PIM stands for “product information management” and refers to the processes, systems, and software used to store, access, update, and analyze data related to your products.
Businesses are going online daily worldwide, and it’s getting easier. But running their businesses requires constant two-way communication with users and customers across channels 24/7, year-round. @kmanjita
Today we interview Kaus Manjita with Mason. Kaus is a no-code evangelist, content nerd, and serial product builder. You’ll find her amid entrepreneurs, brand builders, developers, marketers, and designers over Zoom on Hangouts and on this podcast today.
Mason is Zapier made for commerce. It connects data designs and channels to run your product launches, sales documents, discounts, inventory updates, custom reviews in-app, help, funnels, and more, all on autopilot.
In interviews with homeowners, 25% say they bought their home first for an investment and second for a place to live. The other 75% say they bought a house simply as a place to live with little expectation for it to be a good investment. You grow wealth through homeownership.
Nicole Hamilton has made a career of helping others with home ownership. She explains REAFE in detail. A Real Estate Asset and Financing Evaluation is about maximizing the returns you get from your real estate.
Her tip for the episode is to think twice if you want to refinance. If you refinance with less than half the time on your mortgage, you start over with your interest payments!
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Nicole Hamilton. She is the CEO of Homeowner. Nicole, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in
Nicole: life. Oh, okay. It’s great to be here, Brent. I’m an entrepreneur in the housing industry. I have a company called Homeowner.
Nicole: It’s very pro home ownership and treating your real estate with the same care that you do your other investments. I’ve had other companies in the sector. I’d say the common thread through all of my ventures is an obsession with real estate, finance mortgages, Home equity appreciation.
Nicole: Home is an investment home ownership and intergenerational wealth. My current company home owning. Is dedicated to getting people into home ownership and then getting them good financial outcomes. So it spans the the life cycle of home ownership from buying utilizing and improving your financial situation through home ownership.
Nicole: And then, selling. and my passion, I guess one of my passions right now is weightlifting, . I go really into it.
Brent: Wow. That’s great. Yeah. I definitely need to get more into Weightlift as I’m getting older, I realize that my upper body, I run every day, but my upper body is definitely neglected, especially over time and it, I think as we get into our fifties, which I am, you are it’s harder to gain.
Brent: On your upper bodies, you have to work twice as hard as if we were in our twenties. Anyways, we can, we’ll keep moving out along there, but that’s awesome. That’s good to know. I’ve heard more and more people talking about that, yeah. Alright, so before we jump into our content I have a thing called the free joke project, hashtag free joke.
Brent: And I’m just gonna tell you a joke and all you have to do is tell me if it should be free or if we could charge for it. Do I have to? You do not have to laugh. I would appreciate real real feedback on it. All right. But they’re all fantastic jokes. All right, Ready? Okay. My doctor just diagnosed me with a severe lack of awareness.
Brent: It came out of nowhere.
Nicole: Free .
Brent: Alright. Super
Brent: Thank
Nicole: you. I actually love, another patch of mine actually is standup comedy. Oh, wow. All right. I will listen to any standup comedy. Yeah, so I, I’m interested in the free joke project and I hope to follow that hashtag and learn more.
Brent: Yes. I’ve started publishing on Twitter art on On TikTok, Sorry.
Brent: Sometimes they’re on Twitter, but they’re all on TikTok on my Brent w Peterson TikTok channel Anyways. Free hashtag free joke project. Great. So Nicole homeowner I’m I’m also a homeowner and always interested in the subject. Tell us about how you got into it and what was your journey getting there?
Nicole: Yeah I guess the way I got there was Earlier in my career I was a science major and then I went into technology. And then I got very interested in how technology can make people’s lives better. I know sometimes it makes people’s lives worse, but I know that, for me it was, how can I apply this to really helping people?
Nicole: And then the recession in 2008, housing crisis hit, and I really wanted. Help solve a problem. The problem being that a lot of people got loans that they couldn’t necessarily understand were afford, and that caused a lot of foreclosures and immense pain for economic pain, for many millions of Americans.
Nicole: And so I started a company called Tactile Finance. Tactile Finance, Pronunciation. Pronunciation it. And that was a sort of visualization product for banks to use with their clients or non-profits to use with their clients. And it just provided transparency into the market. And that’s where I got super into the math and.
Nicole: And the consumer need and the consumer approach to housing finance. So it’s been about a 12, 12 year journey to where I am now. Which I would say, I wound that company down in 2015, 16, 2016. And it ran its course and I realized that I really wanted to focus on the consumer, not the inter, B2B business, but focusing on the consumer and the consumer needs.
Nicole: And so I think that journey just gave me a lot of insight. I understand, the, a more sophisticated picture. I understand the bank’s motivation. I understand the role of the non-profits, I understand the mortgage industry as a. . And then I guess one of my superpowers is to take really complicated information and make it digestible for people and an enzyme
Nicole: So that’s where my real passion for homeowner came, which is there’s all this sophisticated knowledge out there, but like people. Regular people like you and me can use it to better their situation and understand the complicated aspects of owning a home, selling a home equity, and things like that actually make an enormous impact on your, ultimate net worth.
Brent: Yeah, I think do. So going back, starting with people with on their first home, how do you help them past rent and getting into their first home? What, Do you have a formula or do Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Nicole: It’s an excellent question. Brent . So I actually have a product, it’s called the Formula, and it’s on our website and it’s like $20.
Nicole: It’s very inexpensive and it’s a system which basically gives you. The ability to see all the diff it’s all the different criteria to be a homeowner. So there’s a lot of different known loans and qualifications to get a loan, and it lets you see where you are in relation to those criteria now, and then plot your way to the quickest, most effective path to being a home.
Nicole: So I’ll just give you an example. If you’re refinancing a house or buying a house the lo what the loan officer is doing in the background is they’re trying to fit you in this formula. It’s called a dti, debt to income ratio. And that’s a blah, blah, blah, gobbly go, industry language, but ultimately they’re taking all the aspects of your financial picture.
Nicole: And they’re trying to fit it into a way in which the bank will say, Brent, you can get this mortgage. But all of that is very opaque to a home buyer. And what this does is it just gives you that information that you can see exactly what criteria they’re using, and there’s ways that you can adjust your goals.
Nicole: If your income is too low and your debt is too. Then the house that you can qualify for is gonna be lower, right? So it’s this formula that you massage and say, Okay, over 12 months, if I can reduce my debt by X and let’s say I pick a house price of, 350,000 then I can get to that goal.
Nicole: That’s a achievable goal for me. Whereas if you don’t have that information, you’re just like, Oh no, poor me. I can’t afford a home. So it’s just empowering people. A lot of people get left out of the housing, out of the home, out of home ownership because they lose faith and they don’t know how they’re gonna get from point A to point B.
Nicole: The real issue is that how, being a homeowner is is a known wealth builder, especially for the middle class. And letting more people get into home ownership is incredibly important. I A lot of, public policies are designed around that. So it’s just like a way to distill this information.
Nicole: Create a plan for yourself and be able to actually see how you can get to that goal. So that’s one of the things that kind of came out of, all this work that I’ve done in the last 12 years is how to make information that’s known in the industry, known by, other people. So it can empower.
Brent: Do you feel as though now what? Home ownership got more difficult after 2008 and are banks getting better at helping people to get into home ownership now compared to right after the crash, the home crash?
Nicole: I think what the crash did is it changed a lot of laws, like the dod Frank laws.
Nicole: It made lending. It made it, it made a lot of good things happen in the industry that prevent consumers from being taken advantage of. So that, I think, was a net positive for everyone, including the banks. In a lot of ways. It made lending safer. It also, we know that we’ve been through very, up until recently, a very, a period of historically low interest rates.
Nicole: We’re not in that right now, hopefully we will be again, sometime I. Yeah, so obviously that made it easier for people to purchase homes and it also drove home prices up too with, demand and everything like that.
Brent: I think my first home was in the nineties and it was, I think we got an arm.
Brent: Or if a five year fix with an arm after. Something like that. Yeah. And at the time it was like 9% interest or something like that, but with the arm it brought it down or something. I don’t know. How you, do you have a formula me, to help people through that? Because I know like my friends in England where every mortgage is an arm and now they’ve said their payments have doubled all of a sudden because of that adjustable rate.
Nicole: Yes. So arms are, I had an. It’s arms, A lot of mortgage people actually get arms, seven year arms and things like that because the interest rate is low in the beginning. But it’s contingent upon the idea that you’re gonna be able to refinance out of that into a better rate. So it’s a, it’s a. So there there’s some risk in that, that you just really need to know what it is. And I actually made a video it’s on my website, but it explains exactly what an arm is. It doesn’t have a lot of viewers cuz a lot of people don’t know, don’t necessarily wanna follow through the whole five minutes.
Nicole: But I do have a video about product, a product review of. Of a ShopVac that, that hits 35,000 views. But the arm video is not as popular as the ShopVac video. .
Brent: Yeah, I have some Jack Russell videos that are far more popular than any videos that I can post on YouTube. So I think it is funny what people tend to watch.
Brent: Alright, so back to finance. If so, one of the hard parts as an entrepreneur, Is getting a mortgage. One of the easy parts before 2008 as an entrepreneur was a stated income mortgage, which they don’t do anymore. How do you have do you have specific help for self-employed people as they’re trying to get a mortgage?
Brent: And maybe is there a certain amount of time that you have to either show a W2 or show your tax returns to a.
Nicole: Yeah, so there’s rules for, so there’s, yeah there’s rules for mortgages. Usually the rule is for W two s is you have to show two years of your income. And it’s two years is really a rule too for business income.
Nicole: So a lot of banks will have you submit. Whatever structure your business is. If you’re, if you’re an LLC or whatever, then you submit that income, to the mc if you’re not getting a paycheck, if you’re taking a draw from the company. So there’s different ways to do it but you touched on a really important thing, which is that, for entrepreneurs, it can be d.
Nicole: If you’re in any of these categories or let’s say an Uber driver, you’re getting income from all these different places and you don’t have a w2, there are formulas that banks use to assess what your income is. So it doesn’t mean that you can’t get a loan. But in business the one thing about business income is that they wanna see that it’s going.
Nicole: So , if you have a year that, you know, so that can be a factor, right? If you have a, if you have, 2021 was a good year and 2022 is a bad year, but 2023 is gonna be a better year. There’s some ease of, getting a loan if you’re showing that your business is improving.
Nicole: And there’s also. There’s always leeway too with in the, these areas where you have to interpret, whether something is improving or not improving. There’s always you can ask for, the manager above the loan officer to take a look at it and see if, if you can submit more documentation.
Nicole: Or provide more information about the industry that you’re in. I know that during the recess, sorry, the pandemic, restaurants, restaurant owners, weren’t a great bet, right? So there’s some industries that really suffer, from declined if you’re getting business income from that.
Nicole: But there’s ways that you can, the more you know about it, the more you can help yourself. Just like anything. .
Brent: Yeah. Especially I think as an entrepreneur, that’s the hardest part is maybe, and I think it’s even harder as a young entrepreneur. So if, let’s just say you’re in your twenties, you’ve started a business and you’re trying to navigate that process of your first purchase because you don’t have a w2 is it better to go to a big bank or a small bank?
Brent: as a new home buyer or as an entrepreneur? Does it
Nicole: matter? I think it’s great to really go to a lot of different types, so I always recommend that people also put a mortgage broker in the mix. , because they have a access to many different types of loans. If you go to a bank they’ll have their own products, but if you go to a broker, they’ll be able to search more broadly and find banks that are more suitable for your particular situation.
Nicole: So it’s just good like anything else to shop around.
Brent: Do you ever talk to people about maybe a sec or investment home or a second home, or somebody that’s buying a home just for Airbnb?
Nicole: So one of the things that home honoring does, which I got into lately, which I think is a really important aspect of investment finance, which is neglected by wealth managers for the most part is analyzing properties for their long term investment potential.
Nicole: in the case of, if you’re someone who’s not getting a mortgage just to get the lowest monthly rate, which is most of us, right? We don’t want to spend a penny more than we need to on our housing, cuz we have a lot of other expenses. But for a lot of people, they do have a little discretion in how they structure their financ.
