Andy and Brian attended the B2B Online event in Orlando, and they’ll catch you up on all the key themes they heard during the event.

They’ll touch on AI, also on AI, and maybe even AI. But also tips on how to convince the CFO to invest in digital.

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Brian Beck: Hey, my brother! Welcome to Friday 15 with Master B2B! Folks, we are broadcasting from the fine land of palm trees today. Straight to Florida. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar, Mr. Cool. Over there with the shades on, hanging out. You’re still at the resort there, Andy. Oh, and drinking on the job, too. I see what you got in that fine cocktail there, sir.

Andy Hoar: Oh, I’ve got to tell you, the sun is beautiful. [Laughter] I can still probably get my shades on here.

Brian: So for those you’re listening, Andy, is hanging out by the pool at the J.W. Marriott, Orlando, with the shades on. And I’m hanging out here in, let’s see here, I’m at Disney Springs. I’ve got a balloon floating overhead. Do you see it there, Andy? Thanks for joining us today for the Friday 15. Andy and I have spent this week here at B2B online in Orlando, Florida. The industry’s bi-annual gathering of B2B commerce executives. We had a great time. We talked to a lot of folks, met with a lot of folks over the last few days. And Andy said, we’re going to get some interesting insights from Andy today, the more he drinks with whatever he’s drinking there. So, we got the umbrella drink. That’s right. Oh, that’s awesome. Well, welcome everyone to Friday 15th from Orlando. We’ve got an interesting recap today. We’re doing a report live from the field, or well recorded from the field, those of you listening on our podcast. And one of the annual events, Andy, several hundred industry leaders are here from across different industries. We saw folks from all different kinds of companies. We’re going to cite some of the key things that we heard over the next few minutes here. But we can just start to jump in on that. But before we do, Andy, anything you want to say about the conference in general?

Andy: Yeah, so I think we made a couple slides here that we want to kind of walk people through on a serious note. So there was one panel, actually, that kind of stood out. Several people commented on this. But we’re back to the same issue about making the case for digital. And somebody had a statement, WIIFM, which is kind of hard to remember, but it stands for “what’s in it for me.” Obviously, the statement is, I think a lot of people forget that when you’re talking to the CFO, you want to talk about how you’re showing how cost won’t increase, but revenue will. And different executives have different worldviews. And when you’re selling digital, sell them the way they want to be sold. An age-old issue around lift vs shift. People pointed out that adoption is the biggest reason why digital grows, which is kind of shifting from existing customers, et cetera. But shift alone isn’t considered real growth by the CFOs. Incremental revenue gets executive attention. And so when you’re talking to these people, talking to the terms they understand, but I’m a big believer in lift and shift, not just lift or shift.

Brian: This is a really key thing, because I heard this question three or four times, just at the conference about, hey, people are struggling with the perception that e-commerce, regardless of the channel, whether it’s direct commerce, Amazon or whatever, simply shifts revenue. And all I’m doing is pushing it from one channel to the other in some cases, a more expensive channel, which, overcoming that is really critical. And what’s fascinating is, and we’ll even share some stories here from the conference a little bit later about, companies that have been really successful with their rollouts, seeing overall lifts in the business when they go to e-commerce, even the e-commerce channels of their resellers, because they’re better prepared to enable the channel for growth – better data, better analytics, better pictures and videos, all kinds of things, right, just asset improvement, alone can be beneficial to the channel, even when a company like a manufacturer moves directly into e-commerce. So this was, but it’s fascinating, we’re still having the discussion, that the industry is still at this, and we haven’t moved beyond it, but it’s a real struggle.

Andy: Well, and then we have this double standard – which is online has to demonstrate down to the penny where all the money is, what the return is on it. And because online has historically been able to do that, it’s held at that standard. Fine. But I talked, if I talked to one executive, I talked to several at this event who said, “The offline money is not being held at the same standard.” They go spend money on trade shows, they spend money on giveaways, etc. And they can’t even measure what the value of that is down to the, down to the hundreds of dollars, tens of dollars, or penny, but for some reason e-commerce has to produce down to the penny, but everybody else can just round up to the nearest thousand dollars. So that’s frustrating to digital executives. I still think that equilibrium will be found, though, because at the end of the day, if you can measure something with precision, you’re going to get more money because you know what you’re getting out of it.

Brian: Yeah, I was talking to Corey Case, the CMO, at Sarnova, at dinner, at one of our dinners. He oversees all the marketing, but even his world where he oversees the budget, it’s hard even to shift, and he understands digital. He’s very sophisticated. It’s hard to shift the organization’s thinking around this, because they’ve been doing those traditional methods for so long. This last piece here is really fascinating that we heard, which was the counterfactual, what happens if we don’t do this? In other words, if we don’t invest in digital or e-commerce, that was an interesting point that we heard. And it’s almost like, it’s a doomsdaying, but it’s existential, right? If we don’t do it, we’re going to lose share. One of the best places to find out what the real situation is, is just look at Amazon, right? And search your brand, not your brand, but just your product category on Amazon. You see all these brands? I did this just a couple days ago with one of the attendees. We looked at his brand on Amazon, and we said, gosh, look at these companies doing all this volume. They never heard of, right? All these brands. You never heard of a lot of them coming out of Asia. And so this counterfactual thing is now resonating. We heard it on the main stage in panels.

