Trends & Wins in B2B eCommerce with Sarah Falcon from B2B E-Commerce Association - EP020

Speaker A: Foreign, everybody, welcome to the E Commerce Masters podcast. I'm very excited to be here today. Live coming from Shoptoberfest in the amazing Brooklyn, uh, borough of New York City. We're in a German beer hall. Uh, I am wearing lederhosen for the very first time. I think that they had to kill two deer to sew these lederhosen together to make them that big. And. And I have an awesome guest with us here today, the amazing Sarah Falcon, the SVP of global marketing for the B2B.E Commerce association, which is a whole mouthful to kind of get out.

Speaker B: Yeah, I apologize for that.

Speaker A: Um, but I did not want to use the acronym just because not everybody knows what that is yet. And so, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, thanks for having me. It is a marketing problem. That lengthy title. Not the name, but we got to work with it for now.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's great to have you on, um, um, and excited for you to be here to talk about the association. And you're based out of the Baltimore D.C. area.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we're. So am I. I'm in Baltimore and we're doing this in, In Brooklyn.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I will have to have you up to the groove space at some point and, and check that out.

Speaker B: That'd be cool.

Speaker A: Um, so, you know, my, um, knowledge, you know, uh, let me take it back. Just a, uh, little bit of this crazy story. And this super tall guy comes wandering into my office one day back around 2010 or 2011, and he's like, B2B E commerce. B2B E commerce. B 2B E commerce. And at that point, um, we were probably about three or four years old as an agency. Uh, we were just really getting our wings as, uh, a Magento partner. We, I think we had just won an emerging young partner award from Magento. And I'm like, what in the hell is this guy talking about? What is this crazy guy coming into my Office talking about? B2B E Commerce. And it turned out to be Justin King. And so here, uh, we are probably 15 years later, uh, and basically everything that he said has been coming to fruition, uh, over that time. So that was my introduction to, to, uh, I guess him now becoming, after a couple of different go rounds, he's now, um, uh, part of the association. And so, um, I've always loved and followed him. And so, um, we've just been excited to learn more about what's happening in the whole world of B2B. And so, uh, here we are today. And um, to be honest, we've been focusing a lot by accident, by accident we kind of started working with manufacturing and distribution. Some of it direct to consumer for them, but also some of it via buyer portals. And so uh, it's just been an interesting go around that this concept that I thought was crazy is now where I actually believe much of the commerce world um, is going to start heading uh, as we progress.

Speaker B: It's really interesting you say that. I worked with Justin King who is very tall. Um, Brett Sinclair who's the founder and also a partner is also very tall. Um, we just had an event in Australia and got to feel I'm five seven which I think is like tall, perfectly reasonable height but with 63 and 64 you feel small.

Speaker A: Yes. Um, and Brett, I'm not, you know, I didn't mean to uh, I didn't mean to, to not mention Brett. But um, you know I uh, you know, it. They are tall.

Speaker B: They're tall guys. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if there's a correlation but uh, but both great. And both have been in this space for a long time as you said. Justin's been talking about this for like 15, 20 years. The I met Justin, uh, working at B2X Partners where we were a um, consultancy for primarily distributors but also manufacturers going through digital transformation and talking about pretty much the same things that we're talking about right now, which is like change management, customer adoption, understanding that you're building E commerce not to build a platform but to serve your customers actual needs. Right. It's not about spinning up a web store that looks like Amazon or Shopify, but it's about like actually meeting your customers where they are. And that conversation was happening you know, um, eight years ago. But right now it feels so different in terms of m, like sort of market readiness and maturity and manufacturers and distributors really starting to engage with this concept of um, E commerce but also just like digital transformation, digital customer experiences and understanding sort of now the, the amount of change management and internal alignment in organization and uh, sort of ongoing selling and modifying based on how your customers are actually using digital and want to use digital in the future. So it feels like there's a, there's a, there's a different level of momentum now than there has been in any of the last 10 years that I've been sort of working with this and talking about it.

Speaker A: Yeah, you've, you've also been in the B2B world a long time. Right? Both as ah, up on the, on the, on the client side as well as, uh, you know, now on the association side. Right.

