, it makes that process a lot easier dealing with these international customs clearance agents. 

Brian Beck: It sounds very complex, but also a good opportunity. Tom, I want to go to you for a moment here because I know customers on your platform often use international as a growth path for their business. Could you speak to how they’re using it and what trends are you seeing? How are they leveraging that?

Tom: Some of the things we’re seeing – and it gets back to some of the clients that we use different terminology – I actually call it catalog management. And the ability to easily say, okay, we have a specific program or account that’s a global account. They have their own procured or specified group of products that they can buy from. How do you show that catalog globally based upon user account login, et cetera, personalization and easily manage that. Or how do you stand up catalogs and stores by region and easily manage global commerce. And I think some of that comes down to: One – What’s the manufacturer’s strategy. And two – basically have a very flexible structure within the e-commerce platform to allow serving different customers globally as well as serving different regions globally, so standing up a store by region with its own unique catalog, which might be more of a traditional B2C direct to customer approach, but then also enabling customers regardless of where they are to get their one catalog as well when they log in. So lots of flexibility in the data structure is what I see as a key element to that. 

Brian Kelly: The catalog strategy may include restricted goods, just because it’s allowed into certain countries doesn’t necessarily mean it’s allowed to be entered into another country?Those tariff rates are going to vary based on those agreements between your countries.

Brian Beck: We’ve been talking about systems and with all systems comes the requirement to actually use them and using them takes people. So my next question is when you think about these opportunities, you talk globally enabling channels. We talked about helping reducing friction in the cycle of purchasing. Can you talk a little bit about it? What human resources are required to take advantage of these different opportunities?

Shannon: I wouldn’t say this is how everybody does it. But what we have is we have a couple different areas within our B2B eCommerce department. Part of the team focuses on managing our website, merchandising, product data, all of the things that go into managing your product catalog and our on-site merchandising. We have a team that’s focused on supporting our clients and our dealers with onboarding. So that’s working through their business requirements, working through the testing once the site’s ready to go, making sure the integrations are working as expected. We have a team focused on digital product management that are working as that liaison between the business and the engineering team to make sure that we’re focusing on our platform enhancements and roadmap. We have an engineering team – So the folks that are in there supporting our platforms and delivering those enhancements. We have some focused energy around those punchout integrations because that is a key strategy. So we do have some dedicated resource support there and working with a partner of ours to connect all of those connections between our clients’ ePrecurement systems at our platform. And then we have a number of other various rules within the organization that supports our client opportunities. We have partnered with our sales team and with our dealers. But really that’s how we’re organized from a B2B eCommerce department. 

Brian Beck: Now that’s very helpful and sounds like a fairly robust team. Rob, from your side of the business, what kind of human resources are required? And you mentioned something to me earlier about outsourcing versus insourcing. Talk about that if you wouldn’t mind. 

Rob: We’ve got a great story there. Early on in our program, we had a lot of dedicated people to many different facets. One of them was the fact that we had somebody internal to all of our ePrecurement integrations, custom integrations with each and every one of our customers. As the program began to grow, we just realized that just wasn’t going to be sustainable. We weren’t going to be able to turn through that as fast as we needed to. And it was literally taking one person. That’s all they did. Each work day was to work on these things and updates. So we went and researched and went to a service provider model who handles all of those ePrecurement connections to us for us. Access that conduit, that portal as an expert really, not only with the connections, but also they are very agile and fluid with how they set things up. And they maintain all of the technical details and upgrades and requirements required across all the different ePrecurement platforms. So we meet with them regularly, we’re actually in a process of moving a lot of new customers onto our new platform. And basically that eliminated the need for that person to do that. And we were able to reutilize that person elsewhere in our development team and other facets. So it was a great huge story for us and something that’s continued to be successful as we go along. 

Brian Beck: And Tom, from your perspective, what Rob and Shannon were talking about teams of folks, – What kind of resources do you see as required to manage it? What are you seeing your clients do?

Tom: It really depends on how large the effort is. As you know, we work with a lot of mid-market companies, and a lot of enterprise companies which have different efforts. To me, the biggest thing is having great product information ready to go. Because Znode has a PIM at the core of it, catalog management is much easier. We see less need for resources from that perspective as far as showing the right catalog, the right product. But it also comes down to the complexity. Is the strategy to have one store with 400 catalogs based about login or is it 400 stores with its own unique catalogs? You go down the list. So I don’t have a solid answer for you because I think it all depends on the scale of the option.

Brian Beck: Brian, I think probably a lot of your value proposition in the market is eliminating manual processes. Isn’t it? 

Brian Kelly: That’s 98% true. The reason I say that is, yes, we want to automate. We want to make sure our technical team is setting these up properly to not necessarily set it and forget it,  but it understands that process flow as it continues to get these orders and calculates those things accurately moving forward as an automated flow. However, we do have teams of compliance individuals that understand the complexities of products and how they need to be identified for customs clearance purposes. And that dives down into material makeup. It dives down into what industry is it made for? Commercial versus residential? All of those things matter and could change the ID of that particular product crossing into an individual country. So yes, we want to automate everything, but we still have that manual process and expertise to dive into those particular ingredients or materials or industries. 

Brian Beck: We don’t want the tax people all over the world chasing us down, right? So, you know, I was in the operator’s seat for a long time. As I think most of you know, I was a VP of  eCommerce at multiple companies. One of the hardest things I always had to deal with was figuring out what to prioritize. So we talked about a bunch of different opportunities here today. And I’m going to direct this next question over to you, Shannon. We think about the customer. We think about prioritization. Where do you start? You know, you’ve got a lot of different – and particularly with now AI out there – just everything. There’s so much opportunity. Where do you start and what role does the customer play in your prioritization efforts when you think about all you could be doing?