Nicole: And you can structure it in a way that gives you, a better return based on your goals, on your investment goals. So one of the things that we offer is a, they call it the reef, which is a real estate analysis. It’s like a financial analysis. So in that case, you’re looking at your current houses, if you have more than one or just one, what the financing is, which your overall goals.
Nicole: And then coming up with different scenarios that could, maximize your, the goal that you’re looking for, whether it’s putting more money in play, whether it’s reducing all your expenses, whether it’s looking to buy a second home, whether it’s looking to buy a home for rental purposes, things like that.
Nicole: It’s a financial investment analysis. And I think, too few people go through those steps to understand their real estate as an investment. And if you consider how much we all spend on our housing, really do, and doing little tweaks, like taking a second look at that, helo that you have, is there a better way to structure it so that you’re spending less?
Nicole: What is the interest rate that you’re on? When does it a adjust, taking a more watchful eye to these major expenses that you have. And a lot of people don’t know that they have options, so that’s a really big focus of home owning right now.
Brent: Yeah. I think you, you brought up a really good point about your financial advisor and it’s been my experience that a lot of financial advisors don’t look.
Brent: A rental property as a valid investment, they think somewhat probab. Some do I’m not gonna, I shouldn’t generalize so much, but a lot of them would say you put your money in bonds or stocks or, and properties sometimes, or a property or maybe a real estate fund might be something they would recommend.
Brent: But buying a rental property and then trying to. Is sometimes out of their purview. Maybe it’s more common for entrepreneurs to buy doing something like that. But I Maybe just a quick comment on that. Do you feel as
Nicole: that’s, Yeah, I think that, wealth managers and investment managers, they know their domain very well.
Nicole: And if you think about. There’s a lot to consider already in their domain. They’re not really necessarily trained or equipped to do something, in the real estate realm because real estate investment is itself a large domain. There’s a lot of math and a lot of considerations, tax considerations all kinds of things.
Nicole: Liability considerations. With real estate investment that is, that, I don’t know that you could expect someone to also be an expert in, it’s a different kind of thing. I have a good friend Roger Brown who wrote a book called and I Wish I had it here. He’s a great guy. It’s called Real Estate in.
Nicole: Math or something like that.
Brent: Roger Brown. I’ll put it I’ll do some research and I’ll put it in the show notes.
Nicole: Yeah, no he’s an amazing mathematician and so I, I learned a lot from him. He did a lot of work with me over the years, validating the math that I was doing. , helping me make sure that it was solid.
Nicole: And so I learned a lot about real estate investment from him, and I just know that I’ve read his book. It’s very interesting, but it’s it’s something if you’re gonna get into that field, I just don’t think that an investment, a wealth manager is the right person to maybe help you with.
Brent: Yeah, and I guess I never thought about this. Probably there probably are wealth managers that are focused more on the real estate side rather than the just straight up investment side. That’s an interesting, I, that’s an interesting take on things. Yeah. How about what about recommending if somebody were to buy a, an apartment, just paying cash for it.
Brent: Is there ever a good time to do that
Nicole: right now? Yeah. , I think right now, if you’re a cash buyer, And, you can imagine if the Fed is trying to, slow the economy down and and we know that rates are going up and mortgage rates aren’t tied to that specifically, but they have definitely, the, a lot of relationship to the cost of money being lent, So you know right now you would expect real estate prices to decrease as it’s harder for people to buy homes in this high interest rate environment or high mortgage rate environment.
Nicole: If you’re a cash buyer, you’re, this is your time, Like this is this is in your sweet spot cuz you. If prices are declining and you’re competing against people who have to get a mortgage and you don’t need a mortgage, then you know it’s your
Brent: time. Yeah. Good. Nicole, we have a few minutes left.
Brent: And it always goes by so fast. If if you have one little piece of advice that you could give somebody, what would that be? To get into the housing market right now.
Nicole: I think that you should if you wanna be a homeowner and home ownership is for you, you should make it a goal. And don’t give up on it because it does have a lot of potential to improve your financial situation, but at the same time, obviously you wanna know what you’re getting into.
Brent: Yeah, I like that. I like that concept because if you never set a goal, you’ll never
Nicole: achieve. Exactly. It’s true for everything in life, isn’t it, Brent?
Brent: Yeah, that’s fairly, that’s a really good way to look at it. So Nicole, as we close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug, what would you like to plug today?
Nicole: I have a newsletter. It has a lot of subscribers. You can go to my site, homeowner.com/newsletter. You can sign. And also, take a peek at the site. There is the formula, which is for people who want to be aspiring homeowners, and there is what we call the reef, which is financial analysis for getting better returns on your, on the money you spend on home ownership.
Nicole: That’s great. That was really three plugs, . That’s
Brent: perfectly fine. You had to sit through my joke, no, I
Nicole: love you could get it. I wanna hear more of your jokes. Okay.
Brent: You could get extra plugs because of the bad joke. ,
Nicole: the free joke.
Brent: Yes. Thank you so much for being here today. It’s been such a pleasure.
Brent: And just so many more things we could talk about on this subject.
Nicole: Yes, Thank you for having me. Wonderful to be here with you. Thank you.
Tune in today to learn about the four easy steps you can take BEFORE Black Friday to make your site faster. (You can even tune in after Black Friday). Thien-Lan Weber talks about the four easy steps you can take today to ensure your ROI is maximized on your website ROI.
OneStepCheckout is not a traditional Magento module provider with a lot of extensions. Our checkout module is our core business. We work exclusively with checkout and conversions to always bring you the best possible checkout product. We are all about reducing customer abandonment and increasing customer conversions.
Brent: Welcome to this Spoony holiday edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Thien-Lan Weber from One Step Checkout and she has done a much better job of her costume and background than I have Thien-Lan. Why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us what your day to day role is and one of your passions in life.
Thien-Lan: Hello, I’m Thien-Lan Weber. I work for OneStepCheckOut. So I guess most people know me otherwise. One step checkout is the main Magento extension to reduce for Magento one and Magen two. My passion in life, it’s eCommerce and drumming. I also like dress. And appearing on podcasts.
Brent: Excellent, thank you.
Brent: And so today before we get into our regular content, I’m gonna tell you a joke and then you are going to tell me if that joke should be free or if we could charge for it. Ready? You ready, ? Okay. I found out my girlfriend is really a ghost. I had my suspicions the moment she walked through the door.
Thien-Lan: It’ll be free.
Brent: Good. All right, Telan. I know today is Halloween, so I dressed up in my doctor who Christmas sweater, which I have my holidays completely mixed. And you are very well appointed in a a scary outfit with a span stuck in your head and you even have a great background. I appreciate that.
Brent: But we, let’s talk about the scary state of the economy and things coming. And then I think, let’s put it into context of what merchants can be doing to make sure that they’re getting everything they can out of their website. . Exactly.
Thien-Lan: Yeah. So yeah, not very funny. The current state of the economy is pretty gloomy.
Thien-Lan: We actually, I noticed that in New York when I went for McLin to New York, it was not as vibrant as 2018 and 2019 when I went and even the locals like Eric, and. Laura was telling, wa was saying that, A bit more dangerous. Lots of homeless people in the street. And I guess here in Europe we hear all the news about inflation war in Ukraine and yeah.
Thien-Lan: Worldwide inflation is around 8.2%. For the last 12 months in the US it’s yeah, around 8%. In Europe it’s around 10%, but with big discrepancies between countries like France, where I live, which is like 6%, and countries where Anton I imagine to expert lives in Estonia where it’s like 25%.
Thien-Lan: So yeah pretty.
Brent: Yeah. And so I know that there are ways in which merchants can help. And one step checkout is at the end of the funnel, let’s say at the checkout process. And I, you mentioned that you had done a article with Forbes about some points in which merchants can look or work through the checkout process.
Brent: Why don’t you explain a little bit about what that was?
Thien-Lan: Yep. We partner up with nata, who is a for finance council member to talk about this context and what eCommerce merchants can do as quick wins to get more sales this holidays. So it’s all about getting. Market share because consumers will have less spending power.
Thien-Lan: So the competition will be really fierce among all the brands. And you need to offer an experience that really appeals from the moment that people like even before people learn on your website up to the end of your online sales funnel. So today, I’m happy to share with you those four. and and they should be a lot, most of them should be implementable before this holiday season.
Thien-Lan: So that’s the good news.
Brent: All right, so let’s just tell let’s tell us the four points and then let’s go into detail on each one of them. Yep.
Thien-Lan: So the first point is to have a fast. Sorry. A fast website good performing websites. Consumers who go to your website, if they, it’s loading in more than two seconds, they’re going to leave and go to another website.
Thien-Lan: So performance is key here and throughout the whole browsing experience, you need to make sure that it loads fast enough so that people don’t leave and find items that they want, gift ideas, and put them into. So that would be by using themes like Hova, for example, on two, that makes the whole experience much faster and even helps you score rank higher in the search results so as to capture more traffic.
Thien-Lan: So that’s number one.
Brent: Number two, Okay, so I, Yep, go ahead. No, go for it. Number two
Thien-Lan: is around shipping. So with C we saw that by online pickup, in store, or click and collect is very popular. And sales going through those channels are going faster than eCommerce itself. So given that most of most of the time those shipping methods are more cost efficient, it costs nothing for the retailer to just have people come and pick it up.
Thien-Lan: It’s going to be very useful for consumers who can’t afford those extra five, $10 for shipping. So that was number two offer. More flexible shipping methods, including cost effective ones. Third one is offering flexible payment methods. And for the last couple of years, by now, pay later has been very popular as well because they allow consumers to pay, let’s say, in sport installments every fortnight, but without paying any.
Thien-Lan: So that helps when the budget is very strained to break it down into a longer period so you get your paycheck and you don’t pay anything on top of that. So offering payment methods that consumers like need for the holiday seasons is a big factor for to drive. And last but not least, having a good checkout that removes all friction from the checkout experience and allows consumers to place their order without forcing them to create an account or look for two coupon code that you might not have, or filling a lot of fields that will allow you to convert all that traffic.
Thien-Lan: And your efforts along the online sales funnel into an actual order.
Brent: So three out of the four are at the end of the funnel, which is probably pretty common that once they get through, number one, if it’s fast enough, they’re gonna, they’re gonna wanna buy something. What if you start at the top of the funnel with.
Brent: The Google has changed its its algorithms to now put more weight on the speed of your site. And if, let’s just say so one step checkout supports more than just Magento, right? There, there are other platforms that you’re supporting.
Thien-Lan: So for Dar, we are looking at supporting Que, but the priority is to support Magento two and Which makes Magento two much faster.
Thien-Lan: And is adding the sexy back into Magento,
Brent: adding the sexy back in, is that what you said? Yep. That’s good. . Okay. So having that sub two second load time, which in the past first Magento especially, has been unheard of. So some of the tools I guess people could use to help with that would just be Google Lighthouse and Google Page speed insights.
Thien-Lan: Exactly. Another resource that I found very useful and entertaining was a deck of slides by John Hughes from ue it was a hundred slides, but very funny ones about page speed, why, what you can do, and all the tips. We can add the links to the notes of this podcast. But this is a fantastic
Brent: Perfect. Yeah, and I will add the, I will add that to all the show notes. Alright, so let’s move on to shipping. So I think in the US anyways, shipping free shipping is the thing and Amazon is really driving that. Do you recommend that merchants do free shipping?
Thien-Lan: So that’s a strategic decision based on your cost goods sold, your pricing, your competitors.
Thien-Lan: So I can’t. You have to offer free shipping or you have to include shipping in your item price. I think depending on categories and consumers there might be different strategies that was better for you. But yeah, consumers one of the key reasons for carbon environment is when consumers see extra cost at the end of checkouts, so that often happens.
Thien-Lan: when checkout is on two pages with the first page with the item price, and then the second page with tax shipping all additional costs. So that’s a big driver. Either you state up upfront how much your shipping is going to be, or you put a threshold of. When shipping becomes free, and that works quite well to get consumers to pile up their cart and reach that threshold.
Thien-Lan: That makes sense for you financially. But yeah the most important is to be very up upfront and not have any surprises. When shoppers go to the end of checkout and see the final cost they have to pay.
