Appearing on The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce

In this episode:

🎯 Pragmatic technology selection means understanding your needs before being swayed by glamour

“I’ve as the CTO now and with my technology head, I’ve made it my mission to just be my global theme is pragmatic technology selection and just understanding your needs before you get glamoured by any technology.4”

Chris Gee, Technology Selection Expert

Transcript of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce: Episode 154: Chris Gee, CTO of the B2B eCommerce Association

00:00:07 Isaiah Bollinger

We lcome to episode one hundred and fifty four of the hard truth about B2B eCommerce. I am your co host Isaiah Ballinger and I am back with Tim. Think we missed a week but we will be catching up and uh, we’re excited about our guest today.

00:00:22 Tim Peterson

Uh, we are excited. You know it’s good to be here and uh, one hundred and fifty four is pretty amazing. I am always uh I am always amazed to hear these high triple digit numbers. Now it’s a lot, you know. And. But I want to also thank the tradition that we have here lately is to thank a lot of people who are listening to our podcast or who reach out. And, you know, I encourage everyone who’s listening to just reach out and say, hello. I am easy to find on LinkedIn, Isaiah is easy to find on LinkedIn or otherwise. And so I periodically get messages and so I was uh. 

00:00:54 Tim Peterson

You know, Harry Joiner is somebody that many of us have known for a long time. He’s been involved in e commerce for decades, mostly on the recruiting side. He’s an avid. Oh yeah,

00:01:04 Isaiah Bollinger

I think I’ve seen him pop up as a recruiter quite a bit. Right? Yeah,

00:01:07 Tim Peterson

He’s a great guy. You know i I’ve worked with him before; he’s amazing. But you know, he’s uh so we get tech recruiters who listen. I had given shout outs last week to people from various business school programs, uh, the students and the professors listening. You know, Many, many people in the world of business from any angle, a lot of consultants, A lot of people in AI and pure tech or just business in general who want to listen and hear from our amazing guests. So I want to thank those folks. Also, a couple people I’ve worked with on startups like Andy Stevenson, who I’ve worked with on a number of startups. He continues to listen to the podcast and I appreciate that. And also a couple other guys Sims Tillerson. 

00:01:53 Tim Peterson

Uh, who is someone I know? A few other folks like Liam Darmody, also a LinkedIn guy who listens in. Uh, I challenged him to listen to our podcast. I said, you know, you don’t have anything to do with this but you should listen. And he said like Oh it’s a good podcast.” Well yeah it is So thank you to everybody. I’ll stop there and uh uh reach out again. I’ll be happy to drop your name uh and for i’m going to pause for a moment so we can insert our sponsor mention. And then i’ll throw it back to isaiah to introduce our amazing guest. Balance is a B2B eCommerce payment solution that works well for you and for your buyers. It offers a seamless one click checkout, for almost any payment method, including ACH wire checks cards even terms. It’s used by leaders in B, two B e commerce, and it’s as easy as buying a shirt from Amazon. Check them out at getbalance dot com. Book a session.

00:02:52 Tim Peterson

And tell them what your needs are. They are the first dedicated payment platform for B2B eCommerce, one hundred percent tailored to your needs. Thanks again to our sponsor Balance. Isaiah, please continue. Yeah,

00:03:06 Isaiah Bollinger

I am excited to bring on Chris Key from the CTO now officially CTO of the B2B eCommerce Association. You know we’ve talked about the B two B Commerce Association quite a bit I think on this podcast and more and more and have you know. Guests from it, And even Justin King going before way back before he was relevant to the association. So, um, you know, you are new to the podcast, And I think, you know, maybe a little more behind the scenes in the association. So love to, just, you know, get people to know you better uh, and what you guys are up to. So yeah,

00:03:44 Chris Gee

Great. No, thanks as well. Yeah, no. I I would say, you know, um. CTO has been kind of like my main role for the last nine months. Before that, and I still am, I am UK lead. So in the UK, I kind of am the face at the events, the person who’s pinging you on LinkedIn saying, “Hey, come and get involved. Let’s have a chat. Let’s talk about how we can work together.” Um and uh. 

00:04:17 Chris Gee

The next big thing for me is to get our new global site and suite of sites all up and running. We’ve got new learning management system come in, we’ve got new job site, we’ve got new website with a whole new membership stack. Connecting all of that across our other platforms, we’ve got the B2B eCommerce awards site, B2B eCommerce world with our U K U S and Australia events.

00:04:47 Chris Gee

And as you can imagine, t here is all of the requests for CRM, AI, email, everything else that we’re fitting in in the background. So, it’s. 

00:04:58 Isaiah Bollinger

A full blown like, is it fair to say it’s a full blown like community engagement platform? Right? Like with a login and you know gets fairly complex, once you start going down that path, right?

00:05:08 Chris Gee

It’s really complex. We’ve got, Multiple member types, so we’ve got like vendor members, we’ve got agency members, and we’ve got merchant members. All, who have a different need when they log into the site ;, they need to be able to do different things. And some of it’s quite complicated. We’ve got different objects; like you can upload case studies, you can upload events and manage events. You can. 

00:05:40 Chris Gee

Upload thought leadership like reports, white papers, blogs. There is so much you can contribute and get your voice.

00:05:48 Isaiah Bollinger

User generated content functionality. I’ve actually been, you know, playing around with AI and kind of doing the whole vibe coding thing, Building a social platform, very different niche and purpose, but similar concept around like a niche and a community in a niche, right where I think we are in this B two B commerce niche, right. But yeah, you start going down the rabbit hole of like just reviews. I’ll give you that example. Like it started getting a lot more complicated. We were pulling in some public reviews from other systems and then, you know, we created our own review system. Like it just it sounds so simple and then it’s like oh, you want to be able to edit your reviews? But then, you know, like these little nuances just adds up right? Like, you add a feature, then you have a bug, and then like it just it never ends. Yeah. 

00:06:38 Tim Peterson

A couple of questions. So, I’ve uh I’ve been involved with other professional associations, a lot of different organizations over the years. Been on the boards of a few. And and one of the things you didn’t mention is uh media or influencer or other types of members. So, is that something you’re also considering? It is there.

00:06:55 Chris Gee

It is there. I mean, if I told you all the things that we were, we were pushing and trying to get off the ground in T four. But yeah, we’ve gotum so.

00:07:06 Chris Gee

I’ve got, I’ve got it like a secondary strategy to the whole thing. So, my imagination for us as a as a community and quick potted history, right? So, I founded an agency with my brother in two thousand and twelve, and we’ve grown as a B2B eCommerce agency. And we aren’t massive. And so trying to cut through the noise and get found was really difficult. And that’s how I ended up finding, In the B 2 B e- commerce association, is I knew we were really good at what we were doing, but it was hard to get seen. It was hard to be noticed. And there were there’s a lot of agencies, Technology consultants with significant budgets in retail for marketing that make it hard for B 2 B specialist businesses to get found. Especially when you type in something like e- commerce agency like impossible.

