Transforming Tradition with Dwayne Doshier from Shopify - EP021

Speaker A: Foreign. Uh, everybody, and welcome to the E Commerce Masters Podcast. Today I'm joined by Duane Doer, partner growth architect at Shopify. Dwayne has spent more than 25 years in E commerce consulting and agency leadership, and now he's helping to guide Shopify's partner strategy for the B2B space. We're going to be talking about Shopify's growing capabilities for manufacturers and distributors, how, how the platform is evolving to support complex B2B use cases, and what advice he has for leaders thinking about digital transformation. I'm, um, so excited to have Duane on the show today. Duane, welcome to the E Commerce Masters podcast.

Speaker B: Oh, Ethan, thank you very much for that introduction. Happy to be here.

Speaker A: I mean, listen, we've kind of, we both of us have been around this block a long time. We've breathed a lot of the same air in that process and you just have such a depth of experience. I was so excited, uh, to get you on the podcast today for all of our listeners to kind of hear about that. Um, you know, if you wouldn't mind kind of starting off, um, maybe, maybe take us on a little bit of an origin story of how you got started in the e commerce industry and then made your way, you know, all the way to Shopify.

Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you for the kind words. You, uh, kind of embarrassed me a little bit. But yeah, my origin story. I went to engineering school and then 90s at the university of Missouri Ralla, which is now Missouri Science and Tech. I have a degree in metallurgical engineering and I started my career as a plant engineer for Dwyer Instruments, uh, which I think is now part of Omega. Uh, right after engineering school I went back to night, uh, school and took Microsoft certifications. And a big part of my job as a very young and inexperienced plant engineer was to start to Internet work the machine tools, uh, you know, bring CAD to more prominence in the factory floor, uh, train the, uh, you know, train the factory floor on just more use of digital rather than manual programming. But I saw, ah, in the late 90s and the early 2000s, so much digitization happening in manufacturing, uh, whether that was in steel plants that were rapidly reducing their workforces and moving to computer controls, uh, whether it was, you know, uh, cnc, machining, uh, really just the digitization of the factory floor and the late 90s and early 2000s, uh, inspired me to do more. And uh, you know, after taking Microsoft certifications, uh, I started interviewing with, with various technology, um, companies and consulting companies. And Ernst and Young took a chance on me. At about the time Ernst and Young was divesting their consulting practice to Capgemini. So I spent seven years in the strategy practice of both Ernst and Young and Capgemini um learned so much about consulting and client service and in the late 2000s went to work for a smaller B2B agency in Chicago, got off the road and uh, focused almost exclusively on digital uh solutions for manufacturers and distributors. In 2011 uh, I was offered an opportunity to join Acuity Group. Acuity Group at the time was the largest independent uh commerce agency in the country. I think we're about 600 people at the time. I joined in 2011, uh, in 2013 we uh, uh roughly in 2012 or 2013 we uh had an initial public offering and then in 2013 uh Accenture bought us and they were one of the largest uh the largest digital acquisition they'd done at the time. They since went on to acquire Born, you know uh, they went on to acquire other companies uh but they really acquired Acuity Group for our capabilities in Adobe uh experience uh Manager which previously was Daycq, uh Hybris both before and after is bought by SAP and we became effectively the commerce implementation arm of Accenture Digital. In 2013 uh roughly 2015 I went to work for Insight Software and Insight Software was uh, a really feature rich platform that was at feature parity against SAP hybris in the 2013, 2013, 2016 time period. And I stayed there for a couple of years and uh, after that I uh joined Guerrilla Group and Guerrilla Group uh, was just a fantastic Chicago based agency. I can't say enough about uh, Brian Grady as a CEO and an owner. He took a chance.

Speaker A: Oh come on, let's, let's talk say bad things about Brian. Let's do it.

Speaker B: Under Brian's leadership, you know I joined late 2017 and um, you know from 2018 to 2022 and I stayed. Uh we are winning multiple Partner of the Year awards for Adobe. We are the primary and premier implementer of Magento Commerce for B2B. In that time period we also won an SAP Pinnacle Award which is just very rare air for a services partner. Especially you know us at a few hundred people compared to the GSI at tens of thousands of people. Uh we were just I think really setting the standard for what commerce implementations look like in that, in that five year time period. Uh in 2018 we were bought by Wonderman Thompson which was part of wpp. I served on the transition team for that and really just kept evangelizing what, what commerce could be for uh, uh, a large ad driven business. Um, I left in 2022, took a bit of a career sabbatical and uh, joined Shopify in late 2023 in a role that uh, serves both our enterprise tech partners but also our GSI and global agencies. Uh, I do have my hands on a lot of things here at Shopify including advisory on some of our biggest tech partners like um, Google, Oracle, Manhattan, uh, but also serving directly our largest GSI's like Accenture, Deloitte, EY, and uh, also recruiting the uh, next generation of B2B agencies to uh, a fantastic place that is Shopify.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's awesome. And I joke about Grady. I love Grady. Um, most of the time. Most of the time. Yeah.

Speaker B: I wanted to say, I'll take a moment and just say that my career is built on the back of just fantastic teachers and mentors. All the way back to my uh, EY and Capgemini days. Just really these senior leaders showing me grace that I didn't recognize at the time and mentoring me and really helping me understand um, what it takes to be a successful consultant. I think about Chris Dalton and Matt Schmelz and Paul Weinreuth at Acuity, who were just leading a fantastic rocket ship of a company and provided so many career opportunities to people. Um, you know, a few other you know, professional mentors including Bob Jingris who's not with us anymore, but he was a fantastic mentor. And then Brian Grady, um, you know the personality, the fiery personality is he's doctor in Sin City. And uh, he really showed us, you know, showed uh, a lot of people uh, what a fiery spirit could produce.

Speaker A: So I mean if you think about just the Acuity coaching, um, tree kind of thinking about in NFL coaching terms, the amount of people that have splintered off that and have gone on to thrive throughout the industry is pretty fantastic. And that was a very exciting time to be in the business like as that was kind of emerging and transforming. Um, and I think one of the things it's like we're seeing manufacturing and distribution go through a similar transition right now with all of the Industry 4.0 kind of AI IoT devices. And I'm a big believer that E Commerce is kind of the tip of the spear for that industry. 4.0 of that fourth industrial revolution. If you're not taking advantage of E Commerce as a manufacturing distributor, you're not going to all the other things. What does it even mean if you're not enabling your salesforce to go bigger and drive more revenue.

