E696:📦THE HIDDEN RISKS KILLING B2B SUPPLIER BUSINESSES - AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT | SANYA RISTIC - ILLUMINISE | B2B COMMERCE CORNER #160 | THE ECOMMERCE EDGE Podcast

Speaker A: Welcome to B2B Commerce Corner. Commerce Corner is a sub series of the E Commerce Edge podcast discussing all things B2B commerce through the lens of agencies, consultants, merchants and more. Enjoy. Sonia Ristik from Illumina out of the uk. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you Jason. My pleasure.

Speaker A: And you are a co founder of this amazing e commerce agency and I know you guys specialize in B2B E commerce and you've held lots of different roles inside the business. You're currently Director of Innovation and Client Success. But before we get into what you do over at Illuminaze, why don't you tell us how you came to be in this world? You've been doing this for nearly 18 years now, so I realize that's a long time to be in E commerce, but prior to running your own agency, how did you even come to be in the E commerce software space? Full stop.

Speaker B: Long story. Don't know where to start. But being a software engineer, I came to the UK 30 years ago. 31 years ago, was it 26. I don't know anymore. Long time. And then um, when I met Lyndon, he was setting up his E commerce business and life somehow. Long story. Wanted us to stay together and I dived in. I lost my job. He was setting up his business and I joined him. So we basically built this business together. It was his idea. But once, um, when I step in, I took over basically and grow the business.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Which he enjoyed. He really enjoyed someone else being responsible for everything. Yes.

Speaker A: Wow. Wow. And I guess if you come from a software engine engineering background and you come from a technical background like that, it feels like a natural adaptation to turn those skills to E commerce development, right?

Speaker B: Yes. And it wasn't easy because once when you are like running a business and you are in leadership role, you need different skills. Your engineering skills are uh, good for coding, but not for being with people and managing people. So it's been a long journey, Jason, from an engineer to a leader, um, and many lessons learned.

Speaker A: What is the single biggest lesson about leadership and the need for leadership skills? And if you were to coach or to teach someone who's brand new to the agency world, what would you tell them and advise them? What are like maybe one, two or three key skills that you think they must have to be able to do that job? Well,

Speaker B: I think what's most important is my shift, personal shift from transactional to relational. And this is actually what I really like to light. I want to bring in the world like how we can relate and co create Together rather than let's just do business. So I think way of being and being with people and listening for unspoken. Really listening for what's emerging, for what's conversation really about, rather than having conversations on the surface. So I would say way, way of being and togetherness. If anyone defined leadership like that's my experience. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think from. At least. And I've gone through a similar journey to you and when I first started out, quite. And not. I'm not a developer, I'm not an engineer, but I'm very technical, have always been very technical. Have always. In my career I've always been a, uh, leaned more towards the solution slash enterprise architecture side of the engagement. And what I have found is that empathy for me is probably the single biggest superpower an entrepreneur can develop. Because without empathy, it makes it really difficult to understand who you're even speaking to on the other side of the table, let alone being able to build a connection with them and to build some sort of camaraderie to where you can even build that team mentality or that partnership mentality. Because every agency says, oh, we're partners, right? We're partners with our clients. But living that every day and behaving in that way is actually hard, mainly because it's operationally hard. It's hard to operationalize empathy. Right. And I think that's when you're trying to scale and grow a business. A lot of it comes down to operational delivery. How do we do what we do, how do we deliver it at a high level with scale to our clients in a way that they understand the value that we're trying to bring to the table for them. But how do we infuse that and operationalize that with empathy in a way that that helps our clients know we care about them, but also leaves us profitable because we still have to run a business, we still have to be profitable, we still have to make money like every business has to make money to be viable. So how do you reconcile those two things? The need to be profitable, the need to be able to scale, but the need to be able to help your clients understand the value that you bring to the table.

Speaker B: I would say that's all the same thing and goes so well together. And the shift when I personally, I've done nine years of different, like, inner work, development, understanding myself, understanding the world, and it all started from conflicts with clients, which were very confusing. And then slowly, as I was doing so many different modalities and understanding myself and relationships, it was a very natural shift Jason where I just started to listen more and started to even observe body language and understand more. And as I relaxed and then relationship relaxed, we were then able to together. This is now a big jump. Like this is 18 years journey. But as I changed my way of being, my team changed the way of communicating with clients, the clients changed. So it was a years of gradual shift towards togetherness and connection that you talk about and then what's emerging? What are we really going to develop? And not like what do you want to develop? So not quite sure I'm answering as it's been a journey but I think listening deeply with uh, head and heart was key to this starting to. In this process we started to shine and we supported clients to shine. So it's journey together

Speaker A: and how have you like I found that when I was running and building agencies. I'm an independent consultant now but for many years I ran and built agencies too. And one of the challenges we always faced was okay, cool, we've got. We were a mid sized agency, roughly 50 to 60 team members inside the agency. And what we found was a consistent three theme was the need to have a constant pipeline of business to keep all the mouths fed inside the business. But also wanting to try to take on best fit clients. Right. An ideal ICP and people that we knew, businesses that we knew we could help. We were just 100% confident we could actually help them move the needle in their business to the place that they wanted to get to. But then there was some work that we took on that maybe wasn't perfect, maybe wasn't with the perfect client or maybe we weren't able to help them as well as maybe another agency could. But we would have to say yes to the work to keep mouths fed. And there was a constant tension in that where we're trying to stick to our guns and only trying to take on clients that we really genuinely think we could form a solid partnership and relationship with and deliver great work for. But also the need to make payroll. And there's this tension between those two things a lot of the time.

