Building an eCommerce Foundation

Brian Beck:
Welcome everyone. My name is Brian Beck. I'm super excited for our session two of our virtual book tour. I'm the author of Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce. And today we're going to be talking all about building a technology foundation for e-commerce. At first, I want to thank our sponsors, particularly our platinum sponsor Elastic Path for sponsoring this session and bringing this content to you. Here you can find out more about our book B2B eCommerce at the link here, billiondollarB2Becommerce.com. And I wrote this book really to arm B2B companies with a playbook for success in bringing digital transformation to their business.

Brian Beck:
There's lots and lots of chapters in here and lots of content. Today, we're going to focus in just one area. The book is available on amazon.com. So, here's our series at a glance. All of the sessions will air at 8:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. Our first session, which was on leadership and alignment with Johnstone Supply is now available on demand. Today, we're going to be talking about building an eCommerce foundation. We've got lots more coming too, and I encourage you to join me for the rest of the sessions. I have some fantastic speakers joining me, so super excited for that. Today's agenda, today we're talking about building an eCommerce technology foundation.

Brian Beck:
In this chapter, I break down all of the, really the steps necessary to find an eCommerce platform, but also the other elements that are important for you to engage in a digital transformation for your business. Today, we're going to go through in detail, some of the concepts with Carl Doll from Keysight Technologies and John Bruno from Elastic Path. We're going to bring some of these to life with some war stories and other things the Carl's going to share.

Brian Beck:
But first I'm going to go through some context before we get into the discussion. Before I dive in on that, I just wanted to give you a little personal experience, I've been in this business for 20 years. And during that time, I replatformed or brought new products, eCommerce product to market probably 35 times. And I've learned a lot along the way. And a lot of that is what we're going to talk about today. I'll relate some personal war stories as we go. What are some of the prerequisites in technology before you get into selecting a platform. It's really about setting the objectives and the human elements before you get into the technology, because the technology really needs to the objectives and not the other way around. Oftentimes, I find businesses make the mistake of just putting up technology for technology's sake.

Brian Beck:
And these foundational elements really come first, leadership, objective definition, understanding your customer's needs, defining what you expect out of it with an ROI model and then aligning the organization. There's a reason I have eight chapters before we get to chapter nine in the book. And a lot of those chapters talk about those concepts. When you have those things in place, if then time to select the right solution for your business. One thing I've learned in doing this three dozen times is, it's important to take the time and do it right. If you do this process well, you'll have a platform you can live with 10 years or more.

Brian Beck:
And there's some elements of that I'll talk about in a second that are important to consider. The very first of those is putting the customer at the center and you have some tools at your disposal today you can do this. You can find out what their needs are. One is interviewing your sales and support team. They're the folks who are closest to your customer. They understand their needs. And not only that, they understand how they can better serve the customer with better digital tools. So, step one is really to interview those teams and then reach out to interview your customers. The most successful implementations I've been involved with over the years, what these companies have done is gone out and involved the customer from the very beginning and integrated that customer feedback into the process of finding the right technology solution.

Brian Beck:
And one great way to do that is by forming a customer advisory board. These are people that are involved, they're customers of different types and sizes for your business. And they're folks that can help you formulate your requirements, but also even test the solution as you're bringing it to market, they may be your first adopters when you roll out the solution. Putting the customer at the center is critical. Requirements are also critical. You think about what does the system need to do, and they need to be founded on those customer needs and also your business objectives, I just described. The requirements are one component. I'll get into some of the others in a moment. Here's some examples and again, I can't provide all the detail in this session, but in the book, I have a lot of detail around these things.

Brian Beck:
You need to number one, make sure that you're bringing a customer experience, that you're the customer expects almost consumer-like. We'll get into that with Carl a Little bit later. Marketing features, website operations and content management, personalization, and loyalty. Your customer expects you to speak to them in a personalized manner. Website, checkout and cart. With a B2B implementation, you need to be able to address the way that your customers buy byproducts from you like buying on a purchase order for example. Omni-channel support. This is a B2C term, but it applies to B2B. What does your sales team need in the field while they're meeting with customers? And how can you better support them with an eCommerce platform?