Speaker B: So, yeah.

Speaker A: Um. Um, you know, it's. It's an interesting. It's an interesting change. I know. Um, you know, we're. We're talking about it a lot. Um, you know, some, some folks we talk to try to treat, uh, B2B like direct to consumer. And that's like a huge misnomer that, that we're coming across. There isn't any training, you know, or events that are really, really specific to this. There are some events, but, um, you know, uh, but, you know, so it's, uh, which we want to get into. I want to talk more about the training, I want to talk about the events.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but it's. It's cool to see the overall evolution and the shift in the change. And I think one of the things that's also happening is that, that when people get out of their car to go in the office, like, and they just bought something on Amazon, they're not like, forgetting how they did that. And so there's so much bad m on the B2B side that creates so much unwanted friction. That, that's what gets me really excited about the opportunity. Like, you're really able to fix people's problems.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: You know, um, with this. Um, so how long have you been with the association? Can you tell us a little bit about, like, what the, what the association does and.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I've been with the association for about a year. Um, I've been working in B2B E commerce and B2B marketing for B2B E commerce for about 10 years. Um, and the thing that I learned, I was in D2C, sort of B2C, some omnichannel. I worked for, um, a beauty brand that was also selling to spas. So we launched a B2B E commerce experience, which was essentially an order form with custom pricing. Right. But I mean, it was like 2010, which is ahead of some, you know, some people. Um, so I had like a very, like, limited understanding of B2B E commerce. And then I sort of switched over from D2C and working brand side to working in consulting and B2B and learned quickly, like, how much I didn't know and how hard it would be to learn what I did. And I just learned through listening to conversations that Justin was having with manufacturers and distributors, um, Bob Lewis, who is, uh, currently at Impacts and was at B2X partners then too, who just like, really knew the space because then and now you can't really Google answers, you can ask ChatGPT like, hey, can you explain to me like an ERP's relationship with an E commerce platform? And you might get an answer that's correct, you might not. And you might really fall on your fe phase in front of a customer, which I got to do. You know, like my first client I was dealing with was pipes, valves and fitting. And it was like a whole discussion about like threading and making sure that you could sort correctly against threading. And I was like, oh man, like I'm not, I'm not in Kansas anymore and I'm like way over my skis. And so part of what the B2B association does is for like dummies like me is sort of fundamental training and education for um, for manufacturers and distributors to understand, like this is how E commerce should work within your organization. It's not about spinning up a web store. It's about meeting customer experience. And then there's also. We also have training and certification programs for vendors who want to talk to manufacturers and not say something like completely off base. Right? Like just even like not talk about their customers as consumers. Not you know, like not use any of the retail jargon. Um, so part of what the B2B E Commerce association does is education and training for manufacturers and distributors and then also for sort of everyone. I say like all the individuals and businesses in the ecosystem of B2B E commerce. So whether it's platforms or SIs or agencies or like payment systems. Right. There's a ton of people now that are in businesses that are touching B2B E commerce. Um, and then we have a bunch of education and resources and training and then um, events. We just did sort of our first big flagship conference in Australia, B2B commerce world APAC and we're doing one in um, Scottsdale in early November. And those are.

Speaker A: It's just a great time to go to Scottsdale in early November.

Speaker B: Yeah, I have no complaints for those

Speaker A: of us on the east Coast.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to get out. Um, and the big differentiation is that it's education focused and it's practitioner only content. Like the only people on stage are going to be people talking about their personal experience of driving E Commerce. Um, and we have like a manufacturer track that's distinguished from a distributor track. I know I was working at an SI for years and they were like, okay, our target customer is manufacturers. I was like, okay, cool. And then they're like in manufacturers and distributors and it just becomes like one word and I was like, these are very different businesses with very different problems. Right. Um, and then it's like manufacturers and distributors and D2C. Right. Like the list just like keeps expanding. Um, but there's a lot to be learned. And so the conference that we have coming up is going to be covering customer adoption, product content strategy, AI and yeah, tracks specific to like the challenges manufacturers have, manufacturers talking to other manufacturers and distributors talking to other distributors.

