Creating a Successful Online User Experience

Brian Beck:
Welcome to Session Seven of my virtual book tour for my book Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce. I wrote this book to give B2B companies a playbook for their digital transformation. Today's Session Seven, we're going to be talking about user experience. You can find out more about the book at billiondollarb2becommerce.com, and the book is also available on amazon.com in paperback, audiobook, and e-book formats. Before we go much further, I want to say thank you to our sponsors, particularly our platinum sponsor, Elastic Path. 

Brian Beck:
So as I mentioned, we're going to be talking today about creating an online experience. I have a lot of sessions we've covered throughout the summer and a lot of great content. Really a lot of fantastic speakers we've had. We've covered everything from leadership and alignment to managing channel conflict and using digital marketing. All of those sessions are available on-demand now. Our sessions today and going forward, our last session will air at 8:00 AM Eastern Standard Time and then be available on demand. So today, we're going to be talking about creating a successful online user experience. 

Brian Beck:
As my guest today, I have Matt Wingham from Cardinal Health, one of the global leaders in healthcare. And we also have Darin Archer, chief strategy officer from Elastic Path. I'll introduce them both in just a minute. But first, I want to give us a little bit of context. I talked about creating an online experience stealing smart from B2C. And it really is a lot about meeting the customer's expectation based on their consumer experiences, you as a B2B company needs to deliver that. But you also have to accommodate traditional B2B workflows. So I'm going to provide some context in a few slides and then we're going to get into our fireside chat. 
So today's buyer is a digital or Amazon native. In fact, many folks don't realize that millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000, will, in fact, be 75% of the global workforce by 2025. And these folks are increasingly moving into B2B procurement roles. And these folks are online natives. In fact, last year, they made 60% of their purchases online, up from 47% in 2017.
Folks, that means that they make more of their purchases online than offline and these are becoming your buyers. Two-thirds of millennials make half or more of their online purchases, guess where? On Amazon. And 97%, almost 100% use Amazon for at least part of their online shopping. And guess what? They expect a similar experience from you in terms of your e-commerce. This group is, I like to say, silently but really quickly becoming the majority of your buyers. So as we talk about and think about digital experience, this is the bar you have to meet. So what is user experience? Well, this is a definition from that authority on the internet, Wikipedia, but I think it sort of sets the context well, and then we'll get into some practical examples so I can really hammer it home for you.

Brian Beck:
Defining user experience, user experience, it's also called UX in the industry. It refers to a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful, and valuable aspects of human-computer interactions and product ownership. Sounds very complicated. But really, what it means is, you're delivering an experience that connects with your customer and makes it easy for them to learn about your business using digital channels. Let me give you some examples. It's not this. This is unfortunately what many B2B companies consider an online experience, which is adequate. And quite frankly, it's a shame.

Brian Beck:
But so many companies really just sort of adding a plug into their ERP system where the customer needs to go in and look for the specific part number, there are no pictures, there are no images. This is not a state of the art user experience, this is more like HAL 9000. If you recall that movie. What it really means is this. So many of you probably know Grainger. I use the example of Grainger in the book and other places because Grainger has invested early and significantly in their online user experience and e-commerce in general. This is a picture of their homepage. Grainger gets close to 60% of their revenue from e-commerce transactions. 
And as you think about user experience, it's really meeting the consumer like expectations of your B2B buyer through your B2B online experience. In the example here of Grainger, you see that it reflects a consumer like experience when you land on their homepage. User experience also includes things like navigation. You see the elements here under all products and you see drill downs into abrasives and electrical and lab supplies. This is a consumer-like experience in terms of the navigation. This is called mega navigation.

Brian Beck:
Similarly, when you get into product categories, you can see on this image on the left side, there are drill downs into specific things that the customer is looking for. When you think about many B2B companies and their product assortment, they're very large, hundreds of thousands. In some cases, millions and we'll talk about this with Matt a little bit later from Cardinal. The elements that you need to drill down and create a product selection, which is manageable for the customer is one of the key elements of user experience for e-commerce. Then site search is another very important component. In this example, the user is typing the word floor and below that word floor, you can see suggestions that are written out in text format. You can see visual examples here as well being suggested to the user.

Brian Beck:
One of the central thesis of my book is about making the buyer's job easier and these paths helping the customer to get to what they need very quickly are critical. If you think about the example of Amazon with 600 million products on it, literally, they have set the bar for getting the customer to their product quickly, and that's important for you as well. Another great example that I use in the book is a company called Ergodyne. Ergodyne is using these same principles. This is a picture of their homepage. Look at the consumer like messaging that's being used here, 40% lighter, infinitely cooler, introducing the lightweight bump caps Skullerz. The point here is they're using consumer like messaging to reach the customer. This is a B2B site, beautiful imagery. Look at their category pages, beautiful imagery, merchandising language. These are foreign concepts to a lot of B2B companies.