00:08:00 Isaiah Bollinger

It’ll be like a million Shopify agencies, but they’re all like you know Shopify yeah, Agencies that work on like consumer projects, it’s just it’s not the same as what we’re talking about. Yeah,

00:08:10 Chris Gee

Yeah, exactly. And and all of our customers were family businesses on trading estates, you know. And, the only way to really find them was to pick something in your house, break it in half, pull a component out and find out who made it. That’s like the best way to find a B two B business. Um and and we were, Well, I just felt like we were under resourced, and I was like, “Well, what do I want?” And that’s how I found the B2B eCommerce Association. I was like, “Well now I’ve found you. I want to be involved.” Yeah. I want to bring the energy that i’ve got and make some stuff happen. So in that mix, there is also coaching for agency owners who are pivoting to b two b.

00:09:00 Chris Gee

Because that’s where they’re seeing their growth. There is coaching for merchants who are maybe leaving a role and want to go out to be a consultant to get involved. We’ve got tracks that we’re curating for kind of like LinkedIn influencer tracks, where less of is it pods? They call them, it’s less of like pods. And more of like this is how to curate good posts. We’ve built some AI tools that will help you refine your language as you are posting so that you are using the right terminology. In case you know, if you’ve not, if you’ve been doing it inside a B two B business for ten years, you might not be speaking the lingo that everyone else is speaking. So that will help you pull that together. Um and then yeah with them we’ve got the the coaching program.

00:09:57 Chris Gee

Mentorships, Global ambassadors, like t here is lots of other ways to be involved and and find a voice in the the association as well.

00:10:07 Isaiah Bollinger

Um, yeah, t here is a lot. I feel like in the last year, Like you know twelve to eighteen months, it’s it’s really accelerated what you guys are doing. Like the platform, you know, The events coming online, just, you know, I think, you know, Brett was kind of a one man show and also in a. Country that uh is pretty far away. I actually met him in person at one of the B2B events, and he had like flown 20 hours, like you know, He has like a baby, and he’s like flying across the world, and it’s a hard business to run globally. And I think but now he’s found like you know US folks, Like Justin King and um I think there’s, you know a decent cohort in the US helping him. I keep just, I want to give credit to some of the other people. Uh there’s more than just Justin King in the US than you guys.

00:10:55 Isaiah Bollinger

You got you in the U K. Yeah,

00:10:58 Chris Gee

Well we’ve got yeah we’ve got Sarah Falcon who’s our CMO.

00:11:02 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah she’s on the podcast. Yeah. 

00:11:05 Chris Gee

Absolutely like just fire, she’s so good and organizing us and getting our our messaging gray and I can’t wait to deliver a whole new set of tools for her because yeah, you know that, that’s what she’s going to do great stuff with, we’ve got people like Jason Hineum. And Amber McDougall, who’s CX Global Director. We have obviously Brett as well, who is an absolute machine. Like, yeah we’re we’re opposite sides of the world; we’re opposite time zones. It’s like neither of us are ever offline. It’s it’s always something something happening. Yeah, and then we’ve got a whole load of.

00:11:53 Chris Gee

Yeah, other people around like Emma, Chris, Sia. Like there’s there’s yeahum I’m just thinking of more names like Ash. There’s there’s a team of people in this growing and growing and growing. And vendors like us,

00:12:07 Isaiah Bollinger

Like Zalab. And uh you know uh we’re growing andum hopefully, you know, the agencies will be contributing more the people within that, the vendor, the software vendors. And then ultimately, We need these manufacturers and distributors to get a little bit more advanced and up the speed. But it is happening. I think for all of us, maybe a little bit slower than we’d like, but it is happening. It’s. 

00:12:36 Chris Gee

For the people, right? Like you know, The association for me, what it exists for is to be able to change to bring change. That’s that’s what an association is. It’s for people who typically compete, To put their eggs in a basket to bring about change for all of their benefit. And when we had two members, it was not a lot of energy behind it. When you’ve got two hundred members and a thousand members and three thousand members, you can bring about change much faster. So the more people join, the more people support.

00:13:14 Isaiah Bollinger

What’s the membership at if you don’t mind? Are you allowed to say orum?

00:13:18 Chris Gee

It’s a tricky one to answer because of the state of the tech stack. But once the new site goes live, this is more than ten people and fewer than hundred thousand. I mean, yeah, yeah, more than ten, fewer than hundred thousand we’ve got We’ve got thousands.

00:13:39 Isaiah Bollinger

Are we past a thousand?

00:13:40 Chris Gee

Yeah like depending on like we have a free membership tier as well, right? So it’s not just pay to be involved. So we have got thousands.

00:13:51 Chris Gee

Yeah, We’ve got thousands. Okay, but in terms of not a hundred thousand,

00:13:56 Isaiah Bollinger

Not a hundred thousand. But in terms of vendor, um, in terms of vendors, in terms of like support from technology and from agencies. It’s like I I think that being that my my background is agency, I think that agencies should be coming to us now and getting involved. I think you know. 

00:14:16 Chris Gee

If you’re if you’re growing an agency and B two B is your focus, the association can really help you with that. And, it’s helping the team at Rixxo, who um who have kind of like, let me come off to the sidelines and just do this pretty much full time. But it helps them because people who have been doing this for years are now going to events. And they’re meeting people and they’re going, oh we’re in it together. We can swap notes. We can actually talk. We’re actually talking about the same thing. We had IRX in the UK. Now, IRX was typically a retail show, an international retail exhibition. We partnered with the event organizers to bring the first dedicated B2B eCommerce expo to the UK. So within within IRX, we had that Justin flew in Brett Jason Jason Greenwood, everybody came in. We had two. 

00:15:12 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah great guy yeah. 

00:15:14 Chris Gee

Yeah it’s fantastic. 

00:15:15 Isaiah Bollinger

On the podcast, at least once we need him back. We’ve had him twice,

00:15:21 Chris Gee

Yeah. And, and we had a two day talk track on B, two B e commerce dedicated to theater, and it was fantastic. And you know i I got messages, and verbatim I got a message from somebody who said,” I have never spoken to anybody who understands the pain of my business.”

00:15:45 Chris Gee

So he came to the B2B zone, met with us, met with the other B2B business. And he was just like, “This has changed.” And so we walked around the exhibition with him. What you know, what’s troubling you? Oh, this will come and speak to these guys. They can talk to you about how you can manage credit for smaller accounts. Come and speak to these guys. They can talk to you about product and The conversations were just hitting ;. They were so good! So good!

00:16:11 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, Something that would be interesting uh, that I think you guys could could uh, just an idea, maybe uh, get this in Brett’s ear. The the other guys ears is um building like add ons to the either the ERP events or the existing, you know, e commerce events that are still a little too B, two C, or like let’s use like Shop Talk as an example. Shop Talk is probably one of the most you know, premier expensive thousand tens of thousands out there. I was there. Mega events, right? But like it’s still pretty B two B light, right? But like, is there a world in which you guys could have like the B two B segment within that? Or like something that’s a bit more official because like I’ll give you an example. Like as Zalab, you know we were new to this. We had merged in with Zalab, and we had a B to C component. So we were kind of comfortable with the shop talks, and we still sell direct to consumer projects. But you know, we’re now very heavily B two B focused.

00:17:09 Isaiah Bollinger

As a combined entity, and they had a hard time like justifying Shop Talk because they’re like,” Well, it’s kind of D to C,” but Shopify you know all of our partners are going to be there. And like it was kind of this like awkward kind of thing. They ended up going; it was successful, but like it wasn’t formalized in that B two B sense. You see what I am saying? But t here is already this massive overlap.

