Chris Reddick (President and CEO at Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) talk about listening to what your clients want in product catalogs.

Part 2 of a 7-part series (Return to Part 1)

RON: You talked about having a buyers group platform that can be customized and adapt to your business processes, versus forcing you into something. But the second half of that, that's really interesting.   

I have this conversation all the time when I'm talking to our larger clients. You know, I can't tell you the number of times I've heard the comment, something close to, “We've done it this way for 50 years. The owner’s never going to change.” And I'm like, “That's great. You know what happened to Blockbuster, right? The same thing.” It's called continuous innovation, right? If you're not continually innovating, you're going to become old.  

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RON: The thing is that you may have been doing business this way for 50 years and this may work really well. And it's a family-owned business and that's awesome. However, those people that have been purchasing with you for the last 35 years, 40 years, they're going to retire and the younger generation is going to take their place. They grew up on phones, and those Millennials and Gen Xers are going to want to have a technology solution to buy, and they're going to come to your site and think it's ancient and they're not going to buy from you anymore. You're going to literally start dropping off some of your most loyal clients.  

We've seen it numerous times. I remember one of our clients where we did a hybrid group buying platform, where we went ahead and re-implemented—very similar to their old buy-in purchase—but then we designed a new Wizard, a selection tool, for the Millennials that can walk them through doing the same thing in about 30 seconds that would take three or four minutes to do with the old way, right? 

So make sure to listen to your clients. The term they use a lot is, we don't know what we don't know. Tell us what you know. You do this a lot, tell us what the best practices are. I would encourage you, when you meet and sit down with your vendor, it's okay to say you may not know, or there may be a better mousetrap, especially when you talk to a vendor like Clarity who's done this hundreds of times. We probably have a lot of ideas. We've seen it work a lot. We've seen it fail a lot. And that's what our business is, to try to improve your processes.  

Let's go ahead and start talking about some of the different capabilities about the catalog itself and how integrating is going to expose a lot of additional features. You mentioned customer-specific pricing, but I want you to just shred this, right, because the catalog has to do a lot because buying groups aren't just like Costco, You're a member or you're not. Buying groups, for us, can be a myriad of different things. So I want you to go ahead and shred through some of these. 

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CHRIS: Absolutely. I just want to say, that is so dead on with talking about the buying group customer experience. And we know for a lot of folks listening to this, you're busy and you're trying to operate the business in addition to getting another piece of software in place or getting something optimized. 

That is what companies like ours focus on. And we really want to help you at least be aware of some of the things that you may not know and that you may not have been exposed to. With some of these features, you want to have this set of thoughts running through your mind at all times. First of all, try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and some of the different roles that those customer avatars are going to represent. 

What are some of the personas and what are they thinking and what do they need? You probably have different personas, different types of roles that are going to be interacting within your site. There's a demographic consideration there too. So you might even have different kinds of preferences for how to navigate the site depending on someone's demographic background or their disposition to technology, for example.  

You want to be able to present this data with a visual format, maybe with a Wizard format, so maybe some pictures and icons with a hierarchical structure. So we need to be able to bring in basic catalog information from the group buying platform, but present it in a compelling way that makes sense. And you don't want to overdo it either, because, frankly, people are busy. They're not coming to your site to be wowed in most cases. I don't think they're opposed to that, but that's not their purpose for being there. They're trying to get work done and get value and purchase something that they need. So it needs to tend toward having a baseline, a very solid utility throughout their experience.  

Ask yourself, what does that mean for the different personas? You're going to need to have a great hierarchy. And this can be very challenging. We hear, “Oh, yeah, great hierarchy. No big deal.” Well, actually it is. That's probably one of the biggest problems most businesses face. You're busy scaling this business, your entire team is busy scaling the business. And so how do you get a great hierarchy? 

We can do a couple of different things, and I won't go into all the weeds here, but the main concept would be, we can bring it in. Maybe we need to review and audit together and make sure that this is solid [plan], but we can bring it in from a source of truth. We can also leverage industry best practices for hierarchical structure, and we can pull from standard hierarchical structure. I'm talking about categories, attributes within each subcategory. Think different product types and what are the nuances of what buyers group customers would search and filter on for those different product types?

 

Listen to Your Clients

Putting yourself in your customer's shoes can be an excellent first step to making them a returning customer. Clarity has experience getting customers to buy...and come back again.

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Continue to Part 3 to learn about customer-specific pricing on a group purchasing platform.