Growth happens when you make the right decisions for your business. Every business leader knows this and recognizes the process involves weighing the pros and cons of different options, using their best judgment to make a choice and then moving forward confidently. Unfortunately, the volatility of our world today — economic uncertainty, global conflict, natural disasters, UFO speculation and the still-lingering pandemic (just to name a few) — is making even the most seasoned executives question whether they should be making any decisions at all or just hunker down until things settle down.
Well, most of us can agree the only thing predictable at the moment is that we live in unpredictable times. So, to help B2B leaders gain insights on how to make the best decisions for their business today, commercetools partnered with Master B2B to host “Double Down or Hunker Down: Which Strategy will Drive Higher B2B Commerce ROI in 2023?”
Moderated by Andy Hoar and Brian Beck, the co-founders of Master B2B, the Un-webinar™ brought together industry experts with opposing opinions to debate an issue leaders are currently grappling with — whether it’s time to go all in and boldly invest in new technology and talent right now or tighten the purse strings and focus on improving existing tech and upskilling their current resources.
A strong proponent that risk delivers rewards, Michael Scholz, Vice President of Product and Customer Marketing at commercetools, teamed up with Riccardo Caruso, Vice President, Worldwide eCommerce and Digital Solutions at Cepheid, to represent Team Double Down. Their opponents on Team Hunker Down included Steven Javor, Director of eCommerce North America at Schneider Electric, who was paired with Chris Baltusnik, e-Commerce Transformation and Operations Leader at Owens Corning — both of whom adamantly believe it’s time to step back and take a more conservative approach.
The teams went to battle over three rounds of questions, with both sides presenting strong, albeit dramatically different arguments. While there were hard punches and low blows, there were also moments when the teams agreed to disagree and others when the opposition's stance was acknowledged as a valid opinion.
The Great Debate: A few of the best highlights from which to glean insight
Andy kicked things off with the first question: Is now the time to expand your core technology capabilities as a long-term investment or do you put off purchases and wait to see what the future holds?
I don't know how many wake-up calls you need. The pandemic was the first one. Supply chain issues, spy balloons, UFOs. I don't know what needs to happen for you to realize that this is the time to double down. Double down as much as you can because if anything — the pandemic and everything that came after that showed us — behaviors are changing, expectations are accelerating, [you need to deliver] personalized customer experience across channels. So don't hit that snooze button anymore. You got to double down.
Team Double Down
Well, where were you during the pandemic? Did you not formulate a strategy and invest then? Are you just waking up now? It's like two years after the pandemic. Have you been optimizing all those investments you've already made? Are you underestimating the end of the pandemic while revenue is declining? And you're going to throw some more money at technology to solve your problems? I mean, have an interesting discussion with your decision-makers and your board now about investing in more technology when you haven't really optimized what you already have. And hey, if you haven't already laid off workers, who doesn't have all this extra time to manage a new tech integration or re-platform.
Team Hunker Down
Brian escalated the conversation with the second question: Should you ramp up hiring, given the market is full of tech and engineering talent, or nurture the folks you’ve got on hand?
Absolutely double down. These are special times. Look, I'm convinced success starts with great people and when things are good, great people are busy doing great things. That is, they're not available on the market. But when crisis hits and they're either directly or indirectly impacted, that's a good time to snatch those champs. So what I say, what I suggest, you're going to have a plan, you're going to be selective, and you're going to be ready to get those people on board when the time is right. Now.
Team Double Down
I could not disagree more. Team Hunker Down all the way when it comes to hiring, and I'll tell you why. Okay, so these companies that are hiring during down economies like crazy are the same companies that are having mass layoffs 3, 4 or 5 months down the road. And it's like turn and burn, turn and burn, turn and burn. So I don't need to wait for a down economy to find extreme talent. I just need to wait for another round of layoffs from Google, from Amazon — from any company that's doing these mass hirings and mass firings.