Brent: Yeah, and I can say from experience that I have dropped out of the cart many times when I get to the end and suddenly shipping is a quarter of the cost of the entire order.
Brent: And I automatically go to Amazon then because A, I know that the ship, there’s no shipping. And then b, I also know that it’s gonna come in two days. The other, I think the other good strategy in terms of shipping, and I do agree that showing shipping up front is such an important thing to do. If you were to have a threshold of, say if you spend 50 euros or $50 and then you get free shipping, I think that’s something that I, that appeals to me and it also gets me to spend a little bit more money.
Brent: So if you’re at $49, you search like crazy on what does that $2 item I could get to get my free shipping maybe talk
Thien-Lan: a little bit about, Does that I do the thing I haven’t looked for. The product that is the same as shipping. If shipping is $10, I’d be like, Oh, I get that $10 items. I can have it for free.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. And if merchants are very clever, they would also do maybe a little scale that says Here’s how close you are to get to free shipping. And if you just add this one more thing. And if they’re very clever, they would add some extremely high high profit items. As incentives to get over that shipping amount.
Brent: So say you’re at $9 and they have something that they charge $9 for, but they pay a dollar for it. Hey, buy this item and you’ll get over your free shipping. There’s so many tactics that merchants could use if they start thinking about the behavior of consumers. And as a merchant too, I think you should be looking at what your competitors are doing and trying to make sure that you’re not missing out on something like that.
Brent: So for example, if your competitor is just offering free shipping, but their every item is a little bit more expensive there’s a reason for it. I think we’ve seen that on Amazon. Sometimes those really cheap things are more expensive cuz there’s free shipping and I you mentioned that earlier.
Brent: About the free shipping part of it. The other one the second one or the third one you mentioned was flexible payments, and you mentioned buy now, pay later. Talk a little bit about that.
Thien-Lan: Yes I’ve been following the Buy now pay later trend for two, three years now. And it all started in Australia and today there are more probably a dozen brands who offer Buy Now pay.
Thien-Lan: the most popular in the US would be a firm and in Europe might be clown. And the whole objective what I find very interesting is that it’s a win-win for consumers and for merchants. The merchants pay a little bit more with our in terms of fees, but consumers get to pay. To slice their payments over six weeks and sometimes more without pay, paying in any interest.
Thien-Lan: So it’s, great for them especially when they are they don’t have much budget and and it. Showed to drive a lot more conversion. And also a lot of those brands, they have their own app. They have their own consumer database, so they give exposure to their own merchants through their apps.
Thien-Lan: So let’s say on the Klan apps, you will say you will have or buy from ex brands, and then consumers will go directly from the cla up to that. Instead of going through Instagram ads or, Google search.
Brent: Yeah. And I think the other thing would be to make sure that they’re at least saving the token for the credit card to check out.
Brent: So second time around, you don’t have to enter all that information. Talk a little bit about that friction that happens in shipping and payment in your check.
Thien-Lan: Yeah so yeah, as I said, the number one reason for car abandonment is high shipping costs. So that’s why it makes sense to offer various options and buy, install to buy online pickup in store.
Thien-Lan: Is a interesting one. And yeah, we’ve partnered with French Magento extension provider called Why Your Mind That does very good quality extensions to allow that and add all these options. So the, this is The more payment and shipping options you offer, the less friction you get because consumers want certain options and if you don’t have them, they will go elsewhere.
Thien-Lan: So for shipping, that’s a great one. And for payments, either, they, one of the reason why they leave a website is also when they don’t trust the website. They have never heard of that band before, that the item is interesting and they don’t want to leave their credit card. So in that case, they would rather, for example, use paper.
Thien-Lan: And so it’s a good one to offer as well.
Brent: Just going back to the shipping I spoke with somebody earlier who said that they clicked on an Instagram ad and they were they needed something for a holiday. I don’t remember the holiday, but they needed it by a specific date and they said the shipping would be three to five days.
Brent: Their date was two weeks out, so there was plenty of time the two weeks came and went and there that nothing was ever shipped. Talk about the importance of maybe some reviews and having that knowledge that, hey, that item is actually gonna get there on time. Because I think sometimes people also wanna know that I’m gonna buy this and I need this, and if I don’t get it in this amount of time, I’m gonna go somewhere else.
Thien-Lan: Yep. So I guess there are two things here. One is setting expectations. So having the right information, the accurate information about when the item is going to arrive at your place is important. The other day I went to a local merchant and they have their own calculation and algorithm saying, Oh, for shipping it might be three, four.
Thien-Lan: But then they don’t re, it’s not accurate. It doesn’t really talk to the carrier. So it’s not, that trustworthy. So if you can, have the right timing and specify information about. When the order is going to be processed, when is going to be packed, when is it’s going to be shipped, and based on how far the consumer is, how long it’s going to take to be shipped, that would be the best.
Thien-Lan: But yeah, otherwise it is better to, overestimate the shipping time, then underestimate and then disappoint.
Brent: All right. So let’s get then to the, Oh we’ve talked a lot about frictions. Tell us about how, maybe, how one a checkout can help reduce that friction with the client at checkout.
Thien-Lan: Yep. After shipping cost being the number one reason for car and the number, the second one is forcing consumers to create an account. So how many times have you been to a website where, Click on cards I want to pay. And then you have that page that says, Log in, I’ll create an account. And you can’t do anything.
Thien-Lan: You can’t, pay, you can’t get your item. And 25% of consumers leave at that point. So we, OneStepCheckOut we’ve been addressing that. Thanks to feedback from a lot of our merchants and clients, and what we do is we allow to create an account by simply using all the information that anyone would answer when they fill out their shipping details.
Thien-Lan: So email, first name, last name, address, and the only thing you need to add it is a small tick box where consumers can enter their passwords twice and that creates an account. So we call it seamless account registration, and it replaces that, account creation wall that is making, 25% of people leave.
Brent: Do you find at that stage some people forget that they have an account and they fill out all that information. How do you get around the idea? , they go through that, they forgot that they created an account and then they click and then it comes back and says, You already have an account.
Brent: Please enter your password. And then they’ve forgotten their password and by the time they get around to finding it, they’ve left because they forgot they were even what they were ordering. Yeah,
Thien-Lan: that happens quite a lot. So yeah. I think we also allow people to check out as. And then have the account reconciliation later after.
Thien-Lan: I have to get back to you on that. But I think that would be the sensible thing to do because you absolutely don’t want people to be stopped at that point when they’re ready. To give you money and to pay for that item.
Brent: Talk a little bit about the idea of one step checkout. What, like the reason why it’s called One Step?
Brent: I think that’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t think through all the different steps that they have to go at checkout.
Thien-Lan: So it all started with Magento one, and back then checkout was six steps. So it made a massive difference to have all those steps into just one. Above the fold with one single button that says Order now.
Thien-Lan: So you can fill out all your fields and not click any next button, just one big button order now.
Brent: So it’s making sure that there’s almost nothing you have to do make sure you complete checkout. How about making sure that users The right address and things like that. I’m assuming, integrates with other plat or other services that help find the right address.
Brent: Yeah, go ahead.
Thien-Lan: The key advantage of our product is that we integrate with. 90% of the third party extensions that are out there. So address validation, that works really well. Tax calculation shipping estimates, any shipping extension hundreds of payment extensions. So whatever you need, you can integrate it with one step checkout.
Brent: All right. I wanna switch directions just slightly. Okay. Are you seeing the same amount of people on Magento two using your services, or do you feel like it’s declining right now?
Thien-Lan: So with Magento two, we could see that it’s on the other side of the product maturity curve. The number of install.
Thien-Lan: And the number of orders for Agen two has been slowing down. But as I said, with Hova, it’s been picking back up, so that’s why I’m saying it’s bringing sexy back. And so a lot of, I would say, yeah, big proportion of new orders from west of checkout, from gen two are driven by hiva things. .
Brent: So you would, you could say that HAFA is changing.
Brent: HOA is ch is saving Magento from the dorans, from the tomb.
Thien-Lan: Let’s say that .
Brent: Absolutely. So if you have something that we started off with spooky and scary. What would be the biggest thing you could tell a merchant that they should think about for. website and for their checkout process,
Thien-Lan: I would say yeah, performance is key.
Thien-Lan: So today people don’t want to wait. Most people would buy their holidays, gifts on mobile, so it has to be mobile friendly. Loading really fast, allowing them to browse and or even, guiding them into what would be the most interesting, the best selling products because people are also looking for inspiration and then removing friction all the way through to check out and let them place their order without asking them for too many questions or asking them to do too many things.
Thien-Lan: So a lot of a lot of that friction is also in the order. Subscribe to our newsletter, get $5 off. Remember this, do this, do that. And you’re like, Go away. Go away. I want my product. And then someone calls you, you do something else, and then you go to another website
Brent: to shop. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great point.
Brent: I do, I’ve had quite a few guests that say, Love you learn to love the popup, but make sure you don’t have the popup in checkout. Because it I agree. It’s so annoying when you’re typing in. All of a sudden you get the popup and says, that, says, Enter your email address and subscribe to our newsletter when you could have a checkbox in your checkout that says, I’m, I’d like to subscribe your newsletter , because you’re putting your email address anyways.
Brent: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a really great point. Popups popups, especially on mobile. I think the other thing is that merchants still are thinking desktop first, and we’ve talked about performance and we’ve talked about friction in the checkout. Friction in the checkout is even more when you’re on mobile because it’s so much smaller.
Brent: So having that easy to use navigation is so important. Do you have any words of advice for people to. Enter as little as possible for the checkout. For mobile, You mean for consumers? No. For a merchant. Is there anything that they can do to reduce the amount of things like you, You said that having options for shipping, but I think.
Brent: At some point, if you have so many options, that’s too many options to show on your mobile phone. Is it recommended that you have as little options or making sure that they don’t have a lot of opt or even that’s where the free shipping would come in, where they don’t even have to choose shipping because it’s free.
Brent: Anything that, and that helps merchants check out on mobile quicker.
Thien-Lan: Yeah, that’s that’s an interesting point and I’ve seen it with. A lamp company. So they are the biggest in Europe. They have lamp.de eliminations.co, uk, lamp.fr, and 13 lamp sites across Europe. And for all their websites they have, they almost removed the shipping method.
Thien-Lan: Section because they have one carrier, one shipping cost, and you don’t have to choose. So that makes the whole checkout form much shorter and it’s quicker. People don’t have to wonder, Oh, what do I want? It just tells you what you’re going to have and that’s it.
Brent: So you’d say they’re helping us shed new light on the checkout process?
Thien-Lan: Yep. They help. Yep. They help simplify the whole thing and I guess they’ve seen that consumers are happy with that. So why give the choice when you know it’s the best options for you as a merchant and consumers are happy?
Brent: Excellent. Telan we are running outta time. And as a bonus on the episode I do want to do another free.
Brent: Because it’s Halloween and I have a Halloween joke for you. And then we’re gonna go into our shameless plug. But before we get there, I do have a special Halloween segment joke for you today. So again, this one is free or paid. Are you ready? Ready. Why did the policeman ticket the ghost on Halloween?
Brent: It didn’t have a haunting license.
Thien-Lan: paid with
subscription .
Brent: Excellent. Good. All right. Yeah. Tn Lan, Thank you so much. As I close out every episode, I give our guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today?
Thien-Lan: The only thing I didn’t mention was that Natasha Sonoma from the Forbes.
Thien-Lan: Council is the CEO of Optt, O P W T Y, and that’s innovative platform that allows you to acquire and manage all your, by now, pay later brands all in one space. So that’s really cool because depending on your. Not all the favorite brands are the same. And if you operate in lots of different countries, you can acquire them all at once, and then in the panel you can see who is performing better and you can dial up that down based on your storefronts.
Thien-Lan: So that really helps consumers have the preferred payment methods. And in terms of integration, that helps all the hustle. talking to each of the brands, integrating them into your two checkout, and then seeing which one works for you. Yeah, excellent. For one, it’s not a plug for one step checkout, but for Opti, and that is compatible with one Step out as well.
Thien-Lan: So it’s like a Lego blog. You have one to click out, you plug Opti and from Opti you can have access to 60 by no pay later. .
Brent: Very cool. Thank you so much. And I will put all these in the show notes and I will try to get this episode live as soon as possible so we are not so far away. Ka TA’s Halloween and it won’t go live today, I’m afraid, but we should have done a live stream.
Brent: That would’ve been a good idea. Yeah. Anyways thank you so much for being here today. 10. Who also helps on the Magento Association. I appreciate all your work and she’s now showing us a nice sticker for one step checkout. I would encourage everybody to go there for their Magento two sites, and I would encourage everybody to use hfa.
Brent: Our newest HofA is our newest sponsor for Talk Calm. So you’re excited about
Thien-Lan: that as well. There you go. I wasn’t even paid to talk about them. ,
Remember when shopping, marketing, and brand building were all going digital? Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah noticed how little the retail industry had changed its approach to sales. @endearhq
While the rise of online shopping pushed many brands into the next frontier of marketing and customer service, retail salespeople were still confined to the in-store experience. Associates’ limited access to resources and inability to earn credit for online sales highlighted a massive gap in the retail sales model.
We interview Leigh Sevin, the co-founder of Endear. She gives us insight into this ever-changing market and how Endear works to bridge the retail gap.
Endear is the first and only clienteling app certified for Shopify Plus merchants. Its CRM and messaging platform is made especially for retail sales teams and tracks how messages convert into sales in-store and online. Endear empowers retail teams to engage customers over remote channels like email and text. At the same time, the app measures how outreach is performing, including data points like average order value, location of last purchase, and time to convert.
Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Leigh seven. She is the co-founder of Endear and Leigh, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Leigh: Sure. So as you said, I’m the co-founder of Endear. Endear is a CRM designed specifically for consumer brands.
Leigh: So we help brands consolidate all of their data and then empower their sales people to use that data to develop really high quality. Relationships with their customers, primarily over email, texts, and of course face to face.
Leigh: In the free time, I do have, I also enjoy exercise and baking.
Brent: Oh, wow. Baking. Good. Are you watching the new series of the great British bakeoff?
Leigh: I didn’t even know it launched. Has it got, is it alive? Is it, Can I launch?
Brent: Yeah, I think there’s, there is two episodes out.
Leigh: This is very big news as I go into fall, so thank you for this.
Brent: Yes, it’ll, it, it’ll be very addictive. Good. And I apologize for cutting you off there. No, not at all. Good. Alright let’s talk about CRMs and if you wanted to just do a brief overview for people who may not know what a CRM is.
Leigh: Yeah, absolutely.
Leigh: CRM is customer relationship management. So really what that means is, when I’m speaking to maybe someone a little bit older or not as familiar with technology, I really describe it as a really high powered grex. So that’s one way to think about it. It’s about taking everything you know about a customer and putting it into one consolidated place.
Leigh: What Endear does in terms of taking it a step beyond that is Basically we try to give you the insight that data is revealing in the aggregate. For example, specific to consumer brands, those things might be what does a customer’s lifetime spend? What’s their average order value? How often are they shopping with you?
Leigh: And these are the things that one of our users would probably try to do on their own, just from the raw data that they might have. And we just wanna take that work off their plate and give it to them in real time.
Brent: Users who are familiar with a CRM would ask then, as a retailer, why would I need a CRM?
Leigh: So CRMs are incredibly popular for the B2B world, right? There is no technical or technology sales person that would spend a day not logging into a CRM. And I think what’s changed about retail, especially for the sales people, is that they used to be able to readily depend on organic foot traffic and therefore not need to do a lot of outbound sales.
Leigh: What came their way was enough to reach their goals and really succeed as a salesperson in a store, atmosphere. But I think what’s changed, especially with eCommerce and obviously with the pandemic and just generally with how much is available to consumers these days, you do need to stand out.
Leigh: You do need to take matters into your own hands, and that’s really what CRMs are there help a salesperson do. It’s about understanding who can I be reaching out to proactively in order to generate a sale, generate a relationship, understand what their needs are, share updates with them, and that all comes from being able to combine the actual data that we’ve consolidated for you with scalable outreach and tracking.
Leigh: So understanding. If I do reach out to this person, how are they responding to that outreach? Are they opening my message? Are they clicking on the products I’m recommending? And I think the insights aspect of endear is what really keeps people motivated to know that, Hey, my, my text message actually converted into a sale.
Leigh: Maybe that customer didn’t come into the store to do that, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is my efforts led to revenue for the company.
Brent: From a differentiation standpoint do you think Endear makes itself from other platforms that are strictly e-commerce?
Leigh: I would say, when we think about CRM, Omnichannel versus e-com, most of the time CRM is genuinely lacking on the e-commerce side as well.
Leigh: But for the most part, e-com brands tend to compensate by relying on individual departments stand in for CRM. So for marketing teams, a lot of the time that’s their email marketing platform or their SMS marketing platform for support teams. That might be their live chat, right? It’s everyone that’s ever asked them a question over live chat.
Leigh: Maybe there’s a customer profile, maybe there’s not. And to be honest, for us, CRM is just so much of a low hanging fruit in the sales world, and also the department that is right now least saturated with technology, they have really nothing but the terminal. So we wanted to go where the pain was most heavily felt, and that to us was sales.
Leigh: But I would say CRM in general tends to be more oriented towards B2B salespeople, and that’s really where Endear differentiates itself. We are more about the integrations that a consumer brand would need, the KPIs that a consumer brand would need, and the amount of data storage that a consumer brand would need over what a B2B brand or company would need.
Brent: When I, as a user come into a retail store and endear is being used there, is there a way that the user would target me or help understand more about me?
Leigh: It’s a, That’s a checkout. Yeah, I get that question. Did you say after checkout?
Brent: No. During checkout or
Leigh: before or whatever. So I get, if you already know the person time and the funniest part is that question assumes something that you’ve already decided to walk into a store. And actually for retail stores, the hardest part is getting you to do that. Stores for better or worse, actually have an incredibly high conversion rate.
Leigh: The convert, about 30% of the people that walk. The return rate is also dramatically lower than it is on econ, right? Econ faces at this point, probably near 40% return rate, whereas stores probably having the single digits. So you know the, What we have to think about is where is the challenge? Is the challenge, knowing who a customer is once they walk in.
Leigh: Not really. The store does great. So to us, the real pain point is how do I get you to walk in the first place? And that’s why Endear is so much more about what to do with your downtime, what to do to generate foot traffic or generate converting traffic on your website. And that to us comes from really understanding who your customer is, cultivating that relationship, and then extending that relationship beyond face to remote channels like email and text.
Brent: Do you leverage social media and allow the users to leverage some of that social media as well to promote that drive to get people into the.
Leigh: I would say that’s something that we’ve considered and have on our roadmap for later down the line. I think there are incredible conversations going on over Instagram right now, where we see Endear coming in most often for social media is we have this really cool feature called stories.
Leigh: And they’re basically, depending on your platform, they’re completely shop. So it basically allows for salespeople to create a custom or completely, special story just for one customer or a group of customers, and send it only to them. And that’s something that they can share via a simple URL that endear then tracks for you.
Leigh: So we do allow some flexibility over how you’re using some of the assets you’re creating within endear across platforms. But really what we’re after is that really high touch, one to one conversations.
Brent: And you’re looking for customers to repeat at the store and increase that traffic from their existing base, right?
Leigh: Yes. We are only using a, the data that a brand already owns, but we’re making them do more with it. So the, KPIs that we focus on helping a brand improve is how do I extend lifetime value? How do I increase aov, how do I increase loyalty? What most of these brands are dealing with right now is incredibly high customer cost of acquisition.
Leigh: And so the only way to compensate beyond just simply trying to reduce that, which I would say you can do by opening a store in the first place, is by then increasing the lifetime value. And that’s really what Endear is
Brent: all about. Do you see, so you mentioned lifetime value. Do you think that the stores that leverage an online.
Brent: can mix and matched both to get people online and then offline to purchase things as well. Do you see that as part of the puzzle and gaining traffic for the retailer?
Leigh: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a very famous stat sort of floating in the ether that opening a store basically increases your eCommerce traffic by about 37.
Leigh: What a lot of people miss is that they’re talking about traffic. So that’s an easy number to gauge. I think what our customers want to know is what about actual conversions? And that is really where your sales people are such a great resource for not just, working, as I said, face to face, but then motivating customers when they go to buy online, to feel more confident about their purchase, to buy more frequently, and also probably decrease the return rate.
Leigh: They really do know what size they are. They know maybe they’ve actually tried it in store and then only got really convinced to buy it after the fact. But those purchases tend to be a lot stickier than the ones of a customer just shopping on their own. And we’ve actually seen that in our own data that customers who shop with the help of a salesperson, even online actually in one case study, had a 50% higher AOV than the customers who were going at it alone.
Brent: Have you seen a difference pre pandemic to post pandemic on challenges that retailers are facing and getting people into the store? Obviously during pandemic it was impossible to get ’em into the store, but you see a switch in how behavior is now, whereas we’re going into full opening .
Leigh: I think, this sort of ebbs and flows because I think what also happened was Every retailer that was a little resistant to change.
Leigh: Maybe they started brick and mortar, really had to open eCommerce and had to embrace that as a channel during the pandemic. So if anything, eCommerce has gotten way more competitive because anyone who was resistant before now needed to figure it out. And obviously their first move is to do all the most obvious channels.
Leigh: That used to be the reason why e-commerce was so great, you could acquire customers for, not much money compared to the cost of opening a store. And I think those two levers have now completely switched. It’s become actually dramatically more affordable to open a store these days because landlords had to learn 10 year leases are not gonna work, no one’s gonna sign a 10 year lease.
Leigh: And we saw that a little bit with the popup craze. And I think that has found its middle ground of saying, what does a two year lease look like? Is that better for me? How can I make it more appealing for tenants to come into my physical space? So those costs have dramatically dropped while the cost of doing business online has actually skyrocketed because everyone’s using the same tools, everyone’s using the same, acquisition strategies.
Leigh: So it’s really hard to stand out right now online.
Brent: Do you see Paid and organic traffic coming to a store, be it online or in person. Do you see any way that somebody could jump start coming into the store rather than if you just didn’t wanna do paid ads? Is there an advantage somebody has to do organic?
Leigh: I think endear is that organic opportunity. We always joke that a marketing team at a omnichannel brand has so much work on their plate, and they are primarily worried about traffic to the site, conversion on the site, and it’s just not, if you have 12 stores right? That means that they can’t be focused on making sure every single store is optimized or maximizing their opportunity with traffic.
Leigh: So really what you get is you have this huge database of customers and the people who are. Focus on making sure those customers know about the store is the store team themselves. So giving them the power within Deere to actually do their own local marketing, their own local outreach. They are going to be the most motivated to get those customers in the door.
Leigh: And I think that’s really, that’s free. You have to pay for a sales force, whether you like it or not, if you’re gonna open a store. So you might as well maximize their resources to get that ROI on that physical retail.
Brent: Yesterday my podcast was about segmentation and and the person that I had on had mentioned Klaviyo. I know that there, there’s a lot of overlaps from CRM to automated marketing. How do you work with other partners to ensure that you’re maximizing? If somebody has attentive or something, how do you work in Totally making sure that. both are being used effectively.
Leigh: That gets to the whole purpose of CRM. We did an analysis at one point, and I think about 75% of our customers use Klaviyo, and I think another like 40% also use Attentive. And so what that tells us is, A) there’s this thing that we call called the Commerce Stack, and just to even be a proper eCommerce brand, you need about seven different apps cuz you need your email marketing and or SMS marketing.
Leigh: You need your loyalty, you need your support, you need your onsite popups and engagement. And then you also actually need the os, the backbone of the whole thing, which is typically Shopify. So With all these different platforms running, they’re all really good at what they do individually.
Leigh: The question. How do you bring them together from a data perspective? And that’s really what a CRM is out to solve. It’s how do you understand, okay, who is my marketing team touching with Klaviyo and who is my sales team reaching out to via Endear?
Leigh: And Endear works to actually consolidate those two things so that you understand, who’s responding more to one channel or another. And across all these channels, what kind of picture can I get of this customer? What kind of marketing does she respond to? What kind of email does she respond to or text?
Leigh: Does she respond to? Has she used her loyalty points? How do we get her to use those loyalty points? So all of it is about actually using these apps in tandem. And then of course, I think right now people are very concerned with, their overall spend on technology. And so the next question has to be,
Leigh: how can I consolidate how many of these apps actually have overlapping functionality? And I think that’s gonna be the really big challenge that comes next For these e eCom brands or for these omnichannel brands, how do I really make sure that I’m being most efficient with the tech stack that I’ve created?
Brent: Do you see a future in SMS verses email or both? Or? I see SMS happening a lot more, but I also see a lot of now, spam and SMS. Do you see SMS moving forward in what where it’s at? Or do you see it plateauing soon and people are gonna ignore messages in the future?
Leigh: It’s gonna take, it’s not there yet, but it’s gonna take the same toll as email, which is, would I ever not answer an email from a friend just because of how much email marketing I get?
Leigh: No. It doesn’t stop me from finding the ones that are important and of. All of our personal email clients or our phones will help us do some of that filtering automatically. So I think what really it comes down to is what is a brand’s email marketing or SMS marketing strategy. And I think the challenge there is that is also why empowering a sales force of some sort can be truly needle moving.
Leigh: They will break through the numbness that comes with marketing at some point. If I truly know somebody and they’re texting me, I want to respond because they likely, the content of that message is personalized. It’s specific to me, It’s content that I care about.
Leigh: And so it’s just about, everyone will say it, but it really is about personalization. And I think what’s cool about focusing on sales rather than marketing. , it lets you not worry so much about scale. The whole point is it doesn’t have to be all that scalable because you have a huge labor force, you have a huge sales force, so let them just do it properly one to one, and it will convert really high.
Leigh: And if you have 20 to 50 people doing that, you’re gonna see incredible results. And as I said, those people work for you anyway, so why not let them cut through the noise?
Brent: Do you think that the big brands out there that are running retail stores, The challenge is getting people into the stores again, or what do you see as the biggest challenge facing retail today?
Leigh: I think from a growth perspective, it is probably that, you still need to figure out how to drive traffic to your stores if you’ve made that investment. I think the other challenge is still for a lot of brands, especially the big ones, omnichannel, How do I understand? How my online and offline channels are working together.
Leigh: How do I make them work better together? How do I help them be resources and allies talk to each other? Because a lot of the time when we at least launched Endear, there was incredible sort of antagonism between what was happening e-commerce and what was happening in store, and they were considered almost rivals.
Leigh: And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make. It’s more about how can these two channels support each other. I think there are really great examples. , brands that have done that really well. With online, with in-store pickup for online purchases, making sure you can return, something you bought online in a store because A, that drives traffic and b, that’s just logical.
Leigh: Not doing that is gonna really annoy your customers. And so for me it’s looking at the strategies that actually unify those things. One of my favorite sites actually does this very cool thing where you can actually search their website by what’s available local to you. So you can basically browse the store from their e-commerce site and then just go buy it or go reserve it, which, talk about same day delivery.
Leigh: You don’t even need that. You can just walk over and go get it.
Brent: Looking at somebody like Best Buy, certainly they’ve now embraced that. It took ’em a a little bit of time to get there. But you can obviously that features a great way to make sure that people see everything, but then go to the right place to get it.
Brent: The future of. I think it was interesting that Amazon is still opening physical stores today, so it’s like online to physical. Do you still see that happening? Do you think there’s gonna be some strictly e eCommerce brands that are going to do little popup stores to see to see how it works?
Leigh: I think there are different, physical presence formats that are right for different kinds of products. And I think what we’ve really seen over the past couple of years is innovation around what does it mean to have a physical presence, right? It used to be a question of do I do wholesale or do I do retail, like dedicated retail?
Leigh: And even that’s a relatively new concept. So what I love is looking at all these different models for how brands can test what it means to. available in a store, whether it’s their own store or, these new sort of neighborhood goods is a great example, right? It’s not necessarily a wholesale deal, it’s more like I’m leasing or renting shelf space rather than an entire, store.
Leigh: And so all these different models allow different kinds of companies to really test what makes the most sense for them. And I think, the same time that Amazon is opening. Warby Parker is still opening tons of stores and actually doubling down on their retail footprint. So I think if anything, it’s a sign that, physical can work for all different kinds of companies and it’s more about understanding and really testing what makes sense for you, and how do you collaborate with other brands so that you are maybe doing a joint effort and you’re not, taking on the entire cost of leads for yourself if you happen to be at a one type of product or one product business that’s not really gonna make sense to just populate an entire store with one product?
Brent: Yeah. I think if anything, the pandemic reminded us that we do like to go outside every once in a while and visit a store and touch a product and shop around and visit, just get out of the house.
Brent: Do you do you think that a lot of retailers now are moving towards Having something like Endear to help them leverage more of their in store versus versus web traffic to promote specific items. You talked about the one item thing, but is there more of an in, in if you have Overstock or under stock, is there a way, is there more of a push to get a lot of that stuff?
Brent: I know there’s a lot of Target has a ton of extra inventory. So they’re pushing, this inventory online, offline. Is there more of that now coming through on retail?
Leigh: Yes, and I think inventory, especially if your omni channel is one of the hardest nets to crack, and it can get very cumbersome and it’s very detail oriented, very logistics heavy.
Leigh: And that to me is another reason why stores really do benefit when they have something like Endear because they have those products literally right in front of them. And with Endear, they can know exactly who. By the store and who would be interested in this product. So being able to again, be your own best advocate and move product that may even be sold out online.
Leigh: Being able to tell an entire neighborhood, Hey, that thing that’s sold out online is actually available in store in your size, come by and hopefully be the first to get editor. I can reserve it for you, is an incredibly, a huge value prop to your community, but also a really easy optimization considering all the challenges that brands face with inventory so it’s basically taking advantage again of your human capital to solve a very big logistical challenge. And I think, best sellers are always gonna move, and that’s great, but especially if you have those lingering products, being able to target them also without even broadcasting necessarily a huge promotion via a marketing email, Potentially sending it to only a handful of VIP customers or a handful of customers who have bought something similar in the past and just extending a promotion to them.
Leigh: Also helps, this long history of the vicious cycle of, if I discount then everyone’s gonna wait for the discount that if I don’t discount, it’s never gonna move. So avoiding that major sale and just giving a handful of people maybe part again, like you have a loyalty program for a reason.
Leigh: You know, Show your gratitude to those people and give them first access, or give them last access to some of these lingering products is a very easy way to really make the most of the inventory you do have.
Brent: I wanna change gears a little bit and talk about entrepreneurship. What motivated you in your young years to start a new CRM?
Brent: It’s a very competitive space. Tell us your journey on Endear and starting that.
Leigh: Yeah. My co-founder, Jenesh and I really got into this space pretty circuitously, it was not a very linear path towards success, but what we landed on was quickly learning that within the physical space in retail technology was lacking.
Leigh: There was a huge doth in just any sort of innovation whatsoever. And of course what we saw was this boom in econ technology and it made sense, right? It’s already cloud based. It’s already driven by fast movers. People who were excited about the future in retail to a lot of people sounded like this very laggard, slow industry that would never adopt anything new.
Leigh: And I think that was one of the biggest misconceptions because if there’s huge success in econ, obviously retail stores are eventually gonna have to. And so what we saw was this huge white space, especially among the newer, more modern brands who were leaning on physical retail as a new growth channel.
Leigh: And they were so data oriented already, and there were no solutions in the market that sort of looked at what the store was doing as a CRM. I think it. Maybe our exposure as solving this problem for our customers, but also ourselves needing a CRM and having a sales team that we realized they were really one and the same.
Leigh: They were all facing the same problems. And I think it’s our orientation towards data specifically that really sets us apart in the market because we’re just giving our users much more information and ammo to work with. Compared to just letting them, maybe you just have a messaging platform. That messaging platform is only as good as the content that the users are sharing on it.
Leigh: And so I just think that relying only on something that lets you do SMS is never gonna get you the scale or the quality of conversion. That’s something like Endear would. That was the biggest lesson, was getting to talk to users and understanding how much of their business was already driven by cultivating these relationships.
Leigh: Understanding that this behavior already existed. It’s just that no one had really, hypercharged it, No one had really given it the proper attention from a tech perspective that it deserved.
Brent: When you started what was your biggest challenge at getting up off the ground?
Leigh: I would say our biggest challenge was really accepting. Being willing to focus on who it was that needed our product most. I think for a while, and I think it’s normal to go through this, we would take any customer that would have us and we would, do whatever they asked of us. But slowly we realized that, there needed to be a very concrete market that we were going after and we needed to use the customer experiences we already had to pinpoint.
Leigh: Exactly who that customer should be. And I think in almost every conversation with a new founder, every conversation, every interview I give, I talk so much about product market fit because I think it is the hardest part of starting a company is finding the product that satisfies a market doesn’t, worry about how big or how small it is, maybe later.
Leigh: But just building something that an entire audience loves is incredibly gratifying and motivating. And being willing to settle on one audience was something that is really hard for founders.
Brent: Do you think that it’s hard to say no to some customers sometime or even say to that customer, you’re really not a good fit and maybe you’re not gonna be successful with us, so why don’t you use X platform?
Brent: We have problem
Leigh: now. We. Can’t help ourselves from time to time. It’s very tempting when someone wants to use your product and you have to be honest about what it can do for their business or what you’re willing to do to meet them halfway. And I think there’s a saying basically that most startups die of congestion, not starvation.
Leigh: And I think that’s a really good way to think about it, especially at where we are in the seed stage. You have to be able to focus and you have to know why you’re focused. And I think it’s always good to put opportunities on your own radar for investigation and research. But we’re always remembering, your bread and butter customer and why they love you so much because they are the ones that will keep feeding you.
Brent: I’m gonna make a small CRM joke, so I apologize, but when you were looking at how you were gonna design Endear, did you look at SalesForce CRM and think , this 1980s interface is the last thing I’m ever gonna want to do, and we’re gonna make all this great data presentable for people who can actually use it.
Brent: and if anybody’s used Salesforce CRM, they know exactly what I’m talking about.
Leigh: I have to be completely honest, I’ve never seen the Salesforce CRM. I don’t know what it looks like. All right. But you’re very lucky. I’ve heard that, I’ve heard that from so many people. There’s like a I literally think there’s a quote on our website that is basically we have plenty of users who have tried Salesforce and to even think about putting.
Leigh: A retail worker who’s constantly on her feet on Salesforce to use as if she were at a computer all day is absolutely insane. And so we’re very honest about, the way that we’ve built the product, specifically for someone who works in a retail environment, someone who is able to, they have to be able to look up from their phone no matter what they were doing, and work with a customer and then look back at their phone and know exactly where they are in their workflow and pick it up instantly.
Leigh: It’s not no secret that turnover is also incredibly high in retail. And so what we think about in terms of how we build the product is okay, and there needs to be something that the second you hire a salesperson, they can pick it up in 30 minutes. They do not have six months to train on something like Salesforce because they’ll probably be gone in six months.
Leigh: So how do we build something that, A, they can get up and running in 30 minutes and B actually might get them to stay longer because they love the tech. They love that they can track their own progress. They love they get credit for sales online. So how do we make it a reason for someone to actually stick with your brand because of how great, the motivation is through Endear.
Brent: Do you find it harder to. design, something that’s easy for a millennial to use as compared to somebody who’s retired but now has gone back to work and is suddenly in retail. Do you think there’s a challenge in both in that sort of learning phase?
Leigh: So one of our first customers, they actually were a beta customer and they were still with us today, like three years later, they got a version of Endear that we would never want anyone to have to be on.
Leigh: The entire sales course were in like the boomer generation, and I trained every single one of them. Maybe sometimes it took an hour and a half. But what I knew was their willingness to work with me and to get trained and then their ability to use the platform was probably the biggest validation that we were doing something worthwhile because every single one of them got on and said, I absolutely hate technology.
Leigh: I don’t know why we have to use this, and yet somehow three years later here, they are still using it and getting even better at it, and they are incredibly productive. So to be honest, millennials are great at tech and it’s great that they use Endear and they, I think they love it. I think what’s more encouraging is that we have users across all generations and they all seem incredible value.
Leigh: And getting up to speed and actually, finding it pretty easy to use at the end of the day.
Brent: And I can say that I’m old enough to remember when I was working as a waiter that you had to look through a big book to see if this credit card was stolen or not. So it has come a long ways.
Brent: Another good parallel would. Somebody who’s a runner and they log all their miles in a physical book and then they move to a spreadsheet, and now they’ve moved to logging all their miles in Garmin or Strava or something like that. Strava. So that same sort of pathway for the CRM could be seen through how we’re making our lives easier.
Brent: And you don’t have to at checkout or at at the pos or even as somebody walks in there is an opportunity or getting people to walk in, I should say. There’s an opportunity to somewhat know the customer and then to leverage that knowledge to help them understand that there’s something.
Leigh: Totally. I tell every founder, if you ever hear of an industry still relying on Google Sheets, that is the billion dollar idea to go after. It’s always a sign that there’s a problem to be solved. And I know a lot of companies that, they are the Google Sheets alternative. They are, as you’re saying, the Strava to just logging it in a Google sheet or same for us, our users went from little black books to, if they were relatively sophisticated, A, a pretty, color coded Google file and then they found us.
Brent: The the typical customer that you would see or the typical user for Endear, would there be a certain size that would be a right fit? 10 stores, 20 stores?
Leigh: We, when we started, a lot of our customers were smaller. I think more of a mindset. Certainly from a, traditional icp.
Leigh: What are your qualifiers? What do you look for? We look for brands that have, north of three stores. That’s something that we do take into consideration mostly because it shows a level of bullishness on physical retail and eagerness to. We look at their tech stack. Do they use platforms that we already integrate with that we, so that we can deliver that really 360 degree view of the customer?
Leigh: But I think what we’re really excited about that we’re seeing now is, if you did start with Endear when you were relatively small, there is no interest in moving to Salesforce because it’s just, it doesn’t matter how big you are, that product is still not designed for the retail store enviroment.
Leigh: And so we’ve seen customers that, started in the single digits that are now, double and nearing triple digits store fleets. And they are not giving us any signs that they’re interested in leaving because we’re growing with them and we are watching their needs change and become more sophisticated at the same time that the product becomes more sophisticated.
Leigh: We obviously hope that trend sticks around, but that’s what we’ve seen so far.
Brent: I’m doing a terrible job of staying on track here, but if we jump back to entrepreneurship have you found it harder scaling your tech stack or your people stack?
Leigh: That’s a really good question for my co-founder Jinesh and our CTO JP, but I will answer it as best as I can.
Leigh: I would say people stack on some level proves to be more slippery in the sense that I think you know what you’re getting with tech and if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly and you are even aware of the quote unquote like tech debt that you might be taking on at any given moment.
Leigh: And it’s also probably pretty clear to you how to fix it. I think the team growth side is you have all these things that you want to, that you wanna do or that you wanna think about, and finding that balance between hard skills and culture and also, equity and making sure that you’re finding that diversity in the applicant pool that you’re looking at.
Leigh: And then you have to think about we are a distributed team. Do we always wanna be distributed? I think so. What are the drawbacks and what are the advantages of that? And what if there are drawbacks, how do we compensate for those? So I think there are just a lot more unknowns when you’re dealing with humans in general, which is why, tech products are really fun to build.
Leigh: because you can rely on them, but then you realize like there’s a user at the other end of that and you have to think about, how are they going to receive this product? What are they gonna want to see from it? So I’ve just basically bundled your questions still back into endear and the problems that we have on that front.
Leigh: But I would, I hope I answered it at some level.
Brent: When Leigh wakes up in the morning, what drives her to get up and do something better? Stronger. Bolder as the Endear co-founder.
Leigh: Anecdotally and broadly, I would say it’s the customers that we work with.
Leigh: So I absolutely adore this space. I love the customers that I work with. I geek out when I see a brand that I recently shopped at or know or just follow on Instagram, and I see them wanting to use in Endear. And I feel the same way when one of those customers just has an amazing experience or one of their sales people has an amazing experience.
Leigh: And knowing that, as I said, it goes back to product market fit, you get incredible motivation knowing that, hey, even if something is broken, even if you know an employee wants to leave, all of that stuff is totally solvable if your customers love your product and it’s totally worth solving if your customers love your product.
Leigh: I wouldn’t feel the same way if customers didn’t. It’s like, why are you even bothering? Like you have a bigger existential problem if your customers are not huge fans of what you do every day.
Brent: Do you ever buy something from a store that’s using Endear and you wanna say, That’s my product you’re using?
Brent: Yes, all the time. The person that’s selling it , by the way, that’s my product. Yeah.
Leigh: I’ve done it. I’ve done it a few times. I also have a very. Supportive husband who won’t walk into a store that doesn’t use Endear without trying to pitch them on endear, which I also appreciate, but I have also stopped doing.
Leigh: It’s very cool to walk around a lot of neighborhoods in New York and see the brands that we work with. I’ve walked in and it’s just a weird interaction. You’re like, Oh, that’s cool, thanks. But it’s not quite anything, I think it would be pretty weird.
Leigh: A HubSpot person came up to me and was like, I work no, actually I’d appreciate it. I’d be like, That’s cool. We use HubSpot. So I try to keep my cool when that happened. But I would say the other thing that gets me up in the morning is when I have friends who say, I just got a text from a store using you and I, I saw you in the url, or I could tell it was you guys.
Leigh: And I think that is also incredibly inspiring that, we are. Penetrating all these different circles of people that are receiving her product and most of the time not even knowing it.
Brent: I started in the Magento world, which is like Shopify, but it. It’s better. And it’s, No, I’m just, I’m not gonna talk about that. But I can also relate to that. Nobody actually cared at all that I was using Magento to sell stuff or developing on Magento. Anyways, we’ll move on. We have a few minutes left.
Brent: And I promised a free joke. I was gonna do it in the beginning, but then I forgot. And now we’re, because I’m a d today, I don’t know why. So I’m gonna tell you a joke. And this is a joke that could be free or we could pay for, . All I want you to do is just react and tell me what you think.
Brent: Here we go.
Brent: Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns the other and says, Dam!,
Leigh: Okay,
Brent: I’m, make it, I’m, That’s clearly a free joke. I’m gonna say a free
Leigh: joke. I was actually ready for it to be. A different punchline from a different joke, and I was like, Maybe this is a different version. So you actually caught,
Brent: Tell me yours.
Brent: Tell me yours. You know
Leigh: The one where it’s like there are two muffins baking in an oven, and one muffin says, Damn, it’s hot in here. And the other one says, Oh my god, A talking muffin. So I thought that was gonna be the joke, but with two fish ,
Brent: Yeah. How do fish talk underwater? That’s my question. It’s Aquaman, right? They must use some kind of radar thing.
Leigh: Yes. And there’s that very famous David Foster Wallace speech or short story about what is water? And it’s basically like people’s awareness. If you haven’t, that’s also what’s on my mind now, which is, it’s a much more existential philosophical question.
Leigh: So now I’m just in 10 different places like you, so there you go.
Brent: All right. I gotta do one more since I clearly bombed the first joke.
Brent: What is the opposite of a croissant? A happy uncle.
Brent: Okay. Cross an, Yeah. Anyway. I get it. I will stop torching you on the jokes, . I
Leigh: appreciate them.
Leigh: I get it. I’m with you.
Brent: If you were to say to a retailer the thing that they should be paying attention to as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What would be that something they should be really looking at now, going to quarter four and even into quarter one?
Leigh: That’s a great question. I would say, what are you gonna do differently from last year? And ask yourself, what did I do last year? and what have I done every year that, am I seeing any difference in results? And I think the question becomes, if everyone else is just gonna do the same thing anyway, what is the harm in taking a year to try something that I’ve never done before?
Leigh: And at the end of the day, I’m not a retailer. I only have so many creative ideas that I’ve seen from the brands that use us, but I think. A like getting ahead of the most obvious things. Like you’re gonna send a promotional email the week before and then three days before and then the day of your sale.
Leigh: What doesn’t look like that? Just anything. But that is my advice at this point, because you can always do that. But is there something more creative you can do either on top of that or instead of that, because you know everyone’s gonna do that and we do have that. Have test.
Leigh: We do have an entire webinar from a bunch of other brands speaking about this that I would highly recommend. This doesn’t count as my shameless plug. I wanna clarify that. I would recommend people go listen to if they’re looking for inspiration.
Brent: All right. And we’ll put that in the show notes. So we’ll make sure you get that on the show notes of the podcast.
Brent: So Leigh, as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Leigh: I would like to plug Endear as an app, is that allowed? Can I just plug the company? Absolutely. Okay, great. Yes, one of the great things about Endear sales process is we offer everyone, both we can get a demo on the app and then we also include a free training as part of your trial.
Leigh: So I would encourage everyone to a go check out the website and Endearhq.com and book a demo because there are no strings attached. And you’ll even get a free training if you sign up for a 14 day free trial. So that is my shameless plug.
Brent: Perfect. Leigh Sevin co-founder of Endear. Thank you so much for being here today.
If you have an online store, you will most likely have someone helping you customize it. We call those people “Developers,” and they help make merchants’ lives easier but creating solutions that increase your ROI on your website.
Stephen Hilliard is a Developer Advocate for BigCommerce and talks about all the great things that BigCommerce is doing for the community and for developers. He goes over some of the past events along with what they are planning for 2023.
The exciting news is the Twitter Spaces that is happening on Thursdays at 1 pm CST – You can join the space on Twitter starting Oct 20th, 2022.
Product information management, or PIM, is a set of processes and technologies used by merchants and brands to help manage the information related to their products and services.
We all want to keep our customers happy, so significant investments were made into CRM. Later, merchants found that the employee was being neglected and invested in that. The final piece to the puzzle was the product and the Product Information Management system.
Akeneo has now moved PIM to the next level with Product Cloud.
Kristen Naragon explains how Akeneo Product Cloud works and helps us understand PIM and how it enables you to get and maintain happy customers.
Akeneo also offers a full host of Akeneo Training classes to get a better understanding of how the system works.
Akeneo provides a PIM (Product Information Management) solution that helps turn browsers into buyers.
2023 is projected to be the year of the PIM, as businesses are now realizing the importance of investing in product experience.
Akeneo offers both open-source and SaaS solutions and has been helping customers with product gathering, enriching, and getting to market faster for ten years.
Akeneo is also well-suited to help with social commerce, providing consistency and speed to new channels.
Social media and influencers are essential for creating a consistent brand image.
Transparency is important to younger buyers.
Akeneo PIM can help merchants get products to market quicker by providing checklists and automating manual processes.
Akeneo Product Cloud allows for dynamic data to be combined into one product record, which can be activated in multiple channels.
Experimentation is key to discovering new channels and reaching new audiences.
Akeneo PIM can help businesses pivot quickly in times of crisis.
Transcript
Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Kristin Naragon. Kristin is Global marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Sorry, Kristin, why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us one of your day to day, what your day to day role is, and maybe one of your passions in life.
Kristin: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brent. I’m really excited to be here. So I try to introduce myself, not by my work. And I try to remove myself from being defined by just the the work that I do. I am Kristen Naragon. I am a mother of two kids who are I think are just the most interesting humans on earth.
Kristin: And I love to travel with my family, my husband and my kids, we like to travel quite a bit. Maybe it’s quite a bit just from an American point of view, but we’ve taken the family to far flung places like Indonesia and Japan and Columbia and all across Europe. So we we have a good time and enjoy exploring new places and learning learning how other people around the world live.
Kristin: So that’s a little bit about me and a passion that I have. A Peloton enthusiast, and I will wake up at ungodly hours in order to fit in a ride or a workout with Peloton. So maybe that’s a plug for somebody else’s business. But I’m a little bit obsessed And in my day job.
Kristin: What I do to make sure I can afford my Peloton is I am the head of global marketing and strategy here at a Akeneo. And I have been with the company for two and a half years. It’ll be three years in February. Gosh, I joined right before the pandemic started, so two hot weeks in the office.
Kristin: And. Got to meet a few people and dispersed. We were. Building and changing a strategy all remotely in a new company was a bit of a trick. But we’ve we’ve done some great things. So that’s a little bit about me and what I’m up to.
Brent: So for the listeners who don’t understand what a PIM is why don’t you give us the 10,000 foot view of a PIM and then let’s dive into PIMS more as we go.
Kristin: Yeah, so PIM it’s hard to explain if if you’ve got zero knowledge, but if we’re trying to talk to our grandparents and let them know what it is, it’s essentially those it’s a solution that helps turn browsers into buyers. And so if you think about what we do as consumers to go looking for researching products that we are interested in purchasing and read all of that information about the product.
Kristin: Find it in different locations, represented in different ways. The PIM serves that up in mo in the most delightful ways. So where the solution that helps those buyers feel more sure. About the products that bra and retailers are selling.
Brent: I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it being said that 2023 is going to be the year of the PIM.
Brent: Why do you think that PIMs are trending so much,
Kristin: Yeah. Oh man. I love this because the way that we see the world is that there are three key assets that any merchant, brand, manufacturer, any commerce business has. The first are customers, it’s pretty important to a business.
Kristin: The second are employee. And the third, of course are products. And so that first wave of investment was around that, the customer and obsession with the customer and the customer experience. And so centralizing the record for customers and then engaging with them in all the ways that a customer, they think wants to be engaged.
Kristin: And so huge industries have been developed around that customer engagement. The second wave has been around that second asset, which is employee. Maybe you might argue it’s going in the wrong order, but it is what it is. And so especially now since Covid, but it started well before this industry surrounding technology and consulting new innovations and supporting that employee experience, that life cycle of an employee from recruiting talent.
Kristin: Onboarding them, engaging them, health meters with employees. All of that is exploding right now. So the customer experience first and still going strong, employee experience wave is here. And if you’re watching it, it’s growing big and tall. That third pillar of a business is the product experience.
Kristin: And woefully neglected still a huge challenge for businesses, and it’s the thing that falls apart. If your customer experience is falling apart, it’s probably due to. A bad product experience. And so they’re waking up to understand, oh my gosh, the missing ingredient and this whole thing that I’ve been investing in is actually investing in that product experience.
Brent: Yeah, and I think one of the fun things or interesting things that I’ve always seen as the pin is that you can then put all of your product into one place and diversified into multiple channels. And as now we’re getting more into omnichannel, pin is even more important. To keep that continuity in product across all channels.
Brent: Yeah, for sure. Maybe talk a little bit about how Akeneo can effectively get over some of those hurdles when you’re talking about continuity of product. Yeah, there’s
Kristin: so many hurdles that we we help our customers with and, you talk about the destination, so it’s always the last mile.
Kristin: I think that a lot of. A lot of people are interested in it, right? The last mile’s, always the heart smile, but actually in. This wave , what we’re seeing is that it’s actually starting way back before the last mile. You’ve got the whole marathon in front of you before you get there of product, gathering product information from wherever it comes from.
Kristin: So if you’re. A retailer, a distributor, it’s coming from maybe thousands of different brands trying to get that information. But even if you’re a brand manufacturer yourself, oh my goodness, you have agencies that you’re working with. You’ve got the creative people, you have the brand people, you’ve got the order management, you’ve got a lot of sources of information that you need, and to get together in one place that’s hard.
Kristin: Pin helps with that. And then certainly, Accelerating that speed of getting the information. So you gotta to crunch that hard work down into as much automation as possible so you get to market faster that last mile of getting to market faster. You gotta enrich the products, make that easy and fun to do, and then get that into all of those destinations.
Kristin: Now we talk about sales channels, which is absolutely one destination for product experiences to show up for your prospects and your customers. But it’s everywhere else too. So think of the end of your post purchase experience. If you’re calling up a particular brand and you want, you say, Hey, I bought this product on this particular site.
Kristin: I need to know X, Y, Z. You really want the person who’s picking up the phones to know exactly what it is and know more about the product than potentially was served to that person. So pin information actually gets served to support that full life cycle of customer information to things. The the customer support teams
Brent: as well.
Brent: Yeah, I think so. Can you started back in the early teens, 2013, something like that? Tell us some of the beginnings of that and how that has impacted how PI have has grown and how it fits into the today’s puzzle or all the different pieces you need for a fully rounded e-commerce and store.
Brent: That’s
Kristin: right. Yeah we we certainly support e-com, but it’s really commerce at its core in all the different destinations. But yeah, back to your question, it’s 10 years. We get to celebrate our 10 year anniversary at at our upcoming user conference in Paris in, in March. And Pretty excited about that.
Kristin: My goodness. Has, have things changed in that last 10 years? Can you have started with the founders who were working on the backend systems? E-commerce solutions like Magento. And they were, hands on keyboard trying to move products from one place into the e-com system and really just saw it loud and clear the problem that managing that product information and getting it into the direct to consumer channel.
Kristin: It was just a total nightmare. And so that’s where they began is trying to solve that problem. And they created an open source solution. And so anybody can go right now on GitHub or wherever you download your open source solutions. and find Akeneo who there, and it’s a powerful solution that’s just available to anybody.
Kristin: And I think that was the part of the vision was they knew this was such a vast problem that they wanted to provide a solution to anybody who needed it. And so we have 80,000 downloads of that solution. Across the world. So clearly it is any customer or any business with a product to sell has this problem and we’re helping them to solve it.
Kristin: And so that was that was the roots of the business. And since we’ve evolved into a full SaaS composable offering we fit into whatever stack a company might. And integrate neatly into whatever ecosystem is in the customer’s base. And so it’s been a quite, a, quite a journey, quite an evolution.
Kristin: And the value that we’re providing and the depth and the breadth, I think we. You hear it with our customers. Gosh, I’ve sold a lot of products before. I’ve been exposed to a lot of different solutions and I’ve talked to a lot of customers in my life. I have never talked to so many happy customers as I have here.
Kristin: It’s creepy, like not creepy, but it’s just, it’s almost unbelievable how delighted these customers are with the Kenya. And so it’s just a, it’s a wonderful, just a wonderful place to, to grow. .
Brent: Going back to the beginnings and the reasoning around, so open source has been a big part of what helped software grow in the last 10 years.
Brent: Yeah. And the is certainly open source and has a community version that’s free for people to download and use. We do tell us some of the importance of that in how ge, how maybe getting users into PI and exposing them to pi, how does that help Akeneos brand to have that open source?
Kristin: Yeah. It’s interesting, it was new to me of this open source model before coming to a Kenya, and what I realized is that especially in a market where as we discussed this it’s it’s been around for a while, the category, but.
Kristin: I think since the 10 years that we’ve been able to expose the, with the free open source model to so many different people, I think the education process, it really has accelerated the education process for what Apam is. Because I think it’s still one of those categories that people are learning about, right?
Kristin: Like learning exactly where it fits into their tech stack, Learning exactly how it solve the value that it bring. The problems that it solves. And so that open source nature that I think has really helped to sort of seed buyers with an educational tool. Now what we’ve got done recently, actually this year we released also a SaaS free trial.
Kristin: So it’s totally free, no credit cards, nothing. You just put your name in and you go, you get a 14 day free trial, it’s SaaS if you’re not a developer or some IT person who really understands how to install, an open source product, I am not one of those somebody like me can go in and just start the free trial on their on their computer and be done.
Kristin: So you’re, you can experience the Akeneo. Value over the course of 14 days. And I think that’s also part of, our heritage is getting the word out there, understanding the value that a solution like ours has to offer is really been helping us to expand the growth of the business, but also the solution at.
Brent: So on a tangent Akeneo has always been known for their purple three-headed. I think it’s a dragon, it’s a hydro, a hying. Is there a story behind that?
Kristin: Yeah. Her pronouns are she and her name is Ziggy. Yeah, she’s evolved as well over time. And she’s taken on some iterations, but she was initially brought into the fold by a very creative person on the team who, took on the adoption of Ziggy and she was the three headed hydro for multi channel.
Kristin: And so at first she was the bad guy. She’s multi-channel, like hard to wrangle. She was evil. But she was tamed by Julia, who is our persona the PI power user. And now they’re best friends. So she and Julia Julia and Ziggy are now friends and Ziggy. Part of the, ah, man, to get your hands on a Ziggy people really like, So you can come to our booth or at any show or come to our user events.
Kristin: You might be able to find some limited addition gigs to adopt and take home with you. Our customers love them, .
Brent: So one of the things that that is coming up in, in commerce now is social commerce. How does PI fit into social commerce and how can new merchants or merchants that are established and have a PIM or are looking at.
Brent: Utilize that for social commerce.
Kristin: Yeah. Gosh. And social commerce is such a broad category too, and it keeps evolving by the minute and some platforms are even taking down the actual transactional piece of it. So I guess when I think of social commerce, that’s everything from the influence piece, the browse piece, the.
Kristin: Showcasing piece to the transactional components of it. And so if you think about it with those two buckets, I think PI is absolutely able to and should be serving that consistent. You talked about a consistent product experience no matter where you’re browsing. and it’s no question in my mind that unless you have a centralized product record, you have consistency in how you’re describing and showcasing your products.
Kristin: If you’re not doing that on social channels, you’re totally missing the whole point. And so driving consistency there is absolutely like table stakes critical these days. And I think the other so consistency is one, but also speed to those new. Random channels that seem to pop up as, as often as they do.
Kristin: I think without a pin, without preset. Centralized system, your speed to those new channels, your speed to market to those new channels is just a nightmare. Whereas with a proper pin, you’re able to open up a new channel, select the types of content, because every channel has different content requirements.
Kristin: But just modify the content that already exists and gets it, get it into the channel. So it’s not like recreating an entire process just to open up one social, new social channel. , it’s as simple as, clicking and reconfiguring. So I think it’s speed to those channels, being able to test out if those channels work for you, for whatever objectives you think that they should be achieving is just so much faster with with a setup pin.
Brent: And I think just going back to the traditional model of just doing eCommerce through one store, the reality of what’s coming is now we are gonna have maybe even when they talk about headless, maybe it’s not gonna, you’re not, you’re gonna be, everything’s gonna be done through all these channels.
Brent: And I know that in an earlier interview this year, we talked about even conversational commerce where. It’s done through chats and things like that. Yeah. So I think that retailers and merchants need to know that they need to stay at least somewhat ahead of the game or stay with it so you can continue to sell and see the channels that are out there.
Brent: What are the trends in in that social commerce head first type of thing that that Akeneo is jumping onto. . Yeah.
Kristin: So if you think about a certain generation of buyer out there, of which I am not one of they are all over social and the influence that social people, influencers on social media channels have and the impact that it can have on your product.
Kristin: And for brand managers out there who want to control their image having the ability to have a central. Like I said before, just single source of truth for your product information and being able to get that into the hands of when possible influencers is absolutely one one thing that is part of, making sure that your brand image stays consistent even if it’s in the hands of somebody that you’re not paying.
Kristin: The second thing is that those younger consumers value transparency. . And so I think being able to provide in those social channels really truly transparent information about the product itself, but also layering in brand values inside of those social moments with your product. So not even discrete from.
Kristin: Side by side and integrated with your product story that is insanely important for buyers of a certain generation, . So transparency is critical and social is if you’re not there you’re just not existent. And those influencers have power. So if you’re not feeding those influencers with the.
Kristin: Information, they’re just going on their own. Those are the trends that we see, which, I think a pin like ours actually supports really nicely.
Brent: And as your team gets bigger, I think that the importance of having different roles on your team to do different things and I think it applies especially in c let’s language One of the features that I particularly like about Akeneo is the ability to do the, to do checklists of things.
Brent: So you could you can see when your catalog is done in English and maybe your catalog isn’t completed in Spanish, and talk about how how that team aspect and even how that the aspect of having the ability to see when pieces are done and getting things launched quicker and not having to dig through mounds of data to figure out what isn’t and what is.
Brent: How that can help a merchant get things to market quicker.
Kristin: Yeah. I’m glad you point that out because it’s one of the usability features of the solution that I think, doesn’t, is not like the sexiest thing to go talking about, but it’s once you get the product, you’re like, Oh my gosh, thank God.