Speaker B: So yeah, I would agree with that. Let me react to that for a second. I sometimes hear that uh, E commerce is commoditized. And uh, commoditized perhaps means common or easy to deliver. And I don't believe that at all. I was obviously involved from commerce from the early days, uh, when it was just custom systems, through the monolith era of Hybris and others, to perhaps the headless era. Now we're in this pseudo composable era. Uh, so. But again, you know, only the kind of the early adopters, uh, were doing commerce in the early mid 2010s. There was still a lot of businesses that weren't doing that. And as more, you know, more companies maybe adopted it, they didn't really invest in it. So they have lagging channels, underperforming channels, or you know, some businesses were just busy printing cash because they had such a big moat around their business. They didn't feel the need to start to digitize, much less transformation. But uh, I can tell you here at Shopify we have, you know, many, many conversations every day with B2B sellers of all sizes who maybe want to rebuild a channel, reinvigorate a channel or many are just starting a new digital offering for the first time. Family business time. Yeah, family businesses that have been owned and been very successful are now being transitioned to a generation that was born digital. And they see the opportunity maybe differently, um, than their, than their parents did or the family ownership. Um, but I don't think E commerce is commoditized at all. Even when you talk about Internet of things or what's going on with AI, this is, this is very, very new. And uh, there's nothing commodity about chat, GPT and what we're doing with that.

Speaker A: And uh, no, no, no, it's very interesting. I mean maybe if you have very simple E commerce use cases and, and you know, Shopify is actually fantastic at that. If you have simple use cases, right? You've got simple products like your, you've got simple things that fit into easy boxes, right? Like Shopify is fantastic for that. And instead of commoditization, it's maybe speed to market, right? Like if you have simple things like you can get to market much faster than you could previously in the past. But if you have complex B2B use cases, deep ERP integration, CPQ integration, if you've got to have, you know, significant role based, you know, systems and 3D visualization and um, you know, thing after thing after thing, I Think um, you know it's, it. I just think that it's like we're just going to find. I do believe that this is the next industrial revolution for manufacturing and distribution. I was um, I did a keynote um, a couple days ago, uh, for a software for an ERP user group. And um, the conversation was that the average 23 year old college graduate um, was 5 or 6 years old when the iPhone was launched. That's going into the workforce today. You've got about five or six more years until uh, the people entering the workforce will have had an iPhone since birth or an Android phone, a smartphone since birth. And we're seeing a significant amount of uh, transformation especially and we're seeing 200, $300 million organizations that still have very like that are not digitally mature at all. And so um, I just think that um, they are ripe to do that. And what you're seeing is transfer of power, um, in terms of maybe the next generation is taking over, maybe it's a family owned business and the third generation is taking over and they're 40 years old and they've had an iPhone since they've been a teenager and they feel it and know it and they've grown up on Amazon. So I think that's only going to continue um, to move forward. So Shopify is really known as a B2C powerhouse. They own the category. Um, and so I guess what, what drove Shopify to invest so heavily in B2B and they are making a significant investment in that. You know they're, they built out an entire sales team specific to B2B. They um, you know, and how has that kind of changed or shifted the company's, the company's focus?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, Shopify is in service of entrepreneurs. Our founder Toby, you know, started Shopify to sell snowboards and you know, 20, 21 years on now, uh, you know so much what he thinks about is how to make it easy for anyone to you know, get started on Shopify in 30 minutes. So people, you know, um, that are in their golden years, we uh, want to make it very easy for them to start a website in 30 minutes and sell their pasta sauce. Right. Uh, we want to make it really easy for someone who's selling you know, T shirts online to be able to come to Shopify and just expand their business. That's what Harley, our president did it and you know, so as our platform uh, you know, embraced entrepreneurs and then entrepreneurs became successful and started having physical retail uh, stores and then became more successful and had multiple Locations and then more successful and had distribution centers. Our platform grew along with that. And then uh, in many, in many cases these types of retailers, uh, uh, and B2C businesses needed to embrace B2B for wholesale motions, perhaps to sell large volumes of bulk goods, perhaps to sell uh, excuse me, their, their outdated or their remnant inventory into wholesale channels. And so the B2B product started with Shopify plus which was based Shopify plus more capabilities to you know, handle multi location, uh, you know, multi inventory type uh, of type of capabilities. And as our you know merchants were successful with us, uh, we continue to really uh, you know develop that platform, that part of our platform expanded, expand that part of our platform while doing it all natively on Shopify rather than acquiring a B2B capability. And so now advance to more recent years. Uh you know we are very uh, dominant in commerce. We run 12% of North American commerce. There's uh, only one marketplace company larger than us that's uh, doing anymore. Um, and we recognize the, the opportunity to um, you know, continue to build capabilities that never allow, that never not allow. But we don't want merchants to leave us for lack of capabilities. We want to continue to grow and serve the ever growing needs of, of uh, entrepreneurs that become successful retailers or that build B2B businesses and Shopify continue to invest uh, in uh, the plus product. Uh so we have both, you know we have software primitives that uh, that recognize B2C customers that might be anonymous versus B2B customers that are logged in. We are recognizing how to support complex build to sold to ship to type of capabilities. Uh we're building out uh fantastic native capabilities around cpq, uh order on behalf of assisted selling, uh, type of motions. But also uh, we have just a fantastic app ecosystem technology partnerships. We have over 10,000 app partners in our app store. Um and then you know some that are more you know really tailored for Shopify, meet really high quality standards are in the built for Shopify program. And we continue to build out you know just fantastic partnerships with CPQ companies like Logic, which is now ServiceNow, right or with you know leading B2B search capabilities like Coveyo. And so um, no company can, can do it all. So we uh, we, we prioritize how to best serve these B2B sellers. And we're uh, we have some, you know, some platform opportunity. We embrace partnerships to do that.

