Issue #17 - Spoiler alert: In this issue there is nothing about Black Friday
In this issue: Vile Rumour & Gossip | GMV Pricing Attitudes | Trust - Can we handle the truth? | Customer Success Frustrations | The Art of the Slooow Burn
Spoiler alert - In this issue there is nothing about Black Friday
Vile Rumour & Gossip
With email metrics completely broken through the IoS changes, most eComm people are focused only on Clicks. The danger (of course) is that the wider benefits of email are being lost. We don’t know of any ESP who has a good handle on deliverability right now - so watch those reports people 🙂
Suddenly, consumer-facing merchants are changing agencies. For years you had to be really poor (and then actually repeatedly poor) to lose a Paid or SEO client, but right now (we think because the social & affiliate programs are adding some complexity) there seems to be a hunt for agencies with more rounded services. Social seems to be heading “in-house”... but the rest is up for grabs.
Those international eComm types are suddenly addressing whether or not they need a “merchant of record” locally, and in fact whether the Global-E pitch has long-lasting value in some territories. Unbundling and starting again with individual Tax, Payment, Returns solutions may be a better route for those above a few $m in overseas sales it seems.
We’re being asked pretty regularly now who we know that can offer truly independent technology advice. Often these asks come from very large businesses who have many internal voices as well as multiple agency providers, but it’s interesting that those consultancies like Javelin group who were so successful in the early days of eComm seem needed again. I’m not saying Javelin were independent but they were perceived that way. Does this tell us something about trust?
GMV Pricing Attitudes
We recently carried out a market sweep of licence fees being paid by merchants for various eCommerce stacks. Our community groups are the only people who will see this work, but apart from showing some very interesting “real world” pricing (some of which were very surprising), we picked up on some huge frustrations from customers with locked-in pricing and penalising “overages”.
One quote from a very angry customer was “I will now punish this vendor when it comes to renewal”, we are being prevented from growing by the overage charges in our contract, which coincides with some lower cost items in our bundles and in turn a basket mix that we can’t afford to sell more of. Even having tried to address this mid-contract – the SaaS vendor has been intransigent. Shortighted? In this era where customers have so many routes to talk to each other – we believe so.
Equally, there are some strange behaviours from clients out there. We recently heard about a leading electricals retailer who had signed a ten year deal with a middleware/API vendor… you can hear the salesperson can’t you… “we’re agnostic, so locking in to us isn’t a problem is it”. Duh.
Trust - Can we handle the truth?
We tend to be the awkward reminder of the lack of trust between tech and customers in the digital world. We can demonstrate this by showing you all the results of our community survey where we asked “Whose opinion do you least trust least when getting a steer on new technology?” – below is the outcome:
Apart from one consultancy and the analysts getting a little kicking, salespeople come in for the most vitriol – so we do counsel everyone to work hard on building trusting relationships. Even if you only consider the mindset of the customer when doing that final meeting, it’s worth stopping and checking what you can do to rebuild some trust.
Customer Success Frustrations
One might think we’re vendor-bashing at all costs, but in fact our aim is to expose those areas customers and vendors are misaligned in an effort to repair them.
All too often assumptions are made about what will make customers churn away. We often notice this when asking clients to try to find a customer to speak about their experience at an event. The answer comes back “the timing is not right”, or “relationships are not as they should be right now”. What we know is that the customer hasn’t been asked… too many open tickets or some GMV pricing frustration is getting in the way perhaps.
Last week we had a call with three CS leaders from large composable SaaS companies; Fintech, eComm and Content. They each mentioned some frustration about keeping information from customers, in effect cloaking changes in roadmap or possible pricing changes – they all wanted to be more transparent. When you combine this with the previous section we can see where trust decays.
The Art of the Slooow Burn
A good news story, and a reminder of how the long game is what ABM is about. Back in 2021 our SDR team generated a 1:1 meeting with a head of retail in the Outdoors sector. All very nice, timing was off (post covid), but the sales team stayed close, and expanded the relationship to others in the leadership team.
We then helped the two companies stay close with a podcast spot for the initial contact, nothing salesy just good exposure for everyone.
Last week we heard from both client and vendor that this is moving forward, 2 years later. Slow burn BUT the cost of sale is very low – simply being helpful from all sides.
That’s it – one more before Xmas everyone.
Insult of the week:
“Deckchair” - Folds under pressure.