Brian Beck:
Remember that green screen I showed you a few minutes ago? Look on the left hand side, you're able to navigate down into categories. These are the fundamental and foundational elements of user experience. Here's a picture of their product detail page. Notice the big rich images, the rich title, the pricing clearly displayed, the description below. You can write a review on this product, see different images. It's not about knowing the exact SKU number of your product, never showing the customer a picture and hoping they order the right thing. These are consumer like best practices, but it's only half the story. The other half of the story is making sure you're accommodating the B2B workflow needs of your customer. And we'll talk about that more in our fireside chat.

Brian Beck:
The sad thing is most B2B sellers are not meeting the buyers' expectation. A study done last year in 2019 by Digital Commerce 360 reveals that only 7% of corporate buyers rate the B2B e-commerce sites they use as excellent. And what were the areas of deficiency? Well, they cited basic UX, user experience features such as lack of product images, inaccurate inventory, lack of sufficient product concept in other areas. So B2B is not here yet. The good news in this, of course, is if you do this well and right, you can leapfrog your competition and really meet your customer's needs where they're looking for you to do that.

Brian Beck:
So what do you do about this? Well, talk a lot about in the book about putting the customer first in the process and this applies to user experience. As much as it does about aligning your selling channels and other things, you need to understand the expectation of your customer and the best in the business. Including the folks we're going to talk to today, Matt at Darin, have put the customer at the center of the experience, they have them interviewed in the process of developing the user experience, they design it around their needs. This is critical and I keep reminding everyone of this.
Understand and deploy the best practices from B2C. Now, you don't want to reinvent the wheel here. You may want to have fun and get adventurous with what you want to do with your digital experience, there are foundational elements you do not want to do this with. There are certain things that the customer expects, things like intuitive navigation as I showed you with Grainger and Ergodyne. Search, which is easy and fast to use in returning relevant results. Product and category page elements, web merchandising, personalizing the experience, recognizing the customer when they come to your website. Content management, how you're presenting content digitally to reinforce your authority in the business. Your shopping cart and checkout, there are very conventional steps here.

Brian Beck:
Now with B2B, you have things like buying on the purchase order and other elements like that that need to be accommodated as well because your customers ' probably buying on credit terms with you. Account support and service, being able to access and self-service, "Where's my order?" Paying for invoices, paying down your credit line, things like that. And then payment methods are also extremely important. Accommodating different payment methods is a proven way to drive conversion from B2C and it applies to B2B just as well. Seek to understand and make your transactional workflows or traditional process more efficient. Again, thesis second thesis in my book is making the buyer's job easier is the key to success here and that applies across the board. We'll talk about that with Matt in just a moment.

Brian Beck:
And finally, you need to get experience by your side. There are well-established conventions for this and there are experts in this field. User experience, folks, you need to put by your side with your technology team as you're building your e-commerce experiences. It's critical you do that. In the chapter in the book, I have a lot of detail around these different elements. I can't go through all in today, but we're going to dive into some of the details in just a minute here with our guests.

Brian Beck:
So you all have met me, I'm Brian. In addition to writing this book, I'm also the managing partner of a company called Enceiba. And at Enceiba, we focus on helping manufacturers and brands and some distributors as well focus on bringing their products to Amazon and establishing a strategy and then executing that. We have a practice focused on B2B as well. So you met me and I'm so excited to have Matt Wingham join me today. Matt and I go back, I guess, four or five years at least. Matt worked with partners several times. Matt, you want to introduce yourself to the audience?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Brian. Hi, everyone. My name is Matt Wingham. I work for Cardinal Health as director of e-commerce within our medical business. Cardinal Health, I think, as most folks are aware, but just to level set, is a global health care company. We primarily focus on distributing pharmaceutical and medical products to healthcare providers. We're a Fortune 15 company, and very much are focused on helping our healthcare providers service patients and we take that set of values that go along with that, very important. I live, as I mentioned, within our medical business and have responsibility for delivering an e-commerce experience that helps our customers along their procurement needs for medical customers.

Brian Beck:
That's awesome, Matt, thank you. I'm so excited to dive into some of these concepts with you. And then Darin Archer, Darin you have great experience. I love the fact that you're here, too, because you've got both the perspective from the software side, and you lived this stuff too. Tell us about your background.

Darin Archer:
Thanks, Brian. I remember not too many years ago feeling like I wasn't quite as experienced or professional in this e-commerce space because I had all this non-traditional e-commerce experience, much of it was B2B, and it seemed like you only got a lot of attention if you were the B2C person, right? But it's definitely been a fun way to learn this. So my background, I've done everything from selling telecom services online, software and high-tech offerings and products. That included traditional telesales and call center folks and sales reps, et cetera, in many of my prior roles. Then I've been on the vendor side trying to build solutions that would be a little bit more oriented to some of these use cases. And so I found myself with Elastic Path as an example.

