Transcript: Episode 5 - The Magical Intersect – Sales + Marketing + Digital

And you just get a far more energized, more aligned organization in which people are working. There's enormous power in just making really, really simple changes, again, to work more effectively cross functionally. But at the end of the day, every single organization is typically trying to achieve one thing or another to do with money, whether that's for their shareholders, their private owners.

Welcome to The Ecommerce Experience, the podcast that turns you into an ecommerce expert. Your host, Andrew Rogencamp, shares his wealth of B2B and B2C business experience to take you on an ecommerce adventure. Each month, you'll hear from industry experts and meet people just like you, looking to take their business to new heights online.

Welcome to the latest episode of The Ecommerce Experience. My name's Andrew Rogencamp, and I'm here to bring you all I can about ecommerce both in B2B and B2C. So this month, what we're gonna do is talk to a chap called Paul Munkley, and I've worked with Paul before. And he's one of those guys that has is is had a senior role in both sales and marketing. Of course, you know, that also means that he's had a senior role in digital recently.

And he's one of those guys that really knows the difference and looks at an ROI when it comes to marketing and has a look at how it works throughout the whole business. So worked in sales roles, worked in marketing roles, and has a close affinity with the whole digital piece. He's now with a company called Emmett Consulting, which he's one of the founders of, and they do marketing consulting out of Melbourne and and around Australia. So, yeah, I hope you enjoy the chat with Paul, and, yeah, here we go. So, Paul, thanks for joining me today.

It's really good to have you here. Paul, I've worked with over several years, and he's got a a great deal of experience in working for several large companies. And what Paul brings a lot of experience in is is around not just the marketing piece, but the sales piece and also the digital piece. I often don't know whether to call you the head of sales or the head of marketing or the head of digital, but you certainly span all those areas. And it's a real good opportunity to have a chat about how those three really important sections or or, you know, departments in a business can work better.

You know, what you've seen companies do well, what you've seen companies haven't do well over the years, and and how people can harness the power of those three together to to really make a difference in their business. So, you know, in terms of that, you know, what we call that sales marketing digital triangle, you know, what do you see of some of the most important things in there to do?

Thanks Andrew, and firstly thanks for the opportunity to join you and your listeners on this podcast. Think culture is the keyword. Very first thing is irrespective of whether you have, I think, a sales and marketing leader at the executive or a sales leader or a marketing leader, culturally, if you don't set those teams up from the outset to think as one and to collaborate as one and to behave as one, two things will happen. Firstly, you just won't get that fabulous feeling of energy and camaraderie and drive in your workforce. And secondly, you'll get less than optimal returns from your sales organization.

I actually think in particular from your marketing organization. The very first thing is for want of a better word than setting pace or taking the concept of setting pace, it's around, I think, setting your entire organization up and even beyond sales and marketing. We'll talk about the technology team and the digital team and the finance guys, for example, to think and behave as one. And I think there are some really, really simple steps that you can take to make that happen in which some of the more successful organizations I've been in have definitely taken and led the way around. The first one of those, I guess, is cadence.

So however much you might sit there culturally and say, Guys, we need you to work together. We want you to work together. We want the concept of not two different organisations, but one organisation pushing together. If those organizations are set up as basic as this sounds on different meeting rhythms, different meeting cycles, talking around different things, especially in their key meetings, then you're not going to expose sales to marketing, marketing to sales, and the digital group to either of those guys as well as you could have. And people aren't going to work with as much, I guess, empathy or comprehension if they were sitting in one of those departments.

So the first thing is those key meetings, I firmly believe are not meetings that your digital marketing guys should maybe attend once a month or once a quarter. But if you have cadence that says, I have key performance meetings every week, every fortnight, every month, Those functionally led meetings, let's say they're sales led, for example, those sales led meetings should have your marketing guys and girls in every single meeting, your digital representative, and for that matter, because we're talking about how teams work together, very much your performance people, your business performance people, your finance guys and girls. You just get a much richer conversation. And again, you get so much more empathy because you really appreciate the pressure is on each of those individual departments that otherwise you kind of think you know, but you never really feel. The second piece then I think successful organizations definitely go really well on is around KPIs.

