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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Speaker 1 (00:00.558)
So don't do this at home.
Welcome to this special e-tail edition of Talk Commerce. Today I Sean Simon. He is with Blurbs and a number of other things. Sean, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.
Yeah, I've been in the e-commerce space and marketing for 30 years. Really, before e-commerce really was a thing. I was on the marketing side. And about five years ago, we started a consultancy to help brands and vendors sort of find each other. Think of it like a matchmaking service. We found that vendors didn't have a way to get to the buyer.
And the buyers didn't have the tools or resources to do proper searches where they could fully vet vendors. And so we thought there's got to be a better way to help the buyers find the right vendors and the vendors to find the right buyers. And so we built Cogent and we built a community around that. So we have 500 members from brands from Allbirds to Walmart and everything in between. It's our community. So they're a great resource for us, but they're the ones we're trying to help with their specific needs.
led to us building out this smart tech discovery platform called blurbs.ai, which is basically the self-service version of what we do at Cogent. A buyer can come in, do a search on anything they want, read about a bunch of vendors in our own voice, much more clear than a lot of the vendors do. You get a blurb on what they do, a blurb on a case study so it's easy to consume, and you get 20 RFI questions. And then you're able to ask them questions.
Speaker 1 (01:33.93)
specific questions about your business that you want to ask the vendor anonymously, which is a nice feature, so you don't get caught up in that sales process. And then on the side, I help a founder out at a company called iBBQ where they make these sort of Korean BBQ type tables, higher level in your backyard. Angelina Jolie has one, it's a small business and it's a lot of fun because it's not somebody that I work with every day in terms of type of business.
So that's what you have cooking. That's awesome. So in the green room we talked a little bit about the challenges from the agency side for RFIs and you had also mentioned a lot of things from the merchant side. Tell us a little bit about how RFIs get just skewed and get out of control and you had mentioned a number of months just to produce one which I never really thought about but
have have cooking.
Speaker 2 (02:27.412)
I know there's a lot of challenges on both sides. Tell us about how you're helping to solve those challenges from both sides.
think back in the day when we were buying media it was easy. What size banners do you have? What's the file size? And you buy your impressions in clicks, And I think when you're buying marketing technology and you look at e-tale here, there's probably 500 vendors, don't know how many, 300, 500 vendors. Shop Talk will have 1,000 vendors. As a buyer, it's overwhelming. But I think when you go to do the RFI, whether you're at a brand or an agency, you only ask the questions that you know of. If it's something you have never bought before, and MarTech does a lot of things people have never bought before.
You don't know how to think ahead. You don't know the right questions. What am going to deal with in six months or a year? And so you end up buying a solution that doesn't solve your needs past six months. And then here you are back at another, you know, etail looking for that, you know, another vendor in that same category so you can rip and replace. And ripping and replacing costs you money as a brand. It costs the vendor money because they're losing a customer. And it all could have been mitigated by asking the right questions. And so we want to help buyers ask the right questions without feeling like they're entering a sales process.
Do you think that's in the RFI process that is one of the biggest holes where you don't really give the vendor a chance to ask those follow-up questions because it's just this could be blind RFI or closed that you're telling them what you want rather than them suggesting something you should get?
Yeah, the look I think the vendors, vendors know their category better than the buyers. They just do they live it every day. So we lean on them to say, hey, what are the things buyers should be asking vendors like you in your category? And so that helps us build out the right RFI questions that every vendor in a category will answer. And then of course, every buyer is going to have specific questions to their business because they have specific needs. So we give them the ability to sort of add on to that RFI with their own
Speaker 1 (04:26.986)
specific questions. We start with four. We ask them a few questions about their business so we can least help the vendor understand like who is this person, like what are they selling or what are they buying and we don't tell the vendor the name and company name but they have a lot of information about the buyer so they can give a good answer and then the vendors the buyers can then decide which ones they want to engage with and ask more questions but they're getting a really big head start by reading all this content.
on their first day of their search on this website without having to go through a sales meeting and hear the dog and pony from a vendor that might not even be a good fit.
You mentioned in blurbs you're going out and getting distilled information or you're scraping sites to distill it down to at least a paragraph. What are you seeing in terms of scrapability and sometimes in the retail they had a map price where it's blocked by certain things. Do you find that and you have to get over some of those technical hurdles?
