Our Digital Future

Brian Beck:
Brian Beck here, author of Billion Dollar B2B E-commerce. I'm thrilled to welcome you to session eight of our virtual book tour, which is really, in some ways, our most exciting session because we're going to be talking about our digital future. I am joined today by Dave Grimm from Illumina and Linda Bustos from Elastic Path. We'll introduce them in a few minutes. We're going to have some great discussion today. I'm super excited. More information can be found on billiondollarb2b2ecommerce.com, and the book is available on amazon.com now in paperback, E-book, and audiobook versions.

Brian Beck:
Here's our series at a glance. We have recorded many sessions here that are now available on demand, everything from leadership and alignment to the organizational evolution, managing channel conflict. And today is all about our digital future, and this session will also be available On Demand after this initial airing. I'm going to start by talking about some context, so giving you some ideas as to what's happening, what's coming, what things are happening that you may not be aware, even apply to your business. Then we're going to dive into a discussion with Illumina, and we're going to learn some things that Digital Dave did in that role bringing digital transformation to Illumina, so some really exciting things even ahead of what consumer e-commerce is doing.

Brian Beck:
So first, some context, what I have here, and this is from the book, are stages of digital maturity. And as companies begin their digital transformation journey, they start with no digital presence in many cases, but then begin building online retail or, excuse me, online content sites. This is really the first step in becoming a digital organization. Many companies are still at this stage and some companies are evolving, and this is what I call step three, which is online selling where you're introducing e-commerce as a channel for your customers. Here, you're basically enabling the transactional elements of commerce that may have existed in other channels in the past.

Brian Beck:
I like to think of companies at stage four and five as digitally mature. This is where you're aligning your selling channels. Your sales team is digitally enabled. Your customers are able to provide or obtain self-support, self-sufficiency through the web. And finally, when you move into step five, your whole organization is digitally transformed. So as we think about our digital future, and the tools that are available to us, the places where you start thinking about integrating some of these tools as you move into four and five. And as we're going to learn today, this is the process that Illumina followed in their own digital transformation.

Brian Beck:
So what are some of these emerging tools and trends in this world that you may take advantage of for your business? Artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and personalization. I'm going to provide you some examples in a minute. Personalization in this world where everyone with a smartphone is responding and pulled in five, 15 different directions and there's so much information coming at you. You, as an entity, have to really capture the attention quickly of your customer and that's what personalization is all about.

Brian Beck:
Internet of Things. Think about your smart refrigerator or if any of you have a car, which most of you do, your car is now smart. It's part of the web of Internet of Things. Fulfillment automation, the process of getting orders to customers. There's some amazing things happening there I'll share in just a moment. Voice commerce, many of you have Alexa in your home, for example. Virtual and augmented reality, any Pokemon GO players out there? This is all about bringing this reality through digital screens. Headless commerce is the new trend that is really helping companies to future proof the business.

Brian Beck:
So I'm going to give you some examples of some of these. Many of you are Amazon Prime members, and as you probably know, Amazon is consistently experimenting and testing new things to make its customer's lives easier. This applies to B2B and B2C. Amazon recently filed a patent for something called anticipatory shipping. This is designed to send out products or items to customers even before they place an order. So think about that. If you're placing an order for something for your consumer life or perhaps your business through Amazon, you may get it without even placing an order the next time your doorbell rings. Fascinating experimentation happening. This is an example of how a company like Amazon is using predictive intelligence and data to better serve their customers.

Brian Beck:
Many of you know probably what this is at a job site, right? I have a case study in the book from a company called Bosch, which is a leading manufacturer of tools and equipment that are used in the construction industry. So this is a typical job site of one of their customers building a commercial building. One of the things that Bosch is doing, which is just so fascinating, is finding new ways to integrate web technologies and commerce into their tools, into their equipment. So, one of the key things that a job or a contractor has to do to be profitable is to match the labor against the deployment of assets in the field. When those two things aren't matched, they're losing money. So those two together need to be coordinated.

Brian Beck:
And what Bosch has done is they've introduced something called Blue Hound Technology, which is if you see here on this slide, there's a little chip that goes into their tools. It can also be placed on tractors and equipment and other things. And what it does is it allows the contractor to trace where those are being utilized in the field and redeploy assets through mobile apps and through desktop software to allow companies to best optimize their assets, their labor, and match it to the equipment in the field. This is a game changer not only for Bosch because it's a new line of business, but also for their customers. This is an example of Internet of Things, as well as artificial intelligence working together to bring value to customers.

Brian Beck:
Another great example of new technology is something called Kiva. These are robots and they're automated robots that roam the warehouse floor. This is a picture of an Amazon Fulfillment Center. And if you look at the bottom here, these little orange robots, what they do is they go out and they grab the shelves, the blue items there, and they bring the shelves actually to the packer at the packing station in the warehouse. What it does is it makes the whole process much more efficient and it allows Amazon to meet and beat its expectations for fulfillment times for its customers. This is an example of automation in a traditional process and we're going to talk a little more about that with Digital Dave in just a few minutes.

Brian Beck:
Many of you know what this is. This is Alexa and this is Amazon Echo. Amazon has just been one of the leaders in voice commerce. I just pulled some statistics earlier this week to tell you this is something that many people don't realize. Did you know that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by the end of 2020? And voice shopping is estimated to reach 40 billion in the US by 2022. More than 30% of US internet users have used voice assistance to look for product information or purchase products. What does this mean? This means that this is a new mode of customers interacting with you and finding products and something that many company don't realize.

