So this issue... think about the bubbles.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• The rise of the outage - This last few months have been interesting for the outages that have occured for seemingly no reason. No peak demand curves, just.... normal. Shopify was totally down for 15mins everywhere. Vercel went down and denied it, then admitted it, then... whatevs. Cloudflare gets the blame all the time we know, but they got the blame for a few more that may or may not have been their fault. What’s going on? We’ve got masses of infrastructure right now!!

• Charitable Speed dating - Vague Fierce, our anonymous Commerce Futures CTO - offered up 15 minute speed dating sessions in return for a £250 donation to the company’s chosen charity. He was mobbed. Clearly a sarcy response to Shoptalk’s rabbit hutches, but we love this idea. As we struggle to get any vendors to give us access to their Tech teams to explain their LLM feeds - maybe we could do the same there?

• Are the European regulators waking up? - two things in June have made us think there are some regulators “growing a pair”. Last week it was announced that Klarna have won a $2bn payout from an case dating back to 2008 - where Google listed its ownnprice comparison services higher than pricerunner. Added to this is the $4.1bn Android fine from the EU court of Justice. And in the UK our mates over at the register have done a great piece on the CMA’s attempt to injext transparency into the new AI search features from Google. This is complex shizzle, but we wonder if the pressure is starting to tell.

  ---

  AI’s conundrum - Adoption v Payback

  The huge valuations of our friends OpenAI and Anthropic will fall away, I think we can all be sure of that - it’s what happens in tech to small investors who invest at IPO, they lose their shirt (the big guys have already made their money to be clear).

  But AI needs to sell more to be anywhere near making good on those revenue promises they have made in the IPO prospectus (and in Sam Altman’s parallel life of bullsh*t).

  So - time to increase token pricing right? Let the gouging commence 🙂

  Well no - they can’t do that, and we can all see why. Enterprise is not yet addicted to AI. The tech is not prevalent quite yet. What will stop that? Token costs….

  The closer tokens come to the price of a human, the less likely they are to be used. And cranking yet another overhead on businesses who are struggling with Tariffs, Taxes, Gen Z attitudes to work - is ill advised.

  The saving grace (in the UK) for AI will be the horrific HR laws which employers now need to navigate, and which make AI very attractive for owners.

  Get them addicted first (we say) - THEN gouge them Sam - OK?

ABM - A new Circle of Trust

One for the SaaS vendors - as promised

ABM (account based marketing) will tell you that you need to continue creating content that is read and interpreted by Agents, but is unread by humans within your target accounts. The LLM is what the human engages with of course.... that layer of genius we all love now.

We have a volunteer client who has acted upon the advice we’ve been banging on about for ages now... building their own “community of trust” - in this case called “incentive economics”. We love the name (beautifully specific), and the ambition. If anyone can get a group engaged without selling these guys are the people we think can.

Trust is the only commodity in sales that has value today, and nobody is earning that with sales content. #payitforward to prospects, focusing on their problems and not your features - those are table stakes anyway now. The relationship will build as you carry out (free of charge) some Ai POC work, which the client know you will be putting into the solution anyway.

And how do you get that first conversation? Pursuing is the temptation, and along with 20,000 other vendors every client has techniques for avoiding you. In our view, the only offer with any appeal right now is some targeted free assistance in navigating the fluidity of the market, specifically with LLM’s. If we’re having trouble getting expertise to present about feeds just think about the opportunity for your biggest brains :)

The end of the highly paid loafer?

Finally, not content with poking fun with our friends at SaaS central, we take aim this issue at the personas in tech vendors that truly drive us to distraction. In this, our first iteration, the “highpaid loafer”.

We’ve all met them. Mid-atlantic males with sharp clothes and a low handicap. I worked with a good few back at Ziff Davis years ago... but now they’re a dying breed. The used to oil the wheels in deals, carry the bag, book the dinner. They traded off their friendship with Deloitte (replace GSi here), but never really moved the needle.