Speaker B: Okay, maybe we are not feeling attention. So I'm connecting to your share. I think our journey was very organic and as we are shifting and growing we almost attract different type of clients. And as we are developing we are learning exactly what you say. We are not meant for everyone and not all clients are right for us. So we develop some partnerships, e commerce consultants and they bring work as well. And we had to close the door if I may say to number of businesses Some businesses left for changing a platform or whatever reason, but we realize at some point that this is it, the sum of the work, it doesn't inspire. And when our team is inspired, one thing that's worth noting, we work directly. Our developers work directly with our clients. We don't have managers, we don't have a middle person. So it's really this connection. And often our projects, like 11 years or seven years, where the relationship is successful, so they're literally waking up to do a great work to inspire clients. And when we get clients feedback and when they say how much it means what we've done and how much we are helpful, that's the biggest joy beyond financial that our team is striving for. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I think clients and uh, this is where I think content can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you at least this is what I've experienced in my own life, that clients will oftentimes self select in or out to work with you based on what they see in the market, even if they haven't met you yet, even if they haven't had a one, uh, to one conversation with you. My clients, 99% of the time they have consumed a tremendous amount of my content by the time they ever reach out, even message me on LinkedIn and say, hey, I've been following you for six months, or I've been following you for a year. I think there's something you can help us with. Can we tee up, uh, a, can we tee up a call to discuss it? But almost always they kind of know how I roll, they kind of know what I do, they kind of understand how I do it. They want to just, more than anything else, they just want to validate and verify that I'm the same person on that call with them that I am in my content. Right. And they want to make sure that there's not a disconnect between my content and who I am as a human being. And that definitely does, at least in my case, that definitely does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of acting as a filter for clients that say, either, oh, this guy's awesome, I think he'll be a great fit for us. Or no, I don't really like his vibe. I don't like whatever. So I'm not even going to bother reaching out to him or even speaking to him because I don't think he's a good fit for us. And so it acts as a pre filter before I ever even speak to someone quite often. And do you find that too, in your business that as you have been more visible and more public in what you do and how you do it, that has acted as an essential filter before a client ever reaches out to even have a conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm really glad you're bringing this because I would call it show up last year. So for 17 years, we were very busy building, doing, learning, moving, working with clients, and we were disconnected from the world. We didn't have very strong partnerships. We were not going out, meeting people, and we were doing very much work in isolation. And then eventually, after seven, eight years of doing inner work, I woke up one day and, like, we are ready to show up. So last year was a really big year of showing up for us. And that led to winning a, uh, B2B Commerce Agency of the Year award. And the shift, or what you're talking about, I can only now experience because it's only one year that we are really showing up and proud of who we are and writing a content. And my partner is as well. He's great networker and people say, oh, I know you. So we now seem to be known and recognized in the community, especially Magento, as this is what we are using for development. And again, for us, it was a journey and I think it's important. Connection is very important in B2B. Like, we tried cold emails, emailing people we don't know, and we often see that if people know about us, if they heard about us, if you had a little conversations, they would be more open to respond. Otherwise, it's just like nothing. Nothing happens. So you're asking me something, I'm discovering and I can see it's working, but I cannot give you any exact, like, numbers or. It's exciting, it's exciting. Oh, I was on some stages and spoke about great business breakthroughs, and then people say, oh, I saw you on the stage and you would not even think about that, or, uh, no. So based on the feedback we are getting is, yes, people now know about us. And I want to bring this different way of working in the world from relational, not transactional. So I'm very encouraged to continue bringing my message even through our podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, uh, interesting, and I can just validate the direction and the path that you're on. As somebody who's been very visible for over a decade, making content for over a decade at scale, I can tell you, and it's interesting because Gary Vee was the one that kicked me in the ass enough times back in the day. And whether you like his vibe or not. The reality is he has helped a lot of people overcome their feelings of social stigma. He's helped encourage a lot of people to become creators. And if for no other reason, I'll always respect Gary Vee for that. And I just remember him saying, you can't be a thought leader if you're not ever putting your thoughts out into the world. And you can't be a thought leader if you don't put the thoughts out into the world to have them critiqued by the market. Right. And to get feedback from the market. And he just kept pushing over and over again. And he even said back then, you may not know upfront, going in all the good things that will come out of being more visible in your business, being more content first, content focused, becoming a publishing company first, and everything else you do being secondary to that. And he was 100% right. Like when I first started creating, I had an audience of five people, right. And that just, it took time to build up that credibility in the market to where people actually wanted to hear from me. But there was so many good things because at the time I wasn't running my own business. And so it wasn't like I was trying to monetize my audience. It was just I wanted to create. I had things inside of me that I wanted to share with the world. And I just had to figure out my way of sharing it and communicating it in a way that mattered to me and hopefully would matter to other people. And the amount of good things that have come out of that, even completely aside from business, just the amount of friends that I've made, relationships that I've built, partnerships that I've made, travel the world. I know people in almost every country now that I can catch up with when I get there. My wife and I love to travel the world and the opportunity to speak at conferences, the, the um, just the amount of people that I have met through being a very open hearted creator, those benefits are actually immeasurable. It's, it's. I can't even put a value on it because it has been so impactful in my life. So if I could give you any advice at all, it would just be keep going. Because Gary Vee said to me back in the day, you won't even know today all the good things that will come over time from those efforts.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm very aware of that. And interesting thing we found is as we started to show up and started to prepare for the talks and engage either PR or a marketing or positioning company through These conversations, we started to understand better who we are, what's our uniqueness, how different we are. I remember my first conversation with the, uh, pr, and I was sharing about how we work, and she was like, really? Really? I never heard that before. And I was like, okay, I didn't know. It's unique. So I think having these conversations by itself is already helpful to discover, uh, your role in the world and understand what are you wanting to create. And it's bigger than, as you say, than we little us can be aware of on, um, the. We are on the journey. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's like a rock in a pond, right? The ripple effect. You won't even necessarily know what the ripple effect you will have on other people by being open about what you've learned, I think more than anything else and sharing what you've learned. And in my case, I'm largely trying to create a platform whereby I can have conversations that I think my audience would often want to have with people but don't have the opportunity to. And so I'm trying to ask the same kind of, not only for my own interest and not only for my own education, but try to ask the types of questions I think the audience would ask if they were in my seat. And so for me, that's a really important thing. And Also, it's also 1m of the ways I try to give back to my industry because the industry has been so good to me for 26 years. This industry. I have met some of my closest, nearest and dearest friends in the whole world through this industry. This industry has given me an incredible lifestyle that I can live and work remotely and travel the world. And it, like, just. I'm so filled with so much gratitude for my industry and the people that I've met through it. Now, not everybody's perfect, of course, but I've just met so many incredible people through our industry that this feels like such a natural thing to do. Because, uh, I remember back in the day when I first started out 26 years ago, there were experts that took me under their wing. They taught me everything that they knew. They had zero expectation of getting anything in return. They helped to bring me and usher me into the industry and protect me in those early formative years. And look, I feel a, uh, really big responsibility to send that ladder back down again, especially in the age of AI, where I think a lot of junior roles are starting to go away and be given away to AI Me. M. Sending the ladder back down again actually feels even more important today than it did even five years ago.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think you speak about the natural journey when we come to certain age, when we have certain experience and the wisdom we want to give back. We want to leave legacy behind. We want to help others to have a faster, if nothing else, an easier journey. And I don't believe in easy. I maybe believe now more in effortless and playful. But the wisdom we could somehow bring it across and help others. I have lots of. I'm M now 56 and I have lots of joy when I feel people who are only 30 who are on the journey of showing up and doing work differently. And I want to encourage, I want to see a world, a better place and this giving back is part of it. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I know you guys do a lot of you do you work with retail brands but you also do a tremendous amount of B2B work with manufacturers and distributors. How did you always, right from the beginning of the business, did you always have this vision we want to have a pretty equal split between retail and B2B or has it been like uh, a more recent thing that you have tried to maybe rebalance the business a little bit and have a little bit more B2B to the retail mix?