Brian Beck:
In another great example, there's a German engineering company called ThyssenKrupp and what they've done is they've armed their sales and service technicians with Microsoft HoloLenses as is shown in the slide. What that allows them to do is their elevator division is for their technicians to actually perform measurements, order products, parts, and accessories for the elevator that they're working on or specking out right from a visual device. This is another element of visual commerce and really transformation that's happening, and ways to make the buyer's job easier, which is really the central thesis of my book as it relates to success in digital transformation. These are just a few examples.

Brian Beck:
So you guys met me. I'm Brian. I'm the author of the book, I'm also the managing partner of a company called Enceiba. Enceiba helps companies manage their Amazon programs and create strategies for success and we focus very much on B2B e-commerce. So Dave, I am thrilled you're joining us. This is your second session with us in this virtual book tour. You want to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Dave Grimm:
Yes, Brian. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really enjoyed our first session talking about e-commerce and how to bring modern transactions globally into a business that's trying to make that transition. I'm really excited about today's session. The examples you've just showed are almost like science fiction. It's amazing how far and how deep technology has come, you know, how it's moved into all different dimensions of business. What I'd like to share with you today is what we've been doing at Illumina in my tenure. As you can see from the slide, I recently departed Illumina and I'm moving to a new brand starting on Monday, I'm very excited. But we'll be talking about what we did in the past at Illumina.

Dave Grimm:
My background, I've been in digital as long as my career goes back, what you call a digital native. I've worked with Esurance in San Francisco in the late '90s in the big .com boom. And moved from there to other startups, landing at a large financial services company, USAA. If you know that company, you're probably associated with military, it's a financial services company for the military. But they were very, very forward thinking in designing the business around customer experience. And my responsibility there was totally aligning customer testing, user testing feedback into the needs of the business to transition to a digital business.

Dave Grimm:
My last year there, we actually made it over 50% online. I believe it was 13 billion on 23, something like that. It's been a while. But that's the type of transition that a business can go through. I went from USAA to Illumina. We'll talk about that business a little later. It's a B2B, multinational, and they were looking to make that B2C light transition for B2B and you're going to see the outcome of a lot of hard work and investments over that 10 year. So thank you for having me.

Brian Beck:
Awesome. Of course Dave, thanks for coming back. Linda Bustos, would you please introduce yourself? I'm thrilled you're joining us as well.

Linda Bustos:
Well thanks, Brian. I'm Linda Bustos like you said. I'm the author of Digital Commerce Strategy at Elastic Path and so part of my role is to stay on top of all of these wild and wacky technologies that are coming down the pipe and then translate that into whether it's worth e-commerce doing or not doing and for what industries. So happy to join this discussion today especially with a company that is doing it and doing it successfully.

Brian Beck:
That's awesome. That is the question, isn't it? What are these things are worth doing and how do you apply them to your business? So guys, let's start off with just a little bit more about Illumina. Dave, the company's been called the smartest company on the planet. I mean, the concept of the business of Illumina, it's world changing. It's an amazing company. Can you put into English for our listeners just a little bit about what Illumina does? I know you talked about it in the first session, but those of who maybe haven't heard the first session, that'd be great for you to just give a little bit of background.

Dave Grimm:
Happy to. Traditionally when I do public speaking, I'll ask people in the room pre-COVID, people at the conference, "Who here has heard of Illumina?" And very few hands will go up. Then I say, "Who's heard of 23andMe or Ancestry?" and then literally the entire room goes up. Maybe they use those products or they were aware of them. Well, those products are a genomic sequencing product. Actually, it's genotyping, very simplistic form of sequencing. And that technology, those companies buy it from Illumina. So we're kind of like Intel Inside. We provide the genomic sequencing technology, engineering, chemistry, physics for commercial entities to produce products like that, that you can use in your everyday life.

Dave Grimm:
But Illumina has a much larger side of the business, which is the research side of the business. In this time of COVID, when the first genomic sequence of COVID virus came out of China, that was done on Illumina technology, and all around the world, our customers are things like the Center for Disease Control, that's the US version. There are versions like that all over the world, and they're using Illumina technology to detect the viruses, detect mutations in the virus, and using the technology to develop the vaccines, hopefully, very quickly. So, there are many, many different examples where Illumina is present, but you're just not aware of it.

Dave Grimm:
Cancer research, cancer treatment, agrigenomics, food production, food safety, all these types of things have a genomic opportunity inside of them. And over time, we personally, in our interactions with healthcare systems and our doctors, are going to be interfacing with Illumina and maybe not know it. Because now when you go and you get a blood test, you don't know who developed the test, you just get the results back from the doctor. So that's where that B2B and B2C kind of shell game occurs. There's companies in the background you're not aware about that are helping you on the front end.

Brian Beck:
That's awesome.

Dave Grimm:
Very good explanation?

Brian Beck:
Very, I think it makes it pretty clear. So in our earlier session, we talked about ROI drivers and the things that are necessary to establish our foundation. And you guys established that foundation very successfully. You've seen some tremendous results from e-commerce are truly transformational. How do you go about thinking about kind of what's next? Okay, so you've got the foundations in place, you're doing e-commerce, you've got some of the basics of content management and all that and maybe some basic personalization. What's next? How do you figure that next step out?