Back when SaaS was shaking this was fine, and if you look where they’re headed it’s all about the safe haven of Nvidia or similar now. The good news is SaaS has started trimming these people out, and with less money from clients it’s about time :)

As always, thanks for the gossip you send us and the rumours we hear - we couldn’t do it without you (well we could actually, but we felt we should say something nice)

Jamie

Remember that Astrid & Miyu is growing fast, profitably and is a true omnichannel business with Shops now leading their expansion strategy.

The most vocal Vibe Coders of late 2025 have ebbed away, and we find ourselves back in a level of normality where it’s perfectly clear that AI won’t change the underlying technology stack particularly quickly.

Kelly Goetsch (one of MACH’s co-founders) was full of “the end of the eCom platform” last autumn, and he’s now writing about how some core elements of the stack won’t be replaced any time soon - so it must be true :)

The same is true of most Vibe coders - they’ve changed their tune.

This has quickly become a conversation about building production software v maintaining it, where the build part is in most ways the more straightforward part. Claude is confusing everyone. I know SaaS vendors who are using Claude to write code, and clients are obviously using it too - so the worlds in some ways are colliding. In turn, this is causing pressure on pricing: “If I can build it myself why am I paying you £100k pa when we only use 50% of it anyway”… etc…

Maintenance is linked to the planned longevity of the tool - and on balance the teams opting to build are doing so because either they do not believe a SaaS product will EVER exist to do the job, or like an ERP they hate the current offerings so much that they’re prepared to go in for the long haul.

In large enterprises I’ve spoken to engineering leads who say “we’ll rent SaaS for a year while we build it”, and those systems are quite “core” I’d say - and yet we’ve got a good few members of the Commerce Futures group who are moving from homegrown to 3rd party SaaS still.

All this is true, but, when it comes to building a secure checkout, there’s a complexity that most end-users clients will not and should not tackle. Equally, why would you build an integration layer of your own when API’s change constantly and you’ll be updating it for years.

On the other hand, I remember Paul Smith having their own CMS for many years, which they ran on top of Magento until they replaced it with Storyblok.

Build will cost 20% and maintenance 80% is what we hear from the grownups - and AI doesn’t particularly help with maintenance - there are still holes which need a human eye in the source code too. Humans are still reviewing all AI code to the best of my knowledge - it’ll likely change of course, but that’s a quality conversation which goes hand in hand with Sovereignty and modeling

Anyway - round and round we go :)

Jamie

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Salesforce are rearming - Always interesting to see who SF acquires as AI business models take shape. The SF walled garden now has M3ter (a very good usage billing platform), TIN (a behemoth AI agent for CS) and more as they take advantage of the lowering of prices in SaaS. Still - $3.6bn for TIN is a whole heap of cash. At least the US govt can’t turn it off when they feel like it right?

• Shopify’s international fudge - I’m often told I’m too harsh on vendors, but the Commerce Futures group is rife with no small frustration regarding “markets” v single storefronts. I get it - Shopify’s home market is so vast that the ROW is a distraction of sorts, but with so much developer talent it should be able to re-architect for international merchants properly without needing many instances. The European enterprise isn’t an option if this is where we stay, and for those who think me too harsh, the Shopify disciples would have you believe it’s capable of running a global business. Yes - if you have 36 storefronts :(

• The haggle is real - Renewals are getting very interesting. We’re hearing of Search businesses agreeing to 1yr extensions with huge discounts (and sighing with relief). Meanwhile Rezolve.ai is out there trying to acquire these businesses on the cheap. We’re hearing rumours that they’re trying to buy Athos... which would be sad given that out of the many mergers around the Athos org has integrated pretty well.

• The LLM cute name contest - I realise we’re all going to become conspiracy theorists as we age, but it’s not just me I promise. LLM’s are all being given “benign” names... taking words from the Tolkien and Greek myths to make them feel super-approachable. The irony that something called “Fable” is the subject global grumpiness is sad, but I do wish the vendors would stop making their models sound cute. They’re not cute, right?

Anti-Loyalty

I’ve tried saying it quietly, but nobody seems to listen. So - a little bit louder.

There are no loyalty programs, there are no loyalty vendors, there are only incentives.