Speaker A: That's great. And I think you know we had a similar journey of where you know we're working with our direct consumer clients and they started asking Us, you know, one at a time, started asking us, hey, we've got this, you know, home, homegrown buyer portal that we built, you know, to kind of power, you know, uh, some online ordering. But we can't keep it up anymore. It's too expensive. We've got to have 10 developers keeping this thing up and we just don't feel like the return is there for it based upon modern E commerce stacks. And so that's how we drove into the B2B market was kind of indirectly. But I find it very fascinating and I love the problems, the challenges that you come across while doing that. Um, um, I've also been like. I also love seeing the evolution of Shopify Plus. I was one of the first, I think eight agencies to take a look at it. Harley blew a bunch of us up to Ottawa where the office was at the time and you know, uh, snowy day, like uh, Jamie Sutton was there and um, you know, it was like ah, it was very much the early days of ah, Shopify. And I've been excited to see, you know, kind of that, that evolution. It is kind of funny though. One of the things that's interesting, um, you know, is that um, you know, one of the, one of the. We often say one of the reasons these projects fail is when you treat um, B2B like B2C. Right. B2C. Right. You just can't do that. And so it's funny because we'll come across um, clients that maybe the CEO, um, saw Harley on Jim Cramer talking about Shopify and they'll come and say, hey, let's get a 2999 Shopify plan and try to do that. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need Shopify plus and the B2B version, like this is not going to work for your customers needs overall. So you need to make sure, um, that if you are interested in Shopify that you get to the right. You've got to get to the right version of that that has the expanded uh, features and functionality.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's true Shopify. I will say that, uh, we don't have different versions of Shopify. Shopify is one Shopify. When uh, when a merchant or B2B, you know, uh, company chooses Shopify, you are, you're getting all of Shopify. Now we do have various plans at various price points that, that match the business needs and you know, the financial capabilities of the people of the companies that choose us. Um, but there are some capabilities uh, that are, you know, gated if you will to Shopify Plus. And that includes our B2B capabilities. We also have an enterprise tier plan that provides um, a few additional um, technical capabilities that large enterprises need and also comes with a lot of support time uh, from a variety of experts, technically business like myself and others. Um, and so we, we, I think we do a very good job of matching our, our pricing tiers to, to the value delivered. I'll also just react to what you said about B2C versus B2B. I think we've heard it in the trade show circuit for five, maybe 10 years that B2B should be more like B2C. Uh, I would like to violently fight that wherever possible. Uh, there are some things where B2B does need to be like B2C and that's around, you know, just world class experiences delivered at speed, uh, you know, high performance, you know, very low, uh, error states. Uh, you know, you really have to handle the basics. And, and you know, the basics being, you know, presentation of product price in the correct place, telling the correct brand story. Um, but you know, personalization and B2B is not like personalization and B2C. Right. Uh, you know, B2B, the buyer is known. There's a lot more factors that we can personalize on including you know, contract and availability and things like that. Um, Shopify does uh, provide the same capabilities uh, to all of our merchants. Meaning when we build a feature and release a feature, uh, in general release, it is broadly available to everybody at the high performance levels that our most scaled merchants receive. And so for example, our checkout, uh, in an uncustomized State can handle 42,000 checkout starts per minute per merchant. That's, that are doing that. So we can handle the flash sales of some of the largest B2B sellers in the world. B2C sellers in the world for brands like Supreme. Uh, we also provide world class security, world class bot protection, world class fraud protection for those types of merchants. Uh, but that scale is also available to the smallest B2B seller who's only transacting a few orders per hour or maybe even a few orders per day. But that, that scale is there and it's ready, the security is there and it's ready. Uh, and when features work for one merchant, they work for them all. And uh, but then when it comes to, to B2B of course things are, you know, many of our uh, you know, launch sites are highly customized with you know, extensive, you know, extensive catalog customizations, extensive price tiers, CPQ, uh, headless is pretty common in B2B to be able to deliver uh, you know, brand experiences, uh, off Shopify and then the checkout and uh, in purchasing experiences on Shopify. Um, so no, B2C does not need to be like B2B. Long story.