Kristin: We recently did a total economic impact study with a few of our customers, and found out that retention was one of the outcomes. Employee retention and satisfaction was one of the outcomes of leveraging Akeneo PIM. And the reasons that were given were exactly what you talk about. So it’s the ability to see.
Kristin: Among a lot of products that you have to enrich. You have to get ready for getting to market, see what status they’re in, in, like you said, which language, but which market, which category, which family of products. So you can triage your day and not just waste time combing through and list lists of products.
Kristin: So it’s just a a quick way to understand where you are in your day to day job. And not be like, dragged down in the quagmire of lots of the Excel spreadsheets on lists of products. The other thing that we discovered was that since those employees were not, Drag down with some menial, matching and v lookup tasks that they were a even more satisfied because they were able to do the higher value work.
Kristin: The work that was actually more interesting of writing colorful descriptions, actually looking for what are the right brand images to put against these products. And so actually taking those extra steps to make their products showcase much more brilliantly on the places that they were going.
Kristin: So employee retention was a really wonderful outcome that we, we discovered with with the, those who are using the PIM.
Brent: I think you can create and I’m gonna use all the wrong words, but like a workflow where you can have certain things that have to get done before the product’s ready to go.
Brent: Oh yeah. Which ensures that the product’s gonna be as great and beautiful as it should be when it goes live. Whereas your typical, if you are using some back end of any nondescript eCommerce system you’re not gonna have all. There’s not gonna be all those things in place to ensure that product is the way it should be across all areas. And even as a manager, then it makes it difficult if you didn’t have that tool in hand to make sure your product looks super great for your customer to see.
Kristin: Yeah. No, it’s true. And the time to market is the, is so employee satisfaction and retention is absolutely one of them.
Kristin: But then time to market is the other benefit and the outcome of that because the speed with which you’re able to triage and understand which categories are ready to go. This is high and you, a lot of automation is happening behind the scenes so that you don’t have to do a lot of the manual work that probably you’re doing with spreadsheets and other old fashioned things to get this product information into one place.
Kristin: As an example, one of our customers who’s a seller of, Apple. Apple doesn’t give anybody any information prior to a launch of a new product, Of course. And so even, Staples. And so they would take them, I think, upwards of two weeks to, gather that information from the product launch and get it up onto their channels and into their markets to sell it.
Kristin: My gosh, that’s how much lost revenue over two weeks period. That’s that. That is an impact to the business, and now they turn it around in a matter of hours. Simply due to that process that they’ve nailed down, leveraging the interface of the PIM and all the automations and checkpoints and quality controls that we’ve got.
Brent: One other benefit that you have is that you can have a third party vendor have limited access to start making that product ready. Not, maybe Apple wouldn’t do this, but if you have a vendor who is giving you a product and they’re, they know everything about it and they can, they have access to your system, they could be starting that pre-product input before your team even has to get a hold of it or a lot of that work would already be done to get it live as soon as.
Kristin: Yeah, totally. And so that’s the one solution for retailers and distributors is that onboarding solution to allow third parties to get in there and import their product information alongside other components. But there’s also inside the administrative rights of the core PIM itself, we have a bunch of customers who have seasonal release.
Kristin: And so they have a ton of products that they just have to get out the door in various season, and they find that it’s actually. Really valuable for them and their community actually, where this particular customer is to hire students, like working students as well as retired people to their offices.
Kristin: Give them, these are the three things that you’re working on. And that’s all the access that they have. So they have their list of products that they work on and the various fields and attributes that they’re allowed to enrich, and they find that their time to market. So much faster. Their flexibility with their workforce is pretty darn high, and they love being able to, to hire into the community people who might otherwise not have those types of opportunities.
Kristin: And it’s just this like win, win all around.
Brent: Talking about new product launches and I know that Akeneo recently unlocked a new product, at the Unlocked Conference. Thank you. Tell us about Akeneo Product Cloud and how that’s gonna change things and enhance things.
Kristin: Yeah, we’re super, super excited about this.
Kristin: This this for us is the way that the category evolves. One of the things that we clearly. Encountered in working with the customers that we have and, the benefits of having 80,000 installs of the product and open sources, having conversations with people to see what other pieces of information help to the browser, turn into a buyer.
Kristin: And if you step back and you think about all of those components of product experiences that help you and I discover to learn to make the purchase it’s more than what a traditional modern pin can consume or should consume. You go up on any product product page, you’ll see things like customer reviews, you’ll see things like and if it’s a dynamic pricing that’s not going inside of pin because it’s hot changing by the, this millisecond sometimes pricing.
Kristin: There are things that, let’s see what other components that we can think of that live outside. So there’s order information, right? So understanding if there’s availability of that product in a certain store that’s near you. Those are all components that naturally and should live outside of a traditional modern PIM like Akeneo.
Kristin: But that also serve that browsing to buying experience. And so the product cloud is that evolution of a composable offering that allows merchants and commerce leaders to get their products and showcase their product. Anywhere with any product information in one single pre in place. So it broadens the scope of product information to both warm and hot data.
Kristin: So non-static, non, once and done marketing data to that more dynamic data, puts it all in one place and allows those merchants to do analytics on performance. Of those products in all of the destinations to where it goes. So we’re pretty excited about this. It’s an evolution of building out the various components for us in this product cloud vision that we’re painting out there.
Kristin: But I think we’ve got the backbone of it with the pin with our app store, with our connected marketplace to. All the destinations that that we need to get them to, to the product information too. So we’re pretty excited about the product
Brent: cloud. Is the, so you’re gonna tie in the ERP and any disparate systems that would be connected to the it’s you’re talking about having everything coming into one place and then spitting it out to the multiple channels again.
Kristin: Yeah, exactly. If you think of the PIM is now one component, one composable component of the entire product record. You’ve got a dam, you’ve got order management systems to serve, availability needs in the product record product life cycle systems that allow the searcher or the buyer or the consumer to understand where the inform the product was sourced from potentially since that’s now.
Kristin: A real transparency, like I said, is a real need for BA browsers and buyers to understand where the sourcing material has come from and how it was sourced some of that lives in a system like a plm. And to be able to combine all of those elements into one full product record in the single source.
Kristin: So now the full product record is elevated at a product data platform level and then shipped out and activated into the various channels that it needs to go. That’s what we now mean by a product record being activated into the various destinations where it needs to go. One of the other value propositions that I’m really excited about there is essentially.
Kristin: Now you’ve got the customer record. Oh, sitting in a CDP or a crm. You’ll have the product record completely. Sitting in a PDP product data platform, marrying those two and syncing those two data sources allows for analysis of your business that you’ve never had before. And so up leveling that centralized product record to that centralized customer record is just gonna.
Kristin: Further unlock so much growth for these businesses.
Brent: That really helps the marketers, the top three things in marketing is measuring. And that will give a lot more insight to how well they’re performing. Absolutely. Kristen, if you had if you had a little juicy nugget that you could give a merchant as we’re going into fourth quarter, Black Friday this busier time.
Brent: What could you give a merchant? What would you what do you think the trend is now in, in this the end of 2022?
Kristin: Oh, Juicy nugget. I love experimenting. I do that myself for my marketers in my in my team. If we’re not experimenting, then we’re not trying, we’re not failing.
Kristin: We’re not we’re not getting out there and making sure that we’re the best showcasing our offering in the best. . And so I think for merchants out there, it’s the same. It’s if you can’t quickly experiment in a new channel, if it’s a sales channel or marketing channel you’re missing out, you’re missing out on exposure to new audiences, or you’re missing out on, being able to showcase your products in ways.
Kristin: You couldn’t on a direct to consumer channel, potentially with with a, the YouTube influencer channel that’s coming out. So I think it’s it’s pretty imperative that, this season, if you wanna try something new, the quicker you can get there, measure it, understand it, pull it off.
Kristin: It’s, if it’s not working, but expand it if it is. I think that’s the real power in expanding your business. .
Brent: Yeah. And just to help listeners understand how easy it would be as you have everything in your PIM and you have a new channel that’s now available, all those channels are gonna be connected within api.
Brent: And all you do is connect the two. And even if it’s such a new thing, there’s tons of middleware that can get you in connected if it’s not available. But generally those larger channels or the new channels that are out there, they’re gonna be available to connect to. And just as we wanna sell that particular thing to somebody, that channel wants that connection with you to sell through.
Brent: So I think that’s a great, That’s a great point that you’ve made about how. The time to market is so greatly reduced by having your product all in one place and ready to go.
Kristin: . Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, we know, we noticed this with And I think a lot of learnings came out of covid on so many different dimensions, but when we were trying to support our customers through Covid and the impact that it had on their businesses the ones in our ecosystem they were able to make these pretty significant pivots.
Kristin: We had a company that would sell to airlines. So they sold things like fuel to airlines. They sold things like everything in bulk to support the flight. And Covid hits, What do you do? So their big idea was to pivot to consumers. So they’re selling to, they’re selling to businesses.
Kristin: Clearly. They decided to take their wear. That actually suddenly were pretty useful for people because they had things like hand sanitizer in bulk. And so what they were able to do is do some repackaging but sell to consumers. So they spun up all that product information that they had in the kidney that they were using to sell to businesses, re, just tweak some of the descriptions to make it more consumer friendly.
Kristin: And they push direct to consumer within a matter of months. That’s a business pivot . But they accessed a whole new market through consumers because they have their product information sorted. Wait, that’s experiment, an experimentation at scale, and that’s business survival. And so now coming out of Covid and flights are all back, they have two consumer bases now buying bases now that they’re able to accelerate.
Kristin: The world’s your oyster in that case, right? Just in terms of new markets, new channels that you’re able to experiment with.
Brent: I do wanna make a D2C, B2B point too, that the PIM is a channel to print as well. Yes. And if you’re a B2B and you have traditional, maybe one channel through some kind of website, but you also have a printed catalog PIM is a great place to put all of your products in, and then you can output to a printed catalog just like you do to any other channel.
Brent: You can think of it as electronic and digital, but that digital turns into pieces of paper at the end, and rather than having somebody comb through, pages and pages of InDesign documents or whatever you’re using you can start it in your PIM and then output to some product that, that actually is the printable version.
Brent: Yeah,
Kristin: I was in my CEO’s office a few months ago and he proudly has displayed on his. This massive catalog. It’s like this thick and dense . He puts it on my lap and I’m like, Oh that’s, I could do some weight lifting with this, but it’s entirely powered by the kidney and the level of detail and the product information that’s in here.
Kristin: It, this is not a lost business of selling with a product catalog for many industries. And if you have to sort through all of that, all of those dense pages of product catalogs in product information manually, oh my Lord. And if you get something wrong, the expense of getting something wrong in a printed catalog that you’re doing thousands of, this is.
Kristin: Business impact. So yeah, getting the product information right and all of those checks and balances that you’d want for your digital, easy to pull down a misspelling on a, your direct to consumer channels. But if you’re have a misprint a spelling error in a catalog that has already been printed.
Kristin: you’ve got a problem. So all of the checks and balances that go into that are pretty important for those channels as
Brent: well. Yeah, and I, so Kristen, I think you and I could talk about great solutions for PIM for the next three hours, but unfortunately we are out of time. Yeah. As I put, as I close out on a, each of our podcasts, I give a chance for the guests to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.
Brent: What would you like to plug?
Kristin: I, it’s the mission that we’ve got is to make sure that we provide a solution for anybody who needs it. So I’d say go to Akeneo.com and just start the free trial. And like I said there’s no, no credit card and nothing’s needed. You just put your your name in there and.
Kristin: There’s a live chat inside the food trial. You can explore the experience all on your own time and all on your own. Or if you need help, we’ve got that too. So I would just say check it out. If you’re curious about what exactly it looks like and under the hood is there for you to open up.
Kristin: So atkin.com is the shameless plug that I’ll put out.
Brent: Yeah, and I’ll put all, I’ll put all the links on the show notes. Kristen Naragon, thank you so much. Kristen is the VP of Global Marketing and Strategy for Akeneo. Thank you for being here today.
Kristin: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much, Brent.
Interested in a beginner’s guide to PIM? Check out this article.