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't deal with the development side, but I know that there was one vendor, and I can't recall which one it was, that we had a hard time getting the information out of just the way the site was built. honestly, there's like thousand vendors on the site today, and I don't think any of them had any issues other than that one. The information on the vendor websites, the bigger challenge is they're long, and they're wordy, and they have buzzwords, and buyers have said, I read for 15 minutes, or I go for 10 pages, I still don't know what they do.
I just need to blurb. I just need to know what they do and what I'm looking for before I keep reading and wasting time because I don't have that much time. So I think the bigger issue is less about how they build it and getting the right content.
Speaker 2 (06:05.602)
Yeah, speaking of barbecue, my friend's dad is the founder of Lloyd's Barbecue. And one thing he said is that your marketing has to be instantly intuitive. Your buyer has to know it right away. And I mentioned some of the new AI things and he's an older gentleman. And I think a lot of people have trouble understanding the technology today and it's harder when you wrap in buzzwords, right? So tell us how you get past some of those challenges of
weeding through the buzzwords and all, you know, think AI is the worst culprit in terms of putting buzzwords on people's websites, right? So do you have a buzzword decrypter that helps the vendor and the buyer?
100%. It's a fantastic question. actually do have, when I enter a vendor into our staging area before we publish it, we actually have a buzzword drop down. So I can add in all the buzzwords that I think that need to be acknowledged for that particular vendor based on what I've read and what I know about the website. Things like AI and performance, zero party data. There's a lot of buzzwords out there and they're always changing, right?
And so we'll have a section on the vendor page, all the buzzwords that are relevant because they use them. So we don't want to be the judge and jury there, but we definitely pull them out as buzzwords. Our blurb will not have the buzzwords.
That's great. So what else are you seeing then in terms of how buyers are getting the advantage? You had mentioned some things about not having to get involved in the sales process, but how are you helping them to get some of those intuitive things that they may not know that they need to know?
Speaker 1 (07:49.294)
Yeah, think with buyers, they are getting inundated with emails and LinkedIn messages to the point where they just ignore everything. And then when they need something, they go just do the research themselves. I heard a podcast last year from an expert in this space that did a global study. 80 % of buyers prefer to do the research themselves. And so we wanted to, when we built this, give buyers all of the tools and information that they need.
to help them, especially in those early days, the initial steps of their journey. And so we put that information on the page and that's kind of what we focus on. But when we do the RFI questions, like I said, we're putting questions in there, like the first 10 are always standard for every category because buyers want to know, hey, how do you handle CCPA or GDPR? What's your pricing model? That's relevant for every vendor. The second 10 questions are specific to that category. And like I said earlier,
the vendors help us out with that. So we make sure we're asking all the vendors those questions that buyers aren't thinking about. There might be some that they thought about, but chances are there's going to be some questions in there that they hadn't thought about, and they're going to get an answer, and then they're going to go, that's really interesting. That is important to me. Now when they look at other vendors in that category, they can look at their answers and see how they match.
What do you think is going to change now in this process? It sounds like you're helping him get through that, but I know there's other AI tools that are out there now that will automatically respond to RFPs and automatically fill them out or whatever. But I feel like you're losing a lot of the opportunity to make yourself sound more unique. Are you seeing some challenges in AI, but some advantages in AI?
We definitely use some AI in what we do. I think the problem with sort of generic AI, just going to a chat GPT and doing some research that way, is that it's only as good as the data that it's scraping from, right? And we've been doing this for 30 plus years, each of us, there's three founders. So we know what's real and what's not. And when you read something, whether that makes sense or not. And so we can use that experience to make sure that we're not putting up information on the website that isn't.
Speaker 1 (10:03.534)
the right information for that search. think buyers need to be really careful when they're using AI. Again, because the data models could be old. Eventually we'll have our own data model, so we'll be able to mine our own LLM. And that's when I think it gets really powerful. But I don't think AI as a search tool is there yet. And at the end of the day, the buyers really don't have the time even to do that.
Every marketing team that I work with is getting smaller and smaller, right? E-commerce team smaller and smaller, and so they need better tools, but they don't have the resources to do the day-to-day as it is. So then to layer on, we need an ESP or we need a new e-comm platform or whatever it is, go do the research. That's a full-time job. You can't just go to chat.gpt and go, what's the best e-commerce platform for whatever.com? That's not gonna work. So I think having experts on your side to sort of leverage AI to sort of expedite things.
is a better way to go than just relying on AI and taking it for gospel.