And I'm not saying for a second that your sales org and your marketing org and your digital team won't have functionally specific KPIs, but at the end of the day, every single organization is typically trying to achieve one thing or another to do with money, whether that's for their shareholders, their private owners, I hate the term not for profit, but collecting money to put into something that is incredibly valuable and important at a community level.

It's all about ringing the cash register at the end of the day, isn't it?

That's exactly what it is. No organization survives unless they have cash flow, unless they have money coming in for whatever purpose. So, you know, typically, I think my experience is actually the sales guys are really wearing that sales pressure wave. Depending on the marketing department, I tend to find a lot of marketing departments aren't necessarily as commercially orientated as they should be. So they look at their net promoter, they look at their brand preference and their brand conversion.

Where's the revenue? Where's my profitability? Where are the goals the finance guys are sweating about and the sales guys are sweating about? Sadly, often with digital teams, I find they can be further back, where they kind of thought of as the techie guys and girls. And yet, they have so much to bring to the table that, again, if they're nursed in those conversations and they're sharing revenue, margin, profit KPIs to some degree, they're more likely to orientate around, put really great success, really great suggestions forward around, and effectively help a combined organization achieve around.

So there's the cadence. There's the alignment of KPIs. And every time that hasn't been in place, where I've put it in place, my experience for what it's worth, it shifts the conversation from arguing about what we're trying to achieve really quickly, maybe to a conversation about how to achieve it, but that's still a better conversation.

And

then I think the last piece is just very much around planning. I see so many marketing teams. I've talked a lot about the sales lab guys. A lot of marketing teams, they'll sit there, they'll develop their marketing plans. They'll talk to finance because they want to know what budget they've got.

And this is a little bit cliche, but it happens a lot. They may or may not reach out to their digital colleagues, and yet they might be talking about automation or remarketing or driving an increase in their social spend as they look at their channels or spend mix. And yet, in all of those cases, it's almost an afterthought. We'll set the plan and then we'll go and reach out to these guys. So we've got our cadence, we've got our KPIs.

How do we move from planning as individual functions and then asking people to come in later to planning together? One of my old cliches is there's no such thing as a marketing plan. Let's have sales and marketing and finance and our digital business partners and even our people business partners all sitting around the room together, understanding the challenges of the organization together, forming the strategy for that organization together, and then getting down to working together on the tactics. So I think you still have a marketing plan. You still have a sales plan, but everything is underpinned by common understanding.

All of those plans are built in a really, really collaborative manner. And then as we get back to that cadence and those KPIs I've just spoken about, everyone knows when they're meeting. Everyone knows what those meetings are about. Everyone knows what's at stake. And the alignment and the sense of energy that comes from that is, again, in my experience, pretty infectious.

Yeah. Because I've seen over the time where sometimes a digital, somebody who's head of the e commerce site will get a budget to achieve sales there. Whereas, really, if you think about that, often the ecommerce is the tool to get that, but the the ability to achieve those sales isn't necessarily gonna come from the ecommerce team. They're facilitating it. They might be able to do some SEO and that sort of stuff.

But unless the brand's aligned with that and the sales team are aligned with that, it's a bit crazy having, you know, a budget put against an ecommerce team for for instance.

Yeah. I agree. There are always exceptions that there might be somebody listening that goes, well, that works in my org because my org is very specific in one way or But for me, e comm is a channel.

Yeah. Exactly.

Retail is a channel. Direct sale is a channel. And if we think about B2B, which is where I spend not all of my time, but certainly a lot of it, to get the customer onto the ecom platform, there was probably a sales pipeline and decision process that involved a human being in the first place. So to your point, we've got the ecom guys there effectively tasked with a KPI, which involves them getting as much revenue as they possibly can out of the customers that have signed up. And yet, it's quite plausible that those guys are struggling because, upstream, they're not aligned with the sales organization that's targeted with winning accounts.

I mean, selling that fabulous e commerce platform and that fabulous experience, and therefore adding users that can drive spend for the guys downstream. And again, we're done. Yeah.

Yeah. Because sometimes that those objectives I've seen in organizations where the salespeople in a B2B environment actually don't tell anybody about the B2B website because they think that website is actually gonna be the end of their job. And so they deliberately, you know, hide it and say, don't worry about that. I'll take care of your order. Whereas, you know, that's the absolute opposite.

I've I've seen studies in The UK that where somebody did a study of, I think, of about a hundred organizations B2B that implemented ecommerce, and not one of them laid off a salesperson because of ecommerce.

I think there's there's there's a whole there's a whole podcast in its own in that running. Sales conditions and channel conflict.

Yeah. But

but I think, firstly, I I can understand the mentality, but it's a very, very short termist view. I think the main thought that goes through my head when you started talking there was it completely misses the customer preference. The reality is customers, you know, for certain purchases, certainly, you know, very complex major purchases or the first stage in a purchase, they may want to speak to an individual. But typically customers want to transact in as quick and as convenient manner as possible. Most transactions just aren't that involved these days.

So the concept of not selling to a customer, the advantages of a really well built, really convenient, really sort of user centric e comm platform, firstly, they're going to harm your company, I think, the longer term, to your point. It's going to really difficult to see a sales organization struggle because they've got a fabulous e commerce platform.

Yeah, exactly.

The second sort of triggers is just how the, I guess, the role of the salesperson I think then can change to one of, I mentioned a few minutes ago, there's maybe initially winning a customer and bringing them into a business, especially again, B2B where you may have large accounts, for example, so there's a human process in signing that organization up. But as more and more customers transact on an ecom platform for the vast majority of their requirements, they actually think it's an opportunity to say, okay, firstly let's upskill our sellers to be far better strategic sellers and category cross sellers.

Or order takers.

Absolutely, but ideally I don't really want an order taker, right? I want my ecom platform to do that for me. It's probably a low skill order taker, but my question is why are you taking orders? Why aren't we driving them to the ecom platform? Solution selling and teaching salespeople to kind of sell categories they may not be familiar with is the equivalent of giving them, in many circumstances, a whole new career opportunity in a different discipline.

And there's also, I think, then the potential to have just far more involved value adding conversations with customers as a result of the fact you have the time and the ability, the bandwidth, if you will, to really understand and probe and learn about their business, safe in the knowledge, the more transactional elements. And we're talking sales here, but it can also be customer service. I've been taken care of on my my e comm and my self serve platforms.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess what you're saying is really at the end of the day, it comes down to serving that customer. If you if you can't serve and impress that customer with not only your service, but your products and that everybody in the business is aligned to delivering that same result, it's it's gonna be hard to succeed.

Absolutely, it comes back to that culture piece. I remember in my very first marketing role, I actually had a background in customer experience and channel strategy. And it was a pretty enlightened marketing exec that was really struggling to get alignment with sales. And there were two departments at complete war and my job was basically to get them to work together. And the first six months, three, six months may have been hard, by the end of the first year, the barriers were well and truly down and I wasn't that bad a guy and marketing weren't that bad.

And by the eighteen, twenty four month work, sales and marketing were working in absolute lockstep. And to your point, it comes back to number one, it was a culture piece that says we're in this together. Number two, we shared goals. So we argued cat and dog about how to get there, but it was a much better conversation than the one we were having, which was what were the goals in the first place.

Yeah. And then blaming everybody's blaming each other for the goals not being met. Absolutely.

And, you know, you don't even have the same goals or you're not aware of people's goals.

Yeah.

You know, you're dead from the outset. So the culture's set, the performance measures are set, and from that, everything else comes. So you get better, I think, results to your comments a few moments ago, and you just get a far more energized, more aligned organization in which people are working, and that drives them. Ironically, given we're talking e comm, that actually drives engagement.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the customers can see that. The customers don't get a feel.

When you when salespeople are talking to the customers and e comm people, you know, if they're supporting the customers, they know that everybody's aligned, and they can feel that sort of joy almost coming out of the supplier, out of the vendor back to the customer.

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, you imagine a conversation with a would be customer, where that customer walks in and they're sitting with the sales guys and all the normal P shares apply. But imagine that the marketing person's in the room, and one of the finance business partners is in the room, and one of the platform developers is in the room, because they want a member of the e comm team, and I've just picked a platform developer there to actually listen to the customer and hear what they want for that first time. Firstly, as a customer, you're going to walk out and be blown away.

Because that isn't happening in many organizations, however simple that concept may be. And secondly, you will get, again, I'm picking on the developer just for the sake of this conversation, you're gonna get a developer that probably in most of his or her past lives has been three or four steps back from a customer sitting in front of machine. They could be brilliant with a customer, you just never knew because you never gave them the opportunity. And they're never going to hear from the customer firsthand you know, what those guys and girls are going through and what they're looking for. So, yeah, I think there's enormous power in, you know, just making really, really simple changes, again, to work more effectively cross functionally.