Dave Grimm:
Well, your previous slide with the five steps is actually a very simplified view of that. There are underpinnings that you simply have to get into place if you want to go through a digital transformation. You have to have a digital presence, you have to hire an expertise from a content design, layout development perspective. You need middleware and technical infrastructure and people to support that in order to move to a transition into a digital business. When you get the building blocks in place, you then have the fun part, which is figuring out what to do when, the staging. And as you've heard me say many times in the past, the way you find out what to do next is to ask your customers what they want. Do user testing.

Brian Beck:
Sounds simple, right?

Dave Grimm:
Well, it's amazing how many people go past that and operate on opinion or theory or imitation. Like, "The competitor did this and we should do it." Well, how do you know if the customers really like it or want it? So that's where I think you can get the feedback from your external customers. When people are buying your product, your internal sales people if you have them, your internal support people, and from that you'll get years worth of work. Then you apply the ROI model to it and say, "Okay. Well, where do we get the most return, limit the cost, the expenditure, and try and get a return quickly?" And that calculus is actually pretty simple. And then you start staging things out, go after the quick wins, we all do that.

Dave Grimm:
Then there's intermediate wins, we're talking about a year of development, technology and build out. And as you do that, you bring your customers back in. When the customer says, "I would like A, B, and C," you show, "Here's what we're building, this is neat what you asked. Here's what we're designing." I should say. When they say, "Yeah, that's not quite what I was thinking but that's what I want." That's that operator game that you play with user testing. But then, when you actually launch a product, you have a core set of customers who understand it and then you go through promotion. I brought a couple promotional videos today to talk about technology releases and features and function sets that we use to promote things that we build. Because it's not all about building and people will come, that doesn't really work.

Brian Beck:
Actually, this might be a good time to play my Illumina video. In terms of guys, this is the outcome of that foundational work and in the process you just described, where now you're being ...

Dave Grimm:
[crosstalk 00:18:46] steps four or five of your model. So it's definitely, it's an end state of digital transformation. So go ahead and pull that up, and then I'll talk about it a little bit after the video.

Speaker 4:
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Brian Beck:
So Dave, that took you about five minutes to put all that together?

Dave Grimm:
The video? Yeah. Well, all joking aside, it's hard to consume that many features that quickly. If you picked up on some of it, there is everything there from order management, pure e-commerce. "Where is my order? Where is my quote? You know, what did I order last time?" That's a widget in this interface. On the other end of the spectrum, you heard voice-over about instrument monitoring. Well, we have Internet of Thing instruments. These sequencers are connected to the internet if the customer wants to, and you can monitor that sequencing run on your phone, at kids soccer game, post COVID, and always know what's going on. And when the results are done, you can tell the next person in the process, the scientist who wants the data that comes on, you can message all through there, you can file a ticket, a case, using Salesforce case management. It goes on and on and on.

Dave Grimm:
All those features inside of that platform existed at Illumina, but they were all in different corners of the business and I couldn't find them, and I work there. So when it comes to, "How do you make a decision?" That's one of those force multiplier things, you know, "How am I going to get value out of all these platforms?" Well, if I can pull them on one place, that will really help a customer. And you ask the customer like, "Would you like to have one place where you could do all these things?" They say, "That'd be great. Absolutely." Then you start designing and you show it to the customers like, "Well, what data is most valuable? Is this what you need? Is that what you need? 

Dave Grimm:
And they help you figure out the details and then the secret sauce is having good designers who understand the business and the technology to produce a really nice, easy to use interface. That's where you have a really good strong program. But your joke, it doesn't take five minutes, it takes years to build up the technical backbone and to build the expertise and to build the change in the business where people will adopt technology like this, both inside and outside.

Brian Beck:
So Linda, you've done a lot of work in helping people think about and sort through all these technologies. I mean, gosh, it's easy to chase the latest shiny thing, right? What's your perspective on that and how do you help companies think through that?

Linda Bustos:
Well, I'm really glad Dave that you brought up that you use customer research and customer insight before you go out and chase the next shiny thing. That's really important. We see a lot of, you think of digital transformation, we have an opportunity here, go out and buy it, and the customer was an afterthought and that's how it fails. And sometimes some of the people in my spot, I work for a technology vendor, we actually support people to go out and do cool things, run fast bright things, right? And there has to be a balance between innovating for innovation's sake when there's no room to fail fast. So from your perspective, how do you use your discernment, if there's an opportunity? For example, Internet of Things, voice commerce, there's a lot of stuff that's successful in B2C around the social sphere, et cetera. How do you filter and just determine what's right for your roadmap?

Dave Grimm:
That's a great question. There are many dimensions to it. I think one part of it is they're the bright shiny objects, as you mentioned. With the type of title I have, digital experience, I have just an innumerable amount of sales calls and request for contact that come to my inbox and my phone. I like LinkedIn, but man, it's a bit much sometimes. So what you have to do is first provide that first gate in yourself. One thing I like to look for is the true net new. There are many different versions of software that do the same thing.

Dave Grimm:
Now in the case of Elastic Path, your headless solution is the next new thing in commerce. That type of solution for commerce is a game changer, in my personal opinion. Getting away from rigid JSPs and difficult code releases and allowing your business to own interfaces. That's cool. When you already have a marketing platform and it's integrated into Salesforce and it's integrated into your content management system and all your analytics, and someone comes and wants to sell you another marketing automation system, it really has to be differential, right? Because the amount of change you have to make to bring in that technology, pay for the technology, develop the training people, you need to have a large return on the back end.

