This week Andy & Brian share some of what they learned while hosting the Master B2B Summit in Chicago, including:

– Who owns the customer experience at different companies?

– Where should your next budget dollar be spent?

– Who should be the next hire on your team?

Plus answers to those questions and more…

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Brian Beck: Welcome to Friday 15. This is Brian Beck here with Andy Hoar with Master B2B. We have an exciting session we’re going to talk about today in 15 minutes. We’re excited to share today a recap of our Summit, our Mindshare Summit, Andy I’m excited for this topic today. We have these great gatherings and then what we forget is that there’s a ton that was learned and exchanged and taken away from it. So we’re going to share a little bit of that today. So let’s get into it. So, no breaking news today because we’ve got a lot to cover and share. I mean, gosh, Andy, what a fantastic event. When we started this whole thing, Master B2B, we talked about it really as a thought leadership series, a series of Un-Webinars where we had debates and what it has truly evolved into is a community of B2B e-commerce executives. And I love this quote. I’ll read it for those of you listening on our podcast, a community, this is from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, he’s a former member of the UK House of Lords. He said, “a community is a place where people know your name and miss you when you aren’t there.” And this is what happened. And it was really a representation. We had 100 plus executives, subject matter experts from all kinds of different industry leaders. Sloan was there, Zora was there, Dawn Foods was there, Owens Corning, Direct Supply, Fastenal. It was just an incredible list of executives that were sharing and learning. And some of the feedback has been amazing. We’ll share that a little bit later, but it’s so different than a traditional conference it’s just a different type of event that we have here. So Andy, any takeaways on the attendees, anything from a community perspective?

Andy Hoar: Well, when we threw that quote up we thought maybe it was a bit aspirational, but as you pointed out, it turned out to be exactly correct before saying, where’s so and so? And I’m glad I came because I wanted to see so and so, and then there are people in the hallway interacting with one another, pointing to their side, talking about things, saying, hey, remember the last time we were here? So there’s definitely a continuity about what we’re getting out of this. And to your point, this is unlike anything else out there which you’ll see from the photos here in a moment, so when we put people in rooms, these are real discussions. These are not fake discussions like I’ve been sadly a part of in the past at other events where it’s all kind of scripted and contrived – not here. I remember one of the ones that I was a part of, I actually hosted it. I had a couple ideas about where I was going to go with it. And I posed one question and 50 minutes later, we went in a different direction, people loved it. And it was, and this is the term I really started to use somebody pointed it out, we were crowd sourcing it. I think that’s exactly the way to think about it. And people come to this event to crowdsource problems, and more importantly, solutions.

Brian: And we’re leaning heavily into this as an organization and as a community because I remember back in my days, Andy, when I was a VP of E-commerce in the consumer side the most valuable input I would get was typically from other VP’s of E-commerce. It was from other folks, other practitioners who would try different things and succeeded in some and failed in others. And I would learn, and I would bounce ideas off of them. And we created that sort of at scale. We held this event at the University of Chicago’s Booth School at the Gleacher Center, it’s a graduate school of business in downtown Chicago. What a fabulous place to do this because it was really, it’s, I think it changed the mindset of folks when they come into a space like this and they see Nobel laureates on the wall. And a classroom setting and really just a different type of setting than what we typically attend is a conference. I think people really enjoyed that. And we got consistent feedback that the venue was fabulous.

Andy: We had the whole floor. Attendees got a private moment. It was like you said, hundreds of nobel laureates. You see any section of it. It goes for hundreds of feet in both directions. Yeah, it’s incredible. And so you walk from one in the other and you’ll be passed on the left or the right by names of extremely famous people. Those of you who are Oppenheimer fans, funny enough, I’ll just tease you with one of the Nobel laureates was the father sadly, the father of the German atomic program, Hindenburg, whose name was actually hanging right behind us. And if you saw Oppenheimer, he was in the movie and it’s like, I didn’t know he was at the University of Chicago for one year. So pretty wild.

