The Supply Chain Has Gone Digital: 7 Challenges Manufacturers and Distributors Must Look Out For (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Mike: Hi, good afternoon to everybody that’s on the webinar today. My name is Mike Brenneman with Sana, Channel Sales Manager here, and happy to be here today. I wanna give a big thank you to the folks at Encore for having us. And certainly a big thank you to everybody that’s taken the time to join to learn more about how the supply chain has gone digital, right? As we all kind of…or in some way, shape, or form beginning and/or in the middle or towards the end of our digital transformation. And so that’s our title for today. We’re also going to be talking a little bit about Sana and how Sana can help as far as your digital transformation goes. But just to walk through just a quick agenda, we’re gonna understand some of the distributors’ digital maturity, we’re gonna talk about some of the top trends that are also impacting not just distributors, but as well as manufacturers, overcoming obstacles and what some of those obstacles are on the path of digital transformation, and how Sana can help you come out on top in what is becoming a very increasingly competitive online market.

We will set some time aside for Q&A at the end. So we’re gonna go through the agenda bullet points that you see here on the screen, then I’ll jump into a bit of a live demo so that you can actually see Sana in action. And then we’ll circle back to those questions. So feel free to start posting those into the chat window as we go through the presentation and we’ll take those towards the end, okay? Just to start off, I wanna talk a little bit about the current state of B2B e-commerce, right? And not only have products from an e-commerce standpoint changed a lot over the course of the years, but we as organizations, as distributors, and manufacturers have been changing and so are our customers. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. And just for starters here, if we take a quick look at some research that we’ve done, you’ll notice here that B2B businesses across e-commerce, maturity, it varies differently across the different e-commerce 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

So as we look at, you know, e-commerce 1.0, right, the kind of the beginning of the iPhone, the mid 2000s, you know, where we’re really just starting to dive into e-commerce for the first time and really build an e-commerce foundation, right? Whereas e-commerce 2.0, organizations are starting to become a little bit more sales-centric, right? They’re starting to get past that foundation and really bring about, you know, higher sales revenues and they’re opening up additional, you know, channels for sales revenue. Whereas when we get into e-commerce 3.0, which we’re really just on the brink of right now, now we’re getting really into hyper personalization, okay?

So it’s one thing to stand up an e-commerce platform or a web store for our B2B customers, it’s a whole another animal to stand up an e-commerce platform so that when our customer enters that portal, they think that it’s built just for them, right? And as we take a look at these statistics here that you can see 84% of B2B folks today are still very much stuck on very 1.0 concepts. And so they’re certainly lagging behind. If we look at e-commerce 2.0 is, you know, 38%, we’ve got some organizations that are starting to make a little bit of progress. But there’s very few B2B companies across the supply chain in the distribution or manufacturing verticals that are really on the cutting edge from an e-commerce standpoint. So a lot of room for growth and maturity there. And as we take a look at the current state of these organizations, right, you’ll notice that, you know, driving sales is really still kind of the big differentiator versus really bringing about structural change, right? And I think that’s another very important component of e-commerce 3.0.

We can see here that within retail companies, 65% of retailers, their key priority is still just driving sales, a little bit less for companies that are smaller on the B2B side as far as manufacturing and distributors go. But point here is, again, you know, a lot of folks are still kind of stuck in between e-commerce 1.0 and 2.0. And as a result, there is a huge movement moving towards e-commerce 3.0. So we see a lot of organizations that, if they’re not selling online today, are beginning to because their competition is, right? And a lot of organizations that are also stuck on old technology, from an e-commerce standpoint, that are starting to move up into newer platforms in more e-commerce 3.0 concepts.

So where do distributors fall, right? Again, stuck between 1.0 and 2.0, we can see that 62% of distributors have e-commerce today, 80% of those that don’t have e-commerce plan to stand up an e-commerce site and start selling online within 1 or 2 years, 71% of our distributors invested in e-commerce in order to drive more sales, and 57% of distributors are selling online to reach new customers. So I wanna highlight this in the bottom right hand corner. And this is interesting, because I think a lot of us, you know, have been standing up e-commerce platforms as closed portals for years, right? We don’t want people to be able to access our catalog unless they’re a known customer back in our ERP system. And we’re starting to see that transform into more of a hybrid approach. A lot of our B2B distributors and manufacturers are starting to open up more of a hybrid portal where they publish the catalog to the public, but maybe they limit the ability to see price as an example or availability and stock as an example, right? But they’re focused on opening up a public portal so that they can get their brand out there, and through search engine optimization, they can start bringing new people to the site and converting them on the site into new customers as well. So something to keep in mind as you start to think about your e-commerce strategy.

A couple of things that we know though when it comes to distributors is that they’re facing some very specific challenges, right? As we all race towards digitization, it’s beginning to change the game. There’s a lot more competitors in our rearview mirror, there are more competitors that are moving to the cloud, that are, you know, further along into the digital transformation strategy. The other big thing that we’re starting to see is direct to consumer sales, right? Suppliers now, because of e-commerce, are more prone than ever to start selling direct to their consumers and, as a result, you know, as distributors, we need to start thinking about, you know, how can we continue to add value, right? How can we continue to specialize and how can we continue to really stay relevant?