And in this particular sort of instance, actually bring that team face to face with the customer, bring the customer face to face with that team. Only good things can happen.

Yeah. Exactly. And I think that certainly from an e comm development point of view, having that developer, normally, the developer's not gonna come up with a solution to say, I well, they sometimes do, but there's normally a BA, you know, business analyst in the middle of that. But when you put the developer in front of a customer so they can feel the customer's pain of how they you know, how one process might work for them or something like that rather than a developer just getting a speck at the end of the day. I think that really enhances the solution that an ecomm platform can provide, you know, not only to the business, maybe in a cost to serve environment, but also to the customer and how how they're, you know, dealing with that vendor.

Yeah. Look. Absolutely. And and in a world where it's really difficult to win business

Yep.

And to retain business, really difficult to win business at a good price, you know, it's really difficult.

I just saw today Woolworths are going into b two b. Did you see that?

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, that piece that you've just touched upon, that could yield a suggestion that might seem really, really small, but that could be the difference between winning that customer and not winning that customer.

Yeah, a massive great experience

and exposed culturally to an incredibly collaborative organization. What does that tell you they're going be like to work with as a supplier and customer? And second be that tiny suggestion. Yeah, the customer might walk away and might go, you know what? These guys are going to charge me 2% or 3% more, but they're already thinking about micro improvements that we can make that I don't know, version improvement or better net promoter score, whatever it may be.

Again, only set you off on the right foot, and it can only drive, I think, commercial good.

Yeah. What do you think about having a development road map, especially around e comm, but not just e comm, but everything else? And also, I guess, taking into the layer of how does COVID affect what you're doing and, you know, how e comm works in with those those road maps of the whole business.

I think the first so if I break that down into into two, you know, firstly, the importance of the road map. At the end of the day, your e comm roadmap, your e comm platform is a product. It's a channel to market. It's a service offering, whatever you want to call it. So I think having that roadmap clear, having that roadmap to the opening parts of this conversation where we talked about that sales, marketing, and digital triangle, having it as a road map that everybody is brought into and understands, and having that sort of regular cadence to make sure the sales and marketing guys know what's coming through from the road map and when is incredibly important because it effectively is an opportunity to constantly remind the market of the improvements that you're making, the changes you make, or the steps you're making to keep your company relevant.

And in a world where marketeers should be constantly looking for opportunities to communicate your product difference and give sales teams, for want of a better word, an excuse, an excuse to reach out to customers and tell them what's going The roadmap basically powers that. So first and foremost, I see a lot of organizations that don't have roadmaps, and they don't really think in terms of this is our product or this is our service, and they certainly don't think of their e comm platform as a product or a service.

Or a differentiator. Or

a differentiator. So if they have got a roadmap again, to the theme of this whole conversation, it's kind of a, that's a technology roadmap. It's not something for our customers. Yeah. Isn't it?

We might take another look. So firstly, I think it's really, really important and it's a brilliant opportunity as we think about sales, marketing, digital collaboration for the sales and marketing guys to mine the opportunities, that roadmap for strong messages to market. And secondly, as you talk about the situation we're in, especially as I sit here in Victoria as we're recording this one today, if you think about

COVID- You evil people down there.

Well, I'm in one of the cleaner areas, I think we've got one or two active cases, Andrew,

but

it's, yeah, if they're gonna lock us down, let's get it done now and let's get through this. I think to the second point you touched on there, roadmaps are so often something that is thought about on a cyclical, maybe an annual basis as part of annual planning, etcetera. Right now, micro gains, micro improvements, small improvements can be the difference between surviving and thriving, if you'll excuse the cliche. They can be the difference between the sales and marketing guys not knowing what to talk about and having something really interesting to take to market. They can be the difference between a couple of basis points of conversion rate optimization improvement, but with something that is as sensitive as your conversion rate, those couple of basis points could be a massive driver of margin and profitability at a time when organizations are under a lot of top line pressure and are probably looking at their cash flow and their bottom lines more closely than ever.