Of course, we all have brand affinities. I’m loyal to Aston Villa, McNair shirts, Petite Peonies. I don’t have to be told that... I just am.

But the economics of incentives - there’s a thing of beautiful complexity, a thing of interest. That’s where “earn and burn” is weakest - tearing apart any affinity with the brand whilst pretending the opposite is in fact happening.

If AI gives us anything it’s the ability to personalise incentives at scale. Copywriting for each individual based upon their behaviour and purchases, discounts that feel random and “gifty” but are actually evenly spread across the customer base.

Come on people - let’s try harder... and stop calling them loyalty programs, they’re just not.

Sovereignty

Where to start. As I design the next MACH Agenda this has to be present. European businesses will not adopt the AI that the vendors need them to if the models risk being turned off.

Global politics are front and centre here, and there’s just no way a global LLM is going to offer any guarantee of availability in the current climate. In Canada a few weeks ago we heard lots of chatter about “Sovereign GPU’s”, which seems like an obvious priority, but the reality is every market will need a sovereign model selection, the world is simply too uncertain right now.

In the UK we’ve got nothing, we’ve sold our soul. the French alone have an LLM - Mistral (not ripe for use though). Nothing in any other sovereign European state, and no sign either.

The vision Tim Berners Lee purports of us each having our OWN sovereign wallet is a very long way away, and whilst the word “Sovereign” has all sorts of awful connotations to do with “Empire” and worse, in the new world it really does mean “mine own”.

We should all think much harder about this subject. Before jumping in to every new model for fun... just hold that thought for a second. Count to 10 - have a ponder.

The LLM Feed - customers in the dark

We are used to things moving faster now... and given the focus on LLM’s across vendors and clients we had expected that in 3 weeks between our last issue and now, we’d have found someone who really understands the product feed for AEO.

Not so... vendors do not seem to grasp the opportunity, and clients are standing around confused. Somebody, anybody, help :)

And finally - our insult of the week. Please feel free to use freely. Don’t forget to find us on substack... A great piece about AI careers there and more to come we promise.

Jamie

We’re going to struggle not to make this a long essay, but here goes nothing.

Okay, so this issue of No Rocket Ships is special, and we make no apologies for the fact that this is about building a career using AI to power your progress. We’ve put it here on substack so that you can share more easily, and maybe even have a discussion about it. Let us know your thoughts… after all I’ve had a career as a business owner rather than an employee - I may have got this all wrong.

Why now?

We’ve seen enough progress within mid-sized and large organisations to have a clear view of where the opportunity lies, and who should be going after it.

The scale of this change is 100X what’s gone before. Every part of every business will have some AI in a few years time, and the understanding is incredibly low currently. In most large enterprises there are execs with 3-4 years under their belts, but they’ve covered very little ground (due mostly to the org structure and the politics).

In mid-sized companies with a small dev team - the pace is rapid. Unfettered by big politics and always constrained for resource, these guys have taken Claude in the last 12 months and accelerated away. They’ve mitigated risk with the CISO, brought new outcomes to the board, and now have permission to go harder :)

What am I arguing in favour of?

A new version of the old chief digital officer role is up for grabs, and taking the opportunity right now are mid-career technology leads. Domain knowledge plus experience is the superpower of the next few years, and if you can truly add critical thinking to this despite being a long-term employee you’ll write your own salary cheque.

Technical strategic thinkers have been constrained by subservient IT roles, but now engineering an architecture isn’t the constraint. Those often quiet and more thoughtful people finally have the tools to illustrate what they’ve always been good at, but unable to rally people around.

The gap is becoming really obvious to most of us - progress is being made, but the speed of change is a competitive advantage, and both control (in all forms) and choice (use cases) are critical.

What allows us to claim this?

We moderate a group of senior executives in their mid-careers, I would say, and the reason we have a viewpoint here is that we are starting to see how those individuals are grasping at the opportunities that AI is giving them in order to create a new career path for themselves. It’s that that we wanted to explore here.

As our own community of Commerce Futures leaders debate AI almost weekly, a persona has emerged which vendors should consider carefully.