Yeah, so how do you then educate them so you're asking them to use your tool to do some of this research, right? How how do you get make sure that and I think you're right too in terms of that they just need they do it when they need it They don't really think about it when they don't need it, right? And that and all the marketing people are just inundating you with all these messages about what you don't need at the time. Yeah
How are you helping to educate the consumer or the, let's take the vendor, not the vendor, but the merchant who wants to buy that product? Because you need to get them on board with this, right? How are you approaching
Speaker 1 (11:44.974)
I think first and foremost, think buyers at brands, they've been looking for a resource. There's nothing out there in our industry that catalogs vendors the way that we do it. You have some review sites out there, but people don't trust the review sites and many of them don't even know they exist. And we don't charge for the buyer to use our platform. It's 100 % free. in a way, it's like, why wouldn't you use it? Like it's going to expedite everything you do, make your life so much easier.
and it's going to give you all the information you need to go back to your boss or your procurement team and be like, this is why we picked this solution. We did this work. Here's the work that we did. Here's the questions that we asked. Here's what we know about the vendors. You can do a comparison side by side and you can justify your decisions. We're not asking for money, so all we're doing is helping make their lives easier. I don't see why they wouldn't want to use it.
Yeah, I got it. I always hear this interesting quote in the e-commerce industry because I came from the Magento side and the quote was that nobody, no CTO ever gets fired for picking Shopify. But they are sometimes the wrong decision. And I think you're right that sometimes they just choose it because it's the thing that seems obvious or the vendor that has the best marketing, right? So you're helping them.
To get over that get over some of that research from the vendor side then how I'm how how is this then helping them to Because they ultimately need to help their sales team right get more deals into the pipeline. How does that help them?
Yeah, look, I've spent, my partners and I have spent decades, I hate saying that, managing sales teams, right? And we know that salespeople tend to be overly optimistic, they leave deals in their pipeline way too long, and then they end up closing deals that aren't necessarily good for the company, that's to drag on resources. So I think that we can help mitigate that risk for vendors. I think the biggest challenge vendors have today, as I said earlier, is that getting to the right buyer is really difficult because that buyer...
Speaker 1 (13:48.982)
is getting inundated, not just with your competitors emails and LinkedIn messages, but every other category is emailing them and reaching out to them. And so they just are overwhelmed and they don't know these, you walk through the expo hall and you can't tell what someone does by the name of their company. The names don't make any sense. I know our name isn't necessarily perfect for what we're offering, but I think when you hear the name and you understand what we do, there's a synergy there and you're like, I get it. But I think that the vendors need help
generating quality leads, not just leads, but quality leads. And so when a buyer uses blurbs and gets to a point where they send them an anonymous inquiry or reach out to them for more information, they're already qualified because they've read all this information in plain English. They're not confused by the buzzwords on your website. It's plain English. We give them case studies. We answer all the questions that they could have. And when they come out to you, like, they've already accelerated your sales process because they've done a lot of the work themselves.
So now they just have a few more questions. So when you get that first meeting, you better be talking about, here's our platform, here's the team we're gonna give you, and here's our price. One meeting, one sales meeting, because they already have all the information. Maybe if it's a bigger purchase, it's two, but they can make decisions as much faster, so these deals aren't sitting in our pipeline. Their boards will love it. If they're a public company, their investors will love it, because it's faster, right? Business is moving along faster.
Sean we have a few minutes left and as I close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug What would you like to plug today?
Well look, I think I've been doing it the whole time, right? Blurbs.ai is, I think it's the future about how buyers will search for solutions. And even if you're coming to a trade show, we don't want to replace trade shows. I think there's a lot of value coming here. But what we did on our homepage is we created a eTail West banner. And when you click on it, we show you all the vendors that are here, at least that we knew of last week. And so you can see them all.
Speaker 1 (15:45.048)
and can do your research before you get to the show, because you can't walk into the expo hall and talk to everybody, or even find everybody, because they're all over the place, right? So we want to help you have a better time, a more successful etail, or whatever conference you're going to, by doing the research before you get here, so you can focus. So you're here to get content, you're here to build relationships, and you probably need a couple of tools. And now we're going to help you focus your efforts.
Yeah, that's great. They're gonna do the same for shop talk
I am. We're definitely going to do the same for Shop This is a good warm up because Shop Talk is obviously a lot bigger.
Yeah, that's, mean, if you hear any sales coach tell you never go into your client's meeting without knowing something about them, right? That's the same for the... When you're trying to purchase something. Sean Simon, it's been such a great conversation. Thanks for being here today.
It's been great, Brett, thank you.