Speaker A: What I love about it is the voice it's creating within the industry. There are just so many, um, it's interesting how many companies that people don't know, um, uh, uh, how many companies people in the E commerce ecosystem don't know exist out there in terms of they're a 50, 60 year old manufacturer, 70, 80, 100, $250 million, uh, 400 million in size and they're out there like some of them are just making bad decisions at times. Right. Some of it could be just as bad as picking ah, a inexpensive cloud platform that uh, won't meet their needs. Right. Or they don't know how to make it meet their needs and they're like get frustrated and go through that process. Um, uh, they think they can just set a Shopify store up and use that. And Shopify does have specific B2B functionality. So I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, if you go through the right process, but they're just kind of taking something off the shelf and trying to turn it into a buyer portal or some type of online system and they maybe not even know what that should be. Yeah, right. And so, and then they get frustrated and then they just kind of throw the whole thing away and then they say it won't work for us. And so you know, I love the concept of the events, the training, the commentary. Uh, you've got a great podcast, um, you know, uh, that has tons of great content on it and so all of that is really important to get these companies trained up that have a very low digital sophistication.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: With that and um, you know they're uh, we've got to figure out how to get them, get, get them moving because as the generational change happens with uh, with their staff, they're not going to be um, that staff is kind of like digitally mature. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So their customers are going to want to buy from them in the same, they, they shop, you know, with direct to consumer brands and Amazon and all the, and all the other things. And so creating a path with no friction, with less friction. I think is, is the, is the key to helping them, helping companies win and stay relevant. Because I think there's going to be just um, people that are lost and going to go out of business.