Brian Beck:
Workflows that are unique to businesses like purchase permission setting and other things. And there's a lot more here. It's all in in the book. But it just kind of scratches the surface. And we'll talk about this these things as we go through our sessions today. The other piece is use cases. involving the organization and your customers. It's not just about a list of requirements, it's about how they're going to use the system. How do you find a platform? Well, you don't want to just look at requirements, you need to also look at flexibility of the qualitative factors.

Brian Beck:
There are dozens of eCommerce platforms. The good news about that is there are a lot of options. The bad news about that is there are a lot of options. The point is that you need to take your time and really sort through this process carefully. Take a long list approach, look at the market holistically, and then narrow that longer list down based on things like unique functionalities you have in your business. How flexible and customized as your experience need to be? What's your budget range? What is the focus of the platform? What's the availability of resources to develop on the platform, systems, integrators and developers and other technical resources?

Brian Beck:
How stable is the company? What's their product roadmap? And what's your technology environment? How well does that fit with what they're bringing to you? You want to look for common use cases. How are your customers and internal stakeholders going to use this system? Again, keeping in mind the practicality of this. It's about objectives, not just a list of requirements. And then qualitative factors are equally, or in some cases more important. This includes cultural fit, the flexibility, the system, the business model, and other factors. Look, I've done this many times. And when you break it down, ultimately what makes the decision is not a list of features for you, it's the qualitative things that are important.

Brian Beck:
Can you future proof the business using the solution? Because you don't know what's coming. You don't know the feature sets or the demands your customers will have five or 10 years from now. There are new touch points emerging all the time. Think about mobile 10 years ago, it wasn't even a thing. Today, it's a huge part of how people interact with you digitally. Internet of things, embedding technology and commerce into the products at the edge. We'll talk about that with Carl a little bit later. Visual and voice commerce, Alexa, and all kinds of other things that are coming down the pipe. And your customers' needs, this is one certainty, they will continue to grow and evolve.

Brian Beck:
And one of the things we'll talk about today is headless commerce. That's emerged as a compelling way to ensure that your business is flexible going forward. With that, you've met me in addition to being an author of this book, I'm also the managing partner of a company called Enceiba. We have a business specifically oriented towards B2B optimization for Amazon business. We help companies run their Amazon programs and determine their strategy. Carl, you want to say hello to us? I'm so thrilled you're here with us today.

Carl Daw:
Yeah. Thanks, Brian and John, and pleased to be on the call today with you two industry leaders. Again, the e-commerce I'm the program manager for Keysight Technologies and focal points for the e-commerce program at Keysight.

Brian Beck:
Awesome, Carl, thank you. Hey, John, you and I go way back. You want to say hello and give us a little, your background.

John Bruno:
Yeah, it's great to see you both. I'll be at the Berkeley this time around, but I'm Vice President of Product Management here at Elastic Path. That means that I'm responsible for setting the product strategy, how we get there, what our roadmap is, and ultimately how we execute to deliver against that. And prior to that, I actually spent the past five years at Forrester Research, where I led their B2B eCommerce research practice.

Brian Beck:
And that's where we first met John. So, that's awesome. I'm thrilled to have you on this as well. Well, great. Well, Carl, to start us off, I mean, we would hope that everyone knows who Keysight is. There are a few people that don't, so I know we have a few slides here. I'd love for us to walk through them and tell us about Keysight.

Carl Daw:
Yeah. And I'll do that in the context of this actual session, because it provides a background context of the journey that Keysight has been on. For example, what are some of the complexity and challenges that ultimately lead to that technology foundation's selection. At Keysight itself is a relatively new company, but we're an 80-year-old company, in reality, we're the original electronic measurement part of Hewlett Packard going back to 1939. I've got an 80-year-old heritage focused on the founding focus of a Hewlett Packard. And then we spun out of Hewlett Packard to form Agilent and then spun out to be a pure electronic measurement company with Keysight Technologies.