Mid-career, ambitious and technical, but also carrying domain expertise (they really understand the business). These individuals are finding ways to fund Claude-coded solutions to problems the business hadn’t considered. A few examples:

• Automated board papers (avoiding bias)

• Early submitted trading data with insights (stealing 2 days from every week)

• BI, BI and more BI

• Building your own stripped out CRM maybe?

• Tooling to prioritise store repair suppliers based upon urgency/quality/spend

How do you get it?

This - it turns out - is the tricky part. It is not enough to just wave and say “I can help”. The politics from owners, CFO’s, resistors in general is real… and you do not want to get fired.

Here’s a picture of “Gordon” from a Persona deck I did years ago, the grumpy 55yr old CTO who never wanted “cloud” in the first fucking place :) - We all know Gordon.

Gordon is just one of the problems, but the biggest barrier is also the greatest opportunity - Nobody else has a clue!

So, what we are seeing work is as follows:

1. Choose something that’ll get you noticed and build it. Choose wisely. Not mission critical but something nobody can ignore (list above has worked).

2. Build it in your own time, using work tokens.

3. Show up with it to an important meeting and present - cleary articulate what it solves and how you speed things up. DO NOT MENTION GETTING RID OF STAFF.

4. Then do it again… and again… make sure you have three really good ideas that you can build cheaply and quickly to demonstrate value.

We’ve seen that these initial builds get attention, and either the CEO or CFO starts referencing them, or colleagues ask for help, and then momentum builds.

Do not ask for permission - we’re hearing some companies have started adoption and then become scared and locked it all down.

Also - be ready for some tough questions about cost and hallucination, find your CISO and have a quiet word once the first demo has been done. Be prepared to work harder than you have without reward for a while.

Then ask for a new job.

Not

Head of AI
Chief intelligence Officer
Brainy git
….nothing with ego….

Instead

Head of Automation
AI Operations Lead

All the best - what do we all think?

Hey people - Another issue from the hive mind here - written by me (Jamie) but contributed to by all those of you i’ve been speaking with these last few weeks.

#Gossip innit

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• “Shrugs Shoulders” - As we enter the re-ordering of SaaS, some vendors are simply shrugging their shoulders as clients say “we’re only using 20%, we’re gonna build it ourselves”. A case in point are Splunk (let’s face it nobody ever knew what they did anyway), who are simply standing up, shaking hands and saying “if it doesn’t work let us know”.

• Contentful have stepped up (before stepping down) - Not what we’d have predicted, but as the game starts to play out these guys have been moving beyond the standard CSM playbook. Clients are applauding quietly from the sidelines… so they sold the business to Salesforce, which will kill it. Nice work People!

• SaaS billing will change - Duh! We know it will don’t we. The questions customers are asking are: Now v renewal? Consumption v % of features used? The first offers are coming out from deflated Search & Merch platforms looking to save clients…

• Projects are out there we promise - Despite the doom in SaaS, clients are invigorated. Yes - online is proving tricky to profit from as the socials “gouge” again, but we speak to merchants and vendors all day long who have plans.

• When you least expect it - Optimizely seem to have a doozy on their hands with Opal. Very good feedback from customers who have done the POC’s, and seemingly product / market fit - large orgs who had the crappy old stuff from Optimizely are delirious. And - it’s good enough for those with a much more modern stack…

Build v Buy (all over again)

So much to say here, but check out the substack article tomorrow on AI careering (sign up and you’ll get it inbox-stylee). Build v Buy is now about the ambition of the stakeholder inside the business.

This isn’t about “Vibe coding” or some term that vendors find convenient to use derisively about home-grown code. Instead it’s about gradually re-thinking the stack and removing half of the tools. In most cases that’s about 15 SaaS products.

Which ones are for the chop the soonest? Here’s our countdown

1 - All things BI (Business intelligence). Very pricey and “Claudable”.

2 - Search & Merchandising. Not that hard and if you’re a forward thinking company with a feed strategy this is a no-brainer

3 - CRM. Sound odd? A stripped-out system with no “send” capability is on the cards for many.

There’s more coming…

SaaS or Infrastructure?

In amongst the chatter about SaaS is a continuing conversation about valuation, funding and (frankly) finding an exit.

The irony I’m finding is that if you’re a SaaS vendor the multiple might be 3x revenue or worse, whereas if you’re classed as Infrastructure the world is your lobster right now. AI infrastructure? 30x revenue or more.

Vendors such as Hightouch are therefore in an interesting position. Massive growth (almost a rocket if we allowed that term), $100m ARR in just 6 years. Most importantly, the platform stores no data, and is growing because everyone wins… data warehouses see more incoming and outgoing data, so they love it. Customers aren’t paying for yet another storage platform which they manage poorly anyway, and they do not appear to be a SaaS vendor to PE or VC companies.

Fascinating times - if you’re a data centre owner you’re suddenly worth 30x more than you were 2yrs ago when you couldn’t give the business away 🙂

Data Warehouse and its time to shine

Turns out you can’t really “do” AI unless you’ve cleaned house. If you do start AI’ing without good housekeeping, your outcomes will be non-deterministic and you’ll be fired. In fact, they’ll be unpredictable anyway :)

Whether you have a Data Lake, Warehouse or Lakehouse - that’s the thing that’s gotta be clean. As the Commerce Futures group joked last week, Lakehouses come in all shapes and sizes, but many are located in swamps, covered in flies and are prone to flooding with poor foundations…

Seriously though - get it right and the Data Warehouse is where AI comes alive for customers.

And finally - our insult of the week. Please feel free to use freely. Don’t forget to find us on substack... we’ll carry on emailing every three weeks or so, but there’s a richer conversation to be had over there we hope.

Finally finally - Our mates at UNRVLD are doing a thing with the Opal people - all about Semantic layers and stuff... wanna go?

Jamie

The image above has been freewheeling around my head for months now.

Is this where we’ll end up as “agents” remove our critical thinking? And Claude has told us we’re amazing once too often?

I don’t want to lose the little true cognition I have. And yes, thinking and chatting is the lifeblood of our working lives....

So - let’s get into it - my opinions follow...

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Recharge bought Skio on the cheap - Skio were doing $33m ARR, and got bought for 3x revenue. 2 years ago they’d have gone for 10x at least. Recharge has become largely dominant in their sector (except for Shopify’s own limited subs service), and Skio were better at lots of the elements of the Recharge toolkit. Customers are a bit sad of course, they know how this ends (more on that later). SaaS valuations are really screwed right now, and what that means for pricing, salaries, all of it - we really don’t know yet.

• The murky beginnings of Rezolve.ai - If you’re in the right community groups (or on reddit) you’ll have read about the dark arts of Dan Wagner’s not so new startup. The beginnings are largely unimportant now though. Out of a SPAC they’ve acquired Crownpeak & Advanced Commerce among others, including three search tools and a bunch of customers. And - $750m burning a hole in their pocket to be spent quickly.
  Murky or not, these are real customers with SaaS that is deeply embedded (some have had Fredhopper for 15 years)... so keep a close eye people, the agentic promise is clearly fluff for now. Oh and yes i asked them for a chat - I am being ghosted.

• Klaviyo’s CRM carcrash - A few weeks ago the CF community witnessed a new AE at Klaviyo sending a “hello, can we catch up” email to 50 accounts who had mostly left their businesses. Oh, and it came out of Salesforce... :) Still funny 10 days later.

Adyen & Talon one - what does it say about SaaS?

This transaction was very early in the cycle that SaaS has known. Talon One has had real momentum for a while now, and hadn’t actually raised that much cash... so really were in control of their own destiny.

I wonder if this has happened now because the thinking is that valuations will only get worse? I can’t see that sales momentum is an issue, the team are excellent and the product positioning has been strong.

The deal presents opportunities for others though. This is Adyen’s biggest acquisition, and they won’t be able to resist fiddling with their new toy. Inevitably, Talon One’s momentum will slow, great staff will move on, and Adyen’s conservative/cautious culture will take over.