Shannon: We always start with a customer first. So we need to be deeply connected with our customers, understand what they need and how they want to do business. And that helps drive how we prioritize what we go after first. But from here, we always have a running wish list of things we want to do. And the big ones, you really have to get a business case together. You need to look at it from all angles, understand the customer need, understand what’s the implication on your internal teams and internal processes. What’s the implication on the dealer and what’s the size of the price? How much business is this going to drive or what kind of incremental improvement will it drive for the customer experience? And we look at all of those factors, and that’s how we prioritize. 

Brian Beck: So how do you stay on top of the customer or know what the customer wants? Are there some methods or approaches you use there?

Shannon: I would say it’s a couple things. I see Rob smiling here. We stay really tightly connected from a relationship standpoint. We work really, really closely with our customers. We’re working really closely with our dealers and our sales team. So we make sure that we keep our finger on the pulse of what’s going on. How is it going? How can we better help? We also make sure that we’re keeping track of where is the industry going? And there may be things that the customer doesn’t realize that we can provide that will add that value. And we try to make sure that we bring those things to the table as well. 

Brian Beck: Rob, did you have something to add there? 

Rob: Shannon hit it on the head there too. In many cases, especially for large features that we offer, we try and embed in there more than just one or two things. We’ve got multiple things and multiple inputs and connections we can do. And so just like Shannon said, sometimes the conversation with the customer is them not realizing what it is that they need to do to realize the best efficiencies. We can have these conversations, these close conversations with them and then propose a way to use our future in a different way that they didn’t even realize. So sometimes it doesn’t even lead to more technical development. It just leads to our employing our expertise on how workflows go on. Our history with other customers and learning from them and be able to combine different ideas. We also learn from it. We add those things into our into our roadmap of future implementations. But in many ways, we can really satisfy some of the needs of the customers just by looking at it from a different perspective. 

Brian Kelly: I think Shannon hit the nail and I had customers first. And in our world, we can look at the same identical customer. It looks the same. It feels the same. But they’re all looking for something slightly different. So we need to make sure we’re listening to the customer and actually navigating their process flow, not necessarily ours. 

Brian Beck: That’s an interesting point. And you know, one of their questions that came to mind, you were talking a lot about data inheritance. I’ll call it federated whatever. You said data was the one key thing here. What happens when you have something like that, that is foundational? The customer may not be talking about it. Or maybe they are talking about it because they can’t find what they want on your website. How do you justify it? I don’t know who wants to weigh in on this. But I’ll throw it out to the group here. How do you justify investments or how do you gain prioritization and alignment on investments in things like PIM or things like content cleanliness, which is a hugely challenging task, even with AI and in partnership with AI. How do you get investments that are really foundational rather than like, hey, I’m going to invest a dollar and get $10 back tomorrow because I just launched this new marketing channel.

Tom: I think it’s a never-ending battle. I don’t know any manufacturer that’s ready to go with all their product information out of the gates. So obviously you have to have a team that is owning product information and MDM. And then you have to have a process and you have to prioritize what products are going to sell first or what are the highest volume products that we move. You probably have some other prioritization around markets as well. Where the biggest growth opportunity or profit opportunity is, it’s probably where you are prioritizing at that point. But I have not seen anyone who has ever conquered the need for better product information. 

Shannon:  I agree. It’s a big meaty thing to get after as a manufacturer, especially a manufacturer with a lot of brands. That really gets down to business case. And really being able to paint that picture. If we do this, what is the impact it will drive? And like you said, sometimes it’s not a clear cut and dried. If I do this, I get this many dollars back. But some of those things, they’re so important as a foundational tool. It’s kind of table stakes. But it’s outlining the picture of what will it take? What is going to cost? What type of resource model do we need to support it?And how do you make meaningful progress? Because you probably can’t boil the ocean there. You have to start and make progress. 

Rob: We’ve had a couple of very large clients on our program that have helped us with the tail wagging the dog, so to speak ,on adding new features – and adding large capabilities on the platform that took some investment. But knowing there was commitment with those customers helped as we talked with our organization to implement those things. I’m not going to say everything worked out perfectly. But many times that growth that we learned from that process and implementing those new features with customers led to the next thing and to the next thing and allows us to continue to grow. Not just the investment of the thing itself, but the investment of the process and the investment of learning more about how to expand our program. 

Brian Kelly: You mentioned foundation and that’s pretty much where Avalara starts. Because you mentioned AI… So going to market, what are the top products that we’re looking to go to market with? We have the top marketplaces that come to us because they look for us for speed to market. We want you to react as fast as we are reacting, and we want you just to get this product out the door because accuracy is not quite that important. Speed is more important. Then as we move that to a higher ticket item – Accuracy becomes that priority because that’s going to affect that tariff. That’s going to affect that import duty. So understanding the foundation on what that customer is looking for, speed to market or more accurate type of assessments, we’re building that foundation on the front end. 

Tom: If I were going to wrap it up, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for manufacturers right now. Getting back to that Digital Commerce 360 study, storefronts, portals, and the last thing in the top three was B2B2C models. But focusing on channel loyalty and enabling channels will prove in sell-through and ROI pretty quickly. I also think it creates efficiency from having internal people, customer sales reps, punching orders into ERPs and just automating those processes. 

Brian Beck: A lot of foundational stuff, a lot of good chat today. Thank you so much. Tom, Brian, Jen and Rob, very much for your time today. It’s been really enlightening. 

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