• • John Wittig, Chief Commercial Officer, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirit

  • Ann Dozier, Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:24]:

Hello, and welcome to CTN. To learn more about the show, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and today’s topic, paving the path to purchase with digital experiences. So COVID has forced a lot of B2B companies to suspend their face to face marketing and the way their sales team used to go and meet with the prospects, and we had those traditional models which were working well, but now because you cannot go and meet someone face to face, what are those digital alternatives that are available which will allow you to not lose that relationship building, that camaraderie building, that way for you to make a connection with someone to present what you want to present about your goods and services and move that forward. Now the marketing also got impacted in the way you used to put the word out and the way you used to go meet at conferences. There are so many ways through which we used to use digital channels, but physical channels were also equally important and effective. So what we want to discuss here today is because of COVID, and even after maybe, hopefully, we’ll get off COVID in a couple of months, hopefully, what would you be doing with the digital realm when you are trying to pave the path to purchase? To discuss that, I have with me Ann Dozier, who’s the senior vice president and chief information officer with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. Hey, Anne. How are you? Fine.

Ann Dozier [00:01:59]:

How are you doing today?

Sanjog Aul [00:02:00]:

Very good. Thank you for joining us, and we have John Wittig, who is the chief commercial officer with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. Hey, John. How’s life?

John Wittig [00:02:09]:

Everything’s great, Sanjog. Thanks for having us today.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:13]:

Beautiful. So it’s gonna be a great group who will be talking to us. So now let’s start with this first question. John, maybe you take this. How do you see the world adapting to the disruption that is caused by COVID in this very context of sales and marketing, the picture that I painted? And when you talk about the dynamic that used to exist in this whole selling buying process and between the vendor and the customer, how has that changed?

John Wittig [00:02:46]:

Great question, and obviously, we’ve seen a lot of variables in that space, Sanjog, since mid March of 2020, but what we see in terms of adapting, we were fortunate enough to be deemed an essential business right from the get go. So we really had to meet early and to use your word adapt, we had to get together as a group to see how to best service our customers and obviously digital jumped to the forefront. We quickly found out our customers were looking for more information, more brand content, more pricing, more recommendations, etcetera, but as you’d mentioned in your intro, we weren’t able to do that live especially early on in March and really had to rely on our B2B site. So we tweaked and adapted our B2B site to speak to our customers a little bit more directly, a little bit deeper, and tried to leverage our sales, but more importantly, I think you also mentioned a really key point, keep the relationships of our what we call our frontline heroes at Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. We like to use the recipe saying that technology, automation, and relationships really are a winning formula with our customers in this day and age.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:53]:

So, Anne, when you look at the scenario, whatever happened, of course, that’s a chance for you to rise and shine and say, okay, folks. Don’t worry. The help is on the way or help is already here. What is that customer of yours? Which on one hand is the customer who you sell to, but on the other hand, the customer who’s your sales and marketing team, which is saying, we feel handicapped, allow us to live and do our job the way we used to without losing any effectiveness. What is the ask?

Ann Dozier [00:04:28]:

So we were very fortunate that John had vision around how do we create that omnichannel relationship with our customers from the start. So we had a great opportunity to build out our digital platform with a focus not only on our customers, but also focusing on our sales reps as well as our service agents. So our overall capability has been very much about connecting all the dots across those relationships to create the best experience for the customer, and also to create the best experience for our sales rep. So as an IT leader, my focus is not only on the customer of our company, but also my internal customers, which the sales team is one of. So we’re actually in a really good place because we started with that vision in mind. So as we adjusted to COVID, that vision just proved true.

John Wittig [00:05:18]:

And Sanjog, if I could add there to it, at no other point, I think, in the history of our company has IT and sales had to work that much closer together. It truly required a team effort. Anne’s team and my team throughout met weekly. We had to be very honed in on the customer and worked our way backwards, but it really was a unique experience for us and really shed some light on how we should be doing business as a team moving forward, COVID or not. So it was a great experience with Anne and the IT department from a commercial leader’s perspective.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:50]:

So John, when you envisioned that digital-based sales and marketing, what was that spark? And the second part is, of course, there are bruises in any journey. So where you are today, you can say we are in a good place. Before even COVID, when you started that journey, what were some of the things that surprised you, shocked you, and what are some of the things you have to do? Maybe some ugliness, maybe some pain that you had to get through for you to get to where you are today.

John Wittig [00:06:27]:

Yeah, and that’s a great question, Sanjog, and we just to give the listeners a perspective, you have to go back to March 2019 when we invested heavily in our B2B space as well as our B2C space, and obviously, as you can imagine, a lot of key learning at that time and point in our journey, but what we heard more than anything loud and clear to your point about the opportunity was our industry, the wine and spirits distribution industry was behind many other industries, and we were hearing that from our retail customers. They wanted to buy from us digitally. They wanted to see content in real time. They wanted pricing in real time. They wanted recommendations on what was selling in their neighborhood that they weren’t carrying, and all those great things that you learn from AI and predictive, but the challenges, as you can imagine, are pretty immense in terms of change management for our sales teams. The technology with our retail customers, were they prepared to take this on even though they were talking a very big game, if you will? And obviously, at the end of the day, we were taking our folks, frontline heroes as I mentioned before, and turning them into consultive selling machines if you will, utilizing technology and combining it as I mentioned earlier with automation. So that change management and that behavior that we needed our sales teams, we basically put a whole new sales capabilities plan in place to teach them about the technology, how to best leverage it, and to keep up with our customers’ needs.

Ann Dozier [00:07:51]:

Yeah, and I’ll jump in here too. On the technology front, we’re a company that’s over 50 years old, and we merged with another company that’s over 100 years old. So as you can imagine, we had a very decentralized technology stack in the back, and we’ve been working over the years to standardize and simplify our technology to be able to offer those national solutions, but building a digital platform on top of the legacy technology that we had proved to be a challenge, not only from a technology perspective, but also from a process perspective, as we drive a change in the back of the house on processes and standardization, while John was also driving the change in the front of the house. So this really has been an overall transformation for us, and we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had the opportunity to make the proper investments, not only in the front, but also the back, to be able to continue to allow us a platform that we can grow on top of.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:45]:

So let’s talk about sales and marketing, which we will anyway do during the course of this discussion, but, Anne, let me take a step back and talk about the very product. The way somebody buys, even in B2B, is there a visual selling? Is there a perception selling? Is there a consumption based proof at then buying? What does that buying process look like in your business? Because sales actually start from the first time they lay eyes on something or the first time they hear about something.

Ann Dozier [00:09:23]:

Well, first of all, I love your comment because the name of our platform is actually Proof. So our goal is to make sure that we provide that proof of the value of the products that we sell to our customers. The product looks very different depending on the customer. We have a tremendous variety of customers from that small on-premise restaurant to a small up and down the street liquor store to these big chains, both on and off premise, and we want to make sure that we’re tailoring the experience to them. So personalization is very important and being able to tie that ability for our sales rep to assist our customer in growing their business the way that makes sense for them and their consumer is key to the core of the platform, which is why we tie the e-comm experience to the CRM experience with our sales rep to make sure that we’re providing the right wine list for the diners, or the right set of products to go on the shelves or on the back bar. So we’re focused very much on making sure that we have the right product in the right place at the right time for the consumer, and that relationship with the customer and that data that they need to make those decisions is key, and that’s a big part of our platform.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:40]:

So John, when somebody wants to buy something or consume something, they do it for two reasons. Either they’re trying to solve a problem or they’re trying to exploit an opportunity. Could you share the lay of the land on what would it be which would trigger someone asking for your products and solutions?

John Wittig [00:11:02]:

Yeah. That’s a great question, and what we’re in an interesting spot in the selling proposition, and just to give your listeners an idea, we’re representing, as Anne was mentioning, in brand building in the middle tier of the selling proposition. So we have distilleries and wineries selling us goods, and we turn around and have to market those brands and sell those brands to the retailer community who ultimately sells to the end consumer. So we play a pretty vital role being smack dab in the middle there, and the opportunity for us is to expose them to not only the products that our customers need on a weekly and daily basis, but to also expose them to innovation, hot categories, recommendations, and things that we’re learning, using if you will from our predictive analytics. So that goes back to my point about the consultive selling. So when our salespeople arrive in front of the customer who’s on the B2B site, and we have roughly 100,000 customers on the site right now. We’re looking for them to consult and pitch and leverage hot categories and brands in that marketplace and continue that brand building, and we feel the more prepared our people are with data and analytics, the better that the platform will sing, if you will.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:13]:

So, Anne, it is almost looking like you were selling consulting services, which is like selling the invisible. Right? And that’s not for the faintest of the hearts either, which means you have to kind of sell your experience, your expertise, maybe some frameworks and maybe some accelerators.

Ann Dozier [00:12:34]:

Well, it’s interesting. It’s very difficult to do a wine tasting selling experience, so that we can educate our customers in a different way to make sure that we’re still bringing that value that we bring directly in an alternative way that will at least get us through COVID, and then once we get back to more people on the street, we’re going to be focused on continuing to blend that capability.

John Wittig [00:13:04]:

Yeah, Anne. I think the really key point there is we are super blessed, Sanjog, to be in an industry where people want to hear the story about the brands we represent. They want to hear about the distillery. They want to hear the story about the origination of the brand. So we really focus a lot on, and that goes back to the relationship part that our people need to be doing that storytelling in front of the customer, and we also need to provide the material to our retailers on the B2B site to continue that journey. So we have a lot of video clips, if you will, from a master distiller on a particular brand or a winemaker out in the field talking about the varietal type and the harvest that year. So that’s a customized personalization that Anne was talking about that we don’t ever want to lose, and we’re fortunate we have a really cool industry to build on that.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:52]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and, John, when we come back, let’s talk about the human element, which is not going to be 100% missing, but to quite an extent because you go virtual. People do business with people they’ll know, like, and trust, and any sale is an emotional decision, and emotions are well perceived and well responded to in person. At least that’s what our experience growing up has been. How much of that you feel realistically would translate and be equally effective if you go the digital route, or what’s left to be desired? Please tell your listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:14:38]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:34]:

Welcome back. So, John, humans connect well in person. They emote well in person; you can perceive when they see something or taste something much better in person, and you suddenly take that away. Being the chief commercial officer, what is missing in your view, and I’m sure she’s doing a fantastic job with her team, to replace that experience? What’s more that you feel we ought to deliver for us to come to the same level of effectiveness? Unless, otherwise, my benchmark is wrong, that is people do business with people who know, like, and trust, and the in-person connection builds that know, like, and trust much better.

John Wittig [00:16:27]:

Yeah. You bring up a great point, and back to one of your earlier questions about the challenges, and we’re in over 44 markets, and in Canada, and as you know even through the pandemic every state was at different levels of seriousness if you will in terms of account closures and the marketplace conditions. For example, 25% of our business was in the on-premise, which is our bars, restaurants, taverns, etcetera, and it took a huge hit, and so taking the people aspect out of the mix, and also as Anne was mentioning about the vision going forward, we’ve been working very hard on how do you keep that personal touch point and what degree and what will the balance be between that and the digital aspect of it. So in our minds, we came back to a couple of things. One is consistent messaging to our people. We have over 6,000 salespeople that we’ve got to make sure that they have the same message. We’re treating, training, and moving them in the right direction, and then it’s the communication vehicles that we would use, Sanjog, not only with our internal teams, but our customers, and we see them on a weekly basis, so we have to be super aligned with what their needs are and how they want to buy from us. So they’re giving us cues. We have to be listening and learning from them, and I think Anne mentioned it earlier, they fall in different buckets. We have a lot of people ahead of the curve that they want us to talk to them just with our B2B site, and then we still have other customers that like that personal touch of a salesman walking through their door every week. So we’re really at a tipping point period here with our customers, and we’re analyzing those groups of customers not only within an individual market, but across the US. So although there’s some recent challenges, that’s how we’re trying to tie the two together.

Ann Dozier [00:18:16]:

Yeah, and I’ll jump in here too. It’s not an either or. It’s an and. The goal is to ultimately have that integrated omnichannel approach, and the good news about this is a lot of the things that we don’t need our sales reps to do, we want to convert to the web and to connectivity through transactions, things around the back of the house, solving issues, replenishing orders, things like that, and the good news with COVID is it drove us to the web sooner, which will also, I think, continue to allow us to do those things that don’t make sense for our sales reps to do through that transactional process versus actually having our sales reps have to spend time on things that are really non value added activities. So the goal in the future is how do we bring that relationship and the value of that relationship, and as John mentioned, those great stories about all the brands that we sell through the sales rep, but at the same time have the transactional pieces continue to flow through the B2B solution.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:20]:

So, Anne, I like your response. I have an additional question regarding the benchmark you would have established for your team, maybe with help of John and his team, that, hey. If I cannot go and meet someone, bottom line, but I have to have some way to build a yardstick, a benchmark, or a holy grail that this is as long as I can get to this level of connection, if you will, this level of feedback that this is good versus not good, I’m earning my paycheck. So what you don’t measure or you cannot measure, you cannot improve. So when you started this journey of helping digital come and kind of almost replace what COVID brought here, the in-person component, it had to be replaced. What holy grails, what benchmarks did you establish working with the business leaders, and to what degree have you been able to get to it?

Ann Dozier [00:20:25]:

Well, let me just start by saying our site actually achieved over 100,000 customers and $1,000,000,000 worth of sales just recently, and that’s in less than 12 months. So clearly, we had a customer base who was very interested in leveraging that type of capability for the transactional part of the business, but the piece that we’ve heard that they’re missing is obviously that relationship, and health and safety right now are very important to us as it relates to our employees, as well as making sure that we’re keeping our customers safe, but our sales reps have continued to be out there in the market, making sure that we’re continuing to provide the education necessary and the tools necessary to allow our customer base to grow their business. So I’ll turn it over to John and let him talk specifically about the accountabilities that he’s holding the team accountable to, but I want to make sure that we focus on the tremendous growth that we’ve had and also just supporting that continued relationship connection that matters.

John Wittig [00:21:30]:

Yeah, and I think, Anne and Sanjog, the thing that we saw right away and early in the journey that Anne talked about was, 37% of our sales consultants’ time was spent in non-selling or non-transactional activity. So it was super important as far as a benchmark, we wanted to remove that. So we’ve been measuring that and we created the B2B site as a self-service site, and we’ve had many of our retailers tell us that they really enjoy it; it’s very similar to our mobile banking in our business, what we’ve built. We’ve built 24 months of invoice activity. They know where their truck is. They know their AR in real time. So all those functions that our sales teams were involved in initially have been taken away, and that allows us to get right into the digital selling, and, obviously, we couldn’t be in person, and we won’t be in person in the future as well, but we’ve created an assisted sales manager, which is a part of the platform where our salespeople can interact with the customer either via email or text and then write on the site, and they’re able to work on their weekly orders, talk about innovation products, and in fact, we’ve had many of our customers tell us the one thing that they value most is building favorites of their previous orders and invoices, and they’re able to build that into their shopping cart. So when our salesperson is either there live or digitally, or virtually, they are able to connect with that particular order and assist our customers through the process.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:02]:

So, John, given where we are today, hopefully, with the vaccine and everything else, we will get over COVID, hopefully, in a year’s time or less. Do you think we will go back to the pre-COVID, or has this changed for good? What’s your perception, and why am I asking this question is because that must in some way be driving what would you do in one year like you did two years ago?

John Wittig [00:23:26]:

No. It’s absolutely, we like to think we’re looking through the windshield versus the rearview mirror on this one. We think it’s changed for good in many ways. We think we still have challenges ahead of us. As I mentioned, there’s a good portion of our customer base out there that still hasn’t really adopted digital yet. We’re moving there. We have a lot of communication vehicles and training vehicles in place that are helping us, but our 3 year plan right now is really focused on something entirely different than what we’re doing today, and that’s really bringing more retailers in the site. As Anne mentioned, we have 100,000 right now. Our total base is 275,000. So we’re looking to add up 50,000 more customers this year to the site, recruit them if you will and get them engaged in leveraging our business. So when we do, it’s super impactful. We’ve got a 60% reorder rate when we get them on there. So we’ve got a lot to talk about, in positive nature to bring them onto the site.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:22]:

So, Anne, like other people, would always like to learn from your experience, the listeners that we would have. When you started this journey of helping digitize, John had a vision, and I’m sure his counterparts had a vision, and you were the convergence point where you’re to take all of that and translate it into a digital vision where people are not being sold, they’re buying. What would be the tenets for anyone else who is in not exactly the same business, but in a B2B, which is different than B2C? What would be the fundamental pillars you would say we gotta put in place for this to be as good and as productive and effective a journey like you’ve had? What’s the lessons learned, good and bad both?

Ann Dozier [00:25:08]:

I think we have two big lessons learned on the positive side. First of all, it starts with the user experience. You have to know your customer, you have to know the way they want to interact with the technology, and you have to make sure that you’re always striving to continue to develop those capabilities that draw them more into the site and make it more personalized. So that’s gonna be a big focus for us. We just had a hackathon with the team to allow them the opportunity to come out with some new ideas, and we started looking at things like voice through Alexa and Siri, and we started looking at other ways to personalize the experience. So we’re gonna continue to focus on that user experience, and that’s one of the big positives that we learned. The other big positive was the importance of the model that we use to develop the technology. This was the first initiative that we actually adopted the SAFe agile model, and what that did for us is it allowed us to bring the team together between the business and IT, with the product ownership residing in the business, the technology development residing on the IT side, but everybody coming together under a common set of needs, a common set of understanding of what we needed to build, and it really gave us the opportunity to bring our developers and our technical team much closer to the business than they’ve ever been before. It also gave us a pipeline of ideas that are continuously coming in, that we can deliver on on a regular iterative basis so that we can create that great experience for the customer. So those are two really big positives that we learned from this experience, and we’re going to evolve that to the rest of our technology relationships with our other business partners in the company. The opportunity that we found is probably one that’s similar to what others have found, which is the site really caught on, especially with COVID, and we needed to make sure that we are not forgetting about the importance of the performance of the site to make sure that we bring that experience to the table. So we had to step back in one of the recent SAFe discussions, and we had to figure out how do we balance the importance of keeping the site in good condition from a performance perspective, at the same time that we’re building all this new functionality. So now we’ve got a good view of a balance of stabilization versus building new functionality that not only the IT team is focused on, but the overall SAFe team is focused on across the business and IT. So I think those are two key things that made us more successful that I would recommend to others that you think about. It’s important to operate as a single team with a single set of objectives.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:55]:

Let’s take a quick break. We’ll be back, and we’ll discuss the customer persona, the preferences, and the habits. So, John, we know, like, COVID happened to us, to you, and to your customers, and when you created your experience pre-COVID, you created based on some persona definition on how you’ll market to them, how you’ll sell to them, etcetera. What has happened to them, and has anything changed materially in their mindset? Have they shed the legacy mindset and become more digital? Have they become less demanding and more accommodating? Have they started looking at you as more of a partner than just a vendor who’s supposed to deliver at their whim? What has changed which helped you, and what has changed which has created new challenges you have to conquer? Please tell your listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:28:51]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and to improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network, with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:45]:

Welcome back. So, John, compare and contrast the pre-COVID and during COVID changes in customer persona, the preferences, the habits, the whims and fancies, and their accommodating nature, if at all that existed pre-COVID, which made you make the decisions on how you will approach them and how will you have Anne’s team support you in building the experiences that you’re trying to?

John Wittig [00:30:14]:

Yeah. I think it was interesting., and it’s that old best-laid plans deal when COVID hit. We’d obviously built a site. We worked and collaborated with Anne on what that site would look like, and I would just say, when you look at when COVID hit, maybe we were trying to be too many things to too many people, and we realized very quickly, sometimes less is more, and what I mean there is, a huge shift in our business to folks gravitating to brands that they know, labels that they know and that they’re comfortable with, and we built a site that a good portion of it was around innovation in our industry, whether it be innovative wine brands, beer brands, spirit brands, etcetera, and what we quickly learned, we spent a lot of time, money, and investment in that user experience with our retailer. Yet the end consumer was gravitating back to the brands they know and love for years. So that really sent a little bit of a curve ball. So Anne and team, as well as my digital team, had to work closely together on what did the content on the site look like, what messaging were we using, and then really how we were sharing those learnings with our retailers, and I think to your earlier thoughts, that really ingratiated us with our retailers at that time when they were really in a tough spot, asking us where is this business going? What brand should I be leveraging? What category? What are the behaviors and data that you’re seeing that you can help me with? So we were on top of it in terms of data, and I think because we did our homework, those retailers relied on us a bit more during the pandemic asking us questions versus us asking them for the order all the time. So we were fortunate to be in a good spot.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:55]:

So Anne, building upon John’s response, for you to be able to sound like an industry analyst who understands the trends, where the world is going, and frankly, you and I did not know much when COVID hit. What did you bank on to sound and indeed be confident in what you’re proposing to them because their lifeline, their business decisions, the kind of things they would do to their business would depend at least partially on what you’re going to suggest to them. So was this done more as a sales and marketing function exercise, or was that enabled by technology and data and digital?

Ann Dozier [00:32:37]:

Well, I think there’s a couple of big shifts that we saw. First of all, not only did we have to shift how we work with our customers, our customers had to shift the way they’re working with the consumer, their customer, and in some cases, with on-premise, the restaurants closed, they’re starting to do a takeout business, started to get creative around cocktails to go and things that they could work with the state to be able to allow them to do to maintain their business. So we had to get very creative to make sure that we were helping them help themselves and their consumers to be able to deliver their business. Secondly, we had lots of large off-premise retailers that were focusing on moving a lot of their business toward the home delivery and toward needing to leverage their website in order to be able to connect with their consumers. So we wanted to make sure too that we were offering the things that we learned as part of our journey to them to be able to leverage as part of their journey. So something as simple as making sure they had the right digital assets on their site to be able to even sell the products was very important all of a sudden, where previously was something we’d been talking about, but not necessarily the highest priority. So we saw that priority shift as our customer base shift their priorities and focus for the consumers. The other thing is we obviously had to make sure that we had the most up to date real time insights to be able to make sure that as we saw these consumer shifts, that we were providing that insight to our customers, so they could make sure that they did have the right products available for their consumer, and as John said, we definitely saw a shift toward brands that people know and love, and we wanted to make sure that we use our BI and analytics engine to be able to provide that insight to our customers through our sales teams and also through the B2B site, in order for them to make the best decisions on how to stock their shelves or their back bar, where bars are open, and also to be able to sustain their restaurant business as they’re dealing with the challenges.

John Wittig [00:34:41]:

And Sanjog, I think Anne brings up a good point. When she spoke about being in front of some key customers and walking them through this journey and how to get through the pandemic, the other thing that was very clear to us is many of our customers didn’t have a strategy around everything we’re talking about here today. So we again were ingratiating ourselves by bringing in that data. They were in flux just trying to keep their stores stocked, and we all know the stories about out of stocks and whatever category. We were no different, and so they were scrambling, but yet they wanted a virtual shelf. They wanted the content from Salsify, for example, of what we do. They wanted the different visible content on the site, and yet when we showed up and asked them what does that look like, they really couldn’t frame it up for us. So we did assist them in helping them build their strategy they’re using right now for ’21 and beyond. So we kinda saw that as a big opportunity, a challenge for them, but an opportunity for us to insert ourselves.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:42]:

So, Anne, it takes a village to deliver digital properly because, yes, you could have a customer which is consuming, but you might have your own ecosystem partners, and whether it’s the speed of delivery, the quality, the innovation, how externally connected is your organization, and how well is each hut in that village working for your digital presence and your effectiveness of digital to really be maximized?

Ann Dozier [00:36:17]:

Well, we knew digital was gonna be a big priority for us. So we had already started a lot of the work to make sure that all the foundational capabilities from an internal ways of working perspective, as well as a true technology foundation was in place. So we went into COVID in a very good place. Not that we knew that COVID was coming and it prepared for COVID, but luckily, we had an infrastructure and a ways of working in place that supported COVID. We built a flexible model for technology development a couple of years ago, and when COVID hit, we were able to take advantage of that flexible partner model to be able to make sure that we had the ability to expand and contract with the needs of the business through our partner network, as well as through our internal teams capabilities and how they work together, and it sounds easy for everybody to start working from home in the IT organization, but we were dealing with trying to support a big part of our company moving to home work and remote work, as well as supporting those that were still in the office, because obviously, we have an in the office business where we have to deliver products every day and make sure that they’re available to the customers, and then at the same time, we were still trying to move forward with developing the digital capabilities needed for our customers. So luckily, we had a lot of governance models in place in IT that allowed us to flex and move and ebb and flow with the business, and that really served us well as we went into COVID to make sure that we can continue to expand the capabilities we needed, but also contract in those areas where we put projects on hold because it didn’t make sense based on the new world of COVID.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:59]:

So, John, everyone needs to make numbers and exceed them because I know today you have got this number, next time it’s gonna be 20% higher. Right? You have this fun job always pursuing it.

John Wittig [00:38:09]:

How did you know, Sanjog?

Sanjog Aul [00:38:12]:

Yeah. