Big Commerce for Alaska Manufacturers

Live with Alaska MEP

Join us for a captivating live interview with Lance Owide, General Manager of BigCommerce, an eCommerce platform that empowers merchants of all sizes to build, innovate and grow their businesses online!

Live Summary

Join Sami Jo Lewis from the Alaska MEP and eCommerce Evangelist for Manufacturers Curt Anderson - Founder of B2Btail as Lance Owide, General Manager of BigCommerce discusses eCommerce solutions for manufacturers.

Key Highlights

• How can e-commerce complement traditional sales channels? 9:51

• It doesn’t have to be a big order. 14:08

• How to get into the consumer market? 20:43

• The importance of understanding your buyer journey. 24:26

Transcription

Sami Jo Lewis 0:02

All right. Hi everyone. Happy Thursday Sami Jo here with Alaska MEP and I'm here with my great friend. co-host, Curt Anderson. How are you doing today, Curt?

Curt Anderson 0:14

Oh my goodness gracious Sami Jo. I couldn't be any better. I'm just so thrilled. So excited. We have an amazing guest to introduce and we're going to just jump right in because we have a lot to cover in a short period of time I want to induce My dear friend, Lance Owide. In fascinating fact here look, fun fact for you, Sami Joe. This young man was in England and he was kind of like a Wall Street guru of Wall Street guy. But anyway, man, happy Thursday, my friend from big commerce. Happy birthday. How are you?

Lance Owide 0:42

I am fantastic. Thank you, Sami Jo and Curt, for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. Talking manufacturing, talking eCommerce to my favorite subjects. So thank you so much for having me on. Well, we'll

Curt Anderson 0:55

dive right in so what I love you know, big financial background that you bring to the table and now you've brought your passion, your expertise, your energy to the world of eCommerce and really helping manufacturers nationwide. You know, get into that E commerce journey. See me Joe. Let's let's just dive right in. I know you got some juicy questions that you are prepared for Lance, let's let's hit that first one.

Sami Jo Lewis 1:15

Perfect. Thanks for and thanks so much for being here. Lance. Want to kick off by sharing? Why should manufacturers care about selling online?

Lance Owide 1:24

Yeah, it's a great first question, and I'm gonna give a strange one I'm gonna say maybe they shouldn't. Maybe they shouldn't. Oh.

Curt Anderson 1:37

We're dropping the mic and like the first 30 seconds is curious minds want to know please share. Why

Lance Owide 1:45

why? Oh, well, you know, everyone looks in retail and sees these fantastic eCommerce site. That means I need to have that. But the truth is you need to as a manufacturer, you have to understand what is it that you want to drive with your business? What are you looking to do? Right, are you looking to grow revenue? Are you looking to increase profitability? Are you looking to improve manufacturing standards? Are you looking to develop new products? If your number one API key performance indicators and I'm on target you have for the year is to build new product? I don't know that you need ecommerce for that. Now of course you could have ecommerce as well. And that can bring benefits that may help you build more products because for reasons that we'll get into, I think it's really important to start there, which is which is that, you know, often folks like myself, I work for any, you know, a company big commerce that is selling eCommerce platform will often stand here and say you need to be on ecommerce. If you're not, you're crazy. The truth is, if that's not in your business plan, that's fine and legitimate, maybe it is in the next few years. But of course for those businesses that say I want to drive revenue, I want to grow revenue or I want to increase profitability. eCommerce can be a fantastic tool. We're doing that, right. Today. You may have a traditional sales team and our sales team is fantastic, incredibly knowledgeable, knowledgeable. Your customers love them. They love talking to them. But they can only reach so many people. Their Rolodex is only so big and they only have so many hours in the day. Right? So if you can get your products on to a website, suddenly you've expanded. You've expanded your reach anyone can find your product. It's incredible. Suddenly, you will have outreach from customers that were net work in your Rolodex that you hadn't even thought to reach out to and suddenly you can drive revenue from New from new avenues and there's a story I really like it. It is a distributor instead of a manufacturer this one but it's just so good that I have to I have to share it. There is a there's a book distributor on big commerce. And in February of this year, they rang up are one of the senior folks on my team and said today, Monday we came into the office and there is a million dollar order in our audit. We usually have an average order of $1,500 this from a customer we've never heard from before we do not know them. Incredible. That is the power of eCommerce. That would never have happened if they weren't online. And searchable. When they went and asked to find out. They just did a Google search. And so to me, that is the number one reason that manufacturers should should care about in commerce is just the ability and ease with which you can then expand your business. And that's just naturally through for growth. You are so much more findable easy to find when you're online and your products are there and your customers can can do their own research. You know,