So I think with all those comments about the importance of having a roadmap in the first place being in mind, right now, as much as time is at a premium, we have Zoom, we have Teams, we have Skype, whatever, a whole load of digital collaboration tools, which give people the chance to sit down and get together and really scrutinize every step of the customer journey, every element of their business, and look for the improvements that they can make, the little bolts that they can tighten, etcetera, to drive just a couple of points of incremental gain in revenue or sales or margin, whatever it may be. You know, if there's ever been a time to double down, you know, grab yourself a pizza and beer or a glass of wine and spend a couple of hours of an evening with your colleagues working this stuff through, you know, now is the time

because

every single inch matters.

It's a really good opportunity, you know, in certainly in the last three months where, you know, for some businesses, things have been super busy, but some, they haven't been busy. It's a good time. I think people get caught up in the BAU of everyday work, everyday business. And, you know, I know the business I work for, we'd have quarterly meetings, and we'd decide we're gonna do this, this, and this. And then we'd walk out and we'd be just back to our normal day to day business, and we never really focused on those things.

So we we now have a thing called OKRs. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. Objectives and key results. And it allows us to align that our whole business around some objectives, not just, you know, individual ones. So we break it down into teams and things like that.

And that allows us to concentrate on them for the next three months. We try not to do it beyond that because, you know, especially in this ecommerce world, things change pretty quickly. And if you've got a road map you know, I've never seen a two year road map on ecommerce that ever eventuated being that actual road map. You know? It's more like a here's the big picture for two years.

Let's break it down and see what we actually wanna do in the next three months. And as you say, make those micro changes. And you'll look back on that two years and go, actually, we achieved quite a bit there without trying to what what I sometimes call is boil the ocean.

Yeah. Absolutely. And it it is hard. You know, people's people's rhythms have changed. Their their lives have changed, but, know, you just use the opportunity word there.

I think as easy as it is to say, and as difficult as it is to do, I think that's the mindset we've got to carry. Even when you're having your harder days, you're learning. Even when people are looking to do there are opportunities. And so just like the example with the commerce vision team there, how do we bring people together, rally them around where the opportunities are, be that in customer service improvement, sales process improvement, micro improvements you can make to your e com platforms that are quick and not necessarily huge amounts of money but can yield significant gain. And how do we just find the time, the extra energy, the extra buoyancy, if you will, to just push that little bit harder as we kind of continue to sort of thug through, let's call it the COVID year and give our business and our customers and our people everything they can.

Because it's a really good opportunity. I spoke about this in a podcast a couple of weeks ago when I was talking to Danny Phillips regarding customer experience, is that it's actually a really good opportunity. You know, we've seen a lot of the B2C customers get a whole lot of new customers. It's a good opportunity to grab those customers and show them how good you are and keep them forever. Because I think come this, you know, and it's I think the terminology is coming up quite a bit in business now is this September cliff everybody's talking about.

Some businesses aren't gonna survive. And if you're in a position where you've made some material changes to your business to an order to make sure that you are one of those ones that survive, you might find this time next year, your your results are way better than you could have imagined pre COVID type of thing.

Oh, absolutely. You bring to mind one of our existing clients is is in the health and fitness industry. You know, we Lucky damn. And we think about, Oh my gosh, the world's ended, right? These guys and a lot of organizations have done this, but they've executed really, really well and never underestimate the importance of great execution.

But they pivoted really, really quickly to online classes.

Right, okay.

The ability to then sort of subscribe and not just join the classes live, but watch those classes through the day. And I can't remember the numbers now, but they have something crazy like two or three times their online subscribers now. And what are we, two and a half quarters into this whole thing, than they do physical customers.

Is that right?

And this is like a business that's been around for a long, long time. So, you know, they've got some really interesting challenges. You know, how do they monetize that model really, really effectively? You know, how do they kind of keep differentiating so their product is superior to the competitors that are, you know, now catching them up? But they're in the lead.

Spotted the opportunity. The September cliff for them is just not a cliff. No. It's a mountain move that they've got to climb because they've got a whole load of work effectively to do to drive engagement with these new customers, make sure they stay on that platform, and again, as I mentioned, to sort continue to monetize it. But what a stunning example.

And you look at it and you sort of say, it's not that complicated an idea either. But had it not been for the situation that we're all in now, and it not been for some fantastic operators and very, very clever people, and and they are, they would probably have never done it.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. There's some great examples of that sort of stuff out there. I saw somewhere the other day where there was an article saying, stop investing in tech.

And and and my son who works at PwC will hate me for saying this, but he stop investing in tech unless it's ecommerce. So, you know, there's a bit of a push out there to say if you've got if you've got limited dollars to spend in tech or in the whole business, ecommerce is one of the key areas where you need to be focusing that spend.

Yeah. I I think, you know, again, they'll build there there there are gonna be people that will listen. They'll have a business that has a specific sort of functional shape that means that's not necessarily relevant to them. But even if I sit here and I think about your question, I'm not even sure who they be. Whether you're putting in a platform because you don't have one, or I guess more likely tuning up your platform, every single dollar counts.

The away from sort of traditional retail and human to human purchasing to sort of self-service online purchasing is accelerating. That pendulum is not going to swing back, I don't believe, by any stretch of the imagination at the end of Will it kind of counterbalance? Will it come back a bit? Yeah, definitely will, but it won't go back to how it was. And so yes, I say, how can I continue to invest in my e comm solution on the assumption I've got one in the first place, and if not, kind of get moving there?

And I talked about conversion rate a few seconds ago. For me, you've got how much traffic can you get to your site and the joys that search brings, But the one that always comes back to me is how do I at least maintain the traffic I've got? And how do I work with my platform, my platform developers, my digital team to do everything I can to maximize conversion of the customers on my site because it's such a sensitive measure. And when you've got all of that investment in your platform and the support team already, every extra dollar that you can squeeze out of it is pure margin.

Yeah, money's a gem.

Just go, go, go. Absolutely e comm, and again, for me, I'm obviously a big fan of conversion rate optimization. So e comm and CRO for me is what we're talking to a lot of customers about.

Right. So maybe just to finish up, have you seen much of manufacturers going direct to the public? What are the risks in, like, a manufacturer deciding, right. Well, I've got a whole supply chain. It might be, you know, some of the large retailers and stuff like that, but I'm concerned that I might be, you know, intermediated by them in the future.

They bring in their own brands, and suddenly my brand's no longer important to them. How do they make sure that if they wanna go to market in a B2C environment, they can do that safely without really upsetting their existing supply you know, customer chain at the moment.

Yeah. Yeah. Look. Absolutely. It's a it's a I think the first one is it's a difficult one because it all depends on your current customers and and how they behave.

And, unfortunately, but realistically, there are there are probably some providers out there that are more aggressive.

Yeah. And Australia is such a small country that we've got some of those businesses that just dominate the market. You know? There's a lot of monopolies or duopolies in Australia.

Unfortunately, so. You know, it's it's a relatively young country in some regards. I think that that sort of still comes through in the competitive landscape in a lot of industries. But but look, I I think to your question, the first thing is it's really, really important to talk to your existing customers effectively, your existing distributors, your existing channels to market because there's one thing worse than having an argument than feeling like your supplier is trying to sort of go around the edge of you and that's feeling like your supplier is trying to undermine you and go behind your back. Must trust its first.

So I guess if you explain to them what your position is, just work together.

Absolutely, Absolutely. So I think the very first thing is there's probably that conversation where people are saying, how do we approach them? Let's develop to a point, and then we'll tell them and have the conversation really early. If it's not going to be a great conversation at the beginning, it's not going to get any better.

No, that's right. If you do it behind

them, then You'll find out where you are, and you may as well start working on it. And you do that with care, and you do that with respect, but that's important. Then I think, very much to the point you touched on there, Andrew, there's the reality of a strong supplier is a good supplier. So you'd hope that the vast majority of a company's channels to market, long as as I come to my last point in a second as long as they can see ways in which you're going to work together, I guess, to minimize impact on the channel this distributor and this current customer owns, there should be a good conversation there because it's a conversation that says, for me to survive and for me to thrive, I need to do things differently as well. How can I work with you to continue to be a great provider to you, but also to start building my own channels to go to market in a way that minimizes your concern and threat?

So I think the second is, as basic as it is, is that sort of negotiation process and that real open minded conversation around how can I do this in a way that works for me because autonomy is better for you, but also in a way that minimizes threat to you? And then the last point that naturally comes from that probably goes back to the product roadmap conversation that we were having earlier. It's amazing how you can differentiate a product. It's amazing how you can tweak and change. It's amazing how you can think about two products that appear and will be very similar, but with some really good brand work, some really good sort of product development thinking, some really good sort of product and feature thinking can be positioned quite differently in the eyes of a would be consumer from a product that you might already be providing to one of your main sort of channel partners, one of your main distributors.