Speaker B: Yeah, that really, that feels like more imminent than ever. And maybe that's part of like part of the change is Covid. Part of the change is AI and just like this feeling that buyer behavior is definitely changing whether we like it or not. It feels like we aren't totally sure yet what it's going to look like, but it's definitely going to change. Um, I think there's also like you said, there's just so many hundred year old family like privately held distribution companies, especially in the United States that are profitable. Right. Like they're, they're in business because they're, they're still like profitable and doing it. And there's this fear. I was talking to someone in a fastener company and the CEO was like, just don't break my business. Like you can try E commerce but just like don't mess up this thing that we've got like going for us for a long time. And that's a real concern. And there is this, I think I called it like the quiet divide between the C suite that, I mean I think Jason Greenwood said this. Like they may not even be buying online. They may literally like their wives may be the person buying on Amazon. Like they may literally not be buying online. And then they're just like they have a digital team and they're like, well the digital team will solve digital and it becomes like a digital project and uh, not a company project. And that, that split um, just sets everybody up for, for a business.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because it's got to be sales, it's got to be operations, it's got to be marketing, it's got to be finance. Like you've got to have all those seats at the table. Um, and like, and if you don't like the project will just fail. One of the reasons why I really actually like this, this part of the uh, of the industry is that you know, a lot of times it's championed by the cfo and a CFO is never going to underfund a project that they, yeah, you know, they'll stick it to the marketing VP or the marketing director, but they're not going to stick it to themselves in terms of underfunding the projects and like, you know, not getting them done the right way. So um, you know, I love that. But it is like there has to be all the legs of the of that, that come underneath of it for it to be success. Uh, we, I just got a call from um, from a company locally, uh, in the Baltimore area. And it's a hundred million dollar distributor, uh, you know, bought by private equity, um, want to push them into growth mode, become the portfolio company, you know ah, for, for that um, for that niche. Um, you know and they went and bought Salesforce ah, CRM and the salesperson sold them Commerce Cloud. Um and the uh, the Salesforce agency they recommended had never done a Commerce before and there were no functional requirements, there was no comps or UI ux, nothing at all to look at. And you know over 12 months later they have nothing to really show for it. And so you know that's an instance where like I just feel bad that they were kind of swindled and they're like well like this. The entire process like wasn't thought through. You know like implementing Salesforce CRM is very different than implementing you know, Commerce Cloud, you know for, for an organization. And so you know we would never implement Salesforce uh, CRM for a company. Uh, and so the CRM folks probably shouldn't be implementing Commerce Cloud unless m. They have a division or you know expertise in that, in that area and those kind of bad decisions are happening every single day.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, you know I'm going to keep talking about this until I actually do this. Um, I would like to map out a guide for um, the people and the businesses involved in an E Commerce like in a re platform or launching E Commerce and the compensation methods and the relation to each other because you don't know what you don't know. And you need to understand if you're going into E Commerce the first time that the partners, the platform picks, they do it for a reason that is like financial or political or both. And the right. There's a reason that all of these relationships happen. And if you are unaware of all of the dynamics that are going on and who's being brought in and why and their financial incentives then it's really easy to just listen to the person who sounds most confident and most sort of, I don't know, the best salesperson.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so let's um, let's talk a little bit about the event in November.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, so first um, year is the first year for this event.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Um, and so um, are you expecting a mix of, of ah, practitioners like solutions folks like platforms? What are you, what's the vibe going to be like overall?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we fortunately we got to do Sort of a, not a test run. But we did this conference um, in Australia and what we had was um, sort of a space for the vendors, the SIs and the platforms. And then the biggest cohort were the practitioners, so people working in manufacturing and distribution. Um, and it was a chance for them to network with each other and then also a lot of time for meeting with the vendors and having conversations. And again it was educational tracks. The first one was um, the event started at noon, but we had a masterclass about customer adoption, um, with Amber McDougall. And it started at 10:30, at 10:00. It was standing room only. And I was like, are Australians just a very punctual people? Is this something that, is this a cultural thing I didn't know about? But yeah, it was packed. And um, yeah, really nice response to that. Um, and so that's sort of what we're doing in the US with again more tracks about AI sort of digital transformation, um, and looking at the landscape at large. And also an executive track because like I said there's sort of this divide between how the executives um, sort of need to understand and ask the digital team for what they want and how the digital team should talk to the executive so that they're making sure that their KPIs are aligning with their, with their, with the executive and sort of the overall business goals. And you know, it's in Scottsdale in November. It's going to be beautiful. We're doing a women in B2B E commerce dinner the night before. I'm doing more and more about the women working in B2B. Um, because you know, manufacturing and distribution is very male dominated. And then like the tech and digital teams within those are also like a, you know, it's just a uh, minority of women. But the demographics are changing. Like the buyers are changing and your partners are changing. Like they're just more women entering the workforce and the trades and leadership. And so you, you kind of just need to understand like who they are and how they're buying and how they want to work with you and things like that.

Speaker A: So yeah, I think that's awesome. I think that's awesome. Um, there was a women in E Commerce event last night that Ariel from our team attended and she, she had a great time at that. So I love those types of things. Um, yeah, it's, ah, you know, I'm excited to go to the event. We were just becoming members of the association, so.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Um, you know, uh, for me, any way that we can kind of help and support the community around this. Um, and I'm actually working on a book called the B2B. E Commerce Blueprint.

Speaker B: Oh, cool.

Speaker A: That, um, hopefully is early Q1. So I'm in the, you know, going through editing that and, you know, we're beating that up currently.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But, you know, I think it's. It takes a lot to kind of build a community around something. And so, you know, my hope is that, you know, we get more and more kind of manufacturing folks and distribution folks and, um, you know, and the more you hear their stories over the podcast and things like that, I think it's super helpful for people to understand that everybody faces challenges when they're implementing something like this.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, we just heard this from an attendee in Australia. They're a fairly small, um, distribution company for boat, um, spare parts. Super specific. But it was just so nice to hear that these bigger companies are dealing with the same problems we are. We thought we were just alone and because we're small and we have these big ambitions that we're coming up against these, like, problems. But it's nice to hear and comforting to hear that everyone's kind of trying to work through these things together. And that part is just really nice. Like I said, I worked in D2C for a long time, and there's so much community around that and there's so much visibility. We knew what every brand was doing, what kind of campaigns they were running, what kind of platforms they were using, what kind of technology they were testing. There is so much covered in sort of mainstream and business news about what's going on. And for manufacturers and distributors, it's really. It can be very isolating because it's really hard to know what's going on outside of maybe your own vertical and your own sort of industry perspective.

Speaker A: Well, plus a lot of it's hidden, too, behind firewalls and passwords and all of those types of things. Um, one of the things that really fascinates me about all of this is the retention, marketing component of it. Um, and I call it that just because it's what it is. It's like people are building these portals and systems, and, um, they're not figuring out how to engage their customers through them to get it activated and kind of get it rolling. I was, uh, sitting with a $400 million, uh, distribute distributor recently, and they spent, you know, um, they spent seven figures on a. On a system that had, you know, 150,000 in revenue through it in the first eight months of this year. You know, and it's like, well, my first question is, you say you've got, you know, a couple hundred thousand customers in Epicor. How many are in the system? Like, how many of those have ever logged in? Um, you know, how many have placed, uh, an order and like there was no, no, uh, concept on that piece of like, they thought it, you know. And I, for me, I feel like you should easily be able to get a 10% of your revenue out of it just from like early adopters. And you know, I'm not saying overnight, but, you know, if you've had this thing a year, you ought to be able to like start like getting, you know, at least 10% of your revenue going through it, um, just because people don't want to talk to anybody anymore.

Speaker B: Right, right.

Speaker A: Myself included, by the way. But, um, you know, so that, that concept is something that like, like personally is like, I'm trying to wrap my head around how do we, people invest so much in these projects? They're kind of death march projects. They're expensive. Um, you know, there's friction. Like, even if it goes 100% right, there's, it's like planning a wedding or building a custom home, there's still parts of it where, you know, whatever team you're working with, whatever vendors, they're going to just feel the stress of it. And then people kind of run out of the steam and then, and then don't fully activate it. And so, um, we're really putting a lot of time and kind of brain power into, hey, what are all these different things that we've done across all these different clients and how do we put that together, um, to have more of a, you know, what's a jumpstart activation look like for this? If you, um, you know, if you have 200,000 customers, like, you know, how many, like, how do we get them to log into the portal? How do we get them, um, you know, how do we track, you know, who hasn't made their first order yet? How do we incentivize them to do that? Um, how do we, you know, use things like abandoned cart and stuff like that? And it's like, you can't, you know, um, I, I tell them you can't run an abandoned cart the same way you do for direct to consumer, like, because somebody might build their cart all day. Um, you know, but yeah, exactly. You can do a 24 hour notice. Like, who, who hasn't, who hasn't ordered in 120 days? Yeah, like, yeah, you know, who hasn't ordered in A year. Right. Like they're, you know, how do you win those folks back and kind of build, build a program to, to do that? Because you have all their data.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you know, how do you think about funding that at the outset? Right. Like who, who are the people and how, like how are you going to resource all of that? Because it's a new sort of bucket of work that needs to happen. Right. Like that's the other problem is there's, I don't know, I feel like sometimes there's this expectation that we'll get like, you know, 7% of revenue online in a year that's going to be like essentially free. Right. Like you paid for the site and then in return you get that 7% revenue. And it's just, I've never seen it work that like obviously great. Like I think Justin King said like 10 years ago, like if you build it, they won't come.

Speaker A: Like they, you've gotta, you've got to be active.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And moving them into it. But once you do, if you can get them um, their muscle memory of doing that, then it can really help, you know, spend you know, more time on your long tail customers and figure out how to move them up, you know, the lifetime value steps of, you know, of revenue. Um, but yeah, it's so interesting to see like how many people just build this and they don't come.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Overall, someone I spoke to in Australia, and I forget who they were, said, you know, we built a site and then they did a big push for customer adoption and they got to 85% in 18 months. And he was like, you know, that means we were too late. Like that we could get there so quickly means that we should have done this five years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, uh, you know, that's hard to quantify, but it's.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, some, some of these systems are super locked down. Right. That you know, companies say that we only want to offer these specific SKUs or you know, products. But you know, one of the other big challenges, especially for distributors is um, how do you put additional products in front of your customers that they don't even know that you sell? Um, and so m. I was having dinner last night, um, pre event here and we were talking to a distributor that had um, a ton of different divisions and sub companies and they've been in a process of trying to put that, um, you know, put that all together and the sales people have gotten pissed because like, hey, why are you taking this away from me? And it's like, they went back and looked because the systems were also separate. This person had actually been ordering from another salesperson within the same organization for these other products.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like, and didn't even know it. And so, um, you know, I think that there's just a huge opportunity to leverage things like AI with product discovery. And, you know, much like, there's been a lot of research and push towards, um, you know, leveraging AI to, uh, to present, you know, what are the, you know, if somebody buys a shirt, what's the next item that they're going to buy out of the catalog? How do we start to leverage that against the depth of B2B ordering data to kind of start to present, hey, maybe your customer doesn't know this exists yet. And, um, but they'll buy it if you put it in front of them. And so I'm curious to see, like, how that evolves over the next, over the next five years.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's so cool. I mean, one of the sort of opportunities and challenges is that all of this, all of the merchandising and AI and like M and A just reveals the scariness of not having good product data. Right. Like it. That's sort of the other problem with E commerce is that it reveals the messiness of the existing systems. And so you do have to sort of take on that, like, expensive and I think, miserable, um, project of like, cleaning up product data and like building taxonomies and all of that stuff.

Speaker A: That's miserable. Yeah, I know that's miserable.

Speaker B: Some people love it.

Speaker A: So, you know, I do think that's, um, an area where AI is going to have a significant impact for companies because, um, you know, just by being able to create, you know, if you put the time in to create a prompt that will help you like, put this data together. Many companies have spec sheets and CAD files and all these components of their products, but they haven't. By leveraging AI to ingest all of that and kind of spit out descriptions and information and fill in structured fields, I think that while it still needs human intervention, I think the ability to do that is better than it's ever been in the history of creating a product catalog.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Um, there's still people doing it in Excel despite all that. But I'm curious, what are you seeing? What are you seeing your customers are most excited about? Um,

Speaker A: I think they like seeing sales.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, I, uh, think they like seeing the revenue increase through, through the systems. Um, it's a different level of excitement. I would I think than what we've seen on, um. Or a lack of excitement about, um, sales. Uh, depending, uh, upon where the project. The project champion is.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so, um.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: sometimes I think, you know, where, uh, I think. I think I would like to see customers get more excited about growing their business through that. Sometimes these projects are just handed off to a person. Um, I think they're most excited when there is kind of the original, um, evangelist or the person that championed the project, that really believes in it. That's where we get the most excitement. M. On these things. So, um, I think, um. I don't know if I'm describing it the right way, but it's almost as if our clients are often drinking from a fire hose. And so, like, it takes a couple years to kind of get to a place where they feel like, oh, we're just kind of getting.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, some wins.

Speaker A: Yeah. Getting some wins.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. Because the project's challenging, then the launch is challenging. Getting it activated, getting revenue, you know, but we tell people, you've got to stop and celebrate.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like, what's your first thousand orders through the system? Your first million dollars through the system? Like, you should literally stop and have some team events to kind of create unity. Unity around that all. Uh, right. We're back in business after Jason Nias just stepped on the power strip and turned off power to the entire podcasting section of Shoptoberfest. So. Thanks, Jason. Um, so I think, um, we were talking about, um. You were talking about the, uh, awards and the event and your jet lag.