Brian: It’s fascinating. And the views were great and the food I thought was excellent and we got good feedback on that as well. So really great location. Beyond the location, it was really about the connections. And we had this session, it was started called table topic connections. And this is one of the highlights. A lot of people wanted even more time at this. What we did was we had all these, all the folks sit at round tables and we alternated and we talked about different different aspects and different questions. Your table, you talked about where is your next dollar being invested in digital? What, what was the answer there? You had some interesting conversations.

Andy: We had a lot of answers, which was also kind of interesting. There weren’t one or two that everybody consistently said. There were some that stood out. User experience was probably number one. Number two was data. And the number three interestingly enough, and this is one of those sign of the time things where we forget we always think that everybody is talking about AI and implementing brand new technologies and upending their companies when in fact there was a bit of a snake still swallowing the food? And it takes a while for it to pass through the system. The number three answer was headless. We’re spending our next dollar on headless. And I thought, wow, isn’t that kind of like two or three years ago? But the reality is many companies on their digital maturity, which we’ll talk about in a moment are still a bit laggard. Yeah. So that was number three. And then there were a bunch of others. I just looking – customer acquisitions, CRM, personalization, search was another one that came up and PIM, our favorite.

Brian: Yeah, that’s a huge topic. And it ties into the first one you said, data. My table topic, Andy, that I was facilitating was, Is Amazon a friend or a foe, which is always, always a hot topic. Everybody wanted more time. A lot of answers around frenemy, meaning that it’s necessary particularly most manufacturers. They knew they needed to be on Amazon. But surprisingly, I got quite a few answers about – Amazon isn’t relevant to me. It isn’t relevant to my customers, my products, my products are too complex. And I was still shocked by that because when I look at in my company Enciba, we work with some very complex products, electrical products, huge HVAC systems, they’re selling on Amazon. So I think there’s still with all the penetration, the hundreds of millions of Prime members and all the search starting there. And everything that Amazon is doing in B2B, which I know firsthand, it’s relevant to almost every single category.I was still surprised.

Andy: Well, the standard that Amazon is setting, a lot of the interaction, the expectation, these things are certainly relevant. So, maybe, they can quite get that part of it but it is surprising, it’s surprising to think some of me would say, Amazon’s not relevant to our business, when, in fact, it’s clearly relevant on the customer experience side. And I found that it’s more relevant than they realized. I was in a presentation once, several years ago, and somebody was talking about Amazon. It was an industrial company. He said, “Ah, we don’t care about Amazon.” And I just happened to look online right immediately prior to the meeting. And I found some of their stuff was on Amazon. I said, “Well, what’s this?” And they said, “Well, that’s not supposed to be there.” I’m like, “Well, it is.” It’s a whole conversation about that.

Brian: So, yeah, it’s necessary. A strategy is absolutely necessary for every B2B company. I don’t care if you have complex products. It’s still important. So, yes. And then, Jared ran a roundtable around who should own the digital customer experience. That’s a hot topic. We had a whole session on that in some of our executive roundtables last spring. I mean, the answers that we heard there, what were they?

Andy: Two paradoxical answers. Everyone. And no one. The two most consistent answers. But perhaps the most surprising answer was no one said the CEO. Now, they mentioned that, “Oh, this digital thing is too tactical. The CEOs concerned with other issues.” But I think that’s a little surprising and disappointing because maybe the word “ultimately” should have been added in there. But why wasn’t that even in the conversation that ultimately the CEO is this customer experience?