Carl Daw:
And focused on the entire electronic measurement value chain of an R&D, design, test manufacture and the like. With that 18-year-old heritage as of today is a pure measurement company and if you can move to the next slide. John, we're about four-point $3 billion in revenue. We have over 13,000 employees worldwide. We are the market leader, we're number one in the majority of markets that we play in. You know how our historical focus and what most people know us for has been on hardware-based instrumentation, hardware products basically. And then obviously we're moving to solutions software and services and new business models associated with that.

Carl Daw:
And obviously products will remain a core part of it, but customers are looking for not just a product, but a true end-to-end solution, for example, where wireless and 5G is a good example, their automotive and acute huge focus for the company. That also ties in with some of our challenges from an eCommerce standpoint, we have a huge product depth. We have a huge product range and have a huge complexity just in one category. We have over 180 products that range from $500 to 200,000. So, helping the customer choose and select and get to what I call product feed is key and enabling it to do that in an online fashion.

Brian Beck:
Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, Carl.

Carl Daw:
Similarly, we've had a historical direct salesforce. All right, traditionally, we've had a direct salesforce-centric organization. We now have a broad channel portfolio where within an indirect channel that represents typically over 30% of Keysight's worldwide revenue. And then sort of lastly given that we have an 80-year-old heritage there's a huge amount of B2B organizational and process complexity and baggage. It's worked well for the past 80 years and trying to marry that to a dynamic digital e-commerce strategy certainly has been some challenges because it works for the past 80 years.

Brian Beck:
Yeah, that's fantastic. And yes, you fit the profile of a lot of companies that are reading this book today, and they're trying to figure this whole thing out. So, I appreciate you joining us, Carl. Let's go ahead and go over to our fireside chat without a fire. And sorry to interrupt you before, Carl, it was a great background. I really appreciate that. Tell us, more about your role. I mean, how long have you been there? What is your role at Keysight?

Carl Daw:
I've been at Keysight for over 30 years. Again, a lot of my peers in Keysight have that heritage, shall we say, with the Agilent and formerly a Hewlett Packard. In my current role, I am the e-commerce program manager responsible for Keysight's e-commerce strategy and roadmap execution, as well as the overall adoption. And then also the realization of the business objectives associated with Keysight's e-commerce program. And we'll talk a little bit more about that what's changed and what's different, I guess later on in the fireside conversation. As part of what a program manager does and drives relative to e-commerce, it really is a partnership and sort of folk point leading what is within Keysight across functional program and initiative across both business functions, IT functions, whether it be the web, BRP, finance, tax, trade, logistics, bringing all the internal stakeholders together executing to that plan, as well as working with external vendors like Elastic Path or their technology consulting partners. Basically bringing all that together, running as a program to deliver on those business objectives for the company.

Brian Beck:
And so, you don't sleep?

Carl Daw:
No, we are always late and we have more roadmaps than we have the capability to deliver on. So, yes.

Brian Beck:
I know it's a lot.

John Bruno:
Always trying to keep you busy. I'm glad that you can empathize with me on the roadmap side of things. Carl, you talked a lot about the pedigree, the history of Keysight, and it's a really interesting dichotomy and quite literally, the organization is technology person, and technology-powered, but you also mentioned that from a sales standpoint, it's very sales and salesforce-centric. I guess that being said when you think about the things, whether they're internal or whether they're external factors now, what kind of drove Keysight to the point or this inflection point where digital and excelling digital is no longer a nice to have, but a must-have?

Carl Daw:
Not a problem. And you're correct, John. It started at Keysight as an HP was a very much a direct sell centric organization that the sales reps were the center of the universe from a customer. And that was a great thing to have in the 90s, the relationship management piece, but they also were the focal point from communication and a customer engagement standpoint. But with digital now the customer is actually now in full control there. They're deciding what and where to engage, how and where they want to be engaged. And obviously doing research, not just on the say keysight.com for example, but multiple internet properties, whether it's that YouTube influencer, for example, whether it's a test and measurement sort of magazine for example, or working with their peers or others on forums, they getting the input that they need.

Carl Daw:
They're doing that research across multiple touchpoints, and then obviously engaging our sales team or our channel partners much later I guess in the process. Keysight and prior to Agilent and HP, we've always had a strong web presence, but that's been more of a, what I call a marketing catalog. A type of environment that is a source of information for them to some degree. The challenge for us really is the work out how to engage that customer digitally support and compliment, and also influence the customer at their different interaction and inflection points. Actually when they're on or when they're ready to buy we can help. Influence the shape and provide the relevant information as part of that journey, we're also been doing some creative things.