00:17:29 Tim Peterson

Let me add to that for a second before we throw this stick. Yeah, yeah, you are making a really good point here because, I’ve been involved with a lot of different associations, a lot of different ones. The National Retail Federation and RF Shop dot org. I am currently a judge for Echo Awards for the ANA, you know, the advertising association. I do the Webby Awards, you know, all this stuff right? But Shop Talk in particular this year, You know, they co- locate another conference called Prosper. That’s always simultaneous with Shop, Talk, and Prosper is for marketplaces. So everyone who does Amazon and all these other marketplace things. 

00:18:05 Tim Peterson

Who could justify being in for that could also come over to people who happen to be there for shop talk, and vice versa. And that’s what I did. I met people from Prosper and Shop Talk.

00:18:16 Isaiah Bollinger

Now it’s all intertwined, right? You are a manufacturer, you might be on the marketplaces, you need Prosper related stuff, you need the e commerce stuff with then you have. 

00:18:24 Tim Peterson

Beat people between both. You know and that’s, Exactly, how I see this,

00:18:28 Isaiah Bollinger

Everything is becoming so omni channel, right? And really that’s how you should be thinking about your business. I mean, I think a good analogy is the business, the membership types that you have in in your platform, right? Like as a manufacturer distributor, I would have you know customer segments, right? And maybe some of those are consumers. Right or like you have like a certain kind of consumer that’s almost like a business. Right like that’s maybe a hobbyist. Right like we had a client that, They were selling like expensive CNC machines, Like and you are like t here is no way fifty percent of their customers were hobbyists. Like you are like, like if you like when we when they when we like learned that, like we were blown away. We were like, oh, this has got to be like ninety percent B two B. You know what I mean or or maybe you get a couple hobbyists but, people would buy these mega machines and put it in their garage. It was a ten million dollar segment of their business. The point I am making is. 

00:19:25 Isaiah Bollinger

All of this stuff is getting so intertwined, and and that’s why you know to your point Tim, it’s like marketplaces. It’s true. E commerce. We need all of it. We need all or we need like, uh, you know, a booth in each area, right? Like set up at a hotel between. 

00:19:42 Tim Peterson

The two and simultaneous right? I mean, that’s what people do today,

00:19:46 Isaiah Bollinger

Anyway, something to think about because I know how hard it is to run an event by itself. But what we’ve been doing is adding on to the events, which is a lot easier. Yeah.

00:19:55 Chris Gee

Yeah, we’ve done a couple of we’ve done a couple of things like that. With kind of like some fringe events, Like maybe doing some networking drinks in a bar nearby at the end of the day. The challenge remains that merchants in B two B behave differently than they do in retail. In retail, as an agency as a brand, you can throw up some kind of event. You know, beers, bowling, darts, even a spin class and you’ll fill a room. You’ll fill a room with energetic people who are maybe marketers, social media managers.

00:20:40 Isaiah Bollinger

I’ve got my new soda company or like some cool yeah. I know what you’re talking about like because we you know you get these, like very excited young people building these CPG businesses. Yeah it’s, It’s not that easy to do that in B two B. You are not going to, you know, especially a lot of the owners and executives and decision makers. They don’t really want to go out of their way to do that, right? Like some of them one are very successful. Honestly, they’re they’re they may be financially set. They don’t need to go to like your bowling event. You know what I mean? Like no But.

00:21:14 Chris Gee

It’s so important. It’s so important to get to these events, like if you are a, if you are a manufacturer, if you are an MD. Owner C level in in, a manufacturing wholesaler distributor. It’s so important to get to these events, And yeah, you are going to go to some where they’re going to be a bit rough. And someone you are going to accidentally end up sat next to a BDM who’s going to really pitch you hard for the wrong thing.

00:21:41 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah with like one year experience.

00:21:44 Chris Gee

Yeah with one year experience, I was at an exhibition recently, and a guy was trying to close me. Um, he was like,” Do you sell online?” I was like,” No.” And then he kept asking me the questions from the script. Um, and then.

00:21:58 Isaiah Bollinger

So technically you kind of do. But yeah.

00:22:01 Chris Gee

And then then he started saying,” A nd, does that sound like something that would be of interest to you trying to get the clothes?” And I was like, dude. I was like just it’s it’s all right. It’s all right just not just not for me talks.

00:22:12 Isaiah Bollinger

I mean, the problem with these. Like, let’s i’m just i keep going back to drop talk because i do think it is one of the best commerce events overall. But. It’s like it feels like when I’ve been there, like eighty percent vendors. Like it’s just agency software vendor, vendor, vendor BDR. You know, And the little merchants are like uh like because they’re just getting bombarded with pitches all day. So they’re like, yeah, they’re a little scared to tell you that they’re a merchant because they’re so worried. They’re going to get pitched. You know? Yeah and. 

00:22:39 Chris Gee

That’s that’s something we’re very mindful of something we’re very mindful of. 

00:22:43 Tim Peterson

I went there, representing merchants because then that’s something that a lot of people do. You know, they don’t want to go. How much did you get pitched,

00:22:51 Isaiah Bollinger

Tim? Did you have a merchant badge? Yeah,

00:22:54 Tim Peterson

I had a merchant badge because I was working on behalf of multiple merchants.

00:22:58 Isaiah Bollinger

How much free swag did you get and pitches?

00:23:01 Tim Peterson

Oh my god, it’s like everybody; I got invited to every single party. You know, all the best swag, all that kind of stuff. But I was legitimately there, trying to do business for the merchants because they don’t want to be pitched right? Yeah. Yeah, but. 

00:23:18 Chris Gee

It’s a rock and a hard place, catch twenty two Whatever it is, i’s like retail thrives off these events. The business and the deals and the education happens at these fringe events. The ability to be able to pick up a call and go,” listen, tell me straight,” that kind of stuff happens after you’ve sat down, broken bread, had a drink with somebody. Not when someone’s pitching you on an exhibition stand, And you know, we’ve we’ve grown our agency over the last thirteen years through those events. That’s where our partnerships have truly been made. And I think that for and to come back to your point is for these exhibitions and for all the B two B events to happen, agencies are the key because agencies. 

00:24:09 Chris Gee

Are the people who speak to the most merchants, the technology vendors, you know, the Shopify’s, the Big Commerce, ORO Adobe. They speak to people, but they don’t speak to as many people as agencies, and they don’t have as close a relationship as agencies. And. So if we really want to bring about change, we need agencies to be bringing their merchants to these exhibitions to educate them. And. Not be scared that you’re going to lose a client because you’ve brought them where there might be other agencies. Because, you know, when you get a girlfriend, You don’t lock her in a cupboard under the stairs, in case she’ll meet another guy. Oh yeah, I hope you don’t. But, you know, that’s what we do. That’s what we do in business. You get a client and you lock them away and you hide them.

00:24:58 Chris Gee

And potentially, are we slowing them down from learning? Are we restricting their progress?