Andy: Now you have to say, well, Amazon’s doing this. Our competitors are doing that. So because the market has shifted, the dynamic has shifted. There is a way to answer this question. And oftentimes the answer is, nothing good. If we don’t do this, it’s not good.

Brian: So Andy, you know in my book, a few years back, I highlighted a whole bunch of case studies around Illumina. Well, we heard from Evan Vasili, who’s the global manager of Omnichannel, a bunch of things around aligning sales and marketing and Illumina, as a company has done a tremendous job at this. They’re a $3.5 billion company getting almost half of their revenue from digital channels, e-commerce, e-procurement. And if anyone can speak to this, he can because they’ve done it so successfully. And he shared some not-so-basic basics, right? Andy, what did he talk about?

Andy: I think there are seven, but I think we’re going to hire just three here. One is get shared dashboards and align KPIs. I mean, this is just blocking and tackling. But so many companies don’t do it. They have sales as their KPIs. And marketing as their KPIs. And sadly, they don’t often overlap. Another big one is to get everybody in the same room. That’s really key, because, they talk about this, but oftentimes they just don’t get in the same room and talk about stuff. They talk past each other, versus with each other. But the biggest one was the one we kind of underline here, which was getting sales to use the content that already exists. I’ve worked with salespeople before. God love them. But they always want more information, and they always want different information. And marketing doesn’t really push the issue here. And says, hey, we have given you really good stuff, case studies, et cetera. It’s just easy to blame marketing when things are not sold well. And so, marketing’s got to push back and say, hey, look, we’ve got the content. Use what we’ve given you.

Brian: That was a really interesting session. And then AI, of course, continues to be all the buzz Emanuela Delgado SVP at PartsTown, which is a very large distributor. The first session at the beginning of the conference got a lot of attention. We heard it throughout the conference. Some of the points that she made. What was she talking about, Andy?

Andy: She talked about customer service and the opportunity for AI with regard to customer service. And she said, when you think about it, think about shifting from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset when it comes to customer service. So instead of just waiting for people to reach out to you, potentially she’s reaching out to them using AI asking, hey, are you struggling here? How can we provide you with more information, et cetera? She pointed out something too about sentiment analysis to gain insights. Like, using customer service phone calls to get insights. Like, why didn’t people convert? Why aren’t these calls converting? Why are customers calling and not using the website? I know I’ve talked with companies before that have thrown all of their customer service transcripts into AI and then had it kind of summarized. If the beauty of AI is actually, if it’s something that’s known, it can read through it, distill it down, almost like note-taking can. And provide insight that perhaps, at scale you’ve never looked at before. She said that data, and this is, well-known, but always good to hear, that data is the key in your AI. Quality of the data is bad then the AI is going to be bad, right? And the last point that she made was, about having guard rails in place. If you don’t have human validation and intervention, anything you build can be a risk to your business. So it’s not ready to take our hands off the wheel yet and let AI take the wheel. You’ve got to have some guardrails in place and it’s got to be smart to do it. But I actually think we’ve shifted and we’re going to continue shifting away from human first AI second, to AI first human second. But that human dimension is really critical.

Brian: I agree. This was a point at the dinners, and we had a bunch of executive dinners at the conference. At one of the tables, we had a big long table, about 12 executives sitting at it. One of the execs said, “Hey, I want to know, can you guys just be quiet for a second? I want to ask the table, how were you practically using this AI?” And I think you had the same thing in your dinner too, Andy, where people are just asking the question, I was reading through a quick recap of the conference today. And I heard someone say, “Hey, are we beating a dead horse at this point? There’s still too much emphasis on AI as the spearhead of the solution rather than treating it as an ingredient that enhances them, makes me roll my eyes as an IT guy. I think about it as the solve, not the headline.” Which is a really interesting point because, you think about search, you think about other solutions, and it really is a part of the solution, not the solution necessarily itself. it has to solve a pain point, right? Or it has to be part of a solution of a pain point. I thought that was an interesting perspective.

Andy: Yeah, it’s been overhyped. Which is unfortunate because I think there are many use cases right now that are emerging for AI that people are going to dismiss because of the overhype, mostly coming from the vendors who were trying to increase the valuation by adding a word AI to the end of it. And I was talking to somebody today who was looking at search technologies and I said, “There’s one company I’m talking to that AI is the every other word out of their mouth.” And they said, “This is the real differentiator.” And he kind of rolled his eyes and said, “You know what? I’ve actually told them when they come on site and meet with my team, stop talking about Gen AI.” Because it’s not resonating. You’re saying things that don’t exist today and he said, “I’m looking for practical use cases.” And I heard the same thing you did. People were asking me at the event, “Hey, how are people actually using AI?” And I want to hear how other people are doing this. So I would suspect that’s the number one reason people came to the event from a content perspective was just to understand what other people are doing and not doing with AI.