Who will benefit? the established “loyalty” players for sure... but there are some bootstrapped and clever types out there. I suspect there will be far more of these deals this year, leading back to suites of SaaS which may never really be bought again....

Are we witnessing the demise of pureplay D2C?

As I wrote a few weeks ago, many D2C companies are spending 20-35% of their total revenues on customer advertising. All with three channels.

In 2005 Heinz (one of the biggest spenders) were lashing out 4.5% of sales revenues on marketing. This has since grown to about 8%, but D2C will never be profitable if they continue to spend at 20%+.

But continue to spend they must for now, because whilst growth is hard to come by, pureplay D2C has to spend big just to stand still. Squeezed by rising ad costs, supply chains, geopolitics and product ranges that do not have repeat purchase built-in - we worry for the sector itself.

Anyone up for opening some shops?

How we love the lion’s den

I got to witness a delicious 10 minute f2f sales pitch & interrogation last week. A senior architect from The Gap and the founder of a server-side tagging business had a really intense chat where deep knowledge was tested, eye contact maintained, subject-matter expertise displayed by both - and ultimately the test was passed, and a next step agreed.

It’s sad in so many ways that all these relationships now start with a zoom call. Face to face is ultimately faster and much more effective, and I know both salespeople and clients would rather start do it in person.

Perhaps in an AI world buying and selling will be the last bastion of critical thinking before we all turn into blobs on lilos :)

Anyway - more focus on these for the rest of the year from me, and more events in the Autumn. Happy Q2 to all and we hope you get the commercial outcomes you deserve (and not a penny more). And - a shout out to Tomo for the support with insults... Temu is a doozy.

Jamie

Oh - and in a nod to our “insult of the week” heritage... are you the funsponge? Check yourself :)

Vile Rumour & Gossip

Leapfrogging is back - More brand-side decision makers who are still on an old platform are considering a leap into the unknown. From an ancient Fredhopper platform to who knows what? Bypassing Algolia, even Constructor... the LLM visibility challenge is real. And finally the home-grown stacks are coming apart. Despite years of pursuit by SFCC they’re all going Shopify or Centra :).

How cross are Stripe? - Last October the ACP was the envy of all it surveyed. Remember everyone claiming they were part of the launch program? And now? OpenAI have bailed on the checkout, so Stripe must be mad as hell and ACP is just a “connective layer”... the website isn’t dead after all apparently.

3 month roadmaps in SaaS - I’ve been banging on about roadmaps being a vital sign to SaaS health for a while now, and in 5 convos this last week I’m told by founders “we can’t publish anything beyond 3 months”. How is a prospect supposed to make a decision based on that I ask you?

Claude for the win - Without doubt, Claude is by far the best tool for devs right now. The gap isn’t small either. One CTO told me last week that “even a really expensive contractor, armed with Claude, can deliver better ROI than a staffer with a lesser toolset. His estimate was a 10x better velocity.

Has OpenAI flown too close to the sun?

I’m not sure anyone wants to say it, but apart from being a bit “goody two shoes” OpenAI seems damaged. Too broad too fast is the call - and whilst revenues are scaling super-quick, the tools are not leading in any category.

You can always tell when the chatter is about others, and whilst “ChatGPT” is the lingua franca of the consumer still, Google has it’s UCP house in order now, and anthropic is on fire.

The “addiction” ruling damaging and distracting Meta and YouTube could not be more welcome in our house, and we hope OpenAI’s lack of a compass gives others an opportunity to reap havoc.

Is old online starting to unravel?

Human nature is curious, inquisitive. The idea of 3 channels where ALL the money goes just isn’t sustainable. Nice job Google and Meta for creating a media addiction, and an industry to go along with it, but it’s finding the bumps in the road, and some are losing grip on their handlebars.

In 20 years of digital, physical retail in the USA still counts for 80% of sales. So despite Amazon, marketplaces and every d2c brand known to man throwing money at the cart, shops are still alive, and more noticably are starting to thrive again.

A CDO I spoke to last week did store visits recently, and the staff came with a list of functionality (iMessage to CRM, SKU reference pics closer to the image for “screenshot shopping”). They’re prioritising all of this.

