MarTalks: How to Crack the B2B Marketplace (Without Losing Your Sanity)

How to Crack the B2B Marketplace (Without Losing Your Sanity)

What happens when you mix a passion for B2B eCommerce, a knack for storytelling, and a borderline obsessive drive to educate an industry? You get Justin King, founder of the B2B Commerce Association—and quite possibly the only guy who ranks on the first five pages of Google for "B2B eCommerce." (Seriously, try it.)

Justin joined me on MarTalks to share his wild ride through eCommerce, from shouting into the void via his blog in 2007 (hi, Mom and Dad!) to becoming the go-to guy for B2B strategy at companies like 3M, Home Depot, and Granger.

Key takeaways from our chat:
🛑 Stop using B2C buzzwords. Telling a distributor about "conversion rates" is like explaining TikTok to your grandfather—it’s not gonna click.
🎯 Build a real B2B team. B2B isn't a side hustle for your B2C sales team. You need specialized sales, marketing, and customer success pros who get the space.
📚 Educate your team. Justin's association literally has a course called "How to Speak Manufacturing 101" because knowing your customer's language isn't a "nice-to-have"—it’s how you close deals.
📱 Ditch the polished corporate videos. Gen Z and Millennials are making B2B buying decisions, and they prefer raw, real, and relatable content. (Think TikTok, not TED Talk.)

Justin’s passion for advancing B2B eCommerce is infectious. If you’re selling into this space—or thinking about it—do yourself a favor and start learning the language of your customers.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Martox, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Martalks is devoted to covering the latest technology developments that drive the global commerce ecosystem from advertising to last mile. Enjoy all of our content at Rosenstein Group.com slash Mar Talks-Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Today we're going to be speaking with Justin King, the founder of the B2B Commerce Association. Justin, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Well, it's very nice to have you here. You know, we've known each other for a few years now. And when we first met, you were championing the marketing group there at Salzify. And uh if you could do a far better job than I could of sharing a bit more about your background to get us started, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, sure. It's actually a pretty fun story because it's not a straight line. As most good careers are not straight lines. My mine certainly is not a I kind of started in the consulting world in the e-commerce space. And so I've been in the e-commerce space for almost my entire career. Started very technical and then moved into kind of project management. And in 2007, I was at a conference and I saw a speaker at that conference, and I said, that's what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to speak. I want to speak. I want to evangelize wherever I'm at. I just want to be on stage. I felt like that was my gift. That was my passion. I didn't know if it was my gift or my passion. I just was like, this is what I want to do. So I started reverse engineering what those speakers did. And they all had a blog and they all had an expertise. And I looked at my own life and I said, I've got no expertise in anything. I'm a I'm a generalist. Like, what do I like? How do I build this myself? So I did a big inventory of all the things that I enjoyed doing, the interests, my career path, the expertise I did have in some areas. And I picked an area and I said, I'm in the e-commerce world. I'm also in the kind of manufacturing and distribution world, but they're not combined. They're not together. We're not doing e-commerce in the manufacturing and distribution world. So I said, How I'm going to place a bet that in the future e-commerce is going to be a key foundational element, not just for consumers, not just for brands, not just for retailers, but for manufacturers and distributors and customers and how they interact with each other, how they sell to each other. And I'm going to make a bet on it. So I started a blog called eCommerce and B2B.com because it was a great URL, not because I'm very creative in the domain naming. And I started a blog and started write about the future of this e-commerce in the B2B world, like how it works with manufacturers and distributors. And I wrote on that blog from 2007 to 2012, and no one came to my blog. I'm exaggerating a little bit. I'm exaggerating a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

My mom, my dad came to my blog, but that's about it.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

You know, Nostradamus had that same issue for a couple of centuries, and he got over it.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

He got over it. Eventually, this actually became something. Eventually, e-commerce started coming to manufacturing distributors. Granger launched their large distributor portal to their customers in 2012. And then people started typing into their into Google search engines, B2B e-commerce, and my little site dominated not the first five listings, but the first five pages of Google, which is a pretty incredible thing to say. I was one of the only ones writing about this topic for that time period. You're shouting out into the darkness. It really was. And I started a trajectory to writing a book, becoming a speaker, becoming a writer, really becoming a media and content producer and thought leader in this whole area of B2B commerce that eventually led me to selling a company and then starting my own company and then selling it to Salsify in 2019, where I was hired to start a manufacturing distributor practice inside of a software company and teach the go-to-market strategy and how do we sell? How do we market? How do we message to, how do we build product for this really unique market? Because they saw it as the future too. And I did that for five years and then left at the end of last year to really co-found the B2B e-commerce association with the original founder, who's Brett Sinclair out of Melbourne. So it's been a pretty very, very non-straight line, non-linear line into my career. But it's something that I am passionate about and I love this industry truly.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Well, I mean, that sounds like better than the kind of, I don't know, drunken weave that I've done in my career.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

There's been enough of that too.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

You know, the head-on collisions and, you know, the cliff falls. You've had a much more linear progression. But at the end, what we've got is a purpose-built organization to help technology vendors develop their marketing to B2B e-commerce clients. And that's an extremely valuable set of lessons that you've packaged up and that every software company, every technology company, every B2B sales company ought to be aware of. And I'm glad that we have you here to talk a little bit more about it. But from a talent perspective, what kinds of marketing leadership skills or backgrounds do you think are crucial for driving a successful market entry? I mean, I've seen companies miss out on marketing opportunities or market opportunities due to a gaps in their leadership. They have people that you just don't understand who they're selling to, what's going to be spectacularly valuable about their offering or differentiate about their volume. Do you see specific roles or types of expertise as pivotal when entering a new market, B2B writ large?

SPEAKER_01 6:31

I think it's less about roles right now, as much as it is about education. I think there's been a, you know, in the e-commerce world, as you're building a team to service the manufacturers and distributors, which is a, by the way, it's a very viable market. It's about $18 trillion on the B2B side versus about $6 trillion on the B2C side. So that there's a significant, there's a significant gap.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Well, you can impress me with numbers all day. Yeah, that's that's good.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

It's a significant growth opportunity. And by the way, the B2B world is so much more immature. So that number has so much growth potential in it, especially over the next five years. As I see companies approach that though, they they want to approach it in the same way they've approached the retailers and brands. And whether it's marketing or sales or product or customer success, they tend to want to take those same skills they've learned successfully in selling to a retailer or a brand, and they want to apply it into the B2B world thinking they're the same. And then while there are similarities, there's enough differences that make that a very evident thing very, very quickly. And it makes it, and to the manufacturer and distributor, when you go in and you're using kind of B2C type language or retail type language, they're immediately turned off by it. So more than just roles, although there are roles, more than roles is really the education and training that's needed to for people to be able to talk the language of their customers, which we all know that's the key, right? I mean, every marketer out there knows, every salesperson knows the key to selling and marketing to a any customer is to be able to talk their language, right? Or at least translate to their language in a simple format. So I really think that's key. I do think that there's a relative lack of when a team is being built, there are some core roles that should be built that companies don't often think about. So I you know, there's a couple ways of building a team to go after a new industry. Often it's done through overlays and maybe one or two people with expertise. This world is so drastic and so dramatically different than the retail world. We've seen teams need to be built specific for this industry. So having a salesperson specific for B2B, a marketing person specific for B2B, and at least a sales engineer specific to B2B that can demonstrate the value of the whatever the tools or software or services that that company has been building. But unfortunately, a lot of companies want to do overlays, and we just haven't watched overlays be overly effective in this market. From large companies to small companies, it's just been a tough way to do it versus building a very purpose-filled team to address this market.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Well, as you said, B2B is three times the marketplace opportunity. So it behooves a company that's going into that space to bring on board people that have expertise within B2B, gravitas with working with B2B customers and B2B stacks and B2B transactions. But as someone who helps companies find those marketing leaders and sales leaders for their businesses, I often see that the skill sets required for B2B differ significantly from those in B2C. And what competencies do you believe B2B marketers need to most effectively engage with the complex buying groups and the longer sales cycles inherent in B2B software and technology sales?

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah, I think it's an interesting, I think a language, the language that's used in this world is just so radically different than the language that is used on the other side. So if you can imagine, if you can imagine having a conversation, even even simple things like in the retail and brand world, we talk about consumers. And we often, I mean, that word consumers is used, it just rolls off the tongues of every sales and marketing person out there, right? We talk about conversion rates and average order value and and some of these acronyms and things that are so kind of prevalent in the retail world. When we use those worlds, it's actually words, it's actually a turnoff in the B2B world. We don't have consumers in the B2B world. We have customers, we have clients, we have very complex supply chains that are often multiple layers thick. And these complex supply chains are typically not, they're they're not just kind of the fringe use cases, they are the normal use cases, like complex is normal in the B2B world. So being able to understand that, and and understanding that is really about really spending time with manufacturer distributors or finding a way to simple things like working with buying groups or associations that feed directly into this just to be able to understand the language that's being used in this industry, I think is the most critical.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Well, that's why I learned French.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

That's right. I've never been good at language, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Never been good at well, you know, you have to, if you want to transact with people in another country, you need to be able to speak their language. And I wanted to transact when I was a student in France. So you do that.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

I've always wanted to speak Spanish. I've never wanted to learn Spanish.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

You know, I I think most of the people that I've spoken Spanish with really wish that I could learn to speak Spanish better. Really? Really, yeah. I think they're remarkably patient, but you know, Duolingo has made me a menace. It's made me a menace.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Hey, the new technology is incredible.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

I'm gonna keep on that path. I'm just gonna keep on that path until they force me to speak English again. But I guess back to the people here that are required to make this happen. You know, marketers require a set of understandings about the market that they are trying to penetrate, that are trying to sell to. They need that language and they all also need a certain set of skills in terms of building that top of funnel, in terms of understanding what messaging is going to resonate with their core audience. And in your experience, which marketing skills do you find are the hardest to recruit for in the B2B space? I mean, I find that companies often struggle to identify marketers who not only have technical expertise, but also think strategically to create scalable programs. Do you find any specific techniques or strategies that are especially sought after in the people you've used to staff your marketing organizations?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

I think there's some ones that I think are interesting that I think are the most effective that are really difficult to find. And frankly, a lot of people just don't even think about. I think copywriting is the most underrated thing in today's marketing world. The ability to write interesting, compelling in the language of the customer with humor, with story. Copywriting plays into every aspect of marketing, whether it's you know, writing a headline, whether it's writing a YouTube headline, whether it's doing a thumbnail for TikTok, whether it's the script itself that's incorporated in that copywriting is so critical. And most companies hire marketers or hire designers, and so few hire people that are copyrighted. By the way, when I say copyright, I don't mean that you have to just be in the copy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The skill of copywriting is an ultimate skill that can be used in every aspect of your life, right? It can be used in your daily right with email and just talking to your own leadership, and then of course, can be demonstrated. So copywriting. I think the next one is especially people of my generation, we don't understand the marketing and event structure that engages the millennial and and you know, Gen Z. My kids, I have four daughters. My four daughters are 24, 21, 20, and 19. They are all Gen Z. They're entering the workforce. My 24-year-old's in the workforce. She's a sales engineer for a B2B e-commerce software company. My other three are entering the workforce as well. Their response to the type of marketing we do today is so radically different from it. There's a new Forester report that came out today, and it said 71% of buyers in B2B companies are now millennials or Gen Z. This whole group has never known a world without the internet. Never known. The ideas of short form content, short form videos, the ideas of a non-perfect video that is so captured in the TikTok and Instagram world where it's not highly produced, right? It's a it feels more real life. The idea to create an experiential event that's not just about content and training, but actually creates an experience for people is part of this new generation. And this new generation can't be discounted. And frankly, I think a lot of us, you know, I've I've myself gotten addicted to the short form videos myself. And so I don't even think it's a generational thing. It's a generational influence, not a generational consume thing. And those people that know how to think and kind of tear down the structures of this is how we used to market, this is what our customers want, who they are, what they believe in, and we're going to feed them on the channels that they are instead of having to do it through a traditional model, I think is a very, very undervalued skill.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Well, I mean, maintaining currency with trends is always been a marquee skill set. And, you know, when you're interviewing someone, you understand whether or not they're curious.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

If they're spending their time reminiscing about the way things were constantly, they're not terribly engaged as the way things are and what what we just did. But the technology keeps evolving too, you know, in terms of social listening, in terms of social CRM, in terms of social commerce, in terms of social advertising, short form video, viral marketing, all of these things are playing into the B2B space as well. And you're at the B2B Commerce Association, you're advising companies on selecting their marketing technology, no?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Yeah, I mean, it's more than that, it's it's really helping. So we have kind of two groups of customers. One are the manufacturers and distributors themselves that want a community, a place to network, and a place to learn and get great content about how to do their own jobs easier. These are VP of digitals, they're, you know, director of digitals at manufacturing distributors, and they're asking, they live in a lonely place, right? They're often one of just a few people inside their whole company that do this. And it's often a lonely place. They're asking for that connection and that community, and of course, that training to continue to upskill them and give them better opportunities within their organization. Then on the other side, we have the vendors and the software vendors, the agencies, the integrators that are trying to serve this manufacturer and distribution environment and want kind of the opposite. They want, they want to learn how do I engage with manufacturing and distributors? How do I sell to them? How do I market to them? How do I build product for them? How do I support those customers? And so we're supporting both on both sides. It's a nice flywheel effect, actually. The more manufacturer and distributors we get, the more vendors we get, and the more vendor expertise we get to help those manufacturers and distributors, the more manufacturing and distributors we get. And so it's a, you know, we really are truly serving both on both sides.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

Well, it's nice to have one organization that has that much symbiosis in it. I see that there are certain instances where the clients really want to tell the vendors, look, this is what I like. This is what I don't like.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

You might be providing them just that sort of a forum. But also, you know, when you're the chief technologist at a B2B at a manufacturer, and you're trying to figure navigate the landscape, particularly when it comes to adopting the latest technologies and composable, you're going to have more flexibility in terms of how you build your tech stack. You're going to have instead of one monolithic provider from hybrids, all of a sudden now you've got commerce tools and eight other SLAs in there for your PIM and for your digital asset management. You want somebody to give you some insight into which pieces are most effective for you. It's not just the vendor.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

I mean, it's not just me they want advice from. They want advice from their peers and they want to hear what their different experiences are, right? They want kind of this kind of 360 view around the decisions that they're making. They want to shortcut some of the decisions that they're making, right? And be able to make faster choices, better choices. And then for critical decisions, they want a place to throw around and say, hey, this is the decision I'm making. What do you think about it? How do you support this? And have you made these types of decisions in the past? In the past, those communities haven't existed where you could actually have those conversations. And it's pretty exciting. It's actually uh something I've been trying to I've tried this three times. When I talked about my, you know, non-straight line for a career, there were plenty of ups and downs in that career, plenty of failures. And I've tried to build this community three times. And the timing just wasn't right. It just wasn't uh, you know, people aren't used to these types of communities, and now it's just such a beautiful place because people are ready for this, they're active, they're hungry for this type of information and the type of connection, especially over the last couple of years when we saw with COVID. So it's a pretty exciting place to be in.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

I've been thrilled. I mean, I've been going to you know, NRF and Shop Talk and Shop Org and IRC and ETAL and B2B Commerce Chicago for many, many years. And it's created this awareness that hey, we can do this all the time online. And we can capture these lessons and share them in a systematic way. So I'm glad that you're Taking advantage of you're playing your part that's right effectively there. And thanks. But let's get back to the sales and the go-to-market alignment. I think that when I have engaged in a search for a CRO or a CMO, and I do a deep needs analysis for why is this open? Why, you know, what is what needs to be accomplished? We're generally replacing somebody. And it's generally because they weren't talking to their compatriot across the way. The CRO wasn't talking to the CMO. They weren't aligned on what they were saying with customers, what their strategy was. And when it comes to B2B, alignment is even more important than it is you have to sing off of the exact same sheet music when you're in sales and marketing. And from your perspective, what traits or experiences do you think that make a marketing executive particularly effective at aligning with their sales counterpart?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

If we back up a little bit, I think there's always a cultural problem when that happens inside of an organization. If I'm the executive of one of these companies and I see misalignment on the teams underneath me, the first thing I have to think about is what kind of culture have I built in that allows this misalignment to happen with my team within my team? That's just where I would start. However, even within individual, like great cultures of people and very collaborative cultures and encouragement of reaching across the aisle, I think that traditional models have still kind of seeped into what we're doing here. So if you think about like, you know, in the past, it's always been more, you know, sales doing their job, marketing doing their job, often on two sides of the building, right? Not actually working together. And that and that and that or two different buildings. Actually, that's preferably two different buildings.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

What is going on?

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Or zip codes. That's right. I think that that line between them has to be obliterated. I think the CRO roles that have included both sales and marketing in them are really interesting, right? When you have one leadership leading both. I think when marketing is split out and do another, you know, maybe even at the CMO level, I think you often get these silos between them. The reality is you are both the closest people in the company to the customer, right? Sales being the closest and then marketing being the second closest. It's not marketing's job to take leads and throw them over the fence and then just leave them there, right? I think I think there's new roles like I think revenue optimization, revenue marketing optimization are those roles that are starting to blend both together as a single role. And I like the idea of actually including marketing in the teams. And so sales has a marketing person with them. Now that might be a shared marketing resource, but having them together, I think leads and the feedback to what kind of leads are coming in and how those leads are being generated and what the ICP is for a customer, I think has to be has to be worked on together, not separately. Or you get these kind of walls where marketing is throwing leads over the wall and sales like these are junk leads and throwing them back over the wall, right? And those kind of lines being kind of torn down are pretty critical. I always love tearing down lines with compensation. I I think I think creating compensation models where groups of people are incentivized together to work on something is the fastest way, especially in software companies. The fastest way to get alignment inside of an organization is align compensation. Align compensation to very specific goals, and you tend to get better results than just telling people what to do. And it even works better if everyone is compensated on those same goals, right? From the CEO down to the CMO to the CRO, if they're all compensated in the same way to the same goals, then you get the best. And compensation will always be my hack. It doesn't cure everything, it's not the cure all, the NLB all, but it's certainly the fastest way to drive alignment to very, very specific goals and tearing down those walls should be one of them.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Well, I think that you know you've struck upon something that's particularly relevant given what you shared earlier. When a company is a B2C technology or software provider and they're going to go into the B2B marketplace, they're going to need to hire people that have expertise within B2B, either as a head of marketing for B2B or a head of manufacturing. Could be we want to see if we think that we can sell into the high-tech vertical. So we're bringing the first person from high-tech in here, the first few people from high-tech with a high-tech sales background that have transacted with HP and Apple and that cabal, giving them a shared compensation model that has reasonable expectations. You can't hire a head of sales and say you have the same ACV requirement for your team as our B2C team.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

It's just not, you don't know. You don't know. You're taking a guess, you're shooting in the dark. The same thing with your marketer. You don't know what your CAC is going to be. You don't know how many leads they're going to have to prosecute. You don't know how many steps. You do know that the sales cycles are going to be longer. You do know that you don't have a reputation within that space. So it's about evangelizing all over again. You'd think, well, we've got hundreds of customers. Like, well, it doesn't matter to a hilla beans, to the B2B customer, if all of your customers before that are B2C. Just like you could have sold hundreds of versions of your software in Europe to an American buyer. It's like, well, I really don't care. It may not work on this side of the ocean. So true. It just is the same thing. Well, in terms of uh, you know, I brought up CAC. So we've got to talk about cost of customer acquisition. If we're talking about marketing and what companies should be investing, I mean, it's only fair. But for companies looking to bring in data-driven marketing leaders, are there any KPIs beyond cost of customer acquisition that you see as essential for identifying the effectiveness of a marketing executive? I mean, when I look for help companies look for a new talent in marketing, it's understanding the metrics that matter can really help ensure that they hire the right person. And yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

In the B2B world, I think what companies will find is that the lifetime value of a B2B customer is significantly higher than a B2C customer. And understanding when you compare cost of acquisition to value of that customer, you can get different ratios that I think are more important to look at than the actual cost. So, for example, your cost of customer acquisition on the B2C side might be lower than on the B2B side, but your potential revenue and profit on that customer is significantly different. And they they have to be treated differently because of that. And so I always encourage companies to look at that versus anything else. I also the time, I think in the B2B world, you typically, you know, these transactions take so much longer. Anytime you have an educational component to this, right, where the customer has to be often educated about the decision they're going to make. When they have to be educated, the amount of time they it takes to educate them, and then the amount of time it takes for them to make a decision is significantly longer. So even when you're including customer acquisition cost, I think you should also factor in the amount of time it takes to close that customer as well. I think that will add to the customer acquisition cost over time to get a better picture and fuller number of what that is.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Again, I think that I couldn't agree more. Particularly, I keep coming back to composable commerce for a reason. Composable is so much different than legacy monolithic commerce, where a replatform was a multi-year affair that was endless and was tragically managed and uh you know impossible to understand when it was going to end. Whereas shifting to composable is not, it is technically replatforming, but it's not a replatform exercise. It's a sequential upgrade. It's a sequential upgrade by functionality. A customer can swap out their PIM without doing anything else. They could swap out their digital experience without doing anything else. They could add a state-of-the-art CDP without doing anything else. And so the disruption in totality is lesser. And that educational effort is why we're here.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

It's making that transition, it's not nearly as brutal as it once was. It's not unplugging the old system one day and wondering whether your job was still going to be there when you plugged in the new one. It's a much more predictable process. Well, let's talk about building a marketing department for B2B success. We've addressed it a couple of ways thus far, but building a robust team is a common challenge. Yeah. I see for companies that are they're looking to scale in B2B. And what roles or skills do you consider foundational? And are there certain non-traditional skills, like I mean, we mentioned copywriting, but there's also change management or sales alignment that we've also mentioned that you've seen as critical for the team's long-term success. And specifically, I'm just talking about when you're hiring that first head of marketing for B2B, what's got to be in that person's toolkit for them to be able to reliably build upon themselves?

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

So a company is a B2C software technology vendor, and they have made the decision, yeah, we've we see an opportunity for B2B. What are table stakes for that founder? What do they need to understand and who do they need to hire at a minimum to have a reasonable expectation that they're going to exploit that market?

SPEAKER_01 33:04

I I think you have to look at it as a go-to-market team, not just a sales team, not just a marketing team, not just a product team. Go-to-market team. And so, and the the basics of a go-to-market team are have a good salesperson, right? That understands this market, or that's committed to getting trained up in this market. Have a committed sales engineer, someone that knows how to demonstrate the product in the use cases of the manufacturer and distributor. These are typically not the same, and they're typically different people. Have a at least a part-time marketer that's able to serve the messaging specific to manufacturer and distributors, and then at least a part-time SDR or BDR to be able to, you know, set appointments for that sales team. That's the basic team. I think what you'll find very, very quickly is that starts to bleed into other areas. Very quickly, customer success will come and say, we need to be able to support the customers that we've closed. And now we need to have people that understand this market and the use cases. And I mean, for example, like a just a brand working with like a brand like 3M working with Home Depot versus Granger, those are two radically different experiences. And just to be able to support them doing both is very difficult. Customer success and then product is the next team that very, very quickly says, okay, how do we build product for this very specific industry? And so I think you can start with sales SC, some part-time support for BDR and marketing, but they're focused on B2B. But very, very quickly, you see the whole go-to-market team expand to customer success and product pretty quickly as well.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

Yeah, I've seen it as a non-starter when you hire an enterprise sales executive and tell them sell to B2C and B2B, they end up being master of nothing and not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot. Or they go to one.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Or they often gravitate towards the one that they're most familiar with, which is almost always B2C, right? And that's what's happened. I've watched it happen at multiple organizations until they create dedicated teams. By the way, the problem with creating dedicated teams is now you're relying on them a time frame for them not to be productive and to be productive. Like it's typically not six months, it's typically at least 12 months, right? Yeah. So it's also five. When we built this team, I brought in a salesperson, I brought in a sales engineer, we brought in some marketing help. It took them nine months to become productive because they weren't selling to B2C, right? They were they were crafting new messaging for this new landscape. However, when they were in front of a manufacturer distributor, they crushed it, right? Because they were very, very focused on this industry. If they were selling both B2C and B2B, they would have just continued working on B2C customers because it was the easiest to do. And so you have to deal with some of that time, the time extension that you get, and the cost of building a team like this is typically at least six to nine months um runway on it.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Yeah, and just having that commitment to them, to those people you bring on board, that yeah, I we we know that this is a long-term project.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:17

This is not a turnaround. We're not gonna be coming back to you in a quarter or two quarters and saying, where's the revenue? We understand that this is an evangelistic role. We appreciate you taking this adventure. Right. Of course, I've never heard a founder say that.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

So if one's listening today and actually says it someone can say it, nobody's real, nobody really believes it. Nobody really believes what you just said.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

You're gonna be making some real friends. You're gonna be making some, I'm sure the board is totally aligned on that too.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Yeah, if you know who the that vendor is, let me know. I've got lots of applicants for them.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Well, let's talk about scaling. You know, one of the things that I love about your process there at B2B Commerce Association is that you're providing some very detailed training for marketers and for sellers. It's like this is yeah, selling to B2B 101. This is how to speak manufacturing 101. This is how to speak distribution 101. Yeah and then there's a you have a whole set of coursework that you provide training, mentorship. I've noticed to my everlasting chagrin with startups that they hire somebody to head up a department, and that person is often running selling or marketing, and they totally neglect building an onboarding methodology for the people that come after them. Or, you know, the company is looking to hire somebody that's junior in one of these roles because they're not even sure if the market for them exists in B2B. So they don't have any onboarding for a B2B marketer. And especially as the teams scale quickly, how would you recommend companies create a structured onboarding plan specifically for marketing hires to help them make an impact faster for to stick around?