Online B2B marketplaces, of course, are also scraping our margins away, right? So the more people that we can start driving to our own portals to start buying from us directly, the better. So as we move on to the next slide, trying to maneuver a digitized supply chain looks a little bit different now than it did 10,15 years ago, right? If we take a look at the left hand side here, you know, our brand manufacturers were relying on distributors heavily to get products to the customers and the customers are relying heavily on the distributors to buy them from. As we look over here on the right hand side, now, with advertising, and with Amazon, and with Google, this is again, just, you know, a glimpse into that direct to consumer model that we’re starting to see more frequently. So there’s a big threat to the vitality of our distributors because of the shift towards digital, and our distributors need to start doing something about that.

So as we look ahead, there’s more increased competition challenging marketplaces. What’s the risk? Couple of fold. One, organizations aren’t using their data properly is what we have found. And what Sapio Research has found, as you see in the bottom left hand corner, so less than half of B2B companies with a web store are actually using their data from their e-commerce platform to support or manage key business drivers. I can’t tell you how important this is, right? Customer needs are changing, we need to be monitoring behaviors of those customers, we need to understand what the customer wants from an experience standpoint and what they’re getting with the other people that they’re buying from, and we need to be able to be nimble and adapt when it comes to e-commerce. So companies need to start using their data better in order to keep the customer at the forefront, okay?

Dropping prices isn’t going to help. I’ve got an interesting story to tell here. I have a company that we just onboarded with Sana a couple of weeks ago. They’re a German engineering company, they’ve got very, very large customers, right? Tesla is a customer, Google is a customer, Lockheed Martin is a customer. They had such a poor experience with their existing e-commerce platform that their largest customer, Tesla, decided to leave them as a customer and instead they went to one of their distributors. Now, their distributor had a great e-commerce site, but their distributor also was increasing and marking up their prices twofold, right? But Tesla was so adamant about that customer experience and having an efficient site that they can get in and out of quickly, that’s built, you know, very much, you know, tailored and segmented for their purposes, that they were willing to pay twice as much in order to get that better customer experience, right? So as we look into the future, the research shows us that, you know, price and product are not gonna be the key differentiators moving forward when we talk about digitization, right? It’s really about providing the best customer experience. And now that this customer has onboarded with Sana, once they go live in a couple of months, they’re gonna be able to get Tesla back as a customer and they’ll have an immediate ROI. So fascinating story and something to keep in the back of your minds.

E-commerce revenue is also at stake. We know that distributors that aren’t offering a satisfactory e-commerce experience are at risk to lose a pretty significant amount of online revenue every year. So the solution is getting distribution e-commerce right, right? And with a solution like Sana that is ERP integrated and a SaaS solution, we are always going to be getting the pricing and the service right. We’re gonna be looking up all of the pricing in the inventory data in real time and exposing that online 24 by 7 for our customers to shop on any device, and to shop at anytime. We can leverage online channels to make offline processes more efficient, right? And what I mean by this is that, you know, there’s a couple of ends of the spectrum. One, we obviously want the customer experience to be more efficient, but also start to think about your back office, right?

If you’re manually creating orders in Dynamics today, if your salespeople are getting emails and then they have to somehow take these emails for sales orders and be able to translate that back over into the ERP system. If your accounts receivable department is getting a bunch of calls and inundated with invoice requests and wants to see order history, these are things that ERP-integrated e-commerce is going to help make more efficient. And we’re also gonna allow you to better grow in scale, right? You’ll be able to bring more products into your catalog quicker, you’ll be able to also expand business units and scale internationally quicker if that’s a goal of yours. So a couple of things that Sana is really gonna be able to help you with.

Now, as we talk and shift more over to the manufacturer side, right, the direct to consumer sales, as we talked about earlier, is, you know, an important component here, Sixty one percent of manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers now sell direct to consumers. And we’re seeing that number jumped significantly as we look into 2019 and 2020. So you’ve gotta get there, right? You’ve gotta get that web presence and that online presence up and running and be able to give your customers that self-service experience, you know, because a lot of the other manufacturers that you may be competing against are doing so. As we look at the adoption of emerging technology, this is an interesting time. You know, cloud and digital transformation has brought about some really interesting technologies as we look at things like artificial intelligence, or as we look at things like machine to machine ordering that’s on the rise and disrupting the way manufacturers do business. So these are all components that are gonna play into e-commerce, you know, as you look towards your digital transformation roadmap and things that we can help you with as well.

And as I move over to the next slide here, customer focus for manufacturers is becoming a big differentiator. The key is to leverage servitization, right? And what I mean by that is that it’s not necessarily just about your product anymore, right? Your product’s great, you know, your customers like your products, but there are others out there that sell similar products to you. How do you differentiate? It’s by providing service around those products, right? And if we don’t have a way to either sell those services and/or at least present those services online so that our customers understand that differentiator, then we’re losing market share.

Lean and agile manufacturing. As we take a look at manufacturers, we see a lot of folks that are starting to implement very lean and agile processes, you know, on the manufacturing floor and at the supply chain level, which is great, right? We can be more efficient, we can have faster time to market from a production standpoint, we can better have the ability to adapt to changing customer needs, and we can eliminate waste, right? But if you are not matching those lean and agile processes out on the web to keep up with the lean and agile processes that you’ve created back on the manufacturing and the production floor, then, you know, there’s some risk and there’s some exposure as well. So we wanna make sure that we’ve got, you know, the technologies in place in an e-commerce portal that allows us to be just as lean and efficient as we are on the back end of our organization.

Some obstacles that manufacturers are starting to see, right? New opportunities are being created, and with e-commerce manufacturers, again, as we talked about, can sell direct to consumers, they can create additional revenue streams, they can expand business models, and they can better sell through wholesale and distributors. The challenges that are hindering are the data challenges that we talked about earlier and systems that aren’t integrated. So if you are on an e-commerce 1.0 solution, if you’re on legacy technology, the likelihood is that there’s a couple of paths that you’re going on right now. One is order hits the web, right, and then somebody gets notified, and then they have to go manually create that transaction on the back end of the ERP system. The other may be that you’re leveraging some sort of a connector or custom-built integration back to the e-commerce solution from the ERP, right, and it actually is putting some of the data in there, but it’s not in real time, right? It’s sinking the data on a particular frequency.

I can’t stress how important it is to have an ERP integrated e-commerce approach. We wanna be able to leverage all of the data that’s already back in your ERP system as one single source of the truth so that you’re not having to replicate and duplicate all of that data out on the web, okay? When we talk about B2B, there is a lot of complex logic that lays in B2B ERP systems, right? Not all of our customers are the same. Our customers have different, you know, expectations of the products that they can buy. Some of them aren’t going to buy 10,000 of the skews that you create or sell, they’re only gonna buy 200, right? I only wanna be able to see that subset. I don’t wanna have to go hunting and pecking through 10,000 skews. And when I log into the site, I don’t wanna see commercial list price, I wanna see my price. I wanna be able to use my blanket sales orders, right? Recreating all of that logic out on the web is nearly impossible. And if you can do it, it’s very expensive and time consuming. So having an ERP integrated approach to e-commerce is very, very important.

The trouble with data accuracy and integration is we can see here when polling customers and prospects and other folks that are using different versions of Microsoft Dynamics, you can see that 79% have stated that working with one business system is very important to them. Getting the right and complete client data in one system is very important to them. And product information, you know, being available as one single source of the truth from the ERP system or from a PIM is very important as well, okay? So again, all reasons why ERP-driven e-commerce is so important here. And another reason why we need to be able to start better leveraging the data that you do have. As you can see here, only 26% to 42% of companies are using their data to support or manage any of the following.

So where does Sana fit in? Sana was built a future-proof B2B e-commerce, okay? We don’t want you to have to be able to compete on price, we wanna provide you with that Amazon-like experience that your customers are craving. And so, Sana was created in 2008. And from the very first line of code that we wrote, we wrote it from inside of the ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics, whether you’re using Business Central, whether you’re using AX or D365F&O or Great Plains were integrated into all of the solutions that you all may be using today, right? And when we created Sana, we really disrupted the industry and we flipped the architecture on its head, right? Rather than building out a website portal and then having to, you know, build the plumbing downward, you know, back to the foundation, the ERP system, we flipped it on its head and we built it from the ERP system up, right?

So our goal is not to give you a web store, our goal and what we’ve created is going to take the investment that you’ve made in whatever Microsoft Dynamics version ERP system you’ve installed, and turn that ERP into a very powerful e-commerce engine. Sana is gonna give you that real time data, right? We’re not gonna deal with sinking of data back and forth, everything’s in real time. We’re gonna help you better meet your customer demands and drive revenue, cross and upsell opportunities. We’ll help you create those efficiencies back office and within your sales department and give you a platform to help you better grow and scale.

Forrester Research calls what we have created a single stack solution, and if you take a look at the solution that you may be on today or ones that you may have used in the past, it’s a bit of a spider web, right? We’ve got the ERP system, we have a shopping cart partner, we’ve got a connector that we’ve built between the two, we have to host at someplace. There’s the CMS front end aspect of it, right? And then, because we’re selling B2B, of course, there’s always the third-party ancillary products like shipping, tax, freight, things like that. So historically, it’s really taken a very disparate number of different solutions to power a good web store. With our single stack approach, we have simplified this significantly. So the foundation of Sana is your ERP system, right? We’re going to take all of the business logic and all of the data, that single source of truth, what you’re already maintaining today, and we’re going to expose that in real time and make that transparent out here in the web store, okay? We’re gonna provide a thin metal web application layer. I’m gonna refer to this in my demo is the Sana admin panel. The Sana admin panel on this thin web app layer is gonna be the CMS, right?