Carl Daw:
You can go online and look at things like Wave 2020, for example, where a combination of things we haven't done historically digitally and basically be where the customer is. Be where they are on YouTube or offer less about the product but more educating the customer on some of the key measurement techniques and capability that our new instruments can provide, whether it be eBooks, white papers, and then creative things like the digital giveaway, something we've never done before. Daily sign up sheets, weekly giveaways, live on YouTube and getting creative like that. And then obviously as now a true multichannel organization, we've got to work... Our sales rep continues to play a leadership role in certain accounts, but obviously partnering and working with our indirect channel, rental and solution partners and tying it back to eCommerce where eCommerce is really viewed as a key part of our overall go to market channel strategy. And just another element of that overall channel mix.

Brian Beck:
Carl, you said some really, really key things there. You said be where the customer is and the customer's in charge and I couldn't agree with you more. We've got actually some sessions about that coming up, so I'm going to have you come back to talk more about that. But that's fantastic. You guys weren't always in e-commerce, tell us... You started at a place where many B2B companies are today, which is sales-driven, salesforce-driven, traditional channels, driving the business. Tell us where you were and how you started with eCommerce. Give us some background on how that all evolved.

Carl Daw:
Over the years we've had numerous e-commerce initiatives, some successful others were not. They were all typically when I call department or sort of vertical function led. Hey, maybe we led a department and you had some accessories. E-commerce was growing, you saw other companies out there having some success in eCommerce. You decided to go and sell your products online, maybe on eBay, for example, maybe decided to have your own create your own storefront, et cetera. But it was very much department lead, vertical function led. Some work, some didn't, we've still got some of those around, like our parts online store, our remarket online store. There were a number of other experiments that just weren't set up for success, for example.

Carl Daw:
They're basically experiments, not well funded. We put them out there, maybe the adoption wasn't there, there was some functionality capability or misalignment, like you said, at the start with. Well, customer expectations were and basically they sort of closed out. We'll talk about ownership later on and what's different. But again, they were very much focused on what I call the web front end. If you go back many years, it was all about sort of the web and the front end. There was less of a focus on, you'd say some of the things that they really differentiate or makes e-commerce successful in a B2B space. Things like the order of the fulfillment, the delivery. We now offer, for example, two-day delivery for eCommerce and believe that's a key differentiator for us, as well as giving what customers expect for an eCommerce sale.

Carl Daw:
And so, really much a sort of a front end web-focused rather than an end-to-end focused.

Brian Beck:
And it really is about making the customer's job easier. I mean, things like fulfillment and talk about all the different aspects of e-commerce. It's not just about an online transaction, but it's about what happens afterwards too.

Carl Daw:
A great web project, for example, I had the world's best store checkout experience than the other, but maybe some of the other elements of that end-to-end that the overall end-to-end commerce deliverable for a customer were there with respect to the payment methodologies, the products that were offered or the ability to fulfill and deliver it in a timeline that the customer expected for e-commerce.

Brian Beck:
It's interesting. That's great, Carl. You mentioned in what you were just talking about that you guys went through several iterations and oftentimes I'll find that in some of the companies I actually have in the book, some of the case studies talk about they tried and they failed and they didn't necessarily do it right. And so, you said that we did it right. What changed? What things happened in the business? Or what changed with leadership or the organization, so that this time you did it right? And I know you've had good success and we'll talk about that but maybe you can give us the changes that led to getting to that outcome.

Carl Daw:
Yeah. And I think to answer that also some of the earliest steps, the successes, as well as the failures help realize, we'll talk about that later on about sort of we knew what we wanted to some degree from a capability standpoint. And so, to be honest, those earlier failures and successes helped shape what needed to do to do it right. And we'll talk about some of the process and policy changes and things like that. Where we are now today is that commerce is a true, company-wide priority. It's not a department or a vertical whatever we have full executive support, sponsorship and engagement. It is a company wide priority. Our executive had a recent investor day for example, and e-commerce was a key element of that, that didn't happen years ago.