00:25:03 Isaiah Bollinger

There is also another side to it, which I think you know. Being on the agency side of the business, I think it’s a hard business, right? Running like you said, it’s a hard business to run. You know, I am thankful that I am part of a larger organization of Zalab. So I am able to, you know, get the help of a lot more resources. But you know even as a larger entity, It’s like you are just always trying to like you said standing out getting leads. You know, you get the lead. You know, they have you know they’re getting ten bids and it becomes a price war. And so I think that like agencies are just, you know, They’re so caught up just trying to get new business and keep the business they have. It’s hard for them to kind of think, oh, well, I got to like also engage in this community. And be proactive in that way, right? Like it’s just like another I am not saying it’s it’s I agree with you. They should be doing it, but it’s just another thing. They have to do that when they’re just trying to kind of like keep their head above water. Yeah, you know,

00:25:56 Chris Gee

But cl. The customers want it, you know. For many years, I’ve been part of different agency accelerator things, And all of the reports say that what people want from their agency more than anything is education. They want to be led. That’s interesting, and so the best way to. Help your clients.

00:26:18 Isaiah Bollinger

The main response you’ve gotten, just like in association asking the merchants and stuff,

00:26:22 Chris Gee

And so this is from this is from working with the agency collective in the U K for many years. It’s been. It’s you know it’s a well reported fact amongst that collective that the reason people, the thing that people want most from their agencies is education and support. They want you to go to them and say hey, you should be doing this because it’s going to make you more money. And not just waiting for the customer to constantly go to the agency and go,” Will you now do this? Will you now do this?” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:53 Tim Peterson

And I’ll go ahead. Go ahead.

00:26:55 Chris Gee

I was gonna say, scooping up the people in your agency in your in your customers and going,” L et’s go to this event, and I’ll walk you around an exhibition and I’ll introduce you to the people at my partners who can tell you about products.” And, then we’ll go for a beer, and then we’ll grab some dinner with this cohort, and you’ll get to meet new people who are in the same boat as you that. That is something that if you wanted to do that on your own as an agency, that’s going to cost you money. It’s going to cost you thousands to put an event on. You could just take them to an event that’s already happening and still come out looking like a hero.

00:27:32 Isaiah Bollinger

It’s an interesting thing that maybe is kind of neglected, which is like, you know, I think as agencies we’re like, we got to go this event, we got to run this dinner, we got to get as many leads as we can. It’s like, Let’s put a little more effort into like bringing some of our customers. Like, let’s get some of our customers there. I think Zalab is is doing some of that, but I think to your point, we probably could be a little bit more thoughtful in doing that more consistently.

00:27:55 Chris Gee

If, if ten agencies went to an event and each brought five customers and all the agencies did something slightly different, the the opportunity in that room is huge.

00:28:07 Isaiah Bollinger

And yeah, cross selling and helping each other. And yeah,

00:28:10 Tim Peterson

I think bigger agencies, Do this. I mean, that’s been my experience. I mean, I’ve worked with a number of agencies that did this, and I’ve also done like paid corporate education, which is unrelated to projects, right? So, I’ve been through agencies, ; I’ve been hired to go in and do training on like whatever type of digital marketing or whatever right, different technology, different tools for these clients, right? And also, there have been tours that are organized, Especially in the context of things, like you know, the National Retail Federation and where you have these conferences. And it’s like well, Let’s go visit all of these retail locations as a group of clients, and we’ll guide you through this. And so there is a lot of that tradition. It just happens I think, you know at a bigger higher level. Like a lot of smaller agencies don’t really do that when they could. It’s easy to do.

00:29:02 Chris Gee

And if we can get, The merchants coming out, I say we get them coming out to play. That’s how I always say it. I was like, we need to invite them out to play. They’ve got to come and have some fun, come to an event, realize that these events are actually good. They’re not they’re not just a pitch t here is education t here is community. T here is networking, t Here is meeting people who are struggling with the same things as you, meeting people who have done the same thing and overcome that challenge and. 

00:29:32 Chris Gee

It’s one day in a year. Like I’ve recently taken over as captain of a business network in cycling club called Tulio, And we meet in t here is think t here is twelve now across the country. First Friday of every month, and if you are a business leader, You get on your bike and you come and do some networking while cycling around some pretty scenery. Now, you think people would be tripping over themselves to do that because they love being on a bike, but they still won’t bring themselves to do that as much as they should.

00:30:07 Isaiah Bollinger

But some great relationships have come out of those events because you first you engage about the bike, then you engage about you, and then you go,” Oh, what is it? You do again?”” Oh yeah,” I’ve got a problem with that. You get to know somebody first and then you share like there’s some. 

00:30:24 Chris Gee

And that’s for me, that’s what the B2B e-commerce association. That’s where the strength is in community, And the whole vibe in, it is so different to anything else that I’ve ever been involved in. Even at IRX, you could feel it like it was really positive, really welcoming. There is a double dose of pragmatism that you don’t always get elsewhere.

00:30:52 Isaiah Bollinger

So much opportunity. There’s a little less people are more open because we’re not like I’m not super threatened. You know, yeah, you know, this other agency is going to steal all my business because we’re still kind of in this, like early stage, um you know, area, whereas I think in like the retail business, everyone’s kind of like trying to you know, compete against each other and steal from the same pie, right? Whereas it feels like we’re kind of still in the early stage building something new here. So with that being said, actually I’d love to like kind of get your take on.

00:31:22 Isaiah Bollinger

It does still feel very early, you know. I still talk to companies that the majority of their operations, it’s I manually put things into the ERP. You know, I take the orders over the phone, email. You know, why does it still feel so like for me? It feels like it’s just not moving that fast from a innovation standpoint. I know some of the techs there, the platforms are getting better but like, It still feels like if you talk to these businesses, they’re pretty analog for the most part.

00:31:57 Chris Gee

They’ve got more complicated businesses, haven’t they? Like the ifs ands or and buts of B 2 B are way more. And so you’ve got a much more fragile system. And that that system may have been refined over 20 years. And yeah, it’s a bit of sellotape, it’s a fax machine. It’s somebody walking a piece of paper from one room to the next, but it’s refined. And, then you want to come and turn that into something digital that is going to be shaky again. And you’ve got to be brave enough to take that step. And that bravery probably comes with timing in your business, timing in your career, budget.

00:32:46 Chris Gee

You know, all the other cycles of the world. Like some people were forced to do it during COVID. Some people will be forced to do it now with all of the political, geopolitical stuff happening.

00:32:57 Isaiah Bollinger

I think that the market shift will be so strong. It’s almost like you have. You know, we kind of saw this in retail, right? Like if you didn’t do it in retail, yeah, like basically became, you know, obsolete well,

00:33:09 Tim Peterson

I mean I think. You know, I want to remind our listeners, I’ve been doing e commerce for thirty years. Right? I mean, So in the mid nineties, when it was new to the B two C side, it took a long time. You know, I mean people kind of forget that because maybe they entered in later, or you know they didn’t remember the dot com boom and bust of around two thousand.

00:33:30 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah like wasn’t Toys R Us like they were still, you know, they weren’t taking it seriously, like ninety five, two thousand, two thousand five people in like two thousand, five twenty ten, they still weren’t like. It wasn’t.

00:33:40 Tim Peterson

It took a long time, you know, and now it’s a given, right? I mean, it’s just a given. Like, that’s the world we’ve grown up in. And everything is you know, people are thirty years old since it’s you know, a long time, right? It’s a long long time. But B two B is is was on a totally different cycle. It had its own needs and patterns and interests and other tech things that they were trying to deal with. And whatever. And now it’s like, oh, you know, now this is something we got to do. So it’s much more fresh, right? Yeah I think it’s going to take a little more time.