SPEAKER_01 38:15

I think there's two aspects of it. One is when you first come on board, the other is you just have general teammates. I mean B2B knowledge is the number one request inside of sales, marketing, customer success teams in the e-commerce space. And the reason is is there's nowhere to get upskilling information. Like, how do you upskill your team? Like, even if you have a decent onboarding process where they learn the basics, how do you continue to upskill them through the years? You can upskill them in sales methodologies and sales tactics. That's that's a that's a wonderful thing to do, but how do you upskill them in knowledge and industry expertise, which allows them to get into the head of their customers even more? And I think having an onboarding and upskilling process, I think is critical for organizations. So we've created these kind of core courses, and they're not simple, they're not the basics. They are, yes, they are foundational, but they move very quickly into personas. And who is the VP of IT at one of these companies? Where do they come from? Like what's their kind of mentality? What messaging works for them? Where do these guys hang out at? Who are their peers? And where do them and their peers hang out with? By the way, the answers to them are drastically different than they are in the retail world. So to be able to have that information and then continue that education, I just think education, you know, every interesting thing that I've done in my life is because I saw it, I read about it, I read a book about it, I watched a video about it, and the light bulb kind of went off for me. And then I got into that thing and started to understand it, and then it opened up a whole nother avenue in my life. And that is no different. I think education training is the absolute key to all of this, and really that's the number one. You know, our tagline is advancing the future of B2B e-commerce through education because we believe in it that much.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

Well, making people productive more quickly is is the first advantage for having that knowledge set that you offer. But I'd also say, uh as you said, most of these folks that are in acquisition in B2B commerce, they're millennials, they're Gen Z, and they have been brought up in an environment where they appreciate that they're gonna have to to remain relevant, to be remain competitive, to remain employed, are gonna have to constantly learn, are gonna have to constantly adapt, are gonna have to constantly pick up something new. And a smart entrepreneur, a smart founder recognizes that they've got to have as a core value an educational plan and training plan and improvement plan for those valuable folks that they're adding, so that when they join, they are given a plan. This is what you're gonna learn. This is your advancement. These are the skills you need to master, these is the language, this is these are the techniques. And that will at least get you to a position where you could potentially retain your most valuable employees because these millennials and these Gen Zers who are non-productive for a fairly long period of time after you hire them, once you get them productive, you want them to stick around, and nothing's gonna get them to stick around more than feeling like there's a pathway for them. There's an investment being made in them in training. That's one of the most consistent complaints I hear is that nobody gets trained. Lack of training. Nobody gets trained. Well, it's like what that's right. It's a minimal investment compared to the value you derive from it.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

It is the number one complaint is lack of training, right? Lack of training, how to do my job, lack of continued training to do my job better. I mean, people at the end of the day, people do want to succeed, right? They want to do better. And how do they upskill themselves? And training education, it has to be good training too. It can't be, you know, we have we have lots of training in our LMS systems that's just horrible, right? And doesn't really get at the core. And I think, I think having good quality training. We just finished, we're we're about to do our live vendor course in January, and we've just finished kind of the foundations, the B2B e-commerce professional level one. And right away I've sent it off to a learning company and said, start rewriting it because we want to write this and continue to improve it to help people actually understand it and learn it. And, you know, we just released it and we're already starting to work on version two. And I think that's a pretty incredible thing.

SPEAKER_02 43:04

Well, I again, I I really appreciate you having created this essentially professional university, professional community for B2B marketers and for all those founders out there that by trade, by background, are not marketers, and you want to hire the best and you want to retain them. You need to give them access to a mentor, to a community. This is a great opportunity to do so through the B2B Commerce Association. And I encourage you to get involved, to get engaged so that your teams get the value, make a contribution at the same time, and you get to know much more about your target audience and develop some potential relationships with them as well along the way as a result. So, Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to speaking with you again in the future.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Thanks for listening to Mar Talks, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and while you're at it, leave a rating and review. To find out more about how the Rosenstein Group can help you find the right leaders for your client development teams in Martech and e-commerce, please visit our website at Rosenstein Group.com.