Curt Anderson 4:59

man, Lance, first off, congratulations to you and the team at Big commerce and just look at how you're changing lives. And you know, it's what we love to see about the MEP we call the MEPs dream supporters. You know every entrepreneur has a dream and just you know what you're doing at Big commerce is just so admirable of helping small entrepreneurs achieve those dreams. Mike Good to see me Joe can you imagine you know walking in the door on a Monday, you hit the inbox. Figure order sitting in your inbox, I think is a perfect segue. I know Dr. Elissa has a great juicy question for Lance. Let's hit him with that one. Samuel. What do you got next?

Sami Jo Lewis 5:36

She wanted to make sure that we asked how to manufacturers grow they commerce.

Lance Owide 5:41

Yeah, it's a it's really more of those million dollar orders in your opinion and you're good. Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't turn down that drug right? With big commerce, we're an eCommerce platform but we focus much more heavily on manufacturers and distributors, so building tools specifically for manufacturers to use, but how is ours? How exactly is that going to help you grow? And how are you going to grow on on our platform? And what we do is we kind of support what we call a crawl, walk run strategy. As I kind of you look at retail today. And every manufacturer thinks how am I going to get there? How am I going to get to a Macy's style site. You don't have to. You don't have to do that. What you want to do is take manageable chunks along that eCommerce journey, right but to be on a platform, like a big commerce that can support that growth as you go through it. And so what we do is we tell manufacturers to start by just getting your products online. Just get your products online searchable with product information. Now you're you're available to anyone in the US maybe anyone in the world if you can support delivering to them you could simply support and provide that you currently have are then able to start searching through that catalog and doing their own research outside of of course the catalog that you're probably still sending them. So now we've got from step one products are online. I'm expanding because I'm more easy to find. And I don't want to use the buzz buzz word but when you're on using big commerce, SEO optimized and you can pay for Google ads and all of the everything in the box that is important that you know we could spend hours talking about next if you're if you're if you're a manufacturer, I've attracted the customer in step one. Now I need to convert them. I want to close this sale. So how do I do that? Why does he How does ecommerce make that make that easier? Well, one if it's easy to engage them, you can build fantastic looking sites with all of that product information that they can self serve in their own time. So it cuts out a lot of the work that the sales team has to do, making it a much simpler process for your sales team. By the time the customer comes to the sales person, they've already they're already familiar with the products. That's great for the sales team. It's also great for the for the buyer I like to do my research on my phone, which is great. So we products online, they're being found. Now we've got to get that product into a cart and checkout. So now set to start transacting online, right transact online. What does that mean? Well, in manufacturing, you probably have bespoke pricing for each of your customers. You probably have specific catalogs that each of your customers might have or you build custom products that only they can purchase maybe with specific logos on lots of variations. So you need to be able to support all of that right in sales, support all of that online, and then allow your customers to check out with the same terms. 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, same invoicing, right that has to be an the same payment methods. That might be credit card, but it's much more likely to be bank transfer, you need to support all of that. Right. And when you do you remove those barriers, what we call barriers to transacting barriers to converting you remove those barriers. So you can now grow that customer that place the million dollar order. They went through that process, they got to the end of the bank transferred the funds right at the end. And so you remove those barriers, the more barriers you get rid of the easier it is to then convert and the last second we can maybe talk about this next but then you want to take it to the next level. A lot of a lot of custom manufacturing to quoting will be occurring, then you want to take that online and bring that process into E commerce as well. And then you've made it so much easier for the sales team. If I as a customer can start my own quote online. It's It's incredible and it's a process. You know that I am really enjoying being powerful. I don't have to pick up the phone. Wait two days for an email I can see all of it online. But Lance