Speaker A: No, no. And that's, that, that is a huge kind of misconception and it's interesting. It's something that we um, you know, that we, we talk about ad nauseam like because you know there's a lot to learn from Amazon, right? For uh, uh, someone who's not digitally mature or not in the e commerce industry. Right. There's a lot you can learn by starting to look at what Amazon is doing. Right? But B2B is not about being Amazon and quite honestly these companies, they can't be Amazon because Amazon has more innovation in one hour than many of these companies, manufacturers and distributors have in five years. Right? And quite frankly B2B E commerce isn't about being like B2C but it is about being informative to your customers, providing all the information about your products and specs and about, about creating visibility. Is it available? Like how long does it take to ship? Where is it shipping from, like which warehouse does it, you know, has availability and then allowing your customers to do business with you whenever they want to do it. And I think that um, that's the big part of E Commerce that they can lean on. Um, if you're selling products and somebody remembers it at 10 o' clock at night that they needed to buy that, um, being able to log in and just do it versus call in the next day and talk to a salesperson is going to significantly uh, is going to help, is going to help grow your revenue and, and create stickiness, you know, for, for your customers, you know, overall. So you know, we could talk. I feel like we can talk.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree. There's a lot to be learned from Amazon from uh, you know, how in, in China, uh, wherever the marketplace models are there, there's a, there's a lot to be learned primarily uh, around product availability, findability, uh, price. Um, but it can also oftentimes be a race to the bottom on price. Right? You can become you know, very uh, uh, you're selling on price primarily perhaps on, on inventory, uh, a bit. Um, but you're not you offering up the value proposition that many manufacturers and distributors have, which is deep industry knowledge, deep understanding of their buyer, deep understanding of the trends in the industry. Uh, you know, I've never seen Amazon consult on upcoming regulatory changes. I see that all the time in B2B manufacturers and distributors.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Right. Uh, uh, you know, I, I see, you know, the value in B2B when a longtime buyer walks into the physical branch location and knows the person behind the desk and has known them for 20 years and that person behind the desk understands the history of that buyer's business and maybe even understands a bit about their personal situation. Um, you know, and they, they can make some really informed choices about what products to recommend. Or perhaps I extend this buyer a little bit more credit because I understand like his personal situation, a little challenge, maybe as healthcare challenge or something's going on his family. But he's been a good buyer for me for 20 years and giving him an extra $5,000 credit that he's going to pay off in a week. Uh, that's the kind of proposition that, that these, that these B2B sellers can uh, can provide in the branch location. I think a lot of that can be extended digitally too. Right. Like there's so many more ways now to, to integrate the knowledge systems inside of B2B2B. You know, manufacturers and distributors, uh, you know, fitment or customer service, you know, the ability to, to connect your, your inside sales desk and what, the activity, the quoting activity or the, or the, the trouble ticket activity to what's going on in, in commerce and make relevant offers regarding, you know, parts for your preventive maintenance program or make relevant offers around job sites. And I even see, you know, some manufacturers and distributors starting to really take in public intelligence around building permits or some things that are happening in their city and then make proactive offers that, you know, we'd love to do site safety analysis. And I was like, why would I do a site safety analysis? I'm not selling product because I'm about to sell a whole bunch of new ladders and hammers and earplugs and whatever and uh, you know, and of course there's some of the larger, you know, plumbing and construction distributors, uh, are better positioned to do this. Uh, but again the, the, the smaller, um, the smaller uh, sellers again have so many value propositions that they can win with and they can present those value propositions digitally. And many times, you know, lead to a transaction that is a lower cost of sale, potentially, uh, a lower cost of service later if, because there's higher confidence that the part's correct. These sorts of things are things that I think about a lot and have conversations on every day.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, um, you know, I mean, I get in different rooms talking about B2B. Um, you know, I was recently, I'm a part of Klaviyo's partner advisory board and um, was involved in, you know, in their recent partner day, um, part of the K Boss summit that they had. And it was hey, like we're using Klaviyo in B2B scenarios. I know that it's much more direct to consumer focused and it's not a one to one, but there's a large, you know, there's a large opportunity due to the integration and the data points and the, and all the data that you know, that they're able to, to collect, to be able to leverage that on top of platforms like Shopify, to be able to do things. And it's funny, I still get pushed back. People don't abandon carts on our site. And I'm like, uh, that's bullshit that people abandon B2B carts every day. Now you don't want to start emailing them the hour after because it might take them all day to build a $10,000 cart, um, and go through the process. But um, those are areas where you can kind of say, hey, how do I adapt this from B to C over to B2B um, and make that work.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I'll take a second to talk about Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a fantastic partner. Shopify. Uh, we invested in Klaviyo very early on before their ipo. Uh, we continue to support them. Uh, they are just a fantastic, fantastic um, enterprise partner for us. And while some might think that Klaviyo is B2C and they recently announced a B2C CRM, um, they have so many B2B capabilities and I think about beyond just the cart abandonment emails, what about if a manufacturer distributor could uh, just have a continuous drip feed of meaningful content that recognizes the buyer's relationship to the seller. That could be something as silly as almost a birthday card if you will, or an anniversary card. At the one year, three, three or five year points after they first register or make their first product purchase or you know, start to really connect uh, the consumable items for a large piece of capital equipment so that uh, you know the main, the seller knows that ah, that this buyer just bought a, you know, a large water pump, uh, at one year do you need to be doing preventative maintenance? And if so, is that the grease and the gaskets and the seals and you know, year two, is it the belts or year five, is it the, you know, fasteners? And oh by the way, you need a torque wrench to make sure this is bolted to the floor the right way. You know again B2C a lot of times does, does well at this and recognizes the loyalty and kind of the timeline. But I think B2B sellers have this real opportunity to recognize the lifetime journey that buyers are on with a seller, uh, you know and then the know the journey through the equipment history and how it might wear and need to be replaced but the journey of the buyer itself from perhaps you know, a project foreman to a procurement middle, um, manager to a procurement officer potentially to a C suite role that is in you know, incredible position to uh, select partners and select spend. And you uh, know partners like Klaviyo are just in a fantastic position uh, to use the data they've collected to inform that. But they also have world class capabilities in terms of, of messaging. And I think this is where I say that, you know Klaviyo is an example of a partner who's built a first party integration to Shopify, meaning we've co built it together. And so uh, the app integration is available from our app store. It can be installed in just a few clicks in a few minutes. And so if um, B2B sellers wanted to get going with an email program, it's on the order of minutes or hours, not months and years. And you know, having operated in the competitive ecosystems, Marketo, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud among others, it's uh, Klaviyo and Shopify are highly differentiated in that way.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean I love it and I think you know one of the things is that people put so much focus into actually launching a buyer portal that they kind of run out of gas at the end where they run out of budget or that you know, everybody's, it's like building a custom home, planning a wedding. They're just, everybody's just worn out you know at the end. But you've got to figure out how to activate it. And those tools like are so fascinating you know using um, you know uh, KDP like to be able to predictably see what products are people buying and like in what order and if this, and if one of your customers has bought this product and we know, you know many customers buy this product after it next like proactively recommending that in a drip or connecting for their order anniversary or even having a simple video of the CEO of the company saying thank you for hey, you've reached the 12 month mark of transactions. Through our online system. There's so many opportunities to create sales touch points um, that allow your salespeople then to do what they do best is actually selling, like to leverage these tools in this data effectively.

Speaker B: Yeah. So Ethan, we're starting to get into it right here. I'm going to, you know, share a few things here, uh, you know, in the past. Well one, I want to react to what you said about organizations run out of gas, uh, when I was leading the strategy practice at Gorilla, uh, and I was, you know, spending every day creating roadmaps, business cases, capital asks, uh, you know, believable practical plans that a C suite could get behind and that guerrilla or other partners could implement. Uh, I almost always included a bit of time to just rest and pause and reflect after the implementation is done. That's uh, both to give time for the organizational fatigue to go away, uh, but also to just pause and see what we learned here and then apply that to phase two. And then six months or a year later take another organizational pause and just really understand that organizational fatigue is real. Um, and that needs to be addressed. That's a part of the transformation companies go on is better recognizing that it's a people driven transformation, not a technology driven transformation. And so as an early preview, something I would suggest, uh, manufacturers and distributors do is when you create these roadmaps for change, build in some time for rest, reflection, ah, renewal, resetting the motion to, to something else. And don't assume that the plan that you created in year zero is going to be effective at, you know, 18 months or, or three years. And it takes no more than looking at our economic conditions in the United States, uh, recently around tariffs or regulatory changes to understand that things can radically change as a result of, you know, societal change, political change, financial change.