Speaker B: I think it's just happening and we are following the flow. How long we are doing Magento? God knows, 12 years when it was like the best known platform and many of the different businesses were using it. And then um, we noticed over time that most of our clients are manufacturers and they develop their own products. That was one thing that was interesting. And then with the Shopify expansion, number of clients leaving for Shopify retail clients, we were left with more complex products manufacturers. So again, as everything else we were on the journey that got us to this place where we are now really enjoying complex challenges which we don't see as challenges, we see them as opportunities. So it was natural following what was happening in the world rather than, oh, I want this direction and I want to go that way. We are now more directive as we understand things more. But we were flowing quite a lot before.

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I think you've probably been on a very similar journey to me. The first sort of call it half of my career. Very retail focused, very retail E commerce focused, very omnichannel retail focused integration with point of sale and ERP systems and PIM systems and all the other things that go along with creating a seamless retail experience for customers regardless of touchpoint. That was. That kind of marked the majority of the first half of my career and the last half of my career has been so heavily B2B focused. And when I started my consultancy six years ago, I didn't just want to be a generic e commerce consultant like everybody else out there was. And I, when I looked back on my career and I said, what have been the most complex, challenging, fun, what are the projects that have pushed me the hardest in my career? And in every single instance they were B2B projects and they were technically the most complex, they were the most demanding of me as a solution architect, they were the most demanding of me as a person and uh, they actually had the most impact on the business. And so when I started my consultancy it's like this feels like a no brainer because so much of retail has become filled with fomo and me too, ism, that kind of. Almost every retailer and their dog starts out Shopify, Klaviyo, QuickBooks and then maybe when they get a bit bigger, maybe they go to netsuite and then maybe they get a little bit bigger and they implement a PIM system and then maybe they get a little bit bigger and they get a CDP and then maybe they get a little bit bigger and they implement Shopify, Pause for a retail store or something like that. And so there's this very well trodden path and set of design patterns in retail that are born out of FOMO in the retail sector. And the idea that, oh, what does that retailer run? I'd like to run the same stack they run. Right. Whereas what I have discovered, and I'd like your take on this, what I've discovered in B2B, there are no two manufacturers or distributors that are alike. They are 100% different. Their processes are different, their people, their skill set are different. The products they make and or distribute are wildly different. The complexity of the back office operations in their business is wildly different. So the, the every single B2B project that I have anything to do with, it's like a whole new learning opportunity for me as well as the client. And sure there are some things that you can take across and say, I've seen this work really well inside this distributor and I think this would work well for you in this scenario. So helping them connect the dots is still important. But there is literally never a dull moment in B2B because those businesses operate in such different ways.