Curt Anderson 9:50

This is phenomenal. And so just unpack So Sami Jo. We've done a number of webinars and workshops with our Alaska manufacturers and one of our tagline is Lance, we'd love to say how can you help that ideal customer make a buying decision on a Friday night at midnight? Without having to wait for them to open up the door on Monday morning, you know, and when you know that and I'm getting chills even thinking about it, you know, digital self serve. What a powerful experience. I hate to say this I hope I don't I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings Lance. It's like we're almost doing our customers a disservice by not taking this stuff. You know what I mean? Like we're almost it's almost like wasting their time of like Hey, I place this order he he'll send an email out. So I love what you're saying. Hopefully we'll have time. I think we're talking about time. You talked about custom. We'll circle back to this. We love configurators I'm hoping minutes at the end. I want to talk about your proprietary products compared to those custom manufacturers that have a proprietary process. Take advantage of E commerce proceduralist site it's the next question. We're gonna get everybody. Let's see secret. Now they have to come back. Right. Same with Joe, what do you have next for our next question?

Sami Jo Lewis 10:55

So how can ecommerce complement traditional sales channel and how can

Lance Owide 11:00

these channels work together? Yeah, this is this is this is a this is a really it's a hot topic. It's not just a good question. It's off topic. I work you know I need 234 manufacturers a day sometimes and invariably in 50% of those conversations can all conflict with my sales team comes out I'm coming on to ecommerce and moving on to e commerce. My sales team thinks this is competitive to them. What do I do? What do I do? And the first answer we have is really isn't what it is not and I'll tell you why. Ecommerce is really complementary to that sales. Your Sales Team are fantastic selling your products. They understand them better than anyone else. And they're great at finding new buyers finding new customers. They're also currently if you're not only commerce, taking orders, answering the phone to pay invoices and probably answering the phone to questions like can you give me an update on where my shipment is? That is not something your sales team should be doing and want to do that doesn't help them get more Commission's don't help you close new customers and new deals. And so when you move on to e commerce all of that can just move online. You can have your order status and order status online. So I would buy I want to know you know where is that shipment? I can see it's been shipped I know where it is. I can get to a tracking number if I want to pay my invoice. They're available online. You don't have to burden anyone do it. I mean, they sound so small. If you want to hold yourself human race answering these questions and on manual processes. You will be very, very, very surprised at how much it is and when you save in that time. Bell. Thank you. They will thank you and then they will drive more revenue. What does that mean? It means that they're going to get high commission. So they'll be actually incredibly thankful for it and full. I know we still get some pushback and for customers for merchants out there manufacturers out there who say well, you know, do I pay commission on the sales online? We always often to consider it whatever you efficiencies, gains you're getting by selling online. How is this improving your your margins? Because we know it is right that manual process that has now disappeared? That's an efficiency gain. And if you consider that efficiency gain, well, maybe you can even give your sales team more commission for sales that happen online, incentivize them to do those sales online so they can just focus on getting new customers in and answering those hard queries and questions about the product. So lots to consider. But we really do believe that ecommerce is is complementary to the sales and once sales teams understand that and get and get the processes bedded in that they love it and never want to look back. They rue the day that they have to manually answer answer the phones pay an invoice.