Speaker A: Uh, so what kind of pause, like, do you recommend for that? For a company thinking about going through digital transformation? Like, like, is it a month, is it a few weeks, Is it, you know, how, how do you, how do you look at that? Um, and first I do want to back up and say you should have a launch plan to activate your customers with this, educate them and get them, get them going and get some momentum going before you actually pause.

Speaker B: And yeah, I think, I think companies need to get clear on what transformation means to them. Are we just transforming the way we interact with customers or present our value proposition or transact. That's kind of one type of transformation. Perhaps there's a sales transformation which could be all encompassing around technology and organization and offers. Perhaps it's like quote to cash or lead to cash. But uh, I think one thing that companies should think about Is that, uh, an effective Chief Transformation Officer will be out of a job in three years and if they haven't gone through your transformation, let's call it in three to four years and you still have the same transformation team transforming, you're probably doing it wrong, right? Uh, in my view, uh, that, and that's not to say that that leader can't do other things in the company. But if you're taking, you know, many, many years to transform your business, uh, are you, are you truly transforming or is it, is it something less than that? Right. I think transformations oftentimes need to be, um, bold. They need to be radically different, they uh, need to be radically well funded. Um, otherwise it's more of a evolution. Right. I think sometimes when you think about revolution, which can happen very quickly in governments or in people, um, that's really what we're looking for for transformations. We're looking for rapid change on the order of single digit, low, single digit years, not this ongoing thing, uh, that's always happening. Um, so I think it should be pretty short, it should be pretty constrained, it should be pretty focused. Um, scope creep is, is, uh, is a huge barrier to transformation. Side quests can be a huge, huge barrier to this. Uh, you know, Toby has talked about SideQuest publicly over the, over recent years. Um, and so, you know, real focus on what you're transforming and why and what does success look like at various stages of maturity, um, matters. And if you're not hitting those measures of success, take a pause and understand. Did we have the wrong measures identified or we're giving it the wrong effort? Do we have the wrong technology? Do we have the wrong people? Um, type, uh, of things. Yeah. Also, I just want to say something else that, you know, Ethan, you shared a bit about, you know, understanding buyer behavior and like, what to do about it. Um, you know, I grew up in an era where, you know, analytics programs, you know, programs overall, not the software, uh, were often underfunded. They're kind of the last thing you did, you know, after user experience testing, uh, you had to, you know, implement base analytics. With Google Analytics, maybe you had, you know, a different product. And then of course you had to, you know, generate through ports and people had to use them. They had to know where to go. Look, uh, we're in a different era now at Shopify and we have AI products that allow anybody with access, uh, to just ask things conversationally. And we produce, you know, amazing insights of what's happened and also great recommendations about what to do about it. So a B2B seller, uh, rather than going to a specific, you know, pre configured dashboard, uh, and you know, only getting a little bit information, you can just use natural language to say, you know, what, what products are, you know, selling quicker than normal and there'll be a report like that, right? Or you know, what, you know, where is my, where's my site traffic? Uh, you know, declined unexpectedly and they'll be an instant report for that or you know, what product should I present differently? And we have answers for that in natural language in multiple languages. And so it's just, it's just radically different uh, that you know, uh, even a uh, C suite executive, you know, very, very far distanced from the site experience, could log into Shopify and use natural language and ask almost any question and get an answer. And that's pretty, that's pretty wild. Or, or the other way, like if you have an idea, uh, for, for what you think Shopify might be able to do and you want to stand up a very specific site, you know, we have AI tools that allow rapid creation of sites on the orders of minutes. And you could be you know, trialing this new experience to, to an internal user base or perhaps to a kind of a POC customer, uh, in just very short order. On things that used to take months, uh, I've seen our vibe coding efforts internally too. I've sat down with a few of my peer partner solution engineers in the, in the course of less than an hour I was seeing websites that used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars of implementations and uh, it's just wild what uh, Shopify can do and the value delivered and the speed at which we do it is um, it just has me breathless every day.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, you mentioned um, earlier you were talking about some of the partnerships and integrations. You mentioned ServiceNow and CPQ. Um, you have a good example of how people are leveraging things like CPQ and ServiceNow within uh, the B2B world.

Speaker B: Well, I can maybe give you that. While I do support that partnership, I think one that really opened my eyes early in my Shopify journey. I was probably my first month and I sat down with one of our partner solution engineers and just asked, can you show me what it takes to, for you to build a demo site? And he said sure. And he fired up the demo site and had it created in under five minutes. And he went to uh, our app store and selected Salsify's app and installed it. And in another five minutes we were flowing product data between Salsify and Shopify And I think I said out loud, what is this black magic voodoo? Because I'm thinking about my PIM history where that would have been a six figure project just to get it installed and configured, much less the data uh, to be relevant uh, that we were using. And it just blew my mind about uh, the speed at which some of our um, partners uh, now enable rapid uh, implementations. Right. Uh, I think about some of the things. Then back to your question about CPQ. We of course have great CPQ partner Logic which is now ServiceNow. But I also see some uh, agencies just building really compelling CPQ solutions on Shopify. Uh, we have uh, an agency partner Tyfi who has uh, you know, built out a very compelling parts accelerator on uh, native on Shopify. It uses fitment data from Aces and Pies. Uh, and we have many, many merchants who have adopted that. Um, you know again it's a purpose built type of solution for automotive, for automotive aftermarket parts. Uh, but we have other partners as well who are building out uh, you know, similar, you know, similar solutions for piping or for construction. Uh, I have another partner IM Digital who has built one for furniture and uh, for furniture, uh, B2B and it, you know, just really fantastic around you know, kind of sizing colors, uh, you know, room matching and so um, there's a place for both native solutions on Shopify that are purpose built and then larger CPQ solutions that might also be used in offline channels or in non Shopify channels, which is what you might see from Logic and ServiceNow.