Brian Beck:
Awesome. Well, Darin and Matt, I'm so excited to have you guys. So guys, let's get into it a little bit. So Matt, you mentioned a little bit about Cardinal Health in your intro. Tell us a little more about kind of where you guys have been, your journey a little bit in e-commerce, where have you come from, where are you today, and maybe a little bit more about where you all are on your digital transformation journey because you've done a lot of investment.

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. Absolutely, Brian. Thanks. I started at Cardinal Health about five years ago, a little over five years ago. I was hired to come in and re-imagine, re-envision a new e-commerce experience that meets our medical customer's needs. We started down this journey really five years ago, and at the time, we had two older legacy e-commerce sites. It's kind of funny, the black screen with the green text that you showed earlier, kind of the DOS prompt.

Brian Beck:
That wasn't a screenshot from your site.

Matt Wingham:
That was not from our old site, but it wasn't too far off. So we had two old legacy experiences that really didn't meet our customer's needs. And to your points earlier, that's really where we started in our journey, was we had to make sure we understand what our medical customers needs are, what jobs are they trying to get done throughout the day. And in our case, we're servicing hospitals and non-acute settings like surgery centers. And we're servicing procurement professionals in those different facilities who are really tasked with procuring the right product at the right time at the right price. And so we keep those three pieces in mind as we think about our customers.

Matt Wingham:
As we think about our journey, we started five years ago really immersing ourselves in customer insights, understanding what our customers are trying to do, and then we started to design and build the experience based on those insights. And all along the way, we've had customers involved, whether it's from the start five years ago, where they were helping us understand their needs through our design concepts and usability testing, putting screens and designs in front of them and getting feedback on what they liked, what they didn't like, and making adjustments to make sure that when we did create the experience, that it would resonate with our customers.

Matt Wingham:
Happy to say we launched our new experience, which is called Cardinal Health Market in March of 2018. It's hard to believe it's been a little over two years. But we launched in March 2018 and we've been working on improving the site. Each month, we have new releases that go in and we continue to, again, gain customer feedback. We have a power user group that we've formed, that we meet with every two months to continue to look at only providing feedback on what we've launched, but then also give us some guidance on additional enhancements that they would find value in and we use that to influence our investments for upcoming years.

Brian Beck:
I love the fact that you guys have done such a good job with customer feedback and creating an ongoing loop. That is so critical to success. Darin, I know you have some experience, too, working with Cardinal. It's over the years, too. Anything you want to add?

Darin Archer:
I was curious, Matt, I think a lot has changed this year. I think it's interesting. March 2018 you launched, two years later, probably, that marketplace has got the most action and seeing it on time. And we are at this tipping point where I know you from both the operator side and the vendor side, B2B is now actually number one focus in many regards over B2C. But I like that you guys are doing a lot of stuff in the focus groups and power users. You've seen some of this new customer engagement where ... I had this example that I've told recently, a story where I had my dentist change. My dentists of nearly 20 years retired, very traditional office in San Francisco, managing their supply chain with a secretary, office manager, insurance broker. They'd call everyone, love to have everything over faxes, and that traditional paper process.

Darin Archer:
New person came in, bought the office, and the new office manager came in and she just immediately was like, "If they don't have e-commerce ... If I can't buy online, I'm not even going to bother with them. We're going to change our vendors." And I imagine, right now it's kind of fervor of everyone scrambling trying to find things. Are you seeing some of these new entrants as well, kind of going back to a Brian talked about with the millennials, that are suddenly kind of having a shift where I could see some market share changes happening if you're not on top of it?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah, absolutely, Darin. With millennials coming into the workforce, we have seen a shift in underscoring the value of having an online experience that helps our customers and really meets those younger buyers, wherever they are, and whenever they want to or choose to interact with us. So that's definitely helping shape the experiences that we create. So what we're trying to do is parse out the feedback that we get based on the type of customer, the demographic of the customer, and really dig in, and create experiences that resonate with the vast majority of the customers that are using our site. But we are starting to definitely see millennials start to enter into that procurement buying mode and we're trying to stay close with them on understanding their needs and how we can deliver for them.

Brian Beck:
Did you have some of those folks in your customer advisory board? Did you aim to add some folks to that profile?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. We do, Brian. We try to get a good mix across the landscape of customers, whether it's my customer segments. So we have our acute, non-acute, and some of our physician office customers. But then also demographic-wise with age range and experience, which we aim for, making sure we have some flexibility into that group. The hard part is in taking all that feedback and figuring out how we distill it down to meaningful insights and then which ones we want to act on and prioritize. That's the challenging part.

Darin Archer:
Yeah, I know. I think that Cardinal Health is an interesting one to me and Matt have collaborated with you guys over the years as well. Because I find that a lot of folks, they look at some of these companies and they just think that you've got a couple major use cases that you're supporting, but you have everything from that traditional procurement process to even nurses reordering within facilities but even doing some new business models where enabling some of your pharmacy partners for example, where they end up kind of whitelisting or OEMing your e-commerce capabilities to then further project and help improve their businesses where customers are changing. All these different channels, are you seeing ... Is the data starting to support some of this anecdotal evidence of the changeover in people wanting to move from phone and fax to e-commerce?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah, it's interesting. In my world, we have a large volume of EDI ordering that's going on. So we have actually over 85%, a little over that, of the ordering that's going on in the medical side that we're seeing is via EDI. Our e-commerce conversion in ordering is about 5% so a very small percentage. But what that means is even those customers that are ordering via EDI, they come to our site and they're dependent on the site to research products and do some level of self-service that they can't do elsewhere. And as their prime distributor, we have to make sure we deliver a good product experience for our customers and also a good self-service capability. 
So it's good for us that we're an important key kind of cog in the procurement workflow for our customers, even though in many cases, they're not actually converting on our site. So we continue to look at that data and figure out how do we drive manual ordering that comes in through calls, through the phone, through fax, how do we drive that electronically, whether EDI or through e-commerce. Those are all areas that we continue to look at and figure out how we can, from a business perspective, try the types of ordering we'd like to have, but then also meeting at the intersection of providing a good experience for our customers online.

Brian Beck:
Matt, you talked about ... I talked a lot in the book about that sort of consumer like experience. I think it kind of fits into this conversation here. What have you found when you think about creating that experience and adopting things from B2C? What have you found to be the most impactful things? What have you guys done? What have you pulled from B2C?

Matt Wingham:
For us, it's a lot around the product experience. What I mean by that is, if you look at some of our data, over 75% of our site visits include a product search. So we've had to make sure we're very, very good at providing relevant search results. And then when you add the scale of what we're looking at, we offer about 300,000 individual SKUs on our market site. So when you look at 300,000 SKUs in the 75% of searching, we had to make sure that we have strong product content to help with the overall search experience. We employ things like type ahead search, which is very common in the B2C world so we're guiding customers to what they're looking for as they enter each keystroke in the search bar. 

Matt Wingham:
In the future, we're going to start looking at pulling some photography and imagery into that type of hit search to help customers additionally. The search is a big piece, product content has been really important for us. And really, just trying to find ways to make the ordering process and the research process fast for our customers, especially our non-acute customers. In many cases, you've got a person who is scrubbing in to help with the procedure, that person is also actually ordering products from us. And so speed and efficiency is important. So things like quick order as an important capability that we've adopted from the B2C world just to help our customers be able to purchase products more quickly.

Darin Archer:
If you do these, it's interesting you mentioned some of the imagery components piece there because I think some that you guys are probably already starting to look at image recognition and maybe some computer vision to translate that back to a SKU and help accelerate that purchase product. That was a use case I've seen more recently, my stint prior in the IT space, I got that request a lot. I have it in my hand, I don't know what the heck it is because I'm buying on behalf of someone else. Can I take a picture of it with my smartphone and then just tell me what it is and I can add it to the cart or something. You're starting to play around with some of those kinds of things or at least have them on that vision list to explore?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah, it's on our roadmap, definitely. And it just gets back to the convenience factor for the customer. They're busy. In a lot of cases, they may be, to your point here, have a picture or have the product in front of them, they could snap a picture. Through image rack, we could tell them what that product is and guide them to that product. We're not quite there yet. We're still building on our foundational product content capabilities but that would set us up nicely to enable that type of image recognition in the future.

Brian Beck:
That's awesome. I know one of the things that we talked about, too, earlier in the session today and in the book, Matt, was about taking not only the best of B2C, but also B2B. So B2B, traditional workloads are different. So you can't just throw up an e-comm site that has nothing with B2C features and expect your B2B customers to buy. What have you found is different, and what have you found is important in terms of commentating those traditional workflows for B2B?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. There's a couple things we've been focused on. So punch out is one example where we enable a capability for a customer to start in their system, typically their ERP system, and create a purchase order or blank purchase order, and then come to our site, build a cart, and then take that order back to their system where they can go through a number of approvals on their side. So punch out is an area that we offer to our customers that helps them with their workflow. We also, just thinking about the EDI transactions and things that are going on in many cases, our customer will just fire off an order via EDI, and they don't actually know if the product is in stock or not. 
And so we'll go back to them and say, I'm making the numbers up but, "Out of the hundred products you ordered, 25 of them are not in stock, 75 are." So they have to now take action for those 25. So we've built up an experience on the site where the customer can now resolve those orders or lines that we couldn't fill. So there's a number of capabilities they have there where they can resolve any sort of line that was on back order or we couldn't fill it for whatever reason. That's a specific B2B use case that we see primarily tied to the volume of EDI ordering that's going on in our world.

Darin Archer:
That was always my challenge. When I made the shift, Brian, from kind of the B2C to B2B. I had a short stint where I was responsible for the B2B store on adobe.com at a software company selling their software to enterprises and companies all over the world. It was this idea that in many cases you have the e-commerce workflow pretty simple. You go through, you browse, navigate, find what you want, add it to cart, whip out your credit card B2C style or PayPal, or whatever, and you purchase and you wait for the wonderful gift to arrive in your home.

Darin Archer:
But in the B2B world, it was like if they purchased with a purchase order or maybe even you had cash on delivery or some various payment methods, the order actually has more states. It kind of falls into these holding grounds where it's like, "All right, we got to go verify inventory." Okay, that's good. Now, is the purchase order authorized? Is there a workflow that maybe has to go to someone else and they have to actually approve that purchase order? At which point then the order's released. And so there's a lot behind the scenes that I think a lot of folks that come into this space or if they're trying to take some of the B2C ideas, they have to have some folks involved that can help them to know where some of those breakpoints are, some of those workflows are, those kind of extra steps, if you will, that comes with B2B.

Matt Wingham:
Darin, I think that's where it's interesting too, when you connect it back to what we were talking about earlier with customer research, ethnographic, on-site visits, which we've done quite a few of are just so vital to understand what are the steps in their process that they're going through. Then once you understand those steps, then you can figure out how to service them online.

Brian Beck:
Interesting. We had a guest in the past, they're coming back from Illumina that you've met, Dave, I think. And one of the things that they've done, for example, to this discussion is they've set up in their part a way to pass the cart along, in their shopping cart along so that the approvers can review and approve it. You have to do those things and those don't exist in B2C. I want to buy my jacket, I don't ... Well, I do need my wife's approval, but not always.

Darin Archer:
That's not quite a workflow we've programmed yet.

Brian Beck:
Right, that's right. Darin, come on, get on that with Elastic Path, man. This is a good discussion, guys. Related to making sure you're meeting customer expectations, Matt, one of the things you talked about was attribution and how do you ... You got all these orders that are happening through your punch out and through integrations, not on the e-comm site. Can you speak to us a little bit? Darin, I think you probably have some good stuff in here too, around how do you know you're meeting the customer's expectation? How do you kind of make that attribution work? Meaning you know it's being researched on your site but the sale isn't tied together with what's happening on the site, necessarily. So how do you make sure you're being successful? What are you measuring?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. For us, Brian, it was a question that we definitely needed to figure out. It really gets back to what value does our e-commerce experience offer to our customers into our business and trying to build attribution model to prove that out. Going back to how our customers are using the site, they're primarily using it to research products and do a level of self-service. Again, they're not really, majority are not converting on the site, which is okay with us. So based on how customers are using the experience around researching products, what we built ... And there's a number of different models you can build, we landed on this particular model that we call a facilitated revenue model. 
So at the highest level, what it's based on is when we take a look at customers that log into our site and research a product or a particular material, and if they have not purchased that material for three months prior but they come and they view that product in our site, and then they start purchasing that product, we count that as a facilitator revenue or a sale that our e-commerce site facilitated. And we start to count that and show those results to our leadership team on the value that our e-commerce experience provides to our customers in our business.

Brian Beck:
That's great. Darin, what about you? I think you have some ...

Darin Archer:
Yeah. One of the things that ... It's interesting because the times right now, it's a little bit challenging with many folks still working from home and we've had this big shift, of course, where we may see a lot more people working from home and then traditional office, but we had made some pretty big strides in the industry on kind of helping to aid in this attribution by identifying who's on that browse side and who's on the purchase and being able to stitch together some information. You don't get into some of these more advanced analytics topics on your new book, Brian, I'm guessing it's probably going to in the second one, but to look at detecting IP addresses, we can do things like reverse lookups and actually see that you're at a company or you're at an institution or university, et cetera, and we start to know who it is.

Darin Archer:
So even if it's someone that may be in the buy flow, for example, they're an engineer and they're reviewing products to design into a solution that they're building, then it can be, the purchase can be even way further out and say three months, it can be something that could come a year or two later and so you want to stitch that together. But that's something that we have been able to do the solutions out there, not just we Elastic Path but the companies out there providing analytics platforms, et cetera. So that's a tactic that is important.

Darin Archer:
And then I've seen some companies that have gotten so advanced where they will use some of the personalization capabilities from the B2C world and take that information, like detecting that you're using your work computer and knowing who you are then and then changing content on the site. So we've done a lot of personalization where you think the B2C use cases, it might be about showing you past purchases and what you bought or people bought this, bought that, those kinds of things. 
But this might be in a B2B context where it's changing out phone numbers, for example, from an 800 number that's going to hit the wonderful paywall of an IVR or some big call center, [inaudible 00:33:49] you got to get through before you get to an agent to the cell phone number of the sales rep that is assigned to your account. And you can do that with these web tools. So there's some pretty neat things that I think we finally have at our disposal that start to solve some of these challenges with attribution because it is such a long drawn out purchase path. 

Brian Beck:
The awesome part about B2B and I've lived in both B2C, 17 years doing B2C e-commerce and then the last five doing this stuff, and one of the things that I love about the B2B market is you have a universe of customers that you know. And then you're not dealing with five, 10 million individual consumers. Maybe you're dealing with 200,000 or even 10,000 customers and the experiences, it's a relationship. You know who they are, you traditionally have done business with them one to one through sales to you, digital provides that extension. And I argue in the book that personalization can be even more powerful in B2B than it can be in B2C, because you're really extending and reinforcing that relationship.

Darin Archer:
Yeah. I like that you took that assertion because I think everyone, listening and starting to ... In many cases, maybe double down on their e-commerce initiatives. Outside of B2B personalization is a lot harder because to your point, you're trying to guess amongst millions who you have on the other side of the glass. And in the B2B context, it's like, "Well, hey, go get that great sales rep or team that has a relationship with it. Sit down with the copy editors in marketing and put together some great content that will be relevant to that buyer." You can actually do that because it's just [inaudible 00:35:29].

Brian Beck:
Everyone logs in with the ... Your job is easy, man.

Darin Archer:
Come on. 

Matt Wingham:
It's too easy.

Brian Beck:
I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Darin Archer:
He's doing it with the actual Bs, like your book.

Brian Beck:
He is. I know. You guys have done a fantastic job. But I do believe that, Darin. Thank you for that. I think it really can be more powerful. Because people have to log in, they come to your site, that you're going to go self-identifying. It's great.

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. I think the other main point to add to that is looking at how you can connect all that data across the channels that the customer interacts with you and even in B2B. So we have calls coming into customer service, we have logins on the site, we have other data that's being collected. So that's one of the areas we're trying to focus on for next fiscal year. [crosstalk 00:36:18] connect all that data.

Darin Archer:
Even on our side, we're starting to play with e-commerce, ironically, with some try buy workflows and trial of software, it's a big thing in the industry now. And one of the things I like is we have an analytics report that I get in my inbox each week that goes out to the whole Salesforce as well. And it shows by company name, nothing obscure like a cookie ID or something. It's just company name and it says how many views they've had, how many people came to the site, and then we can drill down in those reports, and we can see what content do they consume, what were they reading about, which obviously might show some interest and intent. 
And then in the case of a catalog, you can actually show them another products were they looking at, et cetera. I like your point there because I think not a lot of us think about how do you share that past the web team, the e-commerce team, right? And you get that back out to your field organizations, your channel because they could find some value in having that at their fingertips.

Matt Wingham:
Absolutely. That's a huge opportunity for us as we look at the years upcoming, is how do we take all of that data that we're collecting and serves it back to the sales teams and our support teams to just be able to help them sell better. We don't compete, the site doesn't compete with our sales team. It helps them achieve their goals. So we're looking at how we can service that data backup to them. 

Brian Beck:
It's an awesome discussion, guys. It actually speaks to, we had someone from Georgia Pacific on Session Five and that was a lot of what we talked about. It was about aligning these channels so that the sales team works together with e-comm. It's so powerful when that's done well, it's amazing. So Matt, you've had some results from all this, I guess. What can you share? I know you're public, you can share everything. You're a public company. What kind of things can you share?

Matt Wingham:
Yes. A couple of things I can share. So if you look at overall customer satisfaction, when we launched the site, we took a survey and our customer SAP is going up, which is good. So we were right now a little bit over a three on a scale of one to five. And our goal is to get to three and a half and then continue to grow from there. So we believe with the enhancements we've been making this fiscal year that we'll achieve that goal if not exceed it. So excited to take our next poll survey and see where we are around customer SAP. 
And then from the facilitated revenue model, I can't share specific numbers, but we're seeing our facilitated revenue numbers, both from our revenue and gross margin standpoint well exceed our business case modeling that we did several years ago. I'm so excited to see the financial impact and benefits that we're achieving through the facilitator revenue model.

Brian Beck:
Yes. That's fantastic. I mean, you guys, the scale in which you operate is pretty incredible. I know you can't share details.

Darin Archer:
I think that's the key thing. I think everyone could take a leap of faith, Matt, so I'm not hopefully giving away your data but I said the B. You guys are doing billions online. So we'll come back into that with your percentages from earlier anyways, but I'm not giving the real number. But I think it's important to say that because for many folks that might be tuning into this, and Brian looking at your book, that is often a retort, a question, a challenge that comes up where it says, "Yeah, but my business ..." 

Darin Archer:
If we really even get 10% to this digital channel, it would be B, it'd be billions. And our products, they're so expensive. No one's going to do that transaction online, and I like that you got Illumina to actually acknowledge that, "Actually, while we might have started off with the consumables, we're selling multi-million dollar pieces of equipment over the e-commerce store." That's what the buyers are doing. So that's real now, that is not ... Everyone thought no one sell cars online, no one sell these large consideration items online. 

Darin Archer:
Yes, now you can sell major medical equipment, giant tractors from Caterpillar, whatever. It doesn't matter how many zeros come after that. Hopefully, your UI fits it well but other than that, it's real. I like that you got some of that out there, Brian, because I think that's still a concern for a lot of folks that are either very new to haven't started yet or thinking about doubling down. That's their first thing is people really going to do this transaction. And that's some good examples.

Brian Beck:
It's real, man. It's real. It's not just about shoes and books and music anymore. That's 20 years ago. I just have a quick story. It's funny. I used to work with a company called Guidance doing IT work. I still do a little bit of strategy work with them, but they started a site for Foot Locker. I think it was 1998 or '97 or something. And at the time, it was in the closet, in the corner of the office and the CEO of the time is like, "We're never going to sell any shoes online." I wasn't there but I heard the stories and the CEO is not there anymore. It's not the reason why. This was years ago. I mean, I think it's $2 or $3 billion in shoes last year. I mean, it was incredible.
I mean, it is ingrained behavior, guys, but I think the key is to your point there, that Illumina example, it was also about the channels working together. So when they get $1 million, whatever plus shopping cart, clothes on their website, a lot of times the customer has been ... It's a whole journey. Salesforce has been in touch with them, they've learned about the products. It's digital, it's not digital but they're all working together. So flexibility is really important. 

Brian Beck:
And actually, Matt, I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you guys, you got so many ... I know your business reasonably well. I know you have a lot of systems and other things. Legacy and your big complex company, you're the 15th largest, I think, in the galaxy, I don't know. But tell us about different concepts. Darin, this is close to your heart, headless commerce and other things. Have you guys explored kind of how do you build flexibility and what is ... Have you looked at headless commerce, for example?

Matt Wingham:
Yeah. That's a good question, Brian. Flexibility is key for us. As you mentioned, we're a large organization, about 40,000 employees. And we've grown through acquisition in a lot of cases. So as you acquire, you acquire more and more technology and sometimes, as you acquire, you don't always stitch that technology together in some cases, for whatever reason. So we've had to make sure that we are thinking about ... As we think about the customer experience, we need to think about how we build things in a flexible way. Examples of how we built our experience, we were very much API driven so we have services that have been built that will go into our source system to pull out product information, price and availability, contract information, which is big in our world.
So we have very much services based, API based architecture where we're offering data out and then our e-commerce experience consumes that. We're really just a front end to, a good front end to exposing a lot of the information that our customer is looking for through the services we build. So as we continue to evaluate different technologies that are out there, PIM, as an example, Product Information Management System is on our radar here for this upcoming year. We're looking at ways in which we can identify really good source systems that can hold that information but then disseminated out to different consumers of it. Our site being one of them, Amazon could be another one, and just other applications or experiences that our customers are using.

Brian Beck:
Darin, you have anything to add to that? I know that-

Darin Archer:
Yeah. I mean, I think Elastic Path really pioneered this idea of headless commerce back in 2011, 2012. I was actually almost customer and later partner in those early days. And it was this idea that you had to expose a lot of this as an API instead of a web template for a web page. And in the early days, I think we thought it was going to be a number of these other channels, maybe television, social was clearly coming up as a potential channel to purchase in and there was a lot of B2C use cases that drove the early demand to tearing the front end off of the commerce storefront and really exposing all those capabilities, as Matt mentioned, is API so that you can create the experience you need. 

Darin Archer:
But now, if you think about some of the B2B use cases and the technologies that have come forward, what I'm most bullish on is looking at some of the demand for voice, looking at what Alexa has done from Amazon, how it's training people in their homes to engage with a voice bot, with Siri and Google doing the same thing. And all of the plethora of services that you can take advantage of out there. I spent a little bit of time in the Internet of Things space at Intel number of years ago, and that was one of the things that we started hearing about. 

Darin Archer:
And even in Alaska, we have a couple customers that actually asked to have the person that was out in the field, that could be an engineering type person, it could be a sales rep type person, but they're oftentimes out in their truck, et cetera, and they want to be able to talk to their truck, they want to be able to ask, "Do I have this part in the back before they go rummaging around?" Or from inside the facility. So when you start to look at some of these use cases that we're all going to begin enabling and want to enable. Grainger has done some neat things on the vending machine side with the safety boots and all kinds things where they can put that product in your own facility.
And what Cardinal Health, you guys, have some things with some novel vending type options. As soon as you get into those use cases, you can't bring the website down into there. So it really demands that you have thought through an API layer and expose that data from all your systems so that you can create any experience you want. That may be a voice experience, it may be a button, a reorder button on that device. Those kinds of things are what's kind of creating some of this demand. So for those hearing those headless concept, that's kind of in the original, where it came from was simply taking the website head off of it. But you still have to have a head, it will just be one of these other modalities.

Brian Beck:
That's awesome. That's an awesome advertisement for our last session, actually, which is our digital future. We're going to get into a lot of that stuff in our next episode of the virtual book tour. So, Matt, thank you guys. Great, great concept here. Great discussion. Question for you. I asked all of our virtual book tour participants this, guest this, and then I'd love your opinion, too. If you had one piece of advice, you can take two if you want, but one piece of advice for a CEO or a leader who is just starting this. I mean, they're at the early stages and 50% of B2B companies don't have e-commerce guys still. So that's half of our audience, probably, maybe more. What piece of advice would you give to that CEO or that executive about getting started that really have no place, they have nothing they've invested in yet?

Matt Wingham:
It's a really good question, Brian. A couple of pieces of advice I would give. One would be, as we've talked about on this video and call a lot is understand your customer. So do your customer research, understand your different customer segments, understand how they would or would not use an e-commerce experience, in many cases they will. So it's understanding your customer, what their needs are. I think you got to start there. Then I think the second piece, as you start to learn more about your customer's needs is really working on establishing a good strategy and vision for the experience. What are you going to offer to your customers? Which customer segments are you going to service and how are you going to service them?

Matt Wingham:
Then I'd say probably last but not least, there's many other things we could talk through, but is building out a team of seasoned experts who can deliver on the e-commerce strategy and vision and ... Just quick story, when I started five years ago, I had two people on my team to service the scale and breadth of customers that we're talking about. So I have been working on the last five years building out a team in just under 10 people now. Still not enough but I've had a lot of luck pulling in folks from retail going back to the B2C conversation. We had folks who understand merchandising and search and product content, user experience, design, analytics as an example, as well. And also establishing a product owner who wakes up and thinks about the experience every day and how we can connect with our customers. So the team piece is really, really important in order to deliver on the vision.

Brian Beck:
Yeah. And having met many of them, you've done a good job hiring there. It's great. You pull from B2C. What about you, Darin? What advice do you have?

Darin Archer:
I would echo and if not amplify what Matt said around get to know what your customers are wanting to do. I think there's still that perception that there isn't the demand for this. So as much as it sounds like getting into the weeds, I've seen some CEOs be real successful with participating in getting into looking at things like some of those replay analytics tools like a hot jar or something they can be free go begin with and you can take a look at. And also some of the comments coming through CSAT processes, some input on there's some various high perceptions, lots of these little small tools that can grab comments, MPS scores things, but the key is the comments and reading them and digesting it. And maybe if they have a process where they read things in quarters or whatever, it's pulling that information in and really seeing that and hearing the customers want them to be able to engage in that way.

Darin Archer:
I think you probably ... First I felt, reading your book, Brian, I felt like there was almost too much sense of urgency. And as I got into it, I realized and I thought about the changes, I think that probably is still the best advice. It's like, do you really want to be the seers of your industry? You got to move fast and with everything happening this year, market share is shifting. So yeah, I think that's probably the right advice at this point is go.

Brian Beck:
Yeah. And actually, it's interesting you say that, Darin. One of the first case studies in the book is mid-market distributor. It doesn't just apply, Matt, to trillion-dollar companies, these concepts apply to mid-market distributors and manufacturers. The first case study is a company called Petra, they're a mid-market company, and they got into e-commerce 15, 16 years ago. And they've seen the benefits of it all the way through. The key point of that case study is the CEO saying, "I did not have all the information but I acted." It's about acting, it's about moving ahead and it's a little bit about overcoming fear.

Brian Beck:
That's why the first chapter was called The Time is Now. Guys, this has been really fantastic. I appreciate both of you so much. Really, your input is so right on and I think it'll really resonate with our audience. So I want to thank you both. Guys, thank you again, so much. Again, my name is Brian Beck. I'm the author of the book, my contact information's here. I also am the managing partner with a company called Enceiba, helping companies with their Amazon programs. You can go to Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce to learn more about the book and about how we can help you with your strategy for e-commerce. Matt's information is here, Director of E-commerce at Cardinal Health, his LinkedIn. And Darin, his LinkedIn as well. I want to thank them both very much for participating. 
So we have one more session left everyone. Our session eight is Our Digital Future. And we talked a little bit today about Illumina. They're going to be my guest again, the second time in the virtual book tour. That session will air at 8:00 AM on the 16th of September, and that's the final session of the tour. As I mentioned, all the sessions are available on demand. If you have questions, you can email Meg herself. Her email is there at Elastic Path or myself. And I hope that you join us for the next session and good luck in your digital transformation. We'll see you next time.