Curt Anderson 14:08

Yeah, and it doesn't take it doesn't have to be a seven figure order to do it either. You know it can it can be those small orders and again as a salesperson out there when we can put those those main you know, menial tasks like you're describing Lance it just laid off man I'm so busy. I've got to I got 20 emails, I've got to do this. Like if you could pull that off your plate, put that on your eCommerce store, let them do the small little mundane customer service tasks. So then you can go out and be a superstar salesperson and you really are it'll do cold calls, not gonna do new doors. Get people you know send out new ways to a video on how to use my ecommerce store. You know, you talked earlier about the crawl, walk run with that crop process, you know, really like that, you know, we're doing an amazing project 16 Which I don't know this man Snyder doing a wonderful project in here where I'm at in Buffalo, New York, and with a manufacturer through the MEP in New York and they're doing exactly that that crawl, walk run and they've opened a door for a customer for that customer to answer a lot of these questions. So let's keep the party rolling. We have next made some amazing questions. What do you what's next on your plate?

Sami Jo Lewis 15:07

I feel like this segues perfectly because you were just diving in on this. Let's talk a little bit more dive a little bit deeper into channel conflict and how do we ensure the sales team don't see ecommerce as competitive?

Lance Owide 15:20

Yeah, I think I touched on that a little bit. I guess I got a little bit ahead of myself or maybe I was having a premonition about you know what, that's what our next question might be. But it's, it's a really, really good one. Because we we again, we hear this all the time from from manufacturers. And once once the sales team understands of benefits that we just laid out. Generally they come around, but it's a double click on the point I was making at the end there which is, which is that when you implemented commerce and you start to see the improvements in those processes to save time, right, there's time that isn't wasted on manual processes. That's just for the sales team. On the back end, you now have a system that is taking that order and feed it straight to a QuickBooks or an ERP, maybe you're using a NetSuite or an Astra monitor or whatever that might be these other systems that you're using, without any manual data entry on the way. So it's not just front office improvements. It's it's the back office improvements and logistics improvements. When you factor all of that in, you start to see real margin gains in the business and on top of that, online and we saw this with with with with the buffalo manufacturer that was talking about you know they expand their reach those customers are coming in and they're finding them on the online and what they have been doing is not checking out, but starting a quote. So you find their website, they're a manufacturer, manufacturer of antennas, you find a website, these prevous bespoke and you fill in a quote request online. So that actually becomes a channel for the sales team is funneled straight to the sales team. So they love it. They absolutely love it. And so then, you know, you've seen improvements in the back office and the front office that you could potentially use to increase commissions for the sales team. If you want. But they're also getting funneled new customers. And so once you start to see that flow happening, the sales team generally are pretty accepting. What do you think? What do you think?

Curt Anderson 17:34

Yeah, well, how about let's slide into that. So you know, took a deep dive on a sales team. Let's go into channel conflict. If you know Sami Jo, I think you mentioned channel conflict. I like to go here for a second. I just might my call rate before this great manufacturer they sell to a lot of retail, Macy's target, you know, big major retail, and yet they want they have ecommerce and there is a challenge like oh my you know in the especially for like traditional manufacturers that are in that b2b supply channel about if I'm if I'm being clear enough or not too broad plans how about channel conflict? When you get pushback like man I can't go ecommerce because I'll disrupt those channels. What are the what? What conversations you have there? For those folks?

Lance Owide 18:17

Yeah, we hear that quite a lot as well. And I've got a great example here. There's manufacturable housings, what they what they manufacture, and they sell to retailers across the US so you'll find them in Home Depot. You'll find them in Bose and they sell through those channels. But they wanted to go direct to consumer and they wanted to test that that channel. And why did they do it? sort of obvious they wanted to capture a bit more margin. But they obviously don't want to necessarily be competitive to those that are already selling. So they did their toe and I'm going to say the naughty a word here which is they started selling to Amazon. That's how they went direct to consumer. No. Interesting. I know what everyone's probably saying, no, no, no, I can't sell through Amazon. They did something that was really interesting. Actually. They like probably most of the listeners have operations that are set up for delivering truckloads right not anything less than a truckload and certainly not individual items. And so they used Amazon and they shipped off a truckload to Amazon, Amazon, put it in their warehouse and we then could send out individual singular items to the consumer. So it was a really interesting way to go about dipping their toe into into direct consumer and then they launched the eCommerce site. They sold through Amazon, they launched their eCommerce site. And what they did was they said, Okay, we're going to attract customers through Amazon, and then we're going to drive our commerce site directly because they'll see the name or give them a nice little slit in the in the in the package that they're going to get says, Hey, come visit our website. And so they slowly boost that traffic on their website. But that person is someone who's already shopping on Amazon. It's not competitive to the Lowe's or Home Depot or to their other distributors. And so it was it was a very interesting case study. I do agree that it can be difficult, especially when you then get into the advertising side. If you start paying for ads on Google drive traffic to your website, and your distributors are doing the same. There's some conflict, you have to set the boundaries and make sure that you've discussed this with your distributors beforehand. There's nothing worse than getting an angry distributor calling you and saying we're competing for the same search words on Google Now and you are beating me out because the manufacturer has more money. Right.

Curt Anderson 20:43

Well, I'm really

Lance Owide 20:44

curious your thoughts. Oh,

Curt Anderson 20:46

and we got some we've got so much impact right there. We will keep going. We'll get some more questions here. What I just talked with the client this morning, they cost the manufacturer has been around since 1985. Pre ecommerce. He said I had about a dozen to 20 customers in mind you beaver bid is one you know, Walmart bought that and he they bought his fixtures. So he wasn't selling retailing. They were buying. They were the end user, low target, you know, so he goes and eat so he had some major major customers right? He goes an ecommerce he told me he now has hundreds of customers. You know some of these hundreds of customers are Lockheed Martin Boeing for so he continues to sell a fortune 500 companies and small but now what he did exactly what you're describing. He got into a consumer market. He's on Amazon he's on digit key is on each trade soil. So he's gone to the he's embraced the marketplaces. And I know from big commerce, hey, wait a minute, you know, but the marketplaces are gonna be there. The marketplaces are a great way for a manufacturer who's shipping pallet loads or truckloads to get into that consumer market without getting into the consumer part. And I've had a number of clients that they use Amazon, that's the you know, they're strictly b2b. Amazon or the marketplaces are they're b2c. So there's, you know, and I'll end on this and we'll hand it back to you Sammy Jo, I have so I have a little book that I wrote so in my I call it the dominate search and then my dominate search strategy. Use the marketplaces because the marketplace is going after the exact same keywords that you're going after. So if I can have my keyword my ranking Amazon DigiKey Zorro, I want to own that keyword. I don't care what people buy my product, but like you're saying Lance they can use Amazon hey what's what's the actual company and now come to my website and use because they people love by direct site gonna Expedia and I see what airlines they have. Then I'm gonna go to the airline and buy it direct. So David, you're off stop by nap. No, we've got 1.1

Lance Owide 22:47

point is just a small one. You know, we saw this. A couple of years back we saw this revolution happening for manufacturers moving into a bit of direct to consumer testing our marketplaces. We actually bought a company called Speed anomic. They are the best company for sending product data to the likes of Amazon, Walmart, eBay, wish the b2b marketplaces or Oh fair. And so with big commerce, you get access to that you get access to beat anomic or other products and syndicate all that data out for you, which is number number one in that it's now 35% of all internet retailers and retailers in the US uses product manufacturers use it as well, which is

Curt Anderson 23:28

the industry leader hit the rewind button or economics, economics if you are if you feature curiosity, or connect with Lance Atkinson conversation, which I'm assuming job will get you connected to Lance but feet anomic Great. Thank you for for that is a great segue. Let's go on to our next question. St. Joe.

Sami Jo Lewis 23:44

So we work with a lot of small manufacturers here in Alaska. And a lot of things that we hear is moving online can be daunting, time consuming and expensive. So how can our smaller manufacturers approach getting online and what are what should be the some other key considerations?