Dave Grimm:
So, for me, I want to find things that are really net new. Then the beautiful thing about software is it's free in that it doesn't really cost anything to deliver a software packet to a potential customer. And you've sign agreements, you know, "It's your software, it's not mine, I want to try it. I want to experiment with it." Do pilots internally. It takes labor, it takes effort and time, that's worth something, but you don't have to go out and spend a whole bunch of money to figure out if something's going to be right for you. Now if you bring something inside and maybe you have a bake off, you have a ... You're trying to buy a new technology, so you have a couple different vendors compete. And you find when you really like and you have that internal proof point of, "This works for us. It works on our technology stack, it works for our business."

Dave Grimm:
We talked to customers about it and they're interested too, that's a really, really strong logical business case to make the senior leadership, whoever your decision makers are for investment. And then you do the hard work of the business case itself. What do we get back for this. I think that's a really good way to defend chasing your tail around bright shiny objects, have a cogent response when someone ... The one that kills me is when a senior leader's buddy or colleague has a new company and they want you to adopt it. It's like, "Well, we'd love to but here's what it would cost us and we really need to spend this money elsewhere." So it's a great way to play defense and think internally inside of the business and frankly, to protect yourself and your career, make good decisions by being purposeful and systematic and find a good way to make those decisions and ultimately take a risk in business but an informed risk.

Linda Bustos:
I think that's important, too, right? Because as a digital leader, if you're wearing the hat and you're driving digital transformation, there's kind of two ways you could go, you could play safe or you could go really innovative and of course, there's something down the middle. That's the risk of going down that super innovative path and failing, and maybe the opportunity cost of going down there versus doing things that you know that the customer has been asking for, that's been sitting and waiting in backlog for a really long time. For you as the digital leader, do you have anything to share with other folks in your position? How do you make a decision when you could ... There's a big risk. If you fail, you could lose your job over one bad technology or something.

Dave Grimm:
Yeah, and if it weren't for a publicly traded company, you could injure the stock and the shareholders, I mean, really make a terrible choice. I think it depends on the size of the company. It depends what type of market you're in. So coming from Illumina, there are clinical diagnostic markets where you don't experiment. It's heavily regulated, you're dealing with people's lives and safety. That needs to be very purposeful. That's also why they typically are laggards from a technology perspective, things have to be really baked in before a clinical company will move forward into newer technologies.

Dave Grimm:
But then there are higher risk entities, startups. Startups ride that razor's edge between being financially solvent and going out of business. In that type of situation, you typically don't have a huge technology stack and a whole bunch of people to coordinate with. So taking risks is appropriate. Higher risks, I think. I'm not acting as a business consultant, I'm just giving you my opinion. You're working for a very large organization and the ordinal of $10, $20 billion in revenue a year, the risk profile changes and also the level of effort and expense changes.

Dave Grimm:
So as you make the digital transformations, you have to be purposefully, you have to be realistic about what it means inside of the business. There's always a level of risk you take because you're changing something, new creates risk. That's when you take advantage of good change management practices. You test with your customers who make sure they want it, you make sure that your peers are on the same page and aligned with what you're trying to do. And hopefully in those types of situations, you're adding value to your peers as well. Like I'm going to reduce your number of inbound phone calls. What do you think of that?

Dave Grimm:
For the person who manages the call center, "I'm going to make it easier for you to deploy service people in the field because I'll give you information from the instruments." So you know what part you need to take with you before you go, and how long it's going to take you when you get there. So there's all those sorts of [inaudible 00:29:47], what's in it for me inside of a business where you can get people aligned, because you're helping them. You're also helping yourself. That's my best answer. Personally, for me, taking very large risks inside of a large business, I think it's unwarranted. Now, if you're the CEO and you're brought into change that business, that's probably the mandate you have from the board and appropriately so. But I think it really depends on the size of the business and the type of risk you're going after.

Linda Bustos:
Yeah, I think it's so important to have that support from ... Have allies within your organization. I've worked with some companies where the whole digital project was roadblocked by sales. The old school offline, I don't want to say old school negatively, but the traditional ways of doing things and digital is viewed as a threat. So it's really great when you work in an organization where either you can champion that change and sell the vision throughout the company and really communicate how it's going to benefit the back end and get people on board and cooperating with you. I was going to ask you a question. So this kind of naturally segues into that. I want to ask you a question. On all of the investments that you made on the front end and the user experience, how has that impacted your back end and your sales people? How has it enhanced what they're doing?

Dave Grimm:
It's very nuanced. So you bring up a very good point around sales with traditional sales model and Illumina has that. The capital equipment they sell, the sequencer can be up to a million dollars per unit. That's not something someone just kind of passes by, drops into a shopping cart and buys. There's a negotiation, the equipment itself, something of that magnitude requires a physical installed, gets connected to a heavy power source, it has each back for cooling coming off of it. It's a complex interaction and it's absolutely appropriate to have salespeople and technical people involved in that to close the deal, make the sale, install the equipment, and get the customer up and running.

Dave Grimm:
That being said, one thing I didn't talk about earlier in the explanation of Illumina, a metaphor I like to use for people is it's like HP printers. HP sells you a printer or even gives it away and then you have to buy the ink from HP to use the printer over its life and they make good money on the ink, not on the printer, right? Illumina is similar, however, they don't give sequencers away. They're good margin. But when you buy the sequencer, you have to buy chemistry from Illumina to use it and the capital equipment is in field for years, the consumables flow through that sequencer.