More from Vague Fierce...

You remember we teased a few highlights from the Commerce Futures community vendor mickey take a few issues ago? Here are a few more nuggets:

1) how much of this are we actually using ?
2) speak to the former customers not the current ones
3) the danger of the POC/POV
4) do we need it or do we like shiny things?
5) does the business need it or is it looking for an excuse for missing targets?
6) the ceo and the speculative phone call
7) how it ends is as important as how it starts
8) Tobi Lutke and why we shouldn’t worship idols
9) Is it an Alliance or an Empire?
10) Why am I the one spending my time reintroducing myself annually

Also -”Salesman please don’t call me buddy”?

More soon - oh and please do look at our new event series this autumn “Let’s go Shopping“ in Soho London if you can.

Jamie

insult of the week - #funsponge

”He literally sucks the fun out of the room. Whenever I walk past him I feel like I’ve been rubbed down with a sponge doused of meanspirited wipes… he’s got to go!”

Normal service then.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Time to respond - There’s some weirdness going on when it comes to vendors responding to sales enquiries. For some reason it has become “accepted” practice to take some time, in some cases days. I recently made an introduction to Shopify and they responded to the client 5 days later 🙂. They are not alone… is it cool to look less needy? I may use the phrase “in my day” here, but surely this isn’t representative of the hunger in sales teams? Also - statistically I’m informed that almost always the first vendor to respond and build a relationship wins.

• Private Planes & bribery - For years large trade shows have paid customers to attend. Shoptalk Luxe funded brand leaders up to $2000 in “travel” costs to attend this year, but some are going further. A SaaS vendor is offering private plane travel to Vegas in a few weeks, which gives you 4 hours in a metal tube to build a relationship. The conclusion in our Commerce Futures community is that this is the onlyfans of B2B marketing.

• When a webinar has no value - I watched a joint sales webinar this week, from a payment provider and front-end-as-a-service player. They had a customer join - and 30 minutes later I left having learned…. absolutely nothing. The customer got 5 minutes, the three other people from SaaS took the remaining 25 mins, and honestly I could have made the presentation myself and had the chat, and I know very little. No wonder these things have no attendees.

• Be nice to us please? - I struggle to have sympathy with the vendor ecosystem when they complain about customers ghosting or negotiating hard at the end of a quarter for a contract. Anyone who has had an Oracle sales director in their front garden will know where the issue lies - in the quarterly commission system and the behaviour that generates.

  ---

  Rise & Fall of community

  As you know I moderate a “group”, of brand-side people I know, have met, interviewed and given access to one another. I don’t go by job title or seniority, I go by mindset. If I see someone who seems helpful I include them. Chatting to someone at a recent event I heard them explain “Not another community”... in exasperation. Then yesterday I was told by a couple of our lot - that the other group is so dull, full of people showing off.

  In tech we see new words all the time which are overused, commoditised and ultimately discarded. It would be a real pity if such a powerful word was cheapened by people who were monetising or egotistical in their aims in this area, I for one enjoy being the benign dictator of one far too much to cheapen it with $$$.

  ---

  Redefining ERP

  A fascinating conversation last week amongst 7 brands in our group - all in various states of urgency to implement an ERP. For some their current platform is closing down (20 yrs old and the owner is retiring). For others they are growing fast and have avoided ERP for 10 years since launch.

  Given the innovation we see in the wider market it’s a great pity that this is such a frustrating space. Old tech, mafia pricing (again), long implementations and no guarantee of success.

  It’s the first space where brands are asking if AI will replace allow them to replace the idea of ERP in the medium term. Nobody it seems thinks that this space will have a commercial offering for mid-market or smaller businesses in the next 5 years.
  

  Meanwhile - MS v Netsuite all over again sadly.

  ---

  SaaS consumption will decline - an enterprise warning

  Large organisations are where the interesting AI implementations are taking place. Anyone mid-market or smaller is just going to rely on their vendor stacks (can you keep up with Shopify’s innovation?).