This is where I’m going to, you know, hyper personalize the solution for my customers. I’m gonna give them those personalized experiences. I’m gonna build in additional fluffy web content for my products that I wanna sell online. And I’m gonna handle the theming, and the styling, and a lot of the configuration that kind of goes on behind the scenes, right? But this is a much more simplistic model. And it’s also delivered as software as a service, right? So regardless of what version of ERP, on the Dynamics side you’re on today, and where you may be tomorrow, and whether you’re going to shift all together, you know, to a different Dynamics version as we’re starting to see a lot of folks start to move over to Business Central and F&O, from other products like NAV and Great Plains, right, we’re always gonna be there with the latest code. So you’re not going to have to see any more professional services when it’s time to upgrade your ERP, you’re not gonna see professional services from Sana when we come out with the new version release. We’re gonna be there with the latest code, we’re gonna be there with the latest security and with the latest bug fixes. So I would always look towards a SaaS solution as you’re looking at e-commerce platforms and talking about that, you know, total cost of ownership and that continuous value stream into the future.

So Sana wins. You’ll notice here that we’ve got a lot of cross-industry experience. And we’ve got customers that fall outside of these verticals for sure. These are just some that I wanted to highlight that we’re really starting to see a lot of traction with. We’ve worked very recently with a lot of automotive organizations, whether it be parts or whether it be dealers, we are seeing a lot of traction in the electronics, and as well as food and beverage, household goods and furnishings, medical devices, fashion. I won’t read through the entire list here, but I think you start to get the idea. Here’s a little information of a customer that we worked with in Canada called IHL, you all are probably familiar with them. You know, they work with construction professionals, you know, a do-it-yourself organization. They had a number of different challenges. They had a hard time keeping up with changing buyer expectations. They were selling to consumerized construction professionals and they had online and offline data discrepancies. We went through an implementation with them a couple of years ago, and they achieved very significant results. And, you know, the quote back to us was, you know, we no longer have to compete on price and product, right? We now have the ability to drive more value to our customers. And they see the value in that. And as a result, we’ve been able to regain some of the price that we had ticked off a couple of years ago. So they’re delivering better customer experience with accurate pricing and richer, more accurate product information. And they now have more of an omnichannel experience to bridge the gap between those discrepancies of what were online and offline.

Now, I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna jump into my demo environment. And I’m not gonna be able to demo, you know, Sana in its entirety today. So this is gonna be a bit of a high level overview, but I do wanna show you a glimpse of what some of the capabilities of Sana are. If you are interested in getting a more personalized demonstration after this, or you have very specific use cases for your organization that you would like to discuss, then you can certainly reach out to myself or anybody at Encore, and they will be able to facilitate that. At this point, I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna jump over into my demo environment. And there’s a couple of things that I wanna point out before I jump in. The first is that, with every Sana deployment, okay, we are going to deploy three different experiences out of the box.

The first experience is going to be a public-facing portal, right? The second is gonna be a closed portal for our B2B customers, and the third is gonna be a sales agent experience. So that way, our salespeople and our customer service reps internal to our organization can log in and they can represent the customer and they could create a quote or an order on their behalf as an example. You’re going to get all three experiences out of the box. If you don’t sell to the public today, then that’s fine, you can turn it off, right? You may add an additional line of business or acquire company later on down the road and you might want to turn it back on. But we’re gonna give you all three out of the box. The other thing that I want to point out, is one of the nice things about Sana is that we are providing a framework that allows you to build a beautiful website without being a developer, okay? So there’s a number of different design packs that we have, that we’ve created, that you can use to start as your foundation as far as the look and feel of the site.

Once you decide on which design pack you wanna go with, you can start to add your logo, your background colors, your fonts, you can add a parallax scroller, you can add image sliders, right? You can really start to make it represent your unique brand and design it in the way that you want to. Now, for those organizations that have very specific needs, from a CMS standpoint, you’ve already got wireframes that you’ve created from a design standpoint. And maybe you have a large team of developers that do know how to code in .NET or HTML or JavaScript, and that’s fine too. You can either create your own design pack or you can code the site up, you know, from the ground from scratch, but we have flexible there depending on the type of organization that you fall into. So what I’m gonna do now is I’m going to walk through the three different experiences that I just mentioned, and I’m gonna do it in that order. So I’m gonna be pretty brief with all of them, but we’re going to hit on the B2C more public-facing experience, then we’re gonna flip to B2B, and then we’re gonna walk into sales agent functionality.

And in between the experiences too, I’ll dive a little bit into the admin panel and I’ll show you how we can handle a little bit of the configuration behind the scenes as well. So I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna jump into the catalog, right? And I’m not logged in, so we’re starting off with the more public-facing approach. I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna look at some electronics, right? I need a notebook computer that I wanna buy. When I click on notebooks, this is gonna bring up my product list page. And the first thing that I want you all to understand here is that we’re not storing any of this data in Sana. It’s not being maintained in Sana, right? We’re grabbing this direct and in real time from your ERP system. So the price that you see here is coming in real time from Dynamics, my item number, my attributes, my image, that’s my little thumbnail image here, right, these are all coming from Microsoft Dynamics.

The attributes give me the ability to better search, sort, and filter. So you can see I’ve got filtering capabilities here over on the left hand side and I’ve got search and sort capabilities. Now, as I click into the HP ENVY, this brings up my actual product page, okay? All of this data is being driven from Dynamics as well. So you can see here that as I scroll down, I’ve got my attributes which show up the specifications on the website. I’ve also got an attachment. This is a downloadable PDF service guide. And you can see I’ve got some mix and match setup, okay? The second that we integrate into your ERP system, we’re automatically gonna create a product page for all of the items that you wanna sell online, okay? So there’s gonna be a little checkbox for the items back in Dynamics, and as long as you have that box checked that says, “Make visible in web shop,” this product page will get created. You do not have to go create all of your own product pages from scratch like you do with the more shopping cart approach, right? That’s the beauty of Sana and the reason that our tagline is “The shortcut to e-commerce,” okay?

Now, if you want to enhance the product on the web, you can do that and you can get a little bit more creative and start to add things like YouTube videos. Or, if I wanna have multiple images, all I need to do is come into the Sana admin panel, I click on web pages, I go to my product pages, and then I click edit a particular product page. And from here, I can override the description that’s back in Dynamics, right? Maybe that’s a limited character field and it’s a description that’s more internal facing. I can override it here, and if I wanna bring in one of those YouTube videos to show how my product was created, or how it’s put together, or how it’s used, you know, in a live scenario, then I can click Add Content element, and I can do an HTML injection and I can pull in that YouTube video. So we give you a lot of flexibility as far as adding additional fluffy web content knowing that, you know, our ERP systems on the back end can only handle so much from a content standpoint.

And if I want to add additional images to sell my product online, I can add as many as I want right here. So, again, I don’t have to code anything, I don’t have to be a web designer, I don’t have to be a developer, right? This is more of a WYSIWYG experience. And I can come out here and I can really build some beautiful product pages. Okay, now I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to add two of these into my cart. And I’m going to click Checkout. Now, at this point, it’s asking me to log in, right, because I’m not logged in yet. Or, alternatively, I can create an account or I could go through a guest checkout process. Now, our B2B customers are likely not, although some will, have a guest checkout capability, right? But going back to that statistic earlier that 57% of distributors are trying to acquire new customers online, we do wanna give them the ability to convert into a new account.

Now, if you don’t want a public-facing portal, then that’s fine. Again, I mentioned earlier, you know, we’ll turn it off. You could have something that maybe looks more like this, right, where I can’t access the catalog until I’ve actually logged in. But if you do want to go with the more hybrid approach, then we’ll give you the ability to have your customers create an account. The second that they fill in their personal and company information, as well as their credentials, right, give themselves a new username and password and click Submit, we will then write that customer master account back to Dynamics. So we’ll create the new customer record for you right there on the fly in real time, okay? Now, I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna log in as an existing customer named Dave. Dave is a known customer back in Dynamics. And what you’re gonna see now that I’m logged in is we start to bring out some of the real hyper personalization. So as I scroll down my main Maddox page, you’ll notice that I’ve got a little banner that says, “Hey, Dave, thanks for being a great customer.” This is just one example of many in how some of my customers have gotten really creative with personalized banners like this.

And I’ll give you another example. This gets a chuckle out of some people but, you know, maybe David’s over his credit limit, right? Dave logs into the site, we slap them in the face with a banner that lets them know, “Hey, we, you know, we value you as a customer, but you’re over your credit limit. Can you take care of your invoices,” which by the way, they could do right through the Sana portal. So that’s just one example. But we make it very easy to create hyper personalized experiences like that. Again, you can do it from the Sana admin panel. You’re just gonna come in here to create a customer segment. And you’re going to drive that segment off of some sort of logic back in Dynamics, right? So here, I would just come down, and I would choose my credit limit field, and then I would create a condition in a value, and then I would tie the banner to the segment and now, all of my customers that are over their credit limit are now getting that banner that slaps them in the face, right?

If I wanted to, you know, segment it further to only my customers in Canada versus the U.S. or maybe in the Pacific Northwest, then I could continue to further segment that banner. The other thing that you’re gonna notice is I come back out to my notebooks page, the price was $1,049 before I was logged into the site, right? We were showing the public commercial list price. But when I log in as a customer, I’m seeing my customer specific price. So we’re looking at any sales discounts, percentages, customer discount percentages, or customer pricing tiers. You also will have the ability to have your customers leverage blanket sales orders or trade agreements that are on file, but they will see their customer specific price. And again, we’re pulling that in real time from the ERP. The other thing that you’ll notice that I had turned off to the public that I now have turned on to somebody that’s logged in is the availability. So I can now see, you know, what’s actually in stock. And you can turn this on, you can turn it off, or you might just wanna have it say it’s in stock, right?

I don’t wanna show my exact availability, but I do want them to be able to see that it is an item that’s in stock. So those are all configurations that are made from the admin panel as well. Now, my B2B buyers buy differently than my B2C buyers, right? The public comes out to the site because of word of mouth or because of marketing. And, you know, they have to come out to the site and they have to hunt and peck a little bit, right? They’ve never been to the site before. They’re going to browse by category or they’re going to come up here to the top and they’re going to use the keyword search. My B2B buyers buy differently. These folks are repetitive. They know my products, they know my skews, right? They’ve been to the site before. They want something that is built with efficiency and speed in mind so that they can get in and they can get out very swiftly.

There are four different ways that we’ve given your customers the ability to do that for those repetitive buyers. The first way is artificial intelligence. Because we’ve got a direct integration to the ERP system, we have an entire look up into the order history, right? We’re going to take that order history, and we’re gonna aggregate that data. And when I click on this little magic wand here, our algorithm goes to work and it takes a look at what you’re buying, what you’re buying the most of, and how frequently you’re buying it. And when I click on it, it recommends products to me based on my own purchase history, okay? Secondly, if I come into the shopping cart, you’ll notice that I’ve got a quick product lookup. So I can very quickly just start to add items into my cart. If I know a description or a partial description, or I know a partial skew, right, I can just start typing that in and it’s going to automatically pull the items back from the ERP system that match what I’m asking for.

Notice I didn’t even type T-shirts correctly, right? Back in Dynamics, it’s T-E-E, so this is a very intelligent product lookup window and I can very quickly just add items to my cart via this mechanism. Once I’ve added items to my cart, if this is an order that I’m likely to come back and buy on a repetitive basis, I also have the ability to save this as a template, right? So I click Save Template, I call this my Monthly Encore D365 Order, and I save out, right? Next time I come into the site, I come directly to the shopping cart, or maybe we even have it so that I can just either pull up my templates or do that quick product lookup from the second that I entered the site, depending on how you want to configure it. But the point is, is that this gives me a good starting point. Next time I come into the site, I load my templates, I may have 5, 10, 20 different templates that I’ve created over a period of time, but I can easily take a look at them and see what it is that’s inside it to make sure that it’s the one that I wanna use. And then I go ahead and I add it to the cart, and it’s going to add it to the cart with real time pricing.

So if pricing is changed, it’ll reflect here, and it’ll add it to the cart with the customer specific pricing. And then from there, I can remove some of the items or add a new item or possibly change the quantities if I want to, okay? The other thing that a lot of my B2B customers are going to do is they’re going to also stand up a bulk order upload functionality. This is one of my customers, TSW Alloy Wheels. Discount Tire is their largest customer with over 1,300 stores throughout the United States. So they built this upload bulk order page specific for Discount Tire. Now, you’ll notice down here on the page, there’s a hyperlink to download a sample CSV file, and there’s a number of different columns that Discount Tire is gonna fill out, and then once they fill out those columns, like the item number, the quantity, and the warehouse ID, because they are using multiple warehouses. They also have a heavy use of variants, so there’s a variant ID column, but they fill that out or they just reuse the spreadsheet that they’ve used in the past. And then all they do is drag and drop it to right here, and it builds out the cart for them with real time pricing and with customer specific pricing.

So those are the four ways that we’ve developed in order to really get your B2B buyers as repetitive buyers in and out of the site very, very quickly. As I come over to view shopping cart, the other thing that I wanna point out is that we also have the ability to handle quotes, right? So Sana can write a sales quote back to Dynamics just as easily as it can a sales order. And sales quotes can then also be converted to an order as you all know, back office in the ERP system or out here on the web, okay? I’m gonna go ahead and I’m just gonna proceed to checkout. We’re gonna create a sales order versus a quote. Now, I don’t have to key in any Ship To information because we’ve already got it on file, right? We’re pulling it directly from Dynamics from the customer account. If there are multiple Ship Tos, this will turn into a drop down, or if I wanted to key in a new one all together manually I can.

I click Next, it takes me to my delivery method. If you’re shipping on your own trucks, maybe we skip this step. If you are shipping with major carriers, obviously, these are more U.S.-based carriers here, but you’re shipping on also maybe Canadian specific carriers, we can pull all of that in here. And it doesn’t matter whether you are shifting based on weight, or charging freight based on dimensions or flat fee, or whether maybe, you know, your customers had a particular buying threshold, right? And as a result, because this order is over a particular amount, we’re going to waive shipping. There’s a lot of flexibility here. But I’m just going to go ahead and select UPS and click Next, and this takes me to my order overview. Now, we’re not asking for any payment from Dave right now, because we have Dave set up to where he gets invoiced on account, right, and he’s got terms. So he’s going to get invoiced back off a set of Dynamics.

But if you wanted to tie this into a payment service provider or gateway, then you could very easily do so, and we have already built the plumbing for you. So we’ve created a number of different add-ons. And basically, if you wanna have credit card checkout, or ACH, or e-check, and you already have Adyen, or Authorize.Net, or ChargeLogic, or PayFabric as an example, right, these are just a list of 4 out of I think 24 different payment service providers that we’ve created an add-on for, then you can just install it at the click of a button or uninstall or upgrade if there’s a new version. So again, this is something that’s gonna help you deploy faster and deploy with less professional services than it might take you with other solutions that are out there because we’ve already built the connection points between Sana and these different credit card providers, right?

Same goes for email marketing, mailchimp.mailer. If I wanted to have, you know, Google Analytics running, right, I could monitor the behavior of my customers on the web and see who are leaving items in a shopping cart unattended. And then I could just come in here and click Install for MailChimp, and then start dripping campaigns out to them, right? UPS, FedEx, again, so there’s a number of different add-ons for different types of third party functionality. And again, they are gonna allow you to deploy quicker and without any integrations and customization that needs to be created.

So these fields are configurable. I’m not gonna take the time to fill these out. But you might use this for a purchase order number, maybe you want to have some delivery instructions, or maybe you want to rip these fields out or repurpose them all together. That’s all doable and completely up to you. But once I submit the order, now, I have written that order back in Dynamics in real time. If I go to the order page, the proof of this is that this is not a Sana-generated order. As you take a look at this order number, this is coming directly out of Dynamics NAV version 2018, right? So my order has been created in real time, there’s no sync service, right? It’s hitting the ERP in real time. And as a result, you know, we’ve got no risk and exposure to our inventory. So it’s gonna be in an open state, right, and wallets open. Your customer could hypothetically come in here and edit the order if it’s not posted or shipped yet, although you can also remove this button if you don’t wanna give them the ability to do that, right?

They can download the order from here, they can also come in and they can reorder it in the future, okay? So now, that we’re in the My Account section, I wanna touch on a couple of other areas where you’ll have the opportunity for some self-service. So as a customer of yours, I would be able to come out here and take a look at, again, my entire order history. And we’re going to default the last 10 here at the bottom, right? But if I wanted to dive deeper, I could either look at order number or date range, and I could dive into an invoice that you had even before you had this portal, right? Because we have integration into the ERP, it doesn’t matter if it’s a web border, or if it was hand keyed into Dynamics two years ago, we can still expose it out here to your customers. They’ll also be able to see quotes or invoices. They could come in here and take a look at their invoices and they could see what’s been paid and what hasn’t.

If we have put that banner in front of them, when they logged into the site that showed that it was over, they were over their credit limit, maybe they come right here and they take a look at their open invoices and, you know, they select one or two of them and decide they’re gonna pay them right here online. So, again, great self-service capabilities. We’ll also give them the ability to create return orders either at the product level or from the invoice level. So if I wanted to create a return, I could come into my invoice history, I could pull up a particular invoice, and then I could select return order. And this will allow me to do it at the line level, right? So maybe I’ve got five lines in here, I only want to return one, I select my quantity, and then I select the reason codes that you’re gonna expose to them from your ERP system, right? So in this case, maybe it’s been damaged in shipment and I leave some comments and then I wanna take a picture with my smartphone and I wanna show them evidence of it being damaged in shipment. And so I do that and I drag and drop it to right here along with any other documentation, and I click Complete Return Request.

We’ll go ahead and start processing the RMA over into the ERP system. We’re not gonna create the actual return. It’s still gonna be on you to review that return order and make sure that it’s something that you want to accept, but we’ll also send out email triggers along the way. All of the emails are gonna get handled right here from within the admin panel as well. And you can see that there’s about 30 or so that I just have standard here in my demo environment for things like order approval, order confirmation, I forgot my password, return order confirmation, right? And these can be edited, again, without being a developer. I can just edit them right here from within the admin panel in plain text or I could flip over to code view if I was a developer and wanted to get a little bit more aggressive.

So shipments, right, credit notes, return receipts, those are all gonna be exposed here through the portal as well. The last thing that I really wanna hit on is that third experience that we talked about for the sales agents. So I’m gonna log out as Dave, and I’m gonna log in as Steve Sellwell. And Steve would be either maybe a salesperson in your organization or a customer service rep, right? Steve is gonna have the ability, once he logs into the portal, to represent a customer. Now, you can either leverage what we call a super sales agent, which means that Steve would have the ability to look at the entire global customer list, right? Or, you could limit him to only be able to see customers that he’s associated to back in the ERP. But when I type in either an address, a customer number, or a name, I can very quickly find what I’m looking for. And once I select that customer, I’m now looking at the portal through their eyes, right?

So if your customer has a very specific subset of products, we don’t show them the 10,000 skews that you make, we show them 200, right? Then Steve is only gonna see those 200. Steve is going to see the customer-specific pricing. He’s never going to have to call back office again and say, you know, “Hey, what is the discount? Or what kind of blanket sales order do we have on file for these folks?” Right? He’s gonna have all of this right here at his fingertips on the portal. Now, Steve also can carry this along on his smartphone or on his tablet, right? This is built in responsive design, so as I minimize my screen, you see what a mobile view looks like. It becomes more vertical, right? And then as I expand that window a little bit, it automatically responds into more of a tablet view. And then, of course, my, you know, more desktop laptop view.

Now, I’m gonna walk you through a quote to order conversion process really quick just to give you an idea of what can happen between a salesperson and a customer. And this, keep in mind, can work bilaterally, right? Salesperson can start the process, customer can finish it, customer could start the sales process, and the salesperson could finish it. But in this case, I’m gonna be Steve. I’m gonna come out here and I’m just gonna, you know, add a notebook into the cart really quick. And now, I want to go ahead and I want to create a quote because my customer has called me and they said that they need a quote for something but they don’t have the approval to buy it yet, right? So I now come into the shopping cart, and rather than proceeding to checkout I’m gonna select Get Quote. I’m gonna go through the same checkout process where I make sure the Ship Tos are accurate. I pick my shipping or my delivery method. I may or may not make a payment here depending on how that’s configured. And then I select Get Quote.

We now have written that quote in real time back into Dynamics and we’ve also sent an email trigger notification off to the customer letting them know that their quote has been generated, and it has a hyperlink to the quote page. So the customer opens the email, they click on the Quote page, they can download it, and then go run it up the totem pole for approval, right? Or, if they need to edit it in any way, shape, or form, they can do that. But most importantly, they don’t have to rely on the salesperson to create the order for them. They can come right in here and click Convert to Order, and Sana is going to automatically flip it from a sales quote status into a sales order status. And if you’re not using quote functionality today, this may be something that, you know, would be good to be able to use in the future because, obviously, this is going to give you, you know, the ability to forecast better and really see out past, you know, the tip of your nose and to not only what’s been sold, but what is coming along down the pike that’s been quoted so far.

So yeah, those are the three different experiences that Sana offers out of the box. Again, public-facing portal, more B2C. We also offer the more closed portal for B2B and then the sales agent functionality. Of course, a lot of our customers are gonna kind of blend the public-facing and the closed portal together into the more hybrid approach, like I showed you today. But hopefully, this did give you a good glimpse at least at a high level of what Sana is capable of helping you accomplish. I do wanna invite you to download our latest research report. There’s a lot of time and energy that went into this. We also did this aligned with Sapio Research, another third-party, on how to meet buyer demands for better B2B e-commerce. So there’s a wealth of information in here. If you’d like a copy, you can go out to our website, download it directly, or you can also reach out to myself or your rep at Encore, and we can make sure that we get it into your hands as well.

Aside from that, I wanna thank everybody for the opportunity today. And I hope there was at least something, you know, that you were able to take away from this, whether you’re already selling online today or whether you’re starting just to think about it for the first time. And at this point, I do wanna open it up to Q&A in the event that there were any questions that came across throughout the course of the webinar.

Melissa: Hi, Mike. Melissa here. There haven’t been any questions so far.

Mike: Okay, well, we’ll sit here and we’ll hold on for just a minute or two. And if any questions come in, then we can answer them, and if not, then we’ll go ahead and wrap. And please be advised that this session has been recorded as well, and we’ll make sure to send it out to anybody that’s either on the webinar today or may have missed the chance to join.

Melissa: Sounds good. Not seeing anything yet, but, yeah, absolutely. We’ll be sending out an email with the recording and a chance for anyone to ask questions if they need to.

Mike: Perfect. Great. Well, Melissa, thank you again, and thanks to everybody at Encore for having us. We appreciate the partnership, and I will look forward to working with you all and some of the folks that are hopefully on the meeting today in the future.

Melissa: Oh, I just got a couple questions here, actually. Sorry. You have some time still?

Mike: I do.

Melissa: Okay. How scalable is the solution?

Mike: Yeah, that’s a good question. And the solution is highly scalable. We built Sana with scalability in mind, and it’s scalable across a lot of different variables, right? So whether we’re talking about, you know, I’ve got 150,000 or 300,000 items that are back in Dynamics that I sell online or I want to sell online, you know, we do work with organizations at the very enterprise level that have, you know, a large number of items in inventory. We also are very scalable from, you know, a geographical standpoint. So we are a global organization ourselves. We have 14 offices worldwide. We’ve got support in every time zone throughout the world, and we also have a footprint in every Azure Data Center from Microsoft across the world. So, whether it be multi-currency, whether it be multi-language, whether it be we’re selling internationally, or we just have very high transaction volumes and very large items in our inventory, we’re scalable across all those different variables. And I’m happy to dive deeper into that if there are specific questions or use cases that anybody might have.

Melissa: What about going from B2B phase one to B2C for phase two?

Mike: Sure. Yeah, I mean, that’s not a problem. Again, you’re gonna get all three different experiences out of the box, right? So if you just wanna have a closed portal as a first phase, and sell more B2B through that closed portal, then that’s absolutely fine. You know, you just would not configure and stand up the public-facing aspect of it. But you always are gonna have that, you know, to be able to stand up and configure later on down the road after we’ve done our implementation. So there’s not an issue with that at all.

Melissa: Great. Thank you very much. That’s it for questions.

Mike: Perfect. Well, yes, thanks again, and thanks for having me today.

Melissa: Okay. Thanks, Mike.

Mike: Okay. Bye, everybody.

Melissa: Bye, everybody.