00:34:10 Chris Gee

And We’ve got generational experience within businesses now, as well of roles. So, Those e commerce businesses that have been operating for thirty years have refined the roles of CMOs, heads of e commerce, SEOs in B two B. What, we’re going to start to see over the next few years is we’re going to see B two B businesses who want to push, who want to grow b two b businesses who want to change. We’ll recruit from that pool, and when they recruit from that pool of people who are seasoned in retail, They’re going to bring in experience, but they’re going to be missing the B two B nuance. So, we’ve got courses,

00:34:52 Isaiah Bollinger

ERP and customer exactly call. 

00:34:56 Chris Gee

Off like I use I constantly use the term credit. Credit in retail means something completely different in B two B yeah. Completely different terms. The same with invoice. They can they they mean completely different things, And so. 

00:35:12 Isaiah Bollinger

People will credit terms and credit limits like a business of, you know, I have a hundred thousand dollar credit limit. Yeah, like obviously that doesn’t really exist in retail.

00:35:20 Chris Gee

Yeah, exactly. But, if you say to somebody I’m going to give you a credit in retail, They think they’re going to have some money on their account to spend in lieu of a refund.

00:35:29 Isaiah Bollinger

It’s really more refund right is really what yeah. 

00:35:33 Chris Gee

Yeah exactly. 

00:35:37 Chris Gee

And So, All of these people who are going to be migrating from retail, they’re going to be super experienced at ninety percent of stuff, but they’re going to be missing that ten percent of B two B nuance. And, we’re going to need to go through a few cycles of generational change in those roles in the B two B side to really get the pace. They’re gonna, They’re going to come into a B two B business. They’re going to go, right? These are the methodologies. These are the frameworks that work. This is the process you are going to get people who move around different B two B businesses and have a cookie cutter approach that works. And then that will scale. So, but that takes time, doesn’t it? Like and in retail you could do that in six months. In B two B, you might be there for two years before you’ve even got to grips with the ERP.

00:36:27 Tim Peterson

Now you are bringing up a really good point. You know, earlier in my career, A lot of my roles I was the first head of e commerce for a B two C company. Later on, I was the first head of e commerce for a B two B company. You know, It’s a very different thing and that so I’ve done both right, yeah, but I am first. So you know, there was I always talk about an L E D lighting company that I worked with. But you know, they had never had a head of e commerce before, and the job I had had prior to that. There was a head of marketing, but there was never a head of e- commerce. And so I came in and I was that was my specialty. It’s like now we’ll set this up, we’ll separate out the roles for marketing and operations and tech, and here is what we do. And then I leave, you know. And so but you are right, you need that. You need people who absolutely understand exactly what you are talking about here. You have to understand B two B, You know, not just yeah.

00:37:16 Isaiah Bollinger

It’s a good point like within these B two B organizations. I agree, we’re still early and I. Think part of that is just the internal teams and knowledge right, like if you don’t. Have people working on this stuff, then it’s just not going to happen, right? Like you know so. I, would you say have you noticed a trend in that they’re hiring more e-commerce managers, You know, and dedicated e-commerce person like, are you seeing that maturity in that org chart? I also notice it’s very IT leaning. What’s interesting is that. I would say majority of the time in B two B companies like heavy B, two B manufacturing distributors.

00:37:50 Isaiah Bollinger

The ecom will live in it, right? It’s like an offshoot of the IT department because it’s like ERP. Whereas in um retail, It’s almost always living in marketing or like, you know, the e commerce director almost always there is exceptions, right? But it almost always reports up to the CMO, or be like the marketing org kind of runs the org almost or is like the key department. Whereas B two B, it’s all usually I see it living in IT and IT. It’s like one IT guy. And it’s like a five hundred person company, and you are like, like I always think about that. I am like this five hundred person company has like one IT. Like this guy leaves the business, like I can’t tell you how many of these businesses I am like, dude, I don’t if this guy leaves. I don’t know what they’re going to do. He has like twenty years knowledge on the ERP. Like they literally, I honestly think some of these businesses would go out of business if that guy left. 

00:38:42 Chris Gee

Seven years ago. Seven years ago, I started working with a builder’s merchant. And they’re really interesting because they hold no inventory whatsoever. So, builders merchant with zero stock, yeah. Source like. 

00:38:57 Isaiah Bollinger

A B two B dropshipper, basically. Yeah, yeah.

00:39:00 Chris Gee

And they wanted to double in size in a five year plan. And they come to us initially with a Sage Salesforce integration request. And we did the five whys, and we got down to the main crux. The why was, “we want to double in size.” So we took a step back and we looked at and audited. And we were like, “Well, if you are wanting to do this through e commerce, who’s the team?” It was like t here is this guy.” So there was this guy. He was going to be responsible for taking their website and doubling the size of the business. And. 

00:39:43 Chris Gee

And all of it, right? And all of it. He wasn’t even it. He used to be a builder. And uh, he wasum Are.

00:39:50 Isaiah Bollinger

We talking how many people are just people like like how big of a So.

00:39:54 Chris Gee

The sales team were the telesales team were twenty two people. Um, there was equivalent size in the accounts department, because every order was rekeyed into Sage, hence why the initial request Anyway, long story short, I said to them, t here is a couple of ways we can go forward. But ultimately, you need to be thinking about five years from now. What does the team look like that you’ll have in place? So instead of quoting them to do the integration, we said, ” L et ‘ s start by doing the five-year plan and drawing what the org chart will look like in five years. And then we’ll know where we need to be. ” And I went for lunch with the MD of this company a year ago, five and a half years after this, and we looked at that org chart.

00:40:42 Chris Gee

And it was almost spot on. Wow, it was very clear they actually they had fourteen people. The org chart had ten because they’d added a few extra category managers in. 

00:40:56 Isaiah Bollinger

The e commerce department or. 

00:40:57 Chris Gee

The in an e commerce department with a head of e commerce with a head of product, a real department. And you know what? They smashed through their target. They’re now on track to to double again, and then they want to IPO. That’s like their trajectory. Wow. Um, and I said to him, I said so five years ago, when I said to you like, this is what you’ll need. What did you think? He was like, I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe that we would need a team that big, to run the website.

00:41:30 Isaiah Bollinger

And why do you think that people don’t believe that?

00:41:35 Chris Gee

I used to have a chain of music shops, right? Guitars, drums, keyboards. And, we’d have. We had two shops, three, three, at one, two and two in the end. Two shops all with shop fittings. Every day we were open, we had to have at least three staff. We had to clean. We had to light. We had to rent in advance The cost of opening that store on a high street was tens of thousands a month.

00:42:05 Chris Gee

But the website hosting was fifty dollars.

00:42:10 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, whatever Shopify or whatever it is. Yeah,

00:42:12 Chris Gee

Yeah, And so it gives us too much if you are not technical t here is not enough in there for you to understand what’s going on in the middle. You don’t I always say that you should consider a website like real estate.;, it’s just digital and you are on a high street, the internet. But there’s one difference. On this high street, every single one of your competitors is your neighbor. You are next door to all of them. So when someone’s walking down that high street, they can go into any of your competitors or you instantly.

00:42:51 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah instantly.

00:42:52 Chris Gee

So, now you picture it like a high street where all of you are. And all of your competitors are there. Is it going to cost you more or less?