Lance Owide 24:03

Yeah, that's a great point. And it is daunting. It can be expensive if you don't do it right and plan correctly. I always tell manufacturers and actually this goes for we've got manufacturers doing 6 billion in revenue on big commerce and a couple of 100 1000s everything in between and I generally say the same thing to one focus on your buyer. Interview your buyer understand what they want, understand their buying journey. And when you do that, you get a much better idea and picture of what it is that they want, and how you can improve their life. At the end of the day. If you're going online and you're thinking about it. It's to improve your buyer journey as well as expansion but you really want to improve that buyer journey. So when you once you've understood that you'll have a much clearer picture of what you need to achieve. And so the antenna manufacturer that Kurt was talking to, when they understood that buyer journey, they realized I don't need to transact online. That's not what my buyer wants. They still want to speak to a salesperson, but what they would like to do is find the product and then request a quote, they'd like to put a quote together online, and then itself, that bit of the process online. And so once you speak to the buyer, understand that journey and pick and find out which part of that process they really do care about during the line. That's what you fit into that crawl, walk, run strategy as you pick up the call piece that is for people and well within budget and you tackle that first. Right and you do want to do it on a on a obviously an E commerce platform that you can then continue to grow on you really attack that that piece first and what we often hear you know, I want every I want to be online. I want to have all my invoices online fire approval work, I want to have everything. Sure. Let's get there in time. But let's start with something just small and manageable. And so I love the kind of crawl, walk and run.

Curt Anderson 26:04

So say me Joe listen to this. We're coming into time if you don't mind. I'm going to I'm going to cannibalize if I could steal the last question in so if a little teaser earlier in the interview, Lance we've got like less than two minutes or so configurators let's start running man like we've got past the crawl. We're kind of locked in a little bit. There's a manufacturer out there if you think about who wouldn't be great if somebody could go on my website and figure aka build their own product. Give us just a little take us there brother. What's it What's that

Lance Owide 26:37

look like? Yeah, I there's nothing better than seeing a fantastic configurator on online so big, big commerce as a as a platform. We can support 600 variants of a product that's a lot of variants that you can put in and work around. And as an amazing example of this one of the companies in the cost uplift desks, they sell desks. That go up and down. And they they're they're a manufacturer of them, they sell them both direct to consumer, and they sell b2b. If you go on their website, they built the most incredible configurator using big commerce. I worked it out the other day. I think there's some like 10 million variations that you can have on this desk because there are so many variants you can put in that you can select the color, the material, the size, the shape, even down to the grommets and the widgets that are being used. And that's, that's what b2b manufacturing is when we're manufacturing. There's lots of different customizations that your buyers can make an want to make to these products. And you want to put as much of that as you can online. Of course, this is I've run or fly all the way on the far right hand side of the scale, but you can get there and again, you know, as you're going along that journey, you want to have a battle with gravity. That's really, really important. But yeah, there are some some great we've got some fantastic label manufacturers packaging manufacturers and you can customize them and put your own logo you uploaded onto the site. You can see it live agent change all the coloring, all online before that was 10 emails back and forth is the design. Now it's online and done. And you can even place the order online and all the discounted pricing is on there. You're ordering 1000 Here's your price to 10,000 is the price you're going to get or you want to negotiate, send us a quote. We'll come back and we can negotiate. So some really, really great stuff. And when you move it just the buyer experience is just fantastic.

Curt Anderson 28:31

It's phenomenal. And we you know, we could have a whole session just on configurators Lance, and maybe you and I will have to talk about that. But I know we're at time we could probably go for another hour. Lance. I want to give a huge huge thank you for joining us What an honor and privilege and we just wished you just continued success as you just keep crushing it for manufacturers nationwide. So Sami Jo wants to close this out and thank you for the opportunity to spend this time with Lance today. What a gift.

Sami Jo Lewis 28:58

Thank you so much, Lance. It was super great having on the show and thank you so much for being able to talk about the Econ the big commerce platform and how efficient it makes people just to get online and start selling like you talked about right at the very beginning. They will not have a million dollars. So you are not online. So is that not reason enough to get online. So I really appreciate you taking the time being here for it's always wonderful to have you on so thank you so much and tune in with us. We'll be live every other Thursday at noon. Thank you