Team Hunker Down
So, we're very strong [at Schneider Electric] on the fact that we need to keep rewarding our employees and showing them a future and making sure that they see a career forward for themselves. I think if you are going to start with your employees, you have to show that you're behind them, and being behind them means understanding that you've made a promise to them that if they achieve these certain results, they're going to get certain rewards. If you start taking that away from them, then yeah, you're going to have to start hiring because you're going to lose those employees.
Team Hunker Down
Sparks really began to fly when Andy posed the final question: Is now the time for B2B firms to aggressively expand into new channels or focus on optimizing existing channels?
I think it's really important for people to understand that the beacon on digital capabilities, especially the overall digital experience, is always moving farther and farther out. So, you have to keep investing or you'll fall even further behind. So for me, it's not really a question. You got to double down on channels. Obviously, what you already have [in place] needs to work, you can't ignore that. Hopefully, you've been doing that over the last couple of years. But there's no time to waste. You have to focus on adding new channels. Really focus on where your customers are and get a buy button out there.
Team Double Down
One of my mantras is all customers online, and that means enabling all customers to be able to self-service online. You're never going to convince a customer to come to your website if they're using other platforms — so you have to meet them where they are. In 2016, I joined a great company making great products, and what came back from the customers was, we love your products, but we hate buying from you. That was a channel problem. And that's an awful position to be in from a competitive perspective. So, you want to remove all those points of friction, meet customers where they're at, and invest in those channels. My advice is to map out your customers by channel and look at those opportunities and double down on those channels to get them on board.
Team Double Down
Should you take time to look into new channels? Absolutely. But in terms of “aggressively” exploring new channels, that means worrying about certain channel conflicts. We do a lot in terms of our roadmap before actually going into said channels. By aggressively going into those channels, we could be looking at pissing off a whole base that we’ve spent 10 years growing. For instance, previously I was at Goodyear and we had Walmart as our big customer. We were looking into Amazon, we were looking into Costco, but there's nurturing to Walmart before we get to that point. Do I want to expand into new markets? Absolutely. Do I want to do it aggressively? Absolutely not.
Team Hunker Down
The Big Decision: The audience voted and one team emerged victorious
Each round concluded with the audience — executives hailing from an impressive list of major brands including Xerox, True Value Hardware, 3M, Konica Minolta, Staples and Royal Brinkman — casting a vote for the team they believed presented a stronger case for their stance. Andy and Brian presented the results after the final bell, with Team Double Down emerging as the winner hands-down in every round.
Michael’s unwavering conviction that composable commerce is the key to B2Bs thriving in these uncertain times we live in resonated with the audience. As he pointed out, the open environment of the approach is able to deliver B2Bs the flexibility they need to adapt to change easily and without risk. Plus, the incremental rollout strategy of the approach ensures they can recognize tangible ROI faster.
During recessions, that's when winners emerge. And usually the winners are the ones that continue to invest strategically and move ahead of the competition. And if you remember, those are also the times when most of the most amazing startups were formed. Think Airbnb, Uber or Square, WhatsApp, you name it. So, whatever side you're on, whatever your strategic move or response to this ever-changing condition is, it's best founded in a business strategy and a technology approach that is composable in nature.
Team Double Down
The audience also must have appreciated the real-life examples Riccardo offered to reinforce that he continually runs with a “double down” strategy to drive business growth and it hasn’t let let him down yet.
In 2016, I did a deployment. The best-in-class was a monolith. It took us a one full year. We had to close ourselves in this war room without windows and then deploy after one year, big investment. And after four years, when the channel grew to a billion, we had to actually re-platform, which was a massive undertaking. Now, fast forward to last year at Cepheid we took a best-of-breed approach, composable commerce, amd we were able to roll out order management just in few months. In six months we were done with eCommerce. So, we were able to be nimbler faster, meet the needs of our customers, better, greater ROI, and because it’s a plug and play model, we won’t need to re-platform in four years.
Team Double Down
With both contenders presenting strong cases in favor of doubling down, their opponents on Team Hunker Down didn’t really stand a chance. To get a more complete picture of the pros and cons of each strategy, watch the video recap.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.