Speaker A: What about um, you know it's funny, um, what when you're talking to manufacturers and distributors who might be considering um, you know, maybe something like Magento still like, still comes up in the conversation, um, or other, you know, or uh, other platforms. I want to be mindful who we name today. But what is your case for Shopify in today's market for B2B? Um, you know, in terms of you know, versus other maybe more complex platforms.

Speaker B: I don't think we have to talk necessarily about the complexity. We can just talk about Shopify being all native. So when Shopify builds something, we are building it natively. We do not acquire other companies and then integrate their technology. Uh, we sometimes do acquire companies for you know, just great world class talent in areas of need and high potential. But Shopify builds Shopify which is different than the, than the course that uh, that perhaps a Salesforce took by buying cloud craze for B2B and then trying to integrate that or what Adobe took by you know, acquiring a Magento which is built on PHP and then trying to integrate it to their uh, Java based stack, which still hasn't happened. Right. And so again, just like, are you talking about single technologies which allow you to have a single type of team supporting a single technology, uh, or are you managing multiple technologies? I think about some of our competitors in the composable space and they're very formidable and they have very good capabilities and I would never want to cast any sort of fear, uncertainty and doubt on anybody. Um, but, but again it's, are we piecing things together, um, you know, purposefully or perhaps less than purposefully, or are we trying to do everything natively? And I think, I think the native pieces of this lead to conversations about lower total cost of ownership, uh, at the license of the, of the software, whether it be at the integration layers, whether it be in the organization that you're using to maintain it, whether that's internal or with a service partner. Um, and then it gets to matters of extensibility and can we customize the platform or extend the native capabilities of the platform in ways that are highly maintainable? Um, then again, to keep pulling the thread, uh, with Shopify, um, I see a lot of conversation, I hear a lot of conversations. I'm in a lot of conversations with very senior leaders of B2B organizations and they're tired of the patching game, the managed services, um, upgrade game and sometimes upgrades are actually full replatforms, right? And with Shopify, I'm in conversations all the time where prospects or active merchants are talking about Shopify as the last replatform. Because we are truly multi tenant SaaS, we continue to build product capabilities natively in the platform and there's just, no, there's no such thing as a, as a point upgrade or a patch or a full system upgrade. That's, that's, that's just not what we've been and it's not where we're at.

Speaker A: It's, it's, it's crazy. I mean, and quite frankly that's why we divested of our magento practice. You know, back in 2019, I was just sick of the patching and the upgrade and just the reactive nonsense that went along with that. And so, um, you know, uh, it definitely um, you know, has a huge amount of technical debt and just kind of almost wasted cycles of just like doing work that nobody wants to do. Um, you know, no, no engineer developer wants to do like, you know, do that kind of work day after day after day. So um, you Know, I like to

Speaker B: share an answer with that. You know, um, when carrier, I've heard, you know, carriers, leaders, uh, talk about this uh, last couple of years about why they selected Shopify and uh, they had other competitors um, in play as they were trying to choose the commerce platform. And ultimately uh, they chose Shopify. And one of the reasons that they chose it is they had to make a strategic bet. Do we hire a team of 100 developers with varied skill sets and then replace 20% of them a year for natural turnover and do this year in and year out, uh, and then maintain our own roadmap and maintain all the things that you know, that have to be maintained other than the software itself, which still needs to be maintained in the integrations? Or do we bet on Shopify's 4,000 developers to do this? Right. And so the bet was kind of easy. Like you know, is there still a lot of financial considerations? But you know, really the key question was is do we have the capability to identify, you know, you know, develop and retain our people or are we going to make a bet on you know, Shopify's, you know, 4,000 world class developers and uh, in world class infrastructure. And when it comes down to that, without the price tag actually being applied, the decision looks very, very easy.

Speaker A: So how does Shopify think about the role of partners? Right, agencies like Groove Commerce, like us, in helping mid market, uh, manufacturers and distributors be successful on the platform?

Speaker B: Yeah, well I mean come from the 25 years in the service environment, I see the role of partner and uh, for a lot of things it's the early stage advisory of you know, what should we do? Not even around commerce, but like what's the role of a channel? Like what's the, what does our organization look like, what's our digital strategy? What's our overall business strategy? And you know partners can provide some of that third party objective view about what's happening in the marketplace, uh, in the industry, but also in you know, um, tangential or uh, complementary industries. And then I think helping, helping uh, merchants and B2B sellers make a good choice of what are the technology investments. And then you know, of course the implementation and the launch is huge. And then what happens after the launch? How do you help grow that B2B seller's business? Or even if their business is somewhat flat on the growth, how do you help them grow profit in uh, somewhat of a dormant revenue business? So I think there's a lot of different roles for advisory, uh, that partners can provide implementation services that partners can provide I think a lot of times there could be fractional, uh, temporary headcount or long term partnerships. And I think that's really the key for some, for some agencies to think about is like what is our value proposition at this, over this long lifetime of a journey of a customer? Is it really about the implementation or is it more about the long term advisory? Is it, is it both, Is it something else? And I think that's the opportunity that agencies and even GSI is going to really be thinking about is the where to play, how to win. And the where to play is things like, you know, uh, what region are we playing in, what tech stack, what industry? Uh, you know, the how to win could be with our talent, it could be with our geographic coverage, it could be with our economic models around, you know, time and materials or flat fees or fees at risk or revenue share or profit share. And I would just really encourage any of the agency leaders listening to really spend some time thinking about the where to play and how to win. Um, because it's not just about the implementations. There's so much more value that our partners provide that Shopify is just uh, not in the business of providing. We're in the business of providing world class Internet infrastructure focused uh, on E commerce. Um, but the advisory that I just talked about, um, absolutely comes from, from partners.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean from our point of view, you know, we really think these B2B projects are all about building consensus, building an internal coalition. You've got to have buy in, right? You've got to have buy in from, from the sales team because they're kind of scared of shit in this about, hey, you're trying to get rid of me or you're not going to pay me commission on this. You've got to have buy in from the marketing team and buy in that they can add E commerce specific expertise like into their stack into their group. You've got to have buy in from the CFO and from the finance department to be able to grant access to new customers to this in a timely manner, to not have kind of emotional friction in terms of waiting a month to get in there. You've got to have buy in from customer service team that can help assist, you know, with the ordering. Right. And then operations has got to be able to fulfill the orders in a timely fashion as well and be able to get that data, you know, back up to the end user when it's shipped and what the, what the status about that is. So um, we tend to really do a three day in depth, in person, deep dive at our facility, um, and try to get representatives from each of those groups in to be able to, you know, uh, keep them. We have a hotel here actually right above me. And so it's like we, you know, we kind of bring everybody in and we eat and we work and we have lots of conversations. And especially in an age of remote work, many of these folks haven't even had a cup of coffee or a beer together. And you're in your, you've got to build that kind of, that consensus between the teams for this to be successful. Because if just the uh, head of marketing wants it or the head of sales wants it without anybody else, it's not going to be a successful project generally or it's not going to achieve what you're looking to. Absolutely.

