B2B Reimagined

Price changes and churn threats occur throughout the customer journey. How your organization handles them determines how your customers will react: either positively or negatively. Do they stick with you and buy now? Or go elsewhere without a word? It's up to you.

This friendly debate between two passionate CX experts – Zilliant Sr. Director of Alliances, North America Karl Helfner and industry expert Frank Borovsky – is a must-listen for commercial leaders looking to enhance the customer experience. Hear how pricing and sales leaders can team with their CX counterparts to improve customer attitudes and behavior with real-time pricing optimization and revenue operations and intelligence.

Listen to Frank Borovsky's other appearance on B2B Reimagined: Episode 69

Read Frank's CX-focused blog series on Zilliant's site: Critical Calculations for Customer Experience in 2023

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Logik.io CEO Chris Shutts returns to the show, this time to connect with Pascal Yammine, chief executive officer of Zilliant. They discuss the transformational digital shift occurring in industries like traditional manufacturing, high-tech, software, and business services, driven by customer demand for self-service product discovery and buying.

Drawing on recent conversations with customers and prospects, Chris and Pascal paint a vision for a headless, end-to-end commerce and pricing solution that goes far beyond traditional CPQ: bringing flexible, frictionless, and profitable sales motions to life.

Listen to Chris' first B2B Reimagined appearance: How to "Consumerize" B2B Manufacturing

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"When people talk about the death of the channel, the death of distribution, I just sit back and go, 'Hold my beer – give me a whiteboard and I will explain to you how wrong you are.'"

Channelnomics CEO Larry Walsh is our guest today for a wide-ranging discussion on what the channel is and why it matters for B2B companies.

He shared how the pandemic exposed both the vitality of the channel and the perils of neglecting it, how the channel serves as a salve to a recession, why talk of a "new normal" may be misleading, and much, much more.

Read the Channelnomics whitepapers discussed in the episode here: Recession Survival Guide | Distribution as a Recession Countermeasure

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"The world is not constant and stable. So why should your pricing strategy be? You have to mimic the working world that you live in," said Argano Chief Strategy Officer Tim Harris on today's episode.

Harris joined Barrett Thompson to continue the show's ongoing examination on how manufacturers are digitizing their commercial platforms in response to ongoing volatility and unpredictability. Argano specializes in designing modern digital foundations and partners with Zilliant to infuse agile, intelligent pricing into manufacturers' digital future.

Harris and Thompson go deep on the "why" and the "how" behind this critical digitization process.

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"You need to combine the pricing brain and the pricing muscles…the bruscles of pricing."

What does this mean? According to our guests from Accenture – Strategy Principal Director Daniel Lindner and Managing Director, Pricing and Commercial Strategy Daniel Antolin – it means embedding powerful pricing tools into your pricing strategy from the very start. When B2B pricing teams combine the thinking and the doing, so to speak, they earn a seat at the table with company decision-makers and overcome the common obstacles to resiliency. Namely, they can achieve agility, consistency, transparency and differentiated pricing.

Listen to learn how Zilliant and Accenture are busting age-old myths about B2B pricing and how we help our clients find quick wins that serve to fund the rest of their pricing journey.

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Slalom is a global consulting firm and one of the top Salesforce manufacturing partners in the world. Matt Baker and Calvin Chow from Slalom joined the show to help us continue our exploration of current manufacturing trends and commercial solutions.

Learn why a major theme for 2023 is the concept of being nimble – in the areas of pricing, procurement, quoting, and response to macroeconomic changes. We talk through several real-world scenarios and examples of customer success.

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We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring together both of our hosts for the first time. Lindsay and Barrett take a long look at the B2B landscape as 2023 is now underway, with considerable macroeconomic uncertainty persisting amid a new normal in B2B buyer expectations.

How should companies adjust their pricing strategies as prices eventually come down? How can sales operations teams retain and take share, even with widespread reduction in salesforce headcount? Why have those who modernized their commercial systems prior to the pandemic gotten so far ahead of the competition, and how can laggards catch up?

Get the answers to these questions and more, then stick around for our hosts' recommendations on the must-listen episodes from 2022.

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"It used to be that pricing was the most dangerous thing to change, and that if it were done wrong, customers would head out the door and never come back. As a result of the pandemic and the barrage of supply chain woes, material availability, order management, S&OP and demand planning, all that has changed. Historical supply and demand trends don't apply anymore."

In this episode, Salesforce Vice President, Industry Sales for Manufacturing, Auto and Energy Frank Borovksy brought us this insight and much more. Listen to Frank and Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Duran discuss current manufacturing trends, why dynamic pricing is necessary to prevent margin erosion, and what to expect in 2023.

Read about a building products manufacturer that used advanced pricing tools to overcome economic volatility: Strategic Pricing: Thriving in Tumultuous Times

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"We have seen distributors really catching up as it relates to technology. Digitalization has been a key topic across the entire industry. Cloud seems to be the big equalizer, because the software can be staged at really low setup costs. There's not an innovation tax anymore that companies need to pay."

SAP's Global VP of Wholesale Distribution Magnus Meier shared this sentiment and much more with us on today's episode. He joined Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Duran for a deep dive into the current state of wholesale distribution, challenges that distributors are facing, and how technology and value-added services are the key to success in 2023.

Watch our recent webinar with Magnus: Moments of Opportunity: Margin & Revenue Growth in Distribution

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Those working in and observing the building materials and construction industry have been through a rollercoaster ride. In 2020, plants and job sites shut down completely. Then, upon reopening, a surge in demand for new builds and remodels collided with shortages in many of the products necessary to satisfy it. Prices thus soared in 2022 but look to be on their way down as a potential recession lurks.

Few follow the sector closer than Craig Webb, president of Webb Analytics and longtime industry journalist. Craig came on the show to help us make sense of the past three years, his expectations for various construction markets in 2023, and what companies need to be doing now to get ahead of the next economic shift.

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Read the whitepaper mentioned in the episode: Inflation & Beyond: 5 Margin- and Revenue-Driving Strategies for 2023

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