00:43:02 Isaiah Bollinger

More, yeah. I mean, More advertising and content and the things that you need to build be a useful thing relative to. I think that one thing that people don’t understand is that just because it’s the technology has gotten better, doesn’t mean it doesn’t really cost less in the sense that the bar is just higher. So now, yeah,

00:43:27 Chris Gee

It costs more to build a website now.

00:43:29 Isaiah Bollinger

Now, the expectation. To be useful is higher, so yeah, it’s like it’s cheaper to do what you could have done ten years ago. But what I did ten years ago wouldn’t even no one would use it. And. 

00:43:42 Tim Peterson

Two other two other things I want to add to what Chris is saying, and i I agree. I mean, you know early early in my e commerce career, I would go into a company and i’d say, you know, a retailer, for example, and i’d say, well, You know, You have a store. So you have how much of a budget to open a store. Well.” Yeah, then this is your budget for your next store, which happens to be e commerce. And then we take it from there. You know, right? I had to talk about it as if it was another store location. You know, and they would number them. You know, people wouldn’t say it’s store location one twenty three right? And and then people were like wait a minute, it’s much bigger than that. It’s like, yeah, you know, but we had to we had to justify some budget because they did do like.

00:44:23 Tim Peterson

Well, I paid this much for my fax machine, and I paid this much for whatever.

00:44:27 Isaiah Bollinger

The only way they could like quantify it, right? Yeah, and then the second. Then you realize it drives traffic to all the stores. Yeah,

00:44:35 Tim Peterson

Exactly. But the second quick thing too, is that e- commerce also caused its own problems by talking so much about efficiency and speed, and you know ease. Everything was like, you know, look at the changes that will happen because of the wonders of e- commerce. And everyone’s like, well, if it does all that, it must be cheaper too. You know, so people would just completely confuse all of these topics and right. But anyway, yeah I just wanted to throw that in you know.

00:45:03 Chris Gee

I think part of the issue for merchants, one of the challenges is getting the full picture of what it looks like out there because. I used to have a boss and he had a saying, and it was brilliant. And it was, “Even a blind squirrel will occasionally find a nut.” And we only hear about those stories. You only ever hear about the squirrel who finds a nut. You never hear about the ten thousand squirrels who don’t. And, that’s the same in e-commerce. All of this All of our case studies are success about.

00:45:40 Chris Gee

Four thousand percent increase in page views and bounce rate, and even numbers that don’t even matter, but they’re massive. Great great improvements. Yeah,

00:45:48 Isaiah Bollinger

It’s all because like some influencer, you know, retweeted their, you know, it’s like the behind the scenes story. It’s like oh, it turns out their investor is like, you know, a public figure. I. 

00:45:59 Chris Gee

Did a million in makeup in one twelve hour TikTok session. And it’s like yeah greatum brilliant. And it’s like yeah. So after I left, Oxford University is okay. Well, you didn’t come from. You know, there’s always more to the story. There is always more. But, what really happens is it’s hard work opening an e-commerce business, and you’ve got a lot of factors. You sometimes have an agency that is too keen to move too quickly. You sometimes have a client that is too keen to move too quickly.

00:46:33 Chris Gee

You sometimes have technologists that are too keen to use the latest and greatest because they think it’s going to.

00:46:38 Isaiah Bollinger

You definitely have the software vendors that want to sell you their license, that’s for sure.

00:46:42 Chris Gee

You have the software vendors, and so I’ve as the CTO now and with my technology head, I’ve made it my mission to just be my global theme is pragmatic technology selection and just understanding your needs before you get glamoured by any technology.

00:47:03 Chris Gee

There are a number of times where people will walk in and say,” I need a new website.” No, you don’t.” I need a new ERP.” No, you don’t. Yeah. You might need change. You might need some help, but you don’t need to do that or that.

00:47:17 Isaiah Bollinger

A lot of times what I find is like, step one is like you just have bad data, bad data and bad processes, right? Like your processes are not clearly documented; they’re confusing; your data’s crap. You know, you get a new shiny software, the bad data is still going to look bad, right? Like the product pages are going to look crappy. You know, Content and structure and all that and branding is like I mean, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve built done a project where, like with just bad branding, it looks bad. Like you can make it technically good but literally the branding is underrated. Like, you don’t have to spend a lot, but like a modern brand refresh can go a long way towards making something look way better online.

00:47:57 Chris Gee

You Know how you said that a lot of the time it lives with the IT department,

00:48:01 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah? And that’s like so far removed from branding,

00:48:06 Chris Gee

Yeah. So far from branding, but also it’s a trap. It’s a trap for going too much into technology and not into business, yeah. And I was working with a half billion pound plant machinery company. Having a chat with them, and they were telling me about some of their problems. And they’ve got around the world. ; they’ve got thousands of machines that have thousands of parts with cross compatibility with different SKUs. Oem parts ;, some parts might even be exactly the same, just with different SKUs. And.

00:48:43 Chris Gee

They they started telling me about this, And then the head of it was telling me that they’re currently thinking about a way to structure their database so that they can create relationship tables to build out a system that can keep track of all of this and then upload it into the website. And I was like, I am paraphrasing lots of this, but I was like, Oh, a PIM. And he’s like, Say what now?

00:49:07 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah. They’re like a PIM.

00:49:08 Chris Gee

That’s what a PIM does.

00:49:09 Isaiah Bollinger

They had custom built a PIM, and we had a customer that did that too. That I am actually, that’s a conversation I want to have with them. I was like, why are we maintaining this? You know, Dealing with this thing, like there is twenty of these things you can go buy off the shelf that are probably better and much less expensive to maintain. Yeah yeah And,

00:49:27 Chris Gee

If they’d have been in the B2B eCommerce association at that point, they would have been watching some videos. They would have heard some terms. They’d read a couple of case studies. They would have gone well, that sounds like us. 

00:49:38 Isaiah Bollinger

Did they build it? Did they build it?

00:49:40 Chris Gee

They didn’t build it. They. And do you know what what I did is I actually used my position at the association. I rang a few of our PIM members and I said, listen, I’ve got some merchants. They’re not ready to buy, but I want to introduce you, But I don’t want you all over them, and they don’t want you all over them. So would you mind doing like a no pitch demo? And some of our members, they were fantastic. They they just they didn’t put them in the sales pipeline, but they gave them a great demo. And this customer, they left one of the PIM demos and they just went,” That’s that’s what we need. That’s exactly what we need.” You. 

00:50:18 Isaiah Bollinger

Can run as your CRM as just a contact, a marketable contact. You know like you don’t have to put them as a deal right? Or you know, yeah, and I think that to your point, there is a lot of nurturing that needs to happen before. People are ready to buy, and that process can literally be years in some cases. Yeah, right. But, that’s also what makes running an agency so hard is, you know, you got to be farming this, you know these contacts and these relationships, but you might not see the ROI for so long in those cases.

00:50:48 Chris Gee

And, that’s why it’s taken so long for B two B to transform because we’ve got this education piece. You know I. 

00:50:55 Isaiah Bollinger

Actually doing this podcast like, The reason I am like, well, obviously selfishly it helps put our name out there, but like theoretically we’re helping slowly educate the industry which should help us basically.

00:51:08 Tim Peterson

Yes, what I had mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. One of the things that makes me happiest is hearing that there are business students, That there are B schools, you know where people are listening to this podcast to understand what B two B commerce is about. That’s fantastic. That’s exactly, What we want, cause those people are going to go out into the world, they’re going to get jobs, They’re going to already have you know some sort of level of understanding other people didn’t five years ago or seven years ago.

