Issue #3
Read - Sleep - Delete
Already 2023 has taken some shape, the icy breeze of a recession and even more change. In this climate, it is so easy for our friends in vendors and SI land to lose sight of the concerns that are top of mind for merchants.
Here are what your clients are worried about right now:
eCommerce will be dominated (unfortunately) for the first few months by both keeping the team together and GA4. At least with all new analytics everyone’s awful online downturn trend will start again from scratch. If you’re not ahead of this, along with the storm raging in paid media it’s a huge distraction.
Acquisition obsession has already been replaced with retention fixation. We need to appreciate that ROAS is dead boring…. Long live the CDP
Conversion is everything. The Search & Merch vendors are quickly becoming Merch & Search - never has there been a more competitive and less well-differentiated market. Plugging generative AI into search is everyone’s current plan though.
Microsoft
The hilarious thing about ChatGPT is that Microsoft is the biggest shareholder. GDPR compliant and privacy obsessed - wouldn’t it be ironic if Google got outmanoeuvred by a 48 yr old software firm, despite its own huge AI investments in recent years? By the way, so much for the #NoRocketships year, apparently, OpenAI is now valued at $29bn and every VC in Silicon Valley is rushing to find the next player (Jasper) - it’s been live for 7 weeks FFS!!
Oh, and have you noticed we’ve moved on and the phrase is “generative AI”.... rather than the AI everyone has ignored for the last 5 years.
New Age Partnerships
This writer cannot emphasise enough how vital all forms of partnership are this coming year. Let’s look at the dramatic shift in the landscape:
MACH has 70 members (Adyen and GCP this last week too), a pretty even split of vendors and SI’s. Few in this cohort will explore any partnerships outside the Alliance, and being “inside the tent” is becoming table stakes.
Alternatively, a senior global revenue leader in a GSI recently said to me “Oh, the MACH people - they’re the ankle biters really, our main partners are still the monoliths”... there’s a long way to go.
Our Commerce Futures community is full of merchants using the group to co-market, and build their own joint promotions to shared customer groups. The results are really meaningful for AOV & retention. Partnerships are more sophisticated everywhere we look.
Pre-integrated composable solutions: As “stacks” take shape so partner teams are accelerating pre-built stacks to lower the entry barrier. We are counting 4 meaningful stacks right now, many more are needed - especially those involving CommerceTools for mid-market. If only we knew of a specialist integration provider to build these 😁
Professionalising partnership management. I’ve joked in recent months about the new partnership generation - we see the end of golf games and drinking as a career in partnership.
The Long Game
We’re all aware of tech layoffs, they’re all over LinkedIn and the individuals involved are always very public about a new search. There is a wave of redundancies and job losses coming in Brand & Retail, which will be silently observed.
There is always a degree of personal fear that accompanies losing these more traditional roles (was it my fault?), and so I urge every vendor and agency to support these individuals whilst they find their next gig (please build a rule about this into your ABM program). We will be inviting people in this position to Commerce Futures events. As we all know - what goes around comes around 🙂.
New Territory Entry
We suspect that in 2023 fewer vendors will make the leap into new territories, but there are some clear signs of SI’s and agencies expanding their footprint as new opportunities appear.
Something came up last year I thought was interesting. We’ve become something of a specialist in helping SaaS vendors come to the EMEA market, mostly about establishing ICP, local content and direct engagement. Recently though we’ve had some success with clients who are starting “partner first”, building out an SI ecosystem and some strategic partnerships for 8-10 months before anything else.
Both have merit, but in the land of #NoRocketships perhaps the partner model has more merit? You can read about our work here with the lovely people at NewStore.
Word of the week:
#namastebea 🙂 (courtesy Rob Van Vuuren)
Prediction of the month:
NRF will be freeeeezing cold!