Speaker B: Yes. And there are challenges in technology, there are challenges in working across countries, continents, different teams. And what's possibly the same for us is you're working and uh, as well, often some knowledge can be carried across from one Business to another, either a service or functionality. But yes, it's very unique. I would say it's very exciting because you never know what's going to hit you tomorrow, if I may say. And I think because we decided to stay within Magento and adopt commerce and didn't want to go to other platforms homes that's selecting us, uh, to continue the journey and attract bigger businesses, more challenging situations. And this is where partnerships are really important as well. Yeah.

Speaker A: And as of today we're recording at the end of June 2026. Now what is the rough split inside your business in terms of clients? Is it majority B2B now is it still majority retail or Is it majority B2B?

Speaker B: Majority B2B? One client is moving at the moment to Shopify. Uh, so I think Shopify is taking part of the market, leaving more complex projects for us.

Speaker A: Um, and as an X engineer, that must be very exciting for you.

Speaker B: It is very exciting. And especially our team is very senior and very capable and they easily get bored. These complex projects keep them on their toes. And I'm particularly proud of our developers going on the call with clients and consultants and solving these problems together. Because if you send an email, if you just record the videos when there is no real conversation, these problems are very hard to solve. And we developed this way of creating from emerging future and theory you innovation framework that are now embedded in the way we work, which is particularly applicable to the complex project because with complex projects you often don't know what you'll find when you start looking. And you might be surprised. We had a meeting with a client and the problem was here, the system was stuck and then we found a totally different way through and something that opened up through the conversation that you would not know is possible. So this is so exciting. It really gives you a sense of making a difference.

Speaker A: It's really fulfilling for sure, no question about it. And I guess where do you find that most of your clients are based? Are they European, are they North American? Like where are you finding the most fertile ground for opportunities to create that level of change? Co create that level of change with your clients.

Speaker B: We are focused to the UK at the moment and now as we are showing up and building partnership, we might go towards Netherlands, might go towards the US and we are quite observing and thinking and so at the moment we've been UK only. We had partners before when we did Woocommerce and things like that in Australia. But then because of the time zone that was different and it's very important now for Us to see our clients in person.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because of these conversations that unblock um, places of stuckness. And so we are mainly in Europe and uk.

Speaker A: Nice, Nice. And I don't know, I don't have current or recent statistics for the UK and Europe but I know that in the US where the data is the most solid, there is so much greenfields work to be had in B2B. Some the statistic is something like 40 to 60% of manufacturers and distributors in the United States still do not do E commerce at all. And I don't know if that's similar. Uh, obviously some categories in some verticals are much more advanced. But in general the what we see particularly in North America is that B2B tends to be somewhere between five and ten years behind their retail counterparts in terms of their retail mature, their E commerce and digital commerce maturity. Are you finding something similar in the UK and Europe?

Speaker B: Yes. So what we are seeing that these businesses, manufacturing businesses are usually set up long time ago. So there is usually a number of generations and they are doing business the way they're doing business and often it's through the personal connections. And now we are uh, we've been to the manufacturer's lunch just a week ago and not many of them have a website that sells at all. And at some point they'll reach a uh, threshold that life will move them that way. And we are excited to be on the journey until they're ready. But it's just like a natural progression. If you don't have a big need, there is no big necessity. Some businesses, so some business are, businesses are innovative and they want to move forward and some businesses are waiting until they have to move forward forward. So they all adopt E commerce at a different time. And it's exciting time. It's exciting because many businesses are digitalizing. There is all this transformation and it's a scary process for many. Jason. It's scary process because if you have a wrong platform or a wrong partner, you are set up for failure.

Speaker A: And are uh, you also seeing that? One of the things I've recognized in North America is that oftentimes these major manufacturers and distributors, they will sometimes realize it all at once how not having digital commerce capabilities at all is radically eliminated, limiting the reach of their business. And I'll give you an example. So there are some of the industries that I work with, the industrial trade industries, etc, they might want to tender for example for a government contract or they might want to tender for a very large industrial buyer or something like that. And in those scenarios, oftentimes the buyer will dictate how they will be sold to, meaning, okay, cool, you have to service us via punch out, or you have to sell to us via edi, or you have to sell to us in this way, or you have to have a, uh, trade portal where we can log in and we can place digital quote requests or order online and lodge digital RMA requests, etc. Etc. Etc. And so oftentimes they will discover or get religion around digital when they run the risk of missing out on a major sales opportunity or a new channel opportunity if they don't have that capability. Or sometimes when I tell them, hey, look, you would have all these other opportunities if you had edi, if you had punch out, if you had all these other digital tools in your tool belt, you would be able to go after business that you don't even know is there today. Is that some of the conversations that you're having with these major manufacturers and

Speaker B: distributors, Many of our clients came to us having a website already and moving from one older platform to the newer platform. So in a way, what I mainly observe is businesses that are more innovative, they understand the necessity and need to be faster and to be better, and they're pushing businesses forward and often because they're established sales channels and as you say, the way that sales people want to work with, there is lots of resistances in the business. So this is maybe what we see more than this digitalization path because we are stepping in now to get to know manufacturers before they are ready as we are realizing that's what's coming next for us. So I would say different businesses, different challenges. And there is always a challenge or as you say, necessity that pushes us this way or another. Yeah.

Speaker A: And is there a talk track or a narrative that you have standardized on that can help sales teams in particular get comfortable with digital? Because I, at least speaking for myself, oftentimes I'm considered the devil when I first come in by sales teams and they're kind of going, okay, you're the guy that's going to replace us with the robots. You're the guy that's going to take the commission out of our back pocket, you're the guy that's going to help us move to these new digital ways of selling. And all of a sudden now we're not going to make the same money that we used to before. And I have found huge success with sales teams, and usually within about 10 minutes I go from the most hated person in the room to their best friend. Because I am 100% an advocate of sales teams doing awesome work, but I'm not an advocate of sales teams, A, doing things that add no value to them or their customers, and B, doing things that they absolutely hate doing anyway, which is mostly admin crap. And so I am there to give them superpowers, not pick their pocket. And so I am there to make their life better, faster, easier and more efficient and allow them to scale their knowledge in ways that it is impossible to do any other way. And so I'm a massive advocate and fanboy of really strong sales teams doing great work, but there almost always is massive resistance at the start. When I start working with these businesses, I've developed a little bit of a talk track that can help put them at ease pretty quickly. Have you had to do the same?

Speaker B: Um, you are more in consulting role and us being like strategic development partner and working directly with e commerce directors or consultants, we don't always see what's happening on the other side, although we get to hear the stories. And I wish all businesses have people as you, Jason, because not many businesses, some have consultants, some don't have consultants and try to work things out themselves. And you can see, uh, disconnect between the sales team who is still selling on the phone and like all this like a online ability and customers calls who cannot reset the password and sales team cannot help them to reset the password. So all goes to the like a technical e commerce team. And then they tell me they train salespeople and then salespeople go and some new salespeople come. So I think businesses really need to put effort into like making everything to be more digital. And they have so many priorities, so many challenges. It's like where do you look, where do you sort out first? I think you see more of these things yourself being a consultant than us who are like strategic development partner. But yes, businesses who are investing more and moving more towards digital, we can see growing more and faster sales, easier for people to reorder, gaining new customers. We can see how they're growing with this like digitalization shift.

Speaker A: And another piece of data out of the US that I'm sure Europe is quite similar is that in, in 2024, um, Forrester did quite a large body of research around the average age and demographic makeup of B2B buyers in the United States. And their data showed that over 71% of B2B buyers in the US are millennials or Gen Z. Now, now that to me and what I'm seeing is that the buying demographic in B2B is changing very rapidly. We've got more minorities, we've got more women. It's not the male pale and stale B2B sourcing world that it used to be even five to 10 years ago. It's wildly different now. But what I'm seeing is that the selling demographic isn't changing as fast. Because I like you, I'm oftentimes dealing with third generation family owned businesses. They're 100-year-old manufacturer distribution business. They the average age of the sales reps in these businesses are like 50. Right. Uh, and the, one of the challenges that they face is that there's a tremendous amount of industry institutional and tribal knowledge inside the sales reps heads that has never been translated into a digital equivalent. And the risk for these businesses is that these people retire and age out, they die, they go to a competitor, they. There's just huge and growing, rapidly growing risk in a lot of these businesses that if you don't get this information and knowledge out of these people's heads and into a scalable digital system, you may lose that knowledge out of the business forever. And that's a real risk for a lot of B2B's today. Are you seeing the same.

Speaker B: What we are seeing is lots of younger generations and millennials coming in the businesses and then bringing the change. This is what we mainly see and I hear you as well with risk of people retiring or that knowledge being, being lost and working across different businesses. They all have different needs. They are more towards automation or AI or a better customer experience. And I feel you see much more than what we see being focused around the development and technical challenges and cooperations across different parts of the system. So yeah, I think your knowledge is quite impressive, I would say.

Speaker A: Oh thank you. It's just something that I just consistently comes up in almost every single engagement that we're during discovery. We're trying to pull this wealth of knowledge out of legacy sales reps heads. And I'll just give you one example. And so I was working with a uh, huge global industrial belt manufacturer and they're one of the biggest in their vertical and they were. So we had the sales team, the sales director in the discovery of the sales process and one of the things he shared with us was a piece of information that is never on their website, it's always in their sales reps heads. And they said look, we sell industrial belts and if a customer buys a belt that is out of stock, we can tell by the composition of the belt that they've Bought with high levels of certainty when that belt is going to go into an engine or some kind of piece of machinery or something that has like an idler, pulley or some kind of a tensioner on it. And so we know if we're out of stock of that exact belt, we can usually talk to the buyer and say, look, we have that exact same composition of belt, but it's a half an inch longer or shorter than the belt that you bought. And that belt is in stock. We think it will likely work for your application. Will it? And 99% of the time, yes, it will. And so we had to engineer that knowledge and that logic into the front end experience. So that would translate into a digital consultative experience instead dynamically based on the attributes of the product. Now that's an example of tribal knowledge that sits in these people's heads. And if you don't get it out, that is a, uh, you're of not being able to even get close to the same kind of way of thinking getting that information out and saying how can we turn this into a digital economy equivalent of that experience? That feels like a seriously important piece of the discovery process.

Speaker B: Yes, definitely. And we are lucky to work with consultants and e commerce managers and directors who are constantly getting that information out. And we are then working together with them was the best way to bring that to the website. Um, and one of the problem with these sales, they are for manufacturers. The sales teams are very technically knowledgeable and that's not easy either to recruit or to, for people to learn those things. So I agree with you, it's a very important part of the process how to digitalize that knowledge. And then the businesses are then more free and they can grow more and less risk because if that person disappears, the business need to relearn all that again. And the cost of that is huge.

Speaker A: It is. And I tell you, try, try to train a new rep in a highly complex industry. It's really difficult. And what I'm finding is that when we build the digital tools for the customer, the end customer, those same digital tools are used by the back office and the sales reps as well. So they love using digital tooling. So instead of having to come back from a meeting with a client and key in order directly into an ERP system or do customer support and find product information like they, they start to go digital first and they start to go commerce system first themselves. Because that experience even for them as an internal resource for their customers, that tooling is better designed for sales reps than their ERP ever was. And so it feels like that same tooling is not just useful to the customer, it's also useful to the staff inside the business.

Speaker B: Yes. And what's interesting, some of our clients are developed using AI and ratliff it themselves to develop these prototypes, which is so much easier than for us to implement.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Because we can see instead of them explaining. So I think what's happening with AI is going to help businesses just work with developers easier.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. They can go from 0 to 1 themselves in terms of a POC with lovable or replit or manus or whatever. And then you can take them from 1 to 100 and actually operationalize that and get that integrated into their digital experience end to end.

Speaker B: Yes. And again, that's rare. Not every business is AI advanced. Um, we have clients who haven't touched AI and we have clients who almost teach us. Wow, this is amazing. What are you doing? Yeah. So it's again we have this desire of setting up AI collab and bringing our different clients together so they can inspire one another about what's possible. Because at the moment me being in strategic role on these monthly calls, I share this with a client and that with. And let's bring everyone together. They're non competitive businesses, they're all very different manufacturers. Let's everyone inspire one another. And I think this is my desire because like who will listen our podcast, uh, how we can bring more people together so more people learn what you know, what I know and then more of a more m. Faster growth. Yes.

Speaker A: The other thing I'm witnessing, and it's become a really big deal, particularly in the last say 18 months and I'd love to see if this resonates with you too, is that even for the clients of my clients that buy off of them as a manufacturer, distributor, and let's say they buy off them via EDI or punch out or some kind of agentic procurement automation through a Jagger, a coupa, Ariba, whatever it might be. They still and increasingly have an expectation that they can do many other things in the portal other than the transaction. So they still expect to have a portal where they can log in, they can see the product range, they can search for things, they can see their price, they can see the moq, they can see the buying increments, they can launch quote requests, RMA requests, a hundred other things that they want to be able to self service digitally other than the pure transaction, uh, of, of executing a PO with the supplier. And so that, and oftentimes the My clients will ask me that. They'll say, do we really need to be that good at e commerce? Because 80% of our customers do EDI or punch out purchasing or automated purchasing in some way. Sometimes they'll connect directly to our APIs and they'll make a purchase that way. And yet they have never actually asked their customers. Usually when I. When they ask me that, I usually respond by saying, have you canvassed your customers? Have you actually talked to them? Have you actually asked them what they want other than the transaction and what they would like to see in a portal experience that would allow them to automate processes further inside their business or at least make them more efficient instead of having to go to their sales rep for every single thing other than the transaction. And 99% of the time they say, no, we haven't. We expect our customers to talk to their sales rep if they want us to do something that we don't do today. And I'm like, no. You have to give them a dedicated opportunity to share their positives and their negatives about your business. And 99% of the time, you will need an external, unbiased third party to run those interviews, because those customers will not oftentimes say the good, bad, and the ugly to their rep rep because they got to turn around and do business with that rep the very next day. And so they will oftentimes not be as brutally honest as you think they will because they're trying to protect the relationship with you. And so you have to give them an environment where they feel safe to tell you what's great about doing business with you, but what's equally not so great about doing business with you. And do you encounter that too, where they kind of sometimes B2B's have blinders on. They think they're cutting edge at everything, and they're just not. And if they asked their customers, they would soon find out all the laundry list of things that their customers expect from them that they don't even touch today.

Speaker B: And again, it depends on the type of the client and where they are on the journey, because some of the clients are very aware. Ah. And even upfront and having these conversations. And sometimes their customers leave bad reviews because something was not available. So then they're scared about having bad reviews. And we can see with some of them how advanced are those. And then others being on a different place of the journey, they're just doing what they're doing. So I think Jason really depends on the, uh, where the business is in their development and how much ambitious. We would love to work with more ambitious businesses, but not all businesses are ambitious. And again it's about these conversations, every one of them of course getting used to retail experience. Expect that from B2B experience. You know, you don't want to call to do a return or whatever. Everything needs to be digital and easy and so on.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it also, my sense is that it also takes an extreme amount of humility for a hundred year old family owned business to say we still have a lot to learn about our customers and what they want from us and how we can service them best. If you've been in the same industry for a hundred years and you've been successful as a business for a hundred years, it's pretty natural to think you got it all figured out. It's pretty natural for these businesses. I'm working with a uh, huge distributor right now. Their CEO is the grandson of the founders of the company. Right. They're 118 year old family owned business. It would be very easy in that environment to think you know everything and that you know exactly what your customers need at all times. But the, what the businesses I see being the most successful see the highest rates of adoption of their digital capabilities, etc. Are the ones that are equally proud of their heritage but equally humble about what they don't know know about their customers and they're, they remain just as curious today as when they were founded 118 years ago. So I think insatiable curiosity for your customers, what their needs are, how you can work closer and better with them. And so I think it's probably equal parts humility and again empathy that those, the businesses that I tend to see do the best ongoing work with their customers.

Speaker B: Yes, because they are ready to innovate and they are open to listen. And what we are finding these days from few conversations I heard often when younger people come from university they start bringing tools, ideas and knowledge. And if businesses are willing to listen then you know that's the opportunity. But uh, change is not easy. So it's either in the mindset like in our business or something pushes you there and how we end up in one or another, I don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's true, that's true. One of the areas where I'm seeing AI starting to have the biggest impact and I didn't, you know, if I thought back to five years ago I wouldn't have thought this at the time. But where I'm seeing AI starting to have the biggest impact in B2B's today that they can implement tomorrow is turning formerly communication only channels effectively into headless commerce channels. So in, um, B2B, the, there's tremendous amount of emails between customers and their account reps. There's WhatsApp, there's Slack, there's teams, there's messages flying around everywhere. There's, hey, Bob, Jane, can you send me this spec sheet? Can you send me, can you send me this price list? Can you send me this? There's so much communication. Oh, here's a po. Can you process this for me? I'll attach a PO to an email and I'll send it to you. Or I'll attach a CSV to an email. Hey Bob, Jane, can you process this order for me? And I was never a massive fan of headless at all. And particularly for retail, I think it's 99% of the time it's a ridiculous architecture for retailers. But in B2B, I'm starting to see incredible value in headless commerce being extended into these comms channels that already have APIs built into them natively. WhatsApp, Slack teams, they've all got APIs. Nowadays we have tooling that can sit in the middle. And it's a combination of multimodal and conversational AI that has enabled this. So I can send a PO, I can attach a PO to a WhatsApp message to my account rep. It can be picked up by the middleware, mapped directly into our commerce system as if the person logged into the portal and placed the order themselves through the commerce system. Or they can check a price, they can request a price on a sku via, uh, WhatsApp. They can check stock availability, they can check which warehouse that product is available at. They can check their, they can basically do anything that they could do through the portal. A lot of a huge amount of what they could do through the portal through these comms channels that have historically always gone to a human being, but now we can connect those to our commerce systems and we can interpret those requests and we can answer them digitally in an automated way. And, and that is a pretty big game changer because it means that the customer does not have to change their behavior to adopt your digital infrastructure. That to me is a massive win in, in the current world of B2B.

Speaker B: Yes, I hear what you're saying and I feel you're speaking about very advanced things. We don't see much of that with, uh, our clients. They're still using standard ways and standard channels and some of them are prototyping with AI and creating a dashboard where you can see data. But I think what you're bringing with your share is quite advanced, I would say. I don't know. Do you see this adopted, really across?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. Especially for the Salesforce automation side. Not Salesforce, the platform. Salesforce function particularly around PO ingestion for sure. Instead of having a human being have to be on the end of all those communications or even on the end of a live chat session and taking a PO and having to key that manually, key that into an order ordering system or an E commerce system. That is becoming an absolute default expectation in the commerce platform itself, that the commerce platform offers that capability and even a unified inbox in the commerce platform where you can send all your orders to and then it just ingests them in as if they logged in and placed the order themselves manually. And so there's, there definitely is a, uh, rapidly growing expectation in the market that we want our customers to adopt our digital tooling without having to change their behavior. And that's a real important thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And having all these APIs and platforms where you can customize things and access data, uh, easily is definitely a benefit for B2B. Yeah.

Speaker A: And what's next for you guys as an agency over the next, say six to 12 months? What are the types of clients you would love to work with? What are the types of projects you hope to get your teeth into? What excites you about the next six to 12 months worth of agency work for you guys?

Speaker B: Uh, I think for us is building more partnerships. When I hear your knowledge, I would like you to work with some of our clients and bring all of that, as we often depend on, on their internal decisions. And if they don't work with people like you, then obviously they are not moving fast enough. But it's mainly partnership with consultants and helping these non digital businesses digitalize when the need happens. And that can be years for some of the businesses. Um, so it's working with bigger clients, working with more complex projects with across the continents and teams and technologies. So technology is becoming much more complex and I think that's our excitement. And then you can use the knowledge and the wisdom you have from one project and another project and so on. But I think everything is becoming faster and more complex and in a way we are still organically growing with clients coming our way when they're ready. But definitely working with people like you, Jason, and partners who do part of the heavy lifting. I think that's very important for us. We can implement, we can develop, we can co create, we can have conversations, but people like you are making a real difference.

Speaker A: Well, thank you. I, uh, do appreciate the kind words. And I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that it's interesting, when I was running and building agencies, a huge percentage of clients that came to us that thought they were ready for an agency actually weren't yet. So if you get into a discovery with a client and you're halfway through day one of a discovery and 90% of the answers are, we don't know, aren't you supposed to be the expert? Aren't you supposed to be telling us, that's great, but we're an agency. We're here to capture requirements, not help you define them. Right. We're here to, uh, sure, we can give you some ideas and we can point you in the right direction, but ultimately, at the end of the day, the vision for what, the type of experience you want to create for your customer, that's an inside job. That's not. We can, we can help you deliver that. But if you have no vision for what you are trying to create and what, more importantly, what you are trying to get your customers to feel when they do business with you, if you have no vision for that, it's very difficult for us to create a vision that, uh, you don't know what that vision is. So if you can't describe that vision to us, we can't make it come to life. We can't help you build it. Right. And it's not like the field of dreams days where it was build it and they will come. That's not how the world works anymore. And so helping them understand that and helping them understand that vision is an inside job. Sure. And even me as a consultant, I can help share the art of the possible with them so that maybe it stimulates some internal dialogue and some internal discussion and some internal thinking about what they actually want to see in the world. But I tell you, ultimately that vision has to be defined internally. It just has to be. And then people like us can help make it a reality.

Speaker B: Yes. And I think asking questions, sharing examples, we often have this show and tell, like show, Invisible, visible, that's very important. And sometimes in these conversations they believe something and as we ask questions, something else becomes so I think conversations and asking questions and leading clients because they know what they know, they're experts in their industry and we are experts in what we do. And then through these conversations, this wisdom gets, um, unlocked.

Speaker A: Yeah. No question about it if you could sprinkle fairy dust on the e commerce industry writ large and you could change one thing at the snap of your fingers, what would that be?

Speaker B: That would be a way of working through more relational, co creative, being courageous, going towards the problems and working together to find best solutions. And I have goosebumps as I say that. That's really my dream. Jason, thank you for that question.

Speaker A: Oh, I love it. So collaboration over competition I think is a real key thing that drops out of that for me. I'll drop a link to your LinkedIn profile and your website in the show notes. But other than that, if people want to reach out to you and discuss all, all things B2B E commerce and innovation, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

Speaker B: Well, just find me on LinkedIn or come to one of our events. Like next week there is a big magento meet magento week in the uk. There is even a, uh, women in E commerce and then we'll be hosting tables. Come visit us anywhere in the UK or we'll come and see you. Um, yeah, that's it.

Speaker A: Well, as an agency, if you're not already, I would encourage you to get involved with the B2B E Commerce Association. We just had B2B E Commerce World hosted by them in London a couple of months ago and I'm their global mc. So I was able to come to London and so next, next year we'll be doing it again. It'll be held in London again next year. Hopefully we'll be able to see you in person next year at B2B E Commerce World. But as we do come down to the end of our time together now I get to hand the microphone over to you. I get to let you ask me one question, any question you like. It could be personal or professional. So, Sonia Ristick from Illumina, what is your question for me today?

Speaker B: What was the biggest difficulty, Jason, that was the biggest breakthrough for you in life.

Speaker A: I'll give you two. One is that I have worked very hard throughout my life to stay out of debt, get out of debt and stay out of debt. And that has made such a difference in every way, shape and form. The ability to have the freedom to quit a job, to start my own business, to, to travel the world, to do all the things that my wife and I want to do. A lot of that freedom comes down to not owing a single person in the world a dollar. Uh, we paid cash for our house, we paid cash for our car, we pay cash for absolutely everything. So I don't owe a soul a dollar on this planet. And that is a feeling of freedom that is hard to describe and it's hard for people to understand the benefit of that until they're there and until they feel that sense of freedom. The second thing is that I have many friends from many different cultures. I've now lived in three different countries. My wife is Asian Kiwi, she was born in New Zealand but she's Vietnamese Chinese and, and I have traveled. I think I'm at around country 35 now that I've been to in terms of travel. And we travel, we try to travel significantly every single year. And that has been the single biggest business education I could ever give myself. Literally walking a mile. There's a saying walk a mile in someone's shoes. Literally walking a mile in their shoes. Shopping at the places they shop, eating the food that they eat, living the lifestyle that they live instead of just being there and going to a Hilton resort which is the same everywhere in the world. Getting out and meeting people in the local communities, in the local cultures. We, we did almost 20,000 kilometers driving around Mexico when we first moved here in 2023 for the entire year and we traveled to tiny little pueblitos, big cities and everything in between. And it's that type of education I think makes us more empathetic and well rounded humans but also equally entrepreneurs. And we can take ideas from every little pocket of the world and we can translate those and adapt those to other parts of the world and to specific client engagements that we're working with. And it's just, it's better than reading a business book will ever be. And I will die on that hill.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's definitely very experiential and exposing yourself to these situations you start seeing more and more and I'm um, really with your openness. There is lots of openness in the way you speak about your life.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I try to live with a very open kimono to the world and it served me well today. But I really appreciate your time. It's been amazing to chat with you and hear your story and your agency's story story. I wish you every ongoing success with Illumina and I can't wait to hopefully meet you in person, maybe even next year at B2B E Commerce World.

Speaker B: Yes, thank you Jason. We'll be there for sure this year.

Speaker A: Awesome. Look forward to it.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Are you a B2B or D2C E commerce merchant. Then head over to greenwoodconsulting.net to learn how we can help you scale your business.