Speaker B: That's also a uh, suggestion, advice, if you will, that I would offer to manufacturers and distributors is that that technology projects fail in my experience, not because the technology is bad or ill fit. It fails because of lack of alignment, lack of incentives. Right. And so uh, you know I, I believe that the job of a CEO in most companies is continuously stating the strategy both internally and externally. It's going to get the best talent available to do that internally and externally. And of course it's about minding the money, the revenue we have coming in or in a startup type. It's, it's about the funding and the burn rate. Um, but we need executives at the C suite level, preferably the CEO, uh, really championing this and reinforcing at every moment that uh, uh, we are transforming digitally. Here's what it means to the company, here's what it means to our teams, here's what it means to your team, here's what it means to you as an individual. Uh, we need other C suite officers reinforcing that message. Uh, we need directors and mid level managers making that real for their teams. We need grassroots support, uh, of people who are willing to stand up and do it and scream from the mountaintop. That's kind of what I just described, is the perfect world. But it could also operate the other way where perhaps there's somebody with an entrepreneurial idea in a company who really wants to plant their flag and say I'm going to do this, I'm going to do a POC with my customer and then drive that to success and earn the right to go ask for, for more and take it back up the chain. And because it's a very different story for uh, someone perhaps at the grassroots of the Organization to go to the CEO and say I think we need to do E Commerce pause versus I think we need to do E Commerce. And I have five customers already doing it and here we are. So that coalition building uh, and the allies that, the allies that form up inside companies are a big part of the transformation success. So I would encourage manufacturers and distributors to really be thoughtful about do we have the people to do this? Are we seeing the entrepreneurial high energy attitudes or do we have the classic Debbie Downers that say oh that can't work here. Ah, you need to transform spirit and uh, transformative agency partners uh, that can do that.

Speaker A: You know it's funny like when you, when you say that like prior to founding groove, I worked in a, in a, in a, in an Internet role at a, at a $6 billion international organization. And uh, I pitched a digital transformation project and um, went all the way up um, to the executive committee and I think I was 26 years old in there in the boardroom with all the wood and in rich Corinthian leather chairs and um, pitching this project. And it became the number one, um, the number one priority project in the organization. And uh, I just remember sitting there and uh, they had hired Microsoft Consulting Services to come in and do the project against kind of my, you know, some of my opinions. And um, uh, there were a hundred consultants in the room kind of billing, you know, in, in $2002 of you know, $200 an hour. Uh, and you know I'm like I am so fucking fired like with all of this. And I think we, they spent $2 million to build two binders. And uh, you know, I was like give me six people and a pizza budget and a room. And um, you know we, we had our first release in 90 days, um, you know, with, with you know, coming out of that. But it can, it can happen either way. It can come you know, top to bottom or it can come bottom up with, with these types of uh, of transformations.

Speaker B: So yeah, I'd encourage, I'd encourage again like the, the, the industry side sellers, B2B sellers, listening to this, uh, to really think about what they want in a partner. Uh, there are, you know, different partners have different capabilities. Some, some partners are super experienced in the technology, uh, but might not have a lot of experience in the industry. Uh, they can go very, very fast. But there might be a risk point there of having not seen it before in your industry. Conversely, there's partners, uh, perhaps with less experience on Shopify but that have done complex B2B in competitive ecosystems and now are pivoting their business to shopify their agency services and they can just provide world class, um, you know, uh, industry vertical advisory type of things. It really depends on, you know, what you want. Of course the blend of both is, is the best. But that type of Venn diagram of deep industry experience, deep Shopify experience, 25 year practitioners, uh, you know, practice leaders that have done it, that's kind of a difficult Venn diagram sometimes.

Speaker A: That's a unicorn. That's a unicorn.

Speaker B: I mean we, it is, you know,

Speaker A: we find, and it's funny, we like, we will take on projects that may be a rescue type project and they will have worked with a very reputable, very reputable partner. But that partner didn't ask enough questions. Right? They didn't. Or maybe they took exactly what they heard from the customer verbatim and didn't probe any deeper. And what ultimately got built meet the business need or didn't meet the use case. And some of that is the lack of potentially a digital maturity on the client side and not understanding what to say. But it's also on the solution partner that may not like that may just be um, requirements, uh, writers and not necessarily consultants. And there's a difference in having a true consultancy versus somebody that's just going to be well what do you want this to do? And it's like nobody asked why or how or what it all means. And so that's right.

Speaker B: I've been a consultant for 15 years and kind of thought myself at least above average, uh, you know, good but maybe not great. And I was working at Coca Cola and leading a big part of the uh, the B2B go, um, to market definition for them globally. Uh, as part, you know, I was employed a large GSI at the time and uh, the sponsor at Coca Cola would always ask the question what does success look like? That's really the only question he ever asked. And I took so much from that. And then as I moved forward, uh, both at Acuity, later at Guerrilla Group, I kind of became known for that question too. And it was always shocking to me how many large manufacturers and distributors would say no one's ever asked me that question before, but you ask it in every meeting. And I think that that's just one of the key things where people can find success is to stop and ask what does success look like for our company for this E commerce program, for this technology, for my team, for myself? And how does success change over time as the maturity curve changes or my experience Changes. So if nothing else, if anyone remembers on this podcast is just ask yourself, ask your teams, ask your partners, what does success look like? And then just really, really pressure test that. Like, uh, you know, taking a narrow view. Does it change over time? Like, you know, in the short term, success is maybe launching the platform, right? But if you're thinking about, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue that's actually built on the backs of a bunch of individual buying companies and a bunch of individual buyers. And so that what does success look like? Sorry. The question then leads to questions around like, what jobs to be, what jobs need to be done and what does success look like in that job? And if we're successful, what do we need to be successful with next? And if we're not successful, like what gets us back to success? So just this like virtuous flywheel of what does success look like and why and when is just a rich, rich area for consultants. It's a rich area for companies and it kind of flips the script on what consultants are known for, which is answers of it depends. Well, of course it depends.