Brian: Well, you and I are agreement, violent agreement that the chief digital officer should actually be the CEO? So, yeah, I was surprised to hear that too. One other hot question, and so hot that we turned around and asked our LinkedIn community this, “Who will be your next hire for the digital team?” This is one that Carrie facilitated at the Summit. And again, people wanted more time on this question when we surveyed our LinkedIn audience, it was fairly consistent with what she heard. 49 percent said next hire should be data analyst or data scientist or analyst. This theme of data keeps coming up in B2B, PIM systems. I’m annoying you here because you need to pay attention to this. Data scientist analyst number one hire 49 percent followed by product manager for a digital functionality or capability, 24 percent. And then behind that digital marketing and web developer, just developer period. So, I think what’s fascinating to me here is the analytic side. The data and the analytic side continues to be a major theme and a need amongst these folks. And you heard it in your next dollar discussion too?

Andy: I did pretty consistently. It’s the one area that scares companies the most because they don’t have a firm handle on it. And when you don’t understand something, get a strategy. I also often said that I think it’s something that differentiates companies. When you peel everything else away, you can hire people, you can acquire resources. You can’t create custom customer data. Your customer data and everything about it is what separates you. You know what they want. You know when they bought from you, you know what they’re anticipating. You know all these things. And I don’t know, I think a lot of companies are missing the ball here on data.

Brian: So then we broke out into round tables. We had seven of these executive round tables. These were smaller groups of 15 to 20 folks that we broke out into smaller classrooms at the graduate school. And we covered a bunch of topics. We’ll just hit a couple here. I facilitated a conversation along with American Eagle on your dirty data is no excuse. Again, we had standing room only. We had actually turn a few people away because we didn’t have a room to seat them in this round table. So, we need to expand this one next year, I think. But the discussion was fascinating because we had distributors, big distributors, and big manufacturers in the room. And there was a debate going on about who should be responsible, for example, for customer and product data? Should the manufacturer be providing better data to the distributor? Does the distributor because they’re using it in their commerce channels, they hold a lot of responsibility here, even to tell the manufacturer what they need, provide back data and analytics around what they’re what they’re optimizing their digital shelf, all those things? So, I joked that we could have manufacturers and distributors line up on either side, give them the water balloons, the let them go at it. But it was a debate. And I think we ended up in a happy place, which was that there’s responsibility on both sides. But it’s clear that manufacturers need to do a better job with the data and getting it to the distributor so they can be more effective in selling on every other channel. So, it was a great discussion. So, real practical solutions came out of it too, people talking about how they leveraged and improved their own data, how they leveraged systems to do that, et cetera, even AI came up too? And how was yours?

Andy: People talked about digital slush funds. And a few people in the room actually set up funds internally where they could tap into things and say, we need to, we need to make a quick decision, we need to make a quick upgrade. We can’t wait for a process and procedure and capital investment and all that kind of other stuff. And so, that was fascinating because some companies had it. Everybody else was jealous of the ones that didn’t. Everybody kind of agreed that it was a pretty interesting way to go to keep a separate set of funds to make some quick decisions and be able to react to the market.

Brian: Interesting. I’m curious, and maybe we could do a whole another Friday 15 on this, but curious how you justify a slush fund. If I’m the VP of eCommerce, how do I get a slush fund? And the business case to build that, we should do a session just on that to get into that, because the pressure we found in some of our research, the pressure to show an ROI on investments is faster than it ever has been. So, if you have a slush fund that’s sitting there, it’s kind of like a venture capitalist not putting money to work. It’s just sitting there, and you’re not showing any ROI on it, well, you’ve got to do something with this VP of eCommerce, what are you going to do?

Andy: What it was was it was “use it or lose it” money that they had allocated, but that’s specific one. So, through the year, they were going to set up meetings to discuss how to use it, but they were going to use it for sure. By the way, slush fund was my term. Nobody else called it that.