Dave Grimm:
If you have a sales team and you have a contract with a customer and they have a run rate of buying consumables, do you really need the sales team to keep making that same sale over and over and over? I would argue you don't. That's where the e-commerce portion of things comes in. But then you think at the higher level, which is, think about that My Illumina dashboard you looked at. The consumables that the customer is buying, let's say they're on version one, and we come out with version two, a new product introduction. I know you'd buy it, right? So when you're in the dashboard, I'm telling you, digitally advertising to you about the new product.

Dave Grimm:
Now, if a salesperson has to call every one of their customers to talk about new product introduction, that's really inefficient. If I can show it to you real time and say, "Hey, we developed this. Here are the improvements in the product. And by the way, here's a 50% off coupon for the first time you try it, go ahead and try it." They can convert themselves. Now, for those of you who are sending emails out to people, email open rates decline and decline and decline and decline and decline. Having an interface like this, where ... This is part of the business case for My Illumina, that dashboard, is the customer is coming back constantly to work with their equipment and do their research and work in the lab. It's part of their day. That's when you're able to sell to them. It's a commercial business, you want to sell to them.

Dave Grimm:
Now, interestingly, we had a rule where our retailers, people who are selling things and our writers, the retailers, we get 20% of the shelf space, the writers got 80%. Meaning, the writers were telling stories for the customers about how other people are using this new product, their new product two. Or how people in a completely different field are using sequencing technology. The customer bases are inquisitive. They're curious. Researchers are intelligent people and they want to read about it. Well, implicit in all of that is the product that's being used, it's a second click sales mechanism.

Dave Grimm:
So long-winded answer to can sales feel threatened? They can but you can add value to them. Now, let's say the customer buys one unit of that new product, because they run the old one, the new one showed up. Well, what do you do with that sales transaction? How do you tell the salesperson? Now this is where Illumina is going which is to say, "Hey, we have a new opportunity." A new product's been introduced to customers, just one unit, they're trying it. But that's a really good warm conversation to have with your customer. "I noticed that you tried the new product. What do you think? Do you like it? Would you like to purchase the new product?"

Brian Beck:
This is amazing, Dave. You guys are really at stage four and five of, you guys at Illumina, stage four and five of the maturity cycle.

Dave Grimm:
I mean, it's a seven-year program, we should be.

Brian Beck:
Right. But I mean, it's great that you're doing this in practice. I mean, you're bringing personalization into it. I mean, clearly you're building in the Internet of Things, clearly. I have this funny stat in the book, it shows that the attention span of a human and a goldfish, I don't know if you guys saw this. Apparently, in some US health department, I don't know who it was, did a study showing that humans now have a lower attention span than a goldfish does. But I mean, the point is ... I don't know how they measured the goldfish. But the point is, guys, that ...

Dave Grimm:
There was probably a COVID tip as well. They got even lower.

Brian Beck:
Really, I'm not kidding. But the fact of the matter is, in this day and age, you have to be successful. You have to deliver personalized and relevant content. You were just talking about open rates. If you're not delivering something relevant, personalized, based on what they own or what their interests and intentions are, it's just not going to get attention, it's not going to get what you need. So after you have those basics, you got to get some of these pieces in place. Would you agree you guys fit into sort of that four and five at Illumina? Stage or ...

Dave Grimm:
I would. I'd say that, technically, we're definitely there. The adoption by every region and every country and every type of sales model, that still takes time. But each year, we get more and more value, we get more and more rollover. So I'm very, very bullish on continuation of that program. You did make me think of a couple of things in what you were saying there with respect to personalization. For me, there's the personalization at a marketing level and a content level. So the aluminum business, there are basically eight market segments. Someone who's working on COVID is a virologist or microbial researcher. They're working with petri dishes. Someone who works with agrigenomics, they're working with cows, trying to breed cows to produce more milk.

Dave Grimm:
So from a personalization perspective, the microbial researcher sees content and images of microbes in petri dishes and pipettes, these little lab tools. The ag person sees cows and grain and sheep, whatever. So the simple personalization visual perspective with the single data point or segment, you can dramatically differentiate the visual appearance of your brand. You can also make it much easier advertising your own properties because not everyone's fighting for the same location. You have eight different market segments ready to fire, all you need to know is what does this person do when you change the content. That's the dome HTML level out on a website.

Dave Grimm:
At the My Illumina dashboard level, we had personas inside the lab that we designed for. Now, I'm a big believer in the user is always in control. I bought the sequencer. This is my computer, I want to work with it how I want to. So when you sign up for the my Illumina dashboard, it's three steps. Pretty simple. One of the questions is, "What do you do with most of your day?" And what we're trying to get to is, "Are you working with the equipment like you work in the lab?" You physically working with it. "Are you managing the lab? Are you the lab director? Are you responsible for all the sequencers? Or you're the purchasing agent?" Those are three very different people. And what we allow them to do, first off, when they basically tell us what their job is, we repaint the dashboard.

Dave Grimm:
So Brian, if you said, "I'm a purchase agent." The most prominent thing you would see is order management. And, Linda, if you said, "Well, I'm responsible for the lab," the most prominent thing you're going to see is the instrument utilization. "How's the whole lab doing? I want to track all of them. Am I getting my money's worth? Are we efficient?" If I am the person actually working with the instrument, I'm going to see utilization of an instrument. I can favor the one I'm using for my experiment. I don't care about the rest of it. I don't care about how the lab does. I need to make sure that my experiments are going well.