  I am recruiting for MACH’s Toronto conference currently, and SaaS should be a teeny bit scared I think. I’ve got several customer Engineering and CTO types who will present their AI layer, and say that they’re already using 20% less SaaS than 2yrs ago. And that’s all front-end.

  You will start to see me in the wild in a few weeks. I’m the MC for commerce live in April, and I’ll be at MACH X in Toronto - expect an unfiltered summary of all.
  

  Jamie

Jamie

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• No CSM’s worth hiring - A high growth vendor asked me recently if I knew any really strong Customer Success Managers who they might hire. Disappointingly the response from our Commerce Futures Collective was derisory, Sadly, at every point the group pointed out that none of those they knew fulfilled a role that was about the success of the customer.

• Service works both ways - A few weeks ago we talked about some vendors shutting down slightly and “keeping the lights on”. These same companies claim to be focused on “keeping what they have”, and yet having fired their CSM team have ignored most customers for a few critical months as they year starts. Having lectured brands for years about personalisation and loyalty, they need to wake up and realise this service thing works both ways 🙂.

• The Myth of CRO - Quite often we have a full on group rant in the collective about CRO in general. The “line” goes up, more sales… better efficiency… but the fancy attribution tactics rarely pay off, and the CFO isn’t impressed. Starting to think CRO is actually just a “bait & switch” myth.

• The roadmap - it’s a myth (see below). We have instances where clients have bought enterprise s/w on the promise of a specific set of features, only to find themselves in conflict with the product team about the priority of said features. And now? Well they’re funding the roadmap.

AI - Don’t make me feel stupid

We’re entering an era where once again, customers know much much less than vendors.

And once again, I’m reminded of something an eCommerce leader said to me years ago when discussing the technology buying process. “Don’t make me feel stupid”, because whilst my day job is running an eCommerce business, this is our budget and we’ll spend it with people we both trust and want to work with.

Of course, we’ve come a long way since then. Customers know more, vendors are no longer lecturing, and the reality is that nobody knows ANYTHING about AI.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get through this together” is the message we’d recommend sending - if you can bear the humanity of it 😍.

Warning - If you DO make the customer feel stupid, the contract phase will be brutal.

Roadmap webinars - Where is the value?

I’ve started sitting in on vendor roadmap calls & demos… it feels important in an era where investors seem to think Claude will replace everyone.

So far Constructor, Optimizely (Opal), Shopify, Salesforce, Fulfil, Sanity, Contentful and SCALYE. I’ll keep it up I promise :)

These are generally an hour long, and pre-baked. My takeaways:

1 - There’s often a slide at the start that basically says “We might never do any of this”.

2 - The next 13 mins are where the useful stuff is, generally presented by a grownup. But - they’re very insular... no customer references or use cases that really resonate. I feel customers are left to join the dots to their own business.

3 - The remaining 40 minutes are wasteful and vacuous... where technical staff give 5 minute answers that other technical staff ask them. It’s showing off basically.

The reason I a doing this is because I’m on a bit of a crusade about the Roadmap. AI tells us that it should be accelerating, and that customers will see huge strides. I am beginning to suspect that many vendors are really worried about their roadmap and the ability to create one that is meaningful - and deliver it.

If you get your roadmap pitch right, and fix engagement - you will win I promise you!

Use Cases - Think harder

A follow-on from the section above is “Use cases”. My experience is in helping technology vendors and services companies market and sell bleeding edge technology. From Agile 20 yrs ago to AI now.

Effective marketing is never about the technology, but about which problems it solves for customers. Often with new tech the customer isn’t cognisant of the problem they have until it is pointed out - hence my point above about “lecturing”.

With AI adoption, the nature of the technology means that use cases are the key. Thinking harder about the ones that might be relevant for your target client (or indeed yourself if you are a customer) is the key.

Make them niche, make them specific, make them real, and work harder on them than you do on anything else. Build a “Use case for the day” program that educates your staff to consider their own and their clients.

I have made a matrix of 300 use cases which I’m happy to share if you reply to this email and ask - a snip of it above (Yes I used perplexity to help, Sue me)

More in 3 weeks - and yes loads of new podcast episodes have been launched so check them out here

Jamie

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