00:51:34 Isaiah Bollinger

I want to go back to, you know, I certainly agree education training. You know, all of this I think we all need need to keep working on and do a better job of. But what do you think tactically or tangibly You know I think part of it is some of this is just too much to bite off for some of these guys all at once, right? And. You know, okay, I got to implement, you know, Upgrade my E R P and implement the new e commerce platform and do all the integrations. And then I mean I am dealing with it. You know daily where, then it’s like, well, you really need this app on top of you know, Shopify or Magento. You know what I mean? Like I think a lot of people think that they’re just buying the e commerce platform. But it turns out like, well, you got to buy like Celigo to integrate with NetSuite. And like next thing, you know it’s like twenty software. You know and so. 

00:52:19 Isaiah Bollinger

Do you think I guess what I am getting at is like do you think that maybe there are like some more incremental, you know, small wins, you know, that some of these companies could be doing. You know maybe a smaller phase, one get get a win on the board, then move to like kind of a more stepping stone process versus they’re just like stuck in the sand. Trying to do this, like mega project, they can’t get off the ground. You know.

00:52:43 Chris Gee

I think one of the most valuable tools that you can have as a business during change, management are flow diagrams and your process is documented. So if you’re like ISO or something like that, because if you know where you are, it’s not a lot of work to change that to know where you’re going. And then it’s really easy to track and it becomes a lot less scary. When you are seeing something change before you spend the work, and I think about when you are doing web design, right? We’ll make a mockup in Figma before we build the website because it’s faster and cheaper.

00:53:25 Isaiah Bollinger

They want revisions, and you know, you could build it, but you are taking a huge risk that they’re not going to like it. And yeah,

00:53:31 Chris Gee

And it’s time and it’s effort. So don’t build building;

00:53:34 Isaiah Bollinger

You do a blueprint in architecture. You know exactly kind of thing right like But. 

00:53:39 Chris Gee

But not even that, not even that comprehensive. Like I think a lot of the time, as an agency, right? And, you’ll know this when someone comes in and asks you to make a recommendation. Very few people walk in and go,” These are the seven types of orders that we take over the phone. These are the gates that they go through.” And these are. 

00:54:02 Isaiah Bollinger

Twenty more conversations to even help you. And then yeah, I get on my calls because yeah. You know, Sometimes it’s hard to even just get them to get you the information to even make a recommendation.

00:54:13 Chris Gee

Yeah, So the most valuable tool you can have as a business to have cheaper dev, faster dev, Better dev, whether that development is code or business or process, whatever it is, you are developing is to have your processes documented in a way that you understand and a way that you can.

00:54:35 Isaiah Bollinger

Like, do you know Lucidchart or one of those visual tools where it’s pretty easy? You know, it’s like kind of like a PowerPoint kind of thing.

00:54:42 Chris Gee

Or on my LinkedIn, On my LinkedIn, there is an article” How to Write a Mermaid Diagram with Chat GBT.” You could just sit down, write the process in your own words, Give it to Chat GBT with this prompt, and it will turn it into a flow diagram for you. Really? And yeah, it’s just. It’s the most valuable thing you can. You can communicate so much with a flow diagram, and once you have it, when you want to talk about five different versions of it, you are just working with the diagram.

00:55:16 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, and then also you could if you have to talk to five different vendors, you can send them all the same chart. Right? All the same chart. Let’s I want to dig into that a little bit more. You know I know we’re kind of coming towards the end. But like could you break down, maybe a couple of the You know I think the order processing is is so important. Maybe the returns process. Like. I don’t know your top five or ten. Let’s say manufacturer distributor. Like you really got it. Let’s get those you know top five, those top ten. You know, You’re going to always have like unique stuff, that’s completely.

00:55:44 Chris Gee

Yeah yeah, edge cases are always going to occur, right?

00:55:47 Isaiah Bollinger

So like everyone needs to place an order right,

00:55:50 Chris Gee

Like the best way to write it is to start at the end, not at the beginning. So the human brain remembers far better than it predicts. So you can use an NLP tactic. To remember rather than trying to predict, so start at the end of your journey. So, the customer has just received their order. What was the last thing that happened before that? What was the last thing that happened before that. 

00:56:18 Isaiah Bollinger

A shipping or whatever it is and delivery, right? I mean, maybe maybe you did the delivery yourself if you are a manager?

00:56:27 Chris Gee

And how did you know what to do? What data and this chart will start. As six boxes joined together in a straight line to start with, and then you’ll show it to someone else in your business, and they’ll say,” We send an email notification there.” And then someone else will say,” Actually, That goes down to the warehouse, and Joanne has to print it and then tick a box.

00:56:51 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah or accounting has to say it’s been completed and it’s a complete order and it’s reconciled. And like that t here is a whole accounting piece when it’s you know.”

00:57:00 Chris Gee

Then you get your branching. Oh, so and so says if yes to that, if no to that. And as you pass this diagram around and you talk about it, it comes together organically. And all the ifs ands or buts and all the things that we forget. And you know, the ones that if you’ve ever done a technical integration project, you know that You get excited about building it. You build half of it and then somebody goes oh yeah but Well Yeah. 

00:57:27 Isaiah Bollinger

You didn’t solve my edge case. Well, it turns out the database structure is not set up for that. We can’t have this new type, right? It’s a new member type, right? Like using your world like it’s like so you go refactor the whole thing.

00:57:41 Chris Gee

And if you start with the customer got it, you are also doing what is really important which is a customer journey first. So, You are not going with the mindset of”. This is what I have to do to give an order to a customer.” You are working from”. This is what I did to deliver to a happy customer.”

00:58:04 Tim Peterson

And what I would add to that, maybe this is part of the process also. I always do this really twice: I do internal stakeholder questionnaire and journey, and then external.

00:58:19 Tim Peterson

The customer’s like, well, when are you when are you contacted? You know what happens when in this part of the process? And they’re like,

00:58:25 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, they didn’t tell me when the delivery was coming. You find out all these no I wanted to know. Yeah, horrible experience. But they’re not going to tell you, you know the company’s not going to tell you that. But, there’s you know, holes and all I mean we’re dealing with a Costco delivery where the most important piece didn’t come. So we can’t we can’t use the product because of a piece that we needed. Just they’re like, oh, we forgot that part yeah,

00:58:46 Chris Gee

That, thatum that. Prompt by the way, that that LinkedIn article I was mentioning, The prompt in it is using a typical B two B purchase payment via credit CPQ style. So customer’s done a quote, accepts the quote, places it on credit. Done and Chat GPT spat out an adequate first diagram just with describing that process.

00:59:15 Isaiah Bollinger

I think AI uh this is a you know let’s, I want to be respectful of everyone’s time. Let’s wrap up with AI. I think AI right now, I’ve been using it more and more for requirements. So, I had a customer, uh it’s actually kind of a B two B use case, Um more of an internal employee use case where they wanted to, uh have an onboarding commerce experience integrated with Workday, which was the work, and it was like, I was like, you know, I. Basically, i’ve been testing out more Gemini. I don’t know whatever they’re all, Gemini, chat GPT, who’s better, right? Like next next week it’ll be someone else. But um it wrote like a, you know, super detailed text back on an integration that would have taken me a while to write with, like a one sentence prompt. And I sent it to the developer and they’re like great. Like I think requirements, you know, discovery requirements, you know, processes all this kind of like.

01:00:10 Isaiah Bollinger

Pre development, you know, stuff. There is a lot of opportunity I think with AI to help accelerate that.

01:00:18 Chris Gee

It’s very useful for highlighting how much effort something really is. You know, you get the email, can you just? And I’ve built a similar tool that will write requirements, user acceptance criteria, some basic tests. And ask questions of what you would need to ask to elicit a clearer brief. And, you can chuck in a”. Can you just”? And it will give you about eight pages.

01:00:47 Isaiah Bollinger

Send it back, like,” Yeah, we can just do that.” It’s going to be twenty hours. Sorry,

01:00:51 Chris Gee

Yeah, but it’s less about the yeah It’s less about that But. It’s like I can just That’s not a problem But. This is the amount of thinking that’s required because. A lot of the time, the work is just might be one line of code, but to get to that one line of code could take you two days.

01:01:17 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, and factor in it could break things; it has other ramifications. Is it actually going to help everybody? Right a lot A lot of these things are assumptions, right? I mean, without you know really doing proper A B tests. Almost everything you launch is a bit of an assumption, and then you know you have data. You know if it was that change or just other factors. You know there is a million other variables. But sorry Tim, go on.

01:01:43 Tim Peterson

No, go ahead Chris, go ahead.

01:01:44 Chris Gee

I was going to say AI is really good for help. I call it like the limitless pill. It’s really good for helping you get that stuff out, but it’s still not right. It still isn’t doesn’t it’s only, Especially for B two B, we are building an internal LLM with all of the knowledge that we’re curating. And when it’s ready, we’ll let it out to the world. But this B two B knowledge, if it was on the internet, we’d all be experts anyway. It’s not. So the AIs can’t answer a lot of the questions around what we’re doing at the moment. Only some real seasoned experience and. 

01:02:30 Chris Gee

It’s like, um,

01:02:32 Isaiah Bollinger

Information for them to have. Like, There is nothing where yeah, where would they get? It’s not. They can’t go access that information on our heads in your head. My head Tim said, you know,

01:02:42 Chris Gee

And the skill isn’t the skill isn’t in the knowledge for B two B at the moment. The skill is in how to get the knowledge, How to use previous experiences and align those over the top and understand the bits, you know, like. Uh, the term “sherpa” comes up a lot, right? It’s not the climb in the mountain is not the hard part. Um, if you are a sherpa, You do it with a house on your back in sandals, and you go up and down. And when the weather comes in bad, you’ve seen it before. But for someone who’s never done it before, it feels incredibly difficult. And so. 

01:03:27 Chris Gee

AI gives an okay response. You see, that is like less scary than what you are facing. But what I would say is, As a sherpa, like like you guys who’ve you’ve cut that cloth many, many times, if you look at some of those AI responses, you go, ” T here is absolutely no way how we would do this because of this this. And this. ” And, you know, I’ve been in. So we just we do have to be a bit careful until we’ve. Created a knowledge bank of.

01:03:58 Tim Peterson

Yeah, So what I’ll add just to that because I think this is something it’s a really great topic to kind of wrap some wrap this up on. Is that, You know, one of the things that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that the big companies OpenAI Anthropic Google all these companies with, You know their uh various AI tools, they’re they’re looking for partners for the training data, right. And so, once you have your LLM, you can actually go and approach Anthropic or OpenAI and say, “You know, I’d like to offer this as training data.” And if you are an association, There is obviously less risk than if you are a small business or a medium – sized business or what have you because you are just putting the word out there. So when people actually go to, let’s say, Chat GPT and search for how to do X for B two B.

01:04:46 Tim Peterson

It’s going to show the source, so it’s going to be you, right? And so that’s what B two C has learned, you know, again faster than B two B because if you read the sources, I know where that data is coming from, because people are choosing to make it available. Right? So get that. You know, That’s something I would suggest to especially an association to get the word out there.

01:05:06 Chris Gee

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And is That’s. What the new stack will do is allow us to collect content much faster from our members. And. Turn it into something that we can use to to provide even more knowledge.

01:05:21 Tim Peterson

We should put our our podcast out there as training data. Maybe we should figure that out.

01:05:25 Isaiah Bollinger

Yeah, honestly, I mean, if you were, if they were able to contextually parse every episode, and you know, yeah, t here is definitely a lot of value in that.

01:05:32 Tim Peterson

Let’s work with the B two B conversation.

01:05:35 Chris Gee

We should if are into uh if you are into funny old movies, t here is an old movie called Kung Pao. And it’s uh. Oh yeah, good. Yeah, yeah. Kung pow, Right So, it’s a movie where they’ve taken um old Asian, kung fu movies, and they’ve dubbed it and cut in a guy. And, there’s a scene in there that sticks with me and it sticks with me a lot. And he says, Ah yes, we have deliberately trained them wrong. He says we have deliberately trained them wrong. And, that is the case with some of the training data as well as like not everything on the internet.

01:06:12 Chris Gee

Is correct, and so as well as hallucinations, we are dealing with. 

01:06:19 Isaiah Bollinger

Every tweet and every Facebook isn’t true.

01:06:23 Chris Gee

They’re not true. Yeah, it does not it does not take six weeks to build a website and cost a thousand dollars. Yeah, you know,

01:06:32 Isaiah Bollinger

Technically technically, if you log into Squarespace. And yeah, like that’s the problem, right? It’s all, You know,

01:06:40 Chris Gee

Technically I could fix right.

01:06:42 Isaiah Bollinger

I could uh, you know, if you want me to build your house, I could build it. It’s going to be really shitty. Yeah. You. 

01:06:49 Tim Peterson

Have any uh any last words that uh, you know remind people where you are, how to how to be reached all those things before we wrap up?

01:06:56 Chris Gee

Yeah, that’s amazing. I think well like the B2B eCommerce Association, there is free membership. You can start with free, so the only cost is the five minutes it takes to register. And get going. There is so much knowledge in there, and so much community for those that want to take it, and for those that want to give it as well. There is nothing else like it in the world right now. There will be at some point, I am sure someone else is doing something else, but right now it’s us. And I am just super stoked to be working with a team who just never sleep and eat and breathe this stuff that you.

01:07:37 Chris Gee

We are going to make it amazing. If you’re in Arizona later this year, come and see us. If you’re in Melbourne, come and see us. If you’re in the U K, drop me an email. Like, just we just want to meet people and tell them all about what we’re doing. And if you’re a merchant and you’re listening, Go to an event, a B, two B e commerce event somewhere Be brave Go and get involved And. It will pay off. 

01:08:06 Tim Peterson

Well. Thank you. That was a great ending.

01:08:12 Isaiah Bollinger

Very inspirational, right? You know,

01:08:15 Tim Peterson

I know I want to wave a flag or something.

01:08:19 Isaiah Bollinger

That’s great. Well, thank you so much, Chris. Really glad for having me on. Thank you. And we’ll keep chugging along in this little community of ours.

01:08:28 Chris Gee

Yeah, And I hope to see you guys in Arizona later in the year,

01:08:33 Isaiah Bollinger

For sure, for sure. Yeah.

01:08:36 Chris Gee

Perfect. Thank you so much for having me.