Speaker A: I love it.

Speaker B: Let's back up the street a little bit and let's just start asking questions about what does success look like. And then that builds understand on the agency side, that builds understanding. It builds empathy for your customers. And if you can get into these workshops you're talking about, of course the C suite and the senior executives are going to dominate that. But really good consultants watch who's not answering. And they set up the conditions in such a way that the 30 year employee who's been silent for the entire time can let it all out. And like when they let it all out and they take that chance maybe for the first time in their career, and they say, well, success actually looks like X differently than Y. That the C suite said, that's where the friction happens. That's where the tension happens. But boy, that's where the transformation happens is when the rank and file, if you will, you know, the branch out who's been there for 30 years says this is all good. But so, and so the number one customer of the company actually wants X. And then if the CEO is smart, he'll say, well, how do you know that? And create that safe condition. And then that 30 year branch employee, you know, talks about the deep relationship and right there, right there is the path. It just cuts, it just cuts through all the consulting, it cuts through all the kind of the hand waving and gets right to it.

Speaker A: We ask a similar question of like to close your eyes, let's take some deep breaths. Like, you know, I became very spiritual and started doing yoga and grew a man bun during COVID Right. So, you know, it's like, let's take some deep breaths and, and like close our eyes and let's kind of visualize and you know, what are we going to, what do we want this to look like in three years? How do we want it to feel? Right? How do we want people to feel about this? And what do we want our customers to feel about this? And so, you know, we recently had a 25 year uh, employee, um, uh, just let it all out, you know, for about 90 minutes and it was fascinating. Everyone in the room was like, like vigorously taking notes and you know, their co workers had no idea. It was just like they were the front line to so many customer interactions and they had so many frustrations of disconnected things and manual work and it was just like. And how that has badly affected their, the most important customers. And so, yeah, I really appreciate that point of view. Like you've got to, what does it look like? What is success? I really appreciate that comment. So, uh, well, Dwayne, I really have loved, love, loved having you on the podcast. Uh, I mean I feel like we could talk for eight hours, uh, and go through the history of E commerce, but I always like to close with a question. Um, and so for those manufacturers and distributors who are just starting to maybe explore digital transformation and think about B2B E commerce, what's one piece of advice that you would give them, um, as they're embarking on that, on that journey?

Speaker B: Yeah. One that I've been giving, uh, ah, offering to people the last couple of years is that there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the early days of E commerce. The early days, let's call it, 10 plus years ago, when manufacturers, distributors would stand up a site that was one size fits all, they would try to get all of their SKUs onto this site, even if they've never sold them. And every, you know, unless they could have, you know, the, you know, be able to sell the C and D skews on the site that they've never sold before, even in a branch. And if they couldn't have every capability that is available in the ERP or in any homegrown system, they couldn't launch the site. Um, please consider not doing that. What I would consider, what I would suggest that manufacturers and distributors should do is pick off, you know, if they have a million SKU catalog why don't you pick off your 5000 most profitable SKUs and sell that to your 5 most profitable customers who will never ever leave you. And if you actually open up a POC program to them where you're asking them for brutal feedback daily or weekly, they will give it to you. And at the end of that POC period, you know, you will have customers who engage with you almost daily giving you just brutal feedback and high levels of praise as well. If you get it right. Uh, they're not at any sort of risk churn and you're going to learn a lot through that POC period. And the POC doesn't have to be a year, it could be 90 days, right? And in that POC, provide the white glove service that you would want. You know, make, have office hours available, you know, give, go on site and give some of your best, most loyal, most discerning, most skeptical buyers. You know, the white glove service about, about uh, the hey, we're transforming commerce. We want you to provide feedback and help us design this and then really, really act on that. And so I, I think you know, consider doing a, you know, rapid POC at low investment. That stands us up for your most loyal customers. Transact your most profitable SKUs. So you're being profitable at the SKU level, the line level, the order level, the company level and uh, then drive your platform forward for there. Don't think about this as a 1 year implementation, think about this as a 6 to 12 week implementation with a limited customer set, uh, and pick the customers wisely, uh, that are champing at the bit to provide this type of feedback, use these type of digital services and then have humility, uh, to accept the most brutal feedback, you know, have the empathy that they've uh, been under pain and wanted this for a long time. And then when you're successful and the likelihood of being successful and what I'm just talking about is way higher than a long time implementation. Uh, celebrate, celebrate that internally, celebrate that with a customer. Uh, the day you transact your first digital order, uh, celebrate that widely, the day that you hit a certain revenue goal with a customer or a cohort, celebrate that wildly. Um, and don't just take it as business as usual. And uh, everything I'm describing there to you right there is actually my own journey in E commerce. The days of being in these war rooms, the day that a well known 150 year old paint company sold their first can of paint online, that was still high watermark of my career and um, more than five years ago. But, um, I'm looking for those moments all the time. Shopify is looking for those moments all the time to help the entrepreneurs in these small companies do what I just described, or these entrepreneurs in large companies do what I describe and unlock, you know, the value of E commerce. People can build their careers on commerce. I think they can build their careers on Shopify. I'm doing that right now. But, um, but our merchants can do that too. And. And I'd say, you know, just. Just get after it. Get after it in a humble, empathetic, collaborative way and, uh, and learn from the mistakes of the past.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Fantastic. I love it. I love it. Dwayne, thank you again for your time. Uh, if any of you listening have a desire to learn more about Shopify, uh, please just give us a ring. We're happy to help you on that journey, get you introduced to our folks over at Shopify that we work with all the time. Um, and, um, I will look forward to speaking, to hearing from you all in the next episode. Thank you so much. So much. Thank you, Dwayne.

Speaker B: Thank you. Appreciate the time today.