Carl Daw:
E-Commerce was a side little project, hopefully we'll sell a few million, et cetera, et cetera. So, now, e-commerce is a core company or strategy, and it's also a key critical business enabler for Keysight and I'll cover some of those elements in a second, as well as the other thing that's happened is B2B customers have matured. For example, they're expecting to go online and in many cases, but especially for the low cost transactional end, there's no need to talk to a sales rep. They can make the decision themselves, they can check with their peers, they can go on YouTube comparison sites, whatever they know what they want. We want to give them the ability to basically come online basically, and buy that product online with a little engagement from Keysight, if they choose to do so.

John Bruno:
So, Carl, I mean, you talked about the strategic buying, you talked about the leadership change, the culture change, but even if it felt like at the heart of that, and forgive me, I don't have my clicker with me, but I heard the word customer pop up a lot and for good reason. One of the things that I know you hear, Brian, you hear all the time, and I've heard a lot too in the B2B world is business services are increasingly looking to deliver a "consumer-like experiences for their B2B customers. Since you've talked a lot about the customer, can you talk a little bit about what the phrase consumer-like experiences means to you? And I guess more broadly what that sentiment means in terms of what Keysight is looking to deliver for its customers?

Carl Daw:
Yeah. Okay. Thank you, John. And over the years, whether it's been eCommerce or in various web projects, similar to some of the best practices that John outlined relative to engaging the customer, quantitative or qualitative customer research, basically reviewing the actual designs and usability tests with customers some of the typical areas that we've done. Traditionally our projects have been fairly large. We want to make sure that they're right. It's also a significant investment from the company. The upfront investment in customer research, the upfront investment in customer usability testing, to make sure that the designs work, that we go live with something that's going to work for our customers and meet those customer expectations is key.

Carl Daw:
We resonate with the phrase customer-like experience. Its context at Keysight as I mentioned at the start, our customer is the engineer. It's a technical sale. We've got to provide them with the technical material. They're not buying a T-shirt, they're buying an expensive instrument, for example, that has specifications. They've got to make sure that it meets their particular measurement problem as a key part of that customer experience. With respect to the actual e-commerce and customer-like experience a couple of things from a reference standpoint. One, we compared ourselves to sort of leading B2C experiences and sites. Obviously realizing that we have a degree of complexity that some of those don't, so that that's just baggage that we have.

Carl Daw:
The other thing, the phrase that we use within the project team was a frictionless, and that was sort of a mandate for every aspect of it. Every part of that design mandate was take the friction out and a way of doing that was really truly focused. What was the right thing for the customer? I can assure you there was some priory commerce implementations. There were more sites-centric being customer-centric. They were very much focused on us, our process alignment, our policy, for example, we needed to authenticate you as a customer before you could even use our online store at that particular point in time. So, the ability to take the friction out, we basically allowing our customer to do a guest checkout.

Carl Daw:
If they want to do a guest checkout, we're allowing them to do that guest or registered. We've simplified our product structure so not burdening the customer with our complexity and our product structure, complexity, giving them delivery choice, giving them free delivery. We've changed our policies where to ensure that the order flows that helps Keysight from a automation standpoint. And so, it's a Keysight benefit, but it's also a benefit from a customer experience standpoint because that order gets submitted. It automatically flows, it automatically acknowledged in minutes, or for example. A good example of a policy change that helps our customers as well as Keysight, relative to that automation as such.

Carl Daw:
A couple of other ads. Again, based on those previous projects and this also ties into some of the platform side foundation activity, we wanted to offer an integrated experience. We knew this right from the start. We didn't want to separate web marketing site experience and a separate store, commerce experience. Again, our engineers are on our website. They're needing to see the back of the instrument, the specifications, the data sheet, all those things. We wanted to integrate commerce directly into that same page experience and make it integrated.

Carl Daw:
Didn't want to separate the two. Again, that ties into that frictionless. I give the customer the ability to buy where they're already at and already integrating with the website. We're not perfect, I can assure you anybody who goes out on Keysight come today, or you'll still see that we have a long way to go. Again, gets back to that sort of wide and diverse product offering and the complexity, but we're looking at opportunities to improve the customer buying journey and get them from basically awareness to research selection to ultimately, to product fade and looking at ways to differentiate the experience, especially for those low cost transactional products that we offer and are targeting for e-commerce today.