Brian: So we heard from Alice Peregory from Atlas Sign Industries. She talked about getting change management right, which continues to be something that a lot of folks are struggling with. She said one of the biggest traps of change management is trying to change too much, too quickly..This is really the thing that holds a lot of this digital transformation back is change management and failure to align. So taking things one step at a time was her advice. And then Andy, I heard something really interesting. Nick Ostergaard. Nick from Toyota Material Handling. He runs their digital solutions function. He talked about leveraging Japanese business practices for digital. And also he shared with me some things that were really insightful about learning how to manage cross-culturally. And he cited these concepts from Japanese business practices which have to do with, going to the source and gaining alignment building consensus. So even before you walk into a meeting, the decisions are already made and you’re doing these things one by one and then continuously improving. But one of the key things he said that was interesting that he learned and working with Japanese management is that, they’re continually asking questions questions questions questions, questions and it feels like they’re never making a decision. He said what they’re actually doing is not testing the business case as much as how, how resolute you are about making the case. How does Nick feel about this, almost earning into their trust. And is he really convinced this is the solution. And it’s like it’s almost like traditional B to B relationship kind of management where you’re earning the trust. He’s earning the trust of the Japanese management until he realized that it took him a lot longer to get to a solution or get to an agreement on a path, a course of action. Once he realized it, he changed his approach. Now he said he’s getting to decisions more quickly from management. So fascinating sort of insights and cross-cultural management, but also some lessons for for US business.

Andy: It’s something like a commitment due diligence, they want to know that you’re actually committed to them. If you make an argument and they ask a question and then it collapses. Well, you weren’t very committed to it. Plus honor is very important in Asian society. And so if you lie once, okay, that’s one thing. If you lie twice, three times, then, if you’re committed to something you’re not really committed to, then you’re consistently lying over and over again. So it’s kind of interesting insight.

Brian: So we had a debate: “Can you avoid driving into the data ditch” was the theme. This is a highlight of the entire event. And we had a great group. We had a group of practitioners, two teams, Andy, I sided with team inevitable, meaning that it’s inevitable. You’re going to end up in the data ditch. You have to prepare and assume that you’re going to have to clean up data later. We had very seasoned practitioners who’ve been in it for a long time. And we use this analogy of the water treatment process Andy, let’s talk about this for a second.

Andy: It’s very similar like water comes in raw and it comes out the other end pure and distributable to people who are going to drink it. Well, data is not terribly different. It comes in in a raw format. It gets treated through filtered and normalized and standardized and eventually stored. Here, we have a picture of a water tower in an environment that’s more like an ERP or a PIM. And it gets distributed out to internal customers and external customers. And the debate was, can you fix the data when it comes in raw or must it go through this expensive time consuming normalization standardization process? And the fact that the default is it has to go through that standardization process. However, if you do enough upfront thinking, this is the point our team made, you can actually fix a lot of this stuff at the source. And in fact, Nick told a really interesting story about telematics at Toyota Material Handling. He said, look, we get all this data from these forklifts about how they’re being used, when they need to be fixed, etc. Well, that data, if we didn’t actually do a lot of thinking upfront about how to organize and standardize that data instead of calling one thing 73 different things, we wouldn’t be able to use that telematics information. So they did the work upfront and now they have this multi-million dollar telematics business because they did the work on the data upfront. But it is possible to do this as opposed to resigning yourself to taking all the data and it’s always going to be dirty and we’re just going to have to fix it. So this picture of us on stage here.

Brian: Team inevitable said, hey, this, we’re getting data from so many sources that we just have to acknowledge the reality that, the data is not going to be clean ever we’re going to have to deal with this and it is different for a Toyota that owns all the channels and they, they’re a closed loop so they can do that because they own the data they own the equipment or, the platforms and things so it’s much easier for them. So we asked the audience to vote on this and we had my highly, highly accurate decibel meter and we asked the audience to clap and cheer and well, who won? Well, I didn’t win again.

Andy: Yeah, for those who can’t see the picture here. It’s important to show there are six people in front here. We’re all standing next to one another – me and my team on one side Brian and his team on the other side and we have a big box around with an arrow pointed at it saying “winners” and it’s not just a winner’s the debate. We’re winners in all of life.

Brian: So this was close though folks. I mean, we were very close on the voting and I think there’s an acknowledgement from both teams that the problem probably will persist. We talked about AI and we talked about, the fact that AI will has the promise to solve some of this, particularly normalization, but it’s not there yet.