Brian: “Unallocated growth funds or something”, right? So, we also had these awesome case studies. We heard about a dirty data problem and how he addressed it. And he made some significant strides. He shared some data around his improvements in how both the sales team was using their system now for finding products as well as improvements in conversion rate and overall use of the website, penetration of e-commerce to total sales. We had some great case studies from Zoro, Snap-On, Sylvia shared some really interesting insights. Owens Corning, Dawn Foods, and Adrian at J.J. Keller shared a story of how she onboarded onto Amazon and avoided risks and avoided channel conflict and a bunch of other things. So, that one generated a lot of conversation. Again, these were conversational sessions. Like folks would share their problem. People would comment on it. Some people asked for solutions. Sylvia asked for some solutions. It’s Snap-On. And the group, full of 100 executives here weighing in on their problems and helping them with the solutions. It was really great. I felt a little bit like a talk show host in there, Andy, you and I?

Andy: I was always getting microphones in front of people, but yeah, this is, in many ways, probably the highlight of the day because people get a chance to kind of let down their hair and ask some questions, get some feedback. But who wouldn’t want to have 100 people giving you advice about how to solve a problem? Where can you get that?

Brian: They were very practical and people were suggesting specific solutions to solve problems specific software solutions and hires and approaches and mistakes they made. And we had a lot key themes emerge. Now, John Pehler, the former CDO of Rexel, did pre-Summit interviews. And then we heard a lot also during our Summit. So John did that research as a part of our leading up to the Summit. And we pulled a lot of key themes out of this. And we don’t have time, obviously, to cover all themes. Those of you watching the video here can see some of those themes, but we’ll just cover up on two of them. And one of them was digital maturity still varies quite a bit. We’re seeing some manufacturers that don’t really have any commerce function yet, but then you’ve got distributors who are far along the path. Any comments on digital maturity, Andy?

Andy: In fact, we just published a report about it. We’re doing a Webcast next wee where, we are revealing part two in the three-part series about how to think about digital maturity and how to advance through digital maturity. So, yeah, it definitely varies widely. And there’s no right or wrong answer to any of this stuff. Some people are far along with say, the organizational design and less far along with data. Nobody’s superior in all areas and nobody is 100% backward in all areas. So that’s, I think, the takeaway from that.

Brian: Well, and the framework we’ve created for that, that’s all, by the way, even after the Webcast next week, it’ll be available on demand on our website. So folks can download that and watch it, but we have a whole framework, which doesn’t just talk about tools, it talks about organizational structure and hiring and things like that, that so people can assess, you can assess your own digital maturity and figure out what you need to do to move to the next step. We did that in partnership with commercetools. So another key theme was all about AI and AI is not yet foundational, but it’s an opportunity as a differentiator. One of the roundtables I ran, Andy, was about AI and we heard some very practical ways people are using it. A lot of it is around content – product content, getting product content started, some normalization cases, some very specific tools were shared with the group at the roundtable talking about hey, I’m using this solution to do this; where it’s falling down video creation, for example, people said, hey, it’s just not working for that, even though you have Sora and other solutions in the market, it’s not really ready for, at least for advanced product content in a creating videos. Any thoughts on AI?

Andy: Yeah, not perfect, but very promising. I think the very promising part makes it well worth your time because in some areas, it’s a new process.

Brian: I think people need to be working and experimenting with it. So we got some incredible feedback, yeah, I’ll share a little bit of that with the group here, a little bit of, I guess self promotion, but it’s really not us saying it? I mean, VP of eCommerce at Catchmaster, which is a leading producer of professional pest control products, Elias, he said, “an incredible experience filled with valuable insights, innovative ideas and engaging discussions on the future of B2B e-commerce.” Rob Richardson over at Miller Knoll, which many of you sit on Aeron chairs, they’re a big furniture company. “Great atmosphere and conversation”, he left wanting more. Denise Foley, EVP of e-commerce, the ULE group, they’re a distributor of electrical products. “So many learnings, crowdsourcing of challenges and solutions, meeting peers and getting inspired, a brilliant event.” I can’t wait until next year. And by the way, it wasn’t just practitioners that were given the event Kudos. Also, James from Credit Key, James Wallen the VP sales, “hands down the best event of the year for sharing best practices and open dialogue.” Thank you guys for saying those things.