Brian Beck:
Hey, Carl, I thought you were perfect. We got to end this now? I'm kidding. It's a journey we know. It's funny, you mentioned, and I think you may have written this book actually. The book behind me here, but you talked about the importance of a consumer-like experience in some ways, and then also adopting B2B workflows. And that's actually the chapter 10, that's the one following this one. I talk about that actually stealing smart from B2C. Take us back to, you had all these attempts, it didn't work. You put up some implementations that didn't meet the customer's needs, they weren't getting adoption. How did you select...tell us... you've done it right this time you selected a platform take us through that process. How did you select a new platform? How did you get through it? I mean, that's a common question in some cases, it's an investment for these companies both of time and dollars, so they want to do it carefully, our listeners. Tell us how you went through that process. What can you tell them about your experience?

Carl Daw:
It relates to eCommerce platform selection, just to sort of pin that decision. The decision on as relates to e-commerce was the key strategic decision, the influence that was basically a decision that we made to replace our 15 year-old legacy [inaudible 00:32:25] website. And to basically we replaced that with a modern industry leading web content management system. And to do that, we selected Adobe's experience manager platform AEM. That was really the how we started we knew our web platform was old. We knew we wanted to start leveraging an industry platform and the capabilities that that offered. That's really what started the journey, and then basically the e-commerce decision basically moved on from there.

Carl Daw:
What I've got to do though, is I'll provide some additional context because outside of the webinar commerce space, there was a number of other projects that were going on. And at that time within case I probably negative perception of what I call a historical large complex boil the ocean projects that required major investment dollars, major decisions. Took years, ran light didn't deliver as such. We'd had outside of this space number of those decisions. At the time that was the framework that we entered the sort of e-commerce selection, and actually as well as the Adobe AEM web content management platform. We made a couple of strategic decisions early on at the start.

Carl Daw:
The first, trying to avoid that boil the ocean was to go best of breed. It allowed us the flexibility to pick and choose, get the... we went tied into one big monolithic platform. We could choose the best and then mix and match to align with what we wanted and went tied into one particular vendor footprint or whatever. Best of breed relative to a web content management, best of breed as it relates to our product information management system, best of breed as it relates to any commerce platform. That was it.

Brian Beck:
And Carl, you guys landed on Elastic Path. Tell us about that. I mean, John, you represent Elastic Path, so I'm sure you have some perspective here too, but tell us about how you got there and what kind of some stories along the way.

Carl Daw:
Great. Another strategic decision was really around the comment about just enough e-commerce. All right. We looked at the footprint, part of your suggestion that were along and we looked at sort of all players and came to the conclusion. We didn't want that monolithic platform because we'd only probably use 25% of the capabilities. And so, we coined the phrase just enough commerce, looking at their both capability and price point. We looked at all the players and then sort of resonated, as it related to Elastic Path for a number of reasons. Firstly, the headless comment. I talked earlier on about avoiding duplication from having a web content management platform and a monolithic separate storefront eCommerce platform, for example, we wanted that integrated customer experience.

Carl Daw:
And we also wanted to avoid the duplication between web content management and a monolithic eCommerce platform and capability that we didn't want, didn't need. And then obviously have constant churn about what was going to get done where. That was probably a relatively Elastic Path decision, the number one thing that resonated with us, that integrated customer experience and the just enough e-commerce. Key things like the linkage in integration Elastic Path works very well with Adobe AEM. So, we saw that as a natural fit. And then obviously, Elastic Path, what they call their integration framework, realizing that they weren't sent to the universe, that we were going to have to link into Salesforce, Siebel, Oracle ERP, and a various bunch of backend technology ecosystems that fits a company with an 80 year-old heritage that resonated with us as well.

Carl Daw:
Also it fit there just enough e-commerce mantra and we knew we could start with Elastic Path, then build and grow with them. And it didn't come with some huge monolithic type pricing.