Speaker B: Yes. So the last night of the conference in Australia, we had an awards dinner. It was 7 to 10pm it was fancy dress, which I didn't realize, so I was underdressed, and I was like, man, why? Everyone's tired. Don't we all want to go home? Um, but it was, for me, the highlight of this conference. So, uh, yeah, we announced the winners. People got up and they were like, you know, I'm never speechless, but I'm speechless. Like, and it was so. It was so. The whole room was so warm and so celebratory, and people were like, you know, like, I just work in my job, like, trying to convince my boss all the time that, like, I'm trying to get something done and to actually get recognized, like, in this space was so meaningful. And that was the part that I was like, I completely sold. Like, this is. This is such a great. It's such a great community. Like, the people are all, like, trying to do, like, super hard things. Within their jobs with like, very, like a lot of big roadblocks. Um, and it's just really nice to be able to like, celebrate. Celebrate, you know, like the winner. Sure. But kind of everyone for participating in this, in this, because it's, you know. Right. They say, like, things can be like, um, hard but simple or, uh, complex but easy. And like B2B E commerce is just like, it's hard and complicated. Like, it's just, it just is. It's kind of relentless. So it was nice to have a moment to celebrate.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And I love that. And I just don't think people are celebrating, um, enough. And I think that, um, you know, it's one of the things that I talk about in the, in the final chapters of my book is kind of stopping to, you know, understand and, you know, um, you know, make sure that you're thanking everybody and that you're, you know, it is a team. It does take a team to, um, to put these things together. Um, and what's really fascinating for me at times is many of the people on the team have never worked together before. They may work for the same company, but they've never win their roles. They've never come, you know, work with somebody, somebody in finance may never have worked with somebody in IT directly on something.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: They've never. Somebody in operations or customer service maybe has never, you know, worked with somebody, um, you know, in, in sales, you know, or, you know, it just. There's, there's, there's people that, you know, you try to build that team, you know, out of the process. It's one of the reasons why we've gone back to doing in person discoveries and we do them. We've set our facility in Baltimore up to do them with the right technology. And we have an on site hotel, on site restaurants. And so we're putting teams together, you know, for, for three days and having them sit and talk and have dinner together and lunch together. You know, you get a lot out of that when you're, when you're starting off the project, um, in terms of getting everybody on the same page.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: With that.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's really nice to be in person, it turns out.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's. As much as I love Zoom and, you know, all of that, I think it's. Getting people together is, um, is paramount to the success of, of. You can't just do this over. Zoom calls.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, um, so I, you know, we've had, we've heard some noise Today it's like you're starting to feel the rumble of Shoptoberfest. I really think that, um, you know, within the next hour or so, people are gonna be getting crazy drinking, um, German beer. Yeah, I'm a little nervous.

Speaker B: Yeah, I hear it in your voice.

Speaker A: You're like, uh, you know, um, I feel like I should record, like we're recording this before the event. I should record a podcast after the event.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: After we all been screaming and singing German chants and German drinking songs and all of that. Um, so, um, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today, coming over early. I know you've got a busy day of things here at the event. Um, you know, we'd love to, you know, at some point have you up in Baltimore. We've got some events going on and we're really, really excited for the work that you're doing and, um, you know, we're excited for the training that you have. We're excited for, uh, the big event in November. Um, and, you know, uh, I can't wait to see how this evolves over the next few years.

Speaker B: Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And, um, I recognized your face because, uh, B2B, E Commerce association and GrooveCommerce are the two places on TikTok that show up if you look for B2B E Commerce. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, really. It's you and me.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: Are you and Justin King? So it's cool. I'm glad you're doing it. Like, it's, it's all contributing to, you know, building this ecosystem. Yeah, it's good stuff.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. So if people want to find you on online, can they find you on LinkedIn?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: I'm Sarah. Falcon. Falcon, like the bird. Uh, and yeah, we're all around reach,

Speaker A: uh, out and connect.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: All right, Sarah, thank you so much for, for being a guest on E Commerce Masters. Um, I'd like to end with a question. If you have one tip for somebody, um, that's looking to, uh, get into B2B or take their company down the path of B2B, what's one tip that you would give them to think about as they're going down that process?

Speaker B: Yeah. M. Find a person that you can talk to about it. Uh, and you can reach out to me if you want help finding that person. Probably they could reach out to you for help finding that person. Find someone in a non competitive space who's done something like that. People are really generous with their time and like I said you can't Google the answers to the questions you have, but you can have a conversation that will save you a lot of heartache. Oh, yeah.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. I, uh, look forward to having a great day today, and, um, we will see you soon.

Speaker B: Yeah. Thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thank you.