So the last piece for me is, how can I differentiate my product so I'm still taking something to market directly that is going to appeal to my customers, but is not necessarily going to be a straight cannibalization of what is already going to market through my existing channel partners, certainly in their eyes? So again, talk and talk early. Number two, win win. And remember that a strong supplier is for any partner that we wanna work with on a sustained basis is good for that partner. And third piece is never underestimate how many different types of washing powder you can get, right?

That's right. It's the old margarine story, isn't it? Yeah. I think I think there's about 10 different brands of margarine, and eight of them are made by the same company, and they just differentiate them with different brands. And, you know, if they if they only had one brand, they'd probably only get 50% of the market.

By having eight brands, they're they're getting 80% of the market. So it's that old adage.

Absolutely, I did one really early in the end of days actually, and they were in the bathroom and building supplies industries. They had one channel partner that was an enormous, enormous part of their business. And frankly, that channel partner deserved all the respect in the world because they enabled this business to grow, but it was only natural and it was the right point for this particular organization to start thinking about kind of, I guess, building up other channels and potentially their own channels to market. They talk to their partner. They talk to their partner early.

They built some products that, as far as they were concerned, they were very similar to the products they were already selling, but they were positioned in a way that they were very, very different as they went to market from a brand and, again, products and features perspective. I'm probably going back four or five years now. Both businesses are very, very well. Both businesses have trade together, they've probably got a stronger relationship than they've ever had, and the organization in question, the one that I'm talking about, firstly has less of an exposure, if you will, less of a direct reliance on that one partner there. And secondly, again, is a stronger business in their own right because they're selling more product, they're generating more margin, and they're able to be a better partner to their key distributor as a result.

And that distributor might have even found that some of that line that the supplier decided to sell direct or through that other channel might have taken some pressure or some inventory off them that they no longer have to stock. They can just stock the stuff that sells all day every day, and they know that there's another channel that people can get those other products for if they really want those other products.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's even, you know, is there even a conversation that says, if I'm going direct and this is wildly successful, then I'll create a version for you. Think of me as your test star, for me as your test There are so many different ways I think we can change our thinking.

So instead of it being kind of a clash of the fists or a clash of heads, that you can put your arms around each other and work together. One plus one equals Yeah, it's a big old world, there are 25,000,000 people in this country alone, and you know, with e comm, there's massive global market out there. In the vast majority of cases, Paul, you know, ever the optimist, is going to say, there's a way, you know, there's a house here. And I think you've just got to talk and partner and find that way. You know, the final line is if you ever go home at night, you know, you know you've been your reasonable best and you're working with an existing channel partner saying no to you, you know, this is a very, very easy thing to say, but you've got to sit there and reflect on what that's going mean for your business in the longer term anyway.

Yeah. Because it's not sustainable.

Yeah. Alright, Paul. Thanks for your time today. And I think the thing that I've learned out of this today is is whether it's with your internal people, with sales, marketing, digital, or in fact, your partners being your customers, especially in that distribution environment. It's all about collaborating together and working for the, you know, the greater good.

So, yeah, I really appreciate your time today, Paul, and we'll catch up soon, hopefully, when we get down to Melbourne again.

Thanks so much for having me, and we're we're looking forward to having you guys down here and as as a Victorian looking at the warmer weather in Queensland. I'm I'm really looking forward to the day when it's safe for us to get up the coast and see you guys in Brisbane. Thanks, Empry.

Okay. Thanks, Paul. You all hope you enjoyed that chat we had with Paul Monkley from Emmett Consulting. He certainly does know his stuff. He knows how to get the best out of people.

And if you're interested in him working with your company to help you get the best out of not only your sales and marketing team, but also your digital help you bring those strategies together, just either get in contact with me via LinkedIn. That's Andrew Rogencamp, so r o g e n c a m p. I'm on LinkedIn or Paul's also on LinkedIn, Paul Monkley, and he's from a company called Emmett Consulting, e m m e t consulting dot com. So, yeah, I hope you enjoyed that. We'll be back again next month with something different, and we hope you can join us then.

Thanks a lot.

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