John Bruno:
At Elastic Path, of course, we consider ourselves a best of breed commerce platform and we're headless. Everything is API first. Now, we don't want to tell our customers or mandate what kind of experience they need to build, but kind of going back to the selection process. It's really easy to look at the things that are right in front of you, the capabilities, the functionality, the experiences that you want to deliver right here right now. But when you think back to your selection process, how did Keysight balance off the requirements of right now, the immediate needs versus where you're seeing your products going, your technology going and ultimately where you see your customers, their experiences wanting to go?

John Bruno:
How do you balance off the tangible things that you can see in the next six to 12 months versus what might arrive three to five years down the road at the same commerce platform?

Carl Daw:
A great question. And it obviously is part of the evaluation process. One thing as part of that evaluation process and the whole concept of having that integrated customer experience, we realize that with headless that it would actually support basically new business models. The Keysight that we could actually embed e-commerce... Obviously our priority was to get the basic commerce capability out there and deployed. But as an example, Keysight today offers a hardware-based instrumentation that has all the functionality built in. It has software switches that enables the capability. Customers want to make some other measurement capability or they can ring in today and basically place a purchase order and get that capability turned on.

Carl Daw:
We also have an extensive software portfolio with different license types based on usage based licensing or time based licensing. The vision for us that the future capability is to embed commerce wherever the customer is. It ties into that customer-centric approach. If the customer's on k.com great, they want to select, search, add a product to the call, great. But the ability to embed e-commerce where the customer's at, whether it's in that instrument or for example, or embedding in that piece of software the time-based license is going to run out, for example. Why step away from that software application? Why not basically do it directly from the piece of software, get the extension that you need and basically transact online. I think it's a customer expectation. It also fits that new business model that Keysight is moving to

Brian Beck:
That's a great point, Carl. Thank you for sharing that. And oftentimes I'll get asked about ROI drivers for eCommerce. And you guys have had some great success and I'd love to learn more about, maybe you could tell our audience about some of the successes you guys have had with commerce, with aligning channels, all the things you've been talking about today.

Carl Daw:
Some of this is Keysight confidential of course, but some of the key drivers and objectives for Keysight were obviously revenue, incremental customer rates. Obviously, from aware the ecommerce standpoint opportunities to reach out to the territory or geographic customers. Obviously, there's opportunities. And obviously key part of that strategic initiative for Keysight is improving our overall gross margin. Just to expand on a couple of those. We've seen exponential revenue growth since we've launched with what we call differentiated delivery, our two-day delivery option. The typical purchase process for Keysight is typically built towards that and that takes four to five weeks for a customer.

Carl Daw:
From a commerce standpoint and only available on e-commerce, we're providing the ability for customers to come online and basically offer them a differentiated delivery, a two-day delivery experience. And that's really driven that exponential revenue growth for eCommerce. We're also seeing fantastic results better than we expected. It's a positive surprise for us with with new customer reach. 60% of out customers today who are buying online are new customers that we've not seen before exceeded our expectations.

Carl Daw:
They're not in our database, it's new customers that we've uncovered. We can then obviously tie them into our existing, capture them on eCommerce and then tie them into our existing digital marketing programs, as well as our sales organization. We're also seeing great adoption. We offer both a mixture of credit card MPO to align with what our customer choice, give them the choice of whatever. We're seeing great adoption with a credit card usage, at least over 70% obviously has great benefits for Keysight relative to reducing our day sales outstanding, for example, and again, a significantly higher than what we saw originally.

John Bruno:
That's awesome. Those are some really great metrics and it's really interesting to see the impact already on some of the key business objectives that you've had. When we think about selecting the right technology platform, the right eCommerce solution, it's quite easy to default back to a standard RFP of check boxes of features and functionality, but you talk a little bit more about how you baked in some of the objectives and goals that Keysight had into the evaluation process, what you did kind of beyond the standard RFP when you made your selection.

Carl Daw:
And also so a couple of things. One, getting clarity on, I guess, who are the, I guess the key decision-makers, it may sound odd, but getting clarity on who the actual decision-makers are for that decision. There's a lot of people in the room, but we're getting clarity on who is making that decision. It's great that you've got a set of requirements or capabilities, but again, not all of those are equal. There are different stakeholders with different expectations. So, getting clarity on that, and then also for us getting what I call cross-functional alignment on the business problem, we're trying to solve and establishing the clear criteria for how we're evaluating that particular platform.