Dave Grimm:
Then of course, some people in a small business do all of it. They're responsible for everything. So they're allowed to move the widgets around, they can turn things off like, "I don't want your content feed, I don't care." Fine. You're in control, you turn it off. So I think one part of personalization is the, "I'm going to take a simple data point and I'm going to present it to you because I think this is important to you. And I'm going to take away a bunch of stuff I don't think is important." The other part of it is letting the user personalize it for themselves. "Here's what I think you want, you decide. Do you want this or not? You can take it off, you can hide it, you can bring it back, you can favorite it." Give them the tools to use your interfaces the way they want.

Dave Grimm:
Then of course, on the back end, you look at all the signals. "Houston, we have a problem. Nobody wants this widget. No one is turning it off." Well, I think we can probably get rid of it then. Let's mothball that and find out what went wrong. And the flip side of it is everyone really likes the instrument utilization. Okay. Well, when we think about the next set of sprints and where we're going to put our investment dollars of time, people developing features, there's this whole backlog of stuff. Let's not put it in the widget that's not used, let's put our time in dollars into the ones being used.

Dave Grimm:
The harder one is, "Do you really think we can get value out of this one, you know, the middle widget, we just didn't do it right. So let's put more money in there and more effort and make it a little better, get more customer feedback in there." Maybe that can be the leader. That's the fun part, I think, of running a digital business. Where you can sit back and look at all these things going on, you can get the signal from the noise. And it's really hard to argue with large data like that.

Brian Beck:
You let the data speak for the customer.

Dave Grimm:
You let the data speak for itself. You had to build a story around it and explain the value. But in the end, that's, I think the fun of it. The constant growth and optimization and definitely a way to describe the value to the business. I'll tell you a really quick story, we released, I think it was in November, a new product that does remote monitoring of the instruments for health. Meaning the instrument's in good condition and it's performing as expected. When we did that, one of the data fields that we were utilizing had a problem with it so we had to turn it off temporarily while we fixed it. It's like a bug, but it took about six weeks for us to get it straightened out until we can turn it back on.

Dave Grimm:
We start receiving complaints from customers and from salespeople, like, "What happened? Why did we lose that?" And I was like, "We're sorry. We're turning it back on." But it's great because the customers actually said, "Hey, I need that. I want that." It's like a reverse compliment. That's the best feedback you can get. "The thing that you gave me, that it was really useful to me is now gone and I want it back." We fixed it and turn it back on. That's really what you want here. You want the customer saying, "Hey, I like that. I want that. Give it to me. Don't take it away."

Brian Beck:
That's perhaps the best reward for your work.

Dave Grimm:
Stock isn't bad.

Linda Bustos:
Are we talking about a B2B supplier or are we talking you're a technology vendor? Because I think once you go through your digital transformation, you realize you have all this data and you realize that you can build a solution around the products that you sell and so now you've got a user interface, you've got a dashboard, you have your own roadmap for how you're going to evolve that and making even more killer as time goes on. You're doing it with Internet of Things, it doesn't even have an interface at all and making it all work together. So at what point does does a B2B company ... You know, is it inevitable, Brian, that the higher you go up in digital maturity, you kind of flip over and you ...

Dave Grimm:
From a technology company?

Linda Bustos:
Yeah.

Brian Beck:
I mean, that's a great question. And actually, I'm going to redirect that to Dave. But I think from my perspective, companies have to also understand what they're best in the world at and not recreate things that are in the markets. Too often I've seen companies building their own software when they're not software companies. So I think there's a fine line ... I think the way Dave has described me and is the way I advocate for it in the book which is really putting the customer at the forefront. And the way he's been describing it and the way that Illumina has structured their customer feedback loop and working with the sales team and integrating this really makes them unique and in a successful example of putting the customer at the forefront, developing technology but doing it in a way that's not reinventing things necessarily, but they're leveraging things that already exist. I'll pass it over to you, Dave. What do you think?

Dave Grimm:
Well, first off to Linda's point, I kind of laugh. We have this digital distinction in business but everything's digital. Your phone is a computer. They're not attached to copper, it's coming through fiber. When you call someone to schedule an appointment like the doctor's office, they're not writing it on a chalkboard, they're inputting it into an electronic system that does all of their calendar and their scheduling. And your medical records are digitalized. The trick is, how do you get value out of the data that's there and what do you go after? An interesting point, earlier in your presentation, Brian, you were talking about all those different examples and Amazon's auto fulfillment. So this is a shiny object example that I experienced at Illumina. I had people senior to me, demanding that we do auto fulfillment.

Dave Grimm:
I firmly believe in auto fulfillment when you're talking about commoditized products at very low dollar, they're not refrigerated. The Illumina business has extremely expensive chemistry that's very sensitive to temperature and very large dollar amounts. We had shopping carts. Our largest, 19 million in a single order. You don't want that being auto shipped and ending up on a loading dock on a Sunday. No one's there. Or a regional holiday because that's a global business. Monday is the festival of All Saints of whatever and no one's there. And we auto ship it. Sure, you signed a contract, we're going to do this, but are you going to leave the customer holding the bag? No. You're going to make them.  And you're just costing yourself money and a headache.

Dave Grimm:
So in that business when people came to me and said, "We need auto fulfillment." It's like, "Okay, we really don't. What we need to do is automate up to the point of fulfillment so that we can use the Internet of Things." We can see your order history, we know you're running low, because you've used it. So I'm going to put together the order for you and basically hand it to you and say, "You ready? Here it is. You say 'I want it' and you know when it's going to be there." So because you live in that country, in that region, "Wait a minute, everyone's out."

Dave Grimm:
Chinese New Year, great example. Their new year is different than ours and their company shuts down. You don't want to be moving forward this Western concept of New Year being completely ignorant that the company shuts down or the country shuts down for a week and start shipping products. So when you let the customer, like you do all the work for the customer, you get a price discounts applied if they have one and all they have to do is say, "Yes, I want it but I don't want it on that date, I want it on this date." Then you can get fulfillment. But that's for that type of product.

Dave Grimm:
If you're talking about toilet paper from Amazon, that's a pretty regular clip, diapers, and you just throw in the garage if you don't need it. Here's an example. Diapers. Family goes on vacation. No one's there. No diapers are getting used. And Amazon ships you fresh diapers. You go through a lot of them. When you get home from vacation, there's a big box in your front porch and you don't need it. It's not like you're never going to use it. That's not going to hurt you.

Brian Beck:
Right. That whole anticipatory shipping thing, but ...

Dave Grimm:
But that's just your business. You got to know your-

Brian Beck:
That's right. That's their business, not yours. But the interesting thing is that the commonality is you're making the buyer's job easier. Whoever the buyer is, whatever their work are or whatever their needs are, you're using data to say, "They're likely to need this next, let's make it easy for them to interact and transact with us." That's, again, one of the central things I talked about in the book is that that is a key to success in B2B e-commerce.

Dave Grimm:
And going back to Linda's point about the sales team, when you can set up that type of fulfillment, repeat orders make it simple and the salesperson's getting the commission, great. I love this e-commerce thing. Now from the business perspective, it's like, "Well, great." Now we want you to focus on the next product. Get the new product introduction in there, get the new technology, and get the product vertical from the wallet share that the customer doesn't have. It's our job to say, "And if you do that, My Illumina gets even more powerful for you because there's now a new connection into the business."

Dave Grimm:
And ultimately, what that does is defend you because Illumina owns sequencing globally, but that'll change, there'll be a disruptor. It's going to happen, everything gets disrupted. So if you have a new startup that has a cheaper solution, a faster solution, better price point, but that's all they have and you have this whole mature ecosystem to do business with, is the savings of 20% really working leaving all this value that I have? It goes back to the point where we lost the data point on a feature and our customers complained. You can imagine shifting a lab, once they've gotten accustomed to all the service technology in our integrations, they're not going to jump over a simple price point on a single product. At least, I don't think they would.

Brian Beck:
Yeah. It makes sense. So Dave, this is our last session of the virtual book tour. We're capping it off, both of you guys, and you're doing an awesome job. I love this conversation. Let's talk for a second about things that are coming. You talked about a lot of new concepts, predictive analytics, predictive ordering, IoT. I love actually each of you to weigh in on this because Linda, I know you do this with your time, you think about these things. But maybe first to Dave, of all the things that are coming in there, anything you're particularly excited about you think could be a game changer for B2B companies? Any things that we've talked about or even anything we haven't talked about?

Dave Grimm:
Wow, that's a hard question. It's so broad. Actually, I wrote down earlier, when you talked about automation of processes, I don't see a bright shiny object that changes everything for everybody. What I see in being a futurist ... I don't consider myself a futurist. When you're trying to change your business, figure out the thing that you need to automate and to simplify. What I see coming is this more and more, especially B2Bs, become more digital and just getting access to their data and then getting the force multiplier of one plus one is three. Wow, these two data points are bringing together from these two systems suddenly make this whole process we do over here irrelevant. Look how much time we save for the customer and money we save for ourselves.

Dave Grimm:
I think there's just going to be a whole growth cycle and automation of business and efficiencies of business and processes. They go through all these B2Bs that operate around the world. That type of thing is really exciting. I love optimization. I mean, there's step change, introducing something new. And then there's improving, improving, improving and step change. I think one big step change is this whole ecosystem just becoming more digitally conscious in moving, in your metaphor of one to five, the vast majority, when I go to B2B Online or B2B Next, the vast majority are that two stage of your five steps. When the vast majority are four are five, wow, that's really going to be cool.

Brian Beck:
How about you, Linda? What do you think of all these things that are coming? Do we have any game changers here? Do we have step change? Incremental change? What are you excited about?

Linda Bustos:
Well, I think one that's getting a lot of attention and at least is very, very buzz-worthy is AI. I mean, that's an umbrella term for a lot of things. And within that, there are different slices. There's a personalization AI and predictive analytics, which you referenced with Amazon, what they're trying to do with being able to move product as close to the customer based on all of these factors that are the most likelihood that they're going to repurchase again. There's always a danger with that because you don't know if that customer switch to supplier. You don't know if that company even exists anymore, all these kind of things that can happen. So, I think that there's a lot of automation.

Linda Bustos:
Like to your point when you were describing, Dave, about the automation, but there's nuance around that, that there's business logic that has to go in there that needs to be flexible enough that you, as the business owner, understanding your customer, your product. And as your business evolves, because that's the problem with machines, is that they're not in your boardroom. They're not sitting there with your new go-to market strategy or they don't know you acquired another technology or that you bought another company and are rolling it in. And now you've just gained another million customers and you got to mash it all together, they don't know that, right? So I do think AI is going to be something that's really important, but it's going to be balanced with humans, for sure.

Linda Bustos:
But contracting, I think in the B2B buying space is a really interesting one, where AI will be able to cut out a lot of the inefficiencies even in using the website to go through and build the basket and stuff and then you get on the phone sales. And human negotiations can leave things on the table a lot. There's some new technologies that are just taking all the inputs to be able to negotiate fairly and find actual trades and trading options and stuff on both sides that even the humans didn't know existed. Like AI in video game space, too.

Linda Bustos:
They'll run an AI and it starts playing a game and it learns cheat codes that the programmers didn't even put in there. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there. I'm talking like 5, 10, 15 years, but I think it's going to be really important that a digital leader always is aware and ahead of that technology to make sure a disaster doesn't happen. Like all this perishable genetic material sitting out on the porch on the Fourth of July. You don't want that stuff.

Dave Grimm:
Yeah, you don't want that to ... I agree. I think that when I think AI, I think artificial intelligence and neural networks. We're a long way from that technically, but we're definitely in the throes of automation and finding signal and noise. I've seen software for deal maturation whereas ... We actually installed this at Illumina, as a salesperson is building a quote, the average price closed and the average margin delivered can be shown to the salesperson to help them put together a winning deal where they're going to get value back for the business and the customer is going to get a good deal, too, based on how the business is performing. So all those helpers can be embedded inside the interfaces that people are using to your point because the human-computer is quite powerful still. This one up here, mine's a little shady. But the human-computer is still quite powerful. And we're a long way from neural networks but, man, we can do a lot right now.

Brian Beck:
You know, guys, this is a great way to kind of cap things. The session four, I think it was, we talked about organizational needs and what the characteristics of a leader are that are successful in a B2B environment, a digital leader. Dave, I mean, you really do embody a lot of those and a lot of it is what we talked about, which is operating without perfect information, being flexible, being ahead, but being really someone who can align the organization and leadership and being almost a salesperson, because you have to sell these ideas in the company, particularly as it relates to these new technologies.

Dave Grimm:
Very much so.

Brian Beck:
Yeah, and you know it, you've lived it. So one final question for each of you guys. So this is the end of the series. This is the last one of these. If you could give one piece of advice to a CEO who's just getting started in this, any final advice you might give to a CEO who's beginning her or his journey in digital transformation.

Linda Bustos:
This is a heavy question because I think CEOs, hopefully, the CEO can delegate to really strong people. Hopefully, not everything has to be their decision and on their shoulders, if it doesn't work. So I think for a CEO to find the right people and make sure that ... And the people that are driving especially digital have an experience that can truly be delegated can be as a peer in this. And if not go to outside consultants in ... A little plug for you, Brian, because a CEO really needs to have the smartest people around them. Nobody can wear every single hat in the organization. So that would be my advice, just delegate, empower people or get [crosstalk 00:59:08] you need.

Brian Beck:
Right. And get the right people on the bus. I quoted that from Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, in my book, because I believe it. How about you, Dave?

Dave Grimm:
For the CEO, I think it's really important for them to understand that this transformation becomes core to your business. What that means is you're taking on new responsibilities, levels of expertise and investment inside of your business that doesn't exist now. Or they live in little snippets if you're in that one too and your five-step spectrum. That has real capital expenditure and real operational expenditure overhead over time. So the CEO needs to understand this isn't a one-year investment, it's multi-year. But in return, what you get back is more efficiency, happier customers, a deeper share of wallet, more revenue if you do it correctly. That's the kind of deal any CEO is going to want, but they have to stay committed.

Dave Grimm:
And as a transformational leader, you need to be able to set the guideposts on the payback and the proof point. One thing in my experience, both in the financial services side, sales of data inside genomics, a lot of really smart people who are experts in what they do, when you talk about changes, AI, whatever, newness, they don't see it until it's done, they don't really get it until they can hold it and play with an interface with it. It's really hard to talk about things in theory and get a whole bunch of money and then build it. So you have to make the first investments doing well.

Dave Grimm:
But for the CEO, look, this is a serious part of your business. It's going to take multiple years, here are the proof points that it's working, and if it isn't working, we stop, we change. It will work because especially for B2B, just look at B2C. Many of the models are very, very, very established in all sorts of verticals. Here's the one that works for you and having good implementation partners and consultants who've done this before and understand the guardrails can help lead a group through.

Brian Beck:
The very words in the very first chapter of the book are, "The story has been told before." And it's all about from B2C. Guys, this has been so great. Thank you both very much. You've been amazing on this session so I want to thank both of you. Here's our contact information. Obviously, you met me and here's my email and my cell phone. Dave, his LinkedIn. Linda, her LinkedIn. Thank you guys very much. I also want to thank you from our earlier sessions, some of our guest speakers, from Session One, Johnstone Supply. Session two, Keysight Technologies. Digital Dave Grimm, for two sessions, Session Three and Eight. Pella Windows, Session Four. Georgia-Pacific, Session Five. Big Ass Fans, Session Six. And Cardinal Health, Session Seven. Really great.

Brian Beck:
If you all haven't heard all the sessions, I encourage you to listen to them, because there are really some amazing content in there. All sessions are now available on-demand. And when I wrote this book, I wrote it because I want you to take it and read it but also use it as a reference guide. These sessions all cover different parts of the book as you go through it. But it warmed my heart when I was speaking to an executive last week in a big office equipment company, and they had it all dog eared and they had all the post-it notes all over it. So I encourage you, as a takeaway, to do that, to use it as a reference guide, leave it on your desk. I hope it helps you in your digital transformation journey. Thank you for joining us for this series. If you have questions, you can email me or Meg. Well, thank Meg for her help through this entire session and series. The book is available on amazon.com. I hope you pick it up. Thank you so much for joining us.