Carl Daw:
One, it ensures that it's consistent across the actual various vendors that we're actually looking at. For example, it also ensures that the relevant people making the decision on the path also, as you've highlighted at the start, if it's the wrong decision, it can be fairly expensive relative to the project having to get reset, whatever. For me, it's worthwhile putting that that time in upfront to make sure that, I guess, the quality of the analysis and the confidence in the decision. Another thing that we historically do and has been born out is as part of that selection process, for example, is we will force a pilot or a proof of concept. It validates what the vendor is telling us. It also gives us an opportunity to engage the vendor. Maybe not the sales team, for example, but the professional services organization for example or validates, or they may have some solution partners for example.

Carl Daw:
It allows us to validate and we get a tone and a flavor. Brian talked earlier on, for example, about some of the softer options, for example. But that's important understanding, what that vendor is interaction. Are they going to be there for us in six months, 12 months, if the tone and the approach during the pilot or the POC really validates that this is a sale, where are we going to be on our own, or this vendor is going to be with us as part of our journey. And so, that's part of that evaluation process for us. Basically the pilot and the POC to sort of engage on some of those softer elements of the actual evaluation process.

Brian Beck:
It sounds like Elastic Path has been a good partner for you, Carl, which is great. Just kind of... I ask this of all of our guests here in the virtual tour. And I'd love to get your perspective on this. If you had one or maybe two pieces of advice for a CEO who is just starting his or her journey down this path of digital transformation, what would that advice be?

Carl Daw:
As it relates to a CEO and given some of the issues that as a sort of legacy, B2B company with 80-year background for me, I guess, it ties into that management of change, the change management, whatever. And that's really around the advice we're driving organization alignment. And then also driving that alignment on the problem that you are trying to solve. I guarantee you every executive, every department or functions got their expectation of what they're looking foR from that e-commerce project. All right. And that's going to be a casualty executing on a project where there's not that alignment across the company.

Carl Daw:
And then they're going to be issues that are going to pop up and having that clear clarity on what the priority the focus is across the company is clear. We've also seen it, of getting clarity on who owns e-commerce within the company? Again, it seems rather fundamental question, but I can assure you over the years where that, that has not been clear. I own this product line, it's my product line. I'm going to sell it online, whatever, and we end up with multiple competing storefronts, misaligned strategy, misaligned marketplace strategies, just getting clarity on who owns e-commerce, who's accountable for it. Again, execution may be different.

Carl Daw:
And then the last one, I'll basically a touch on this back to the comment we made about platform selection, whatever. Don't overbuy. One, was obviously there's cost implications, there's implementation considerations, and then you're going to have a complexity nightmare. And then you're going to have to have white papers strategy sessions just to work out which platform is doing what within the company to some degree. We resonated with that just enough e-commerce phrase and we think we did well relative to making that one of the key things that we considered.

Brian Beck:
Well, thanks for that, Carl and John, thank you as well. I'm going to share a few things here on my screen, just to take us through our just closing remarks here. Thank you guys, both. And Carl, your experience is just so on point. I swear you wrote this book, man. It's awesome. Let me go ahead and share my screen here, guys. And so, here's just a bit about, hold on one second, there we go. Here's our contact information Carl and John, again, thank you very much. If you want to reach out to me, here's my information. And you can go to the book site here, I'll list again to learn more about Billion Dollar B2B ECommerce. And again, chapter nine, we talk a lot about these concepts that we just shared.

Brian Beck:
Don't miss our next session, revenue drivers, and return on investment. I've got a company called Illumina sometimes called the smartest company on the planet. Pretty interesting. Give you guys run for your money, Carl, I suppose. And that's going to be available June 24th. Everyone, thank you very much. Our emails Meg from Elastic Path and Brian from Enceiba, or you can email us if you have any questions or want to get in touch with us right down there at the bottom. Thanks again and I hope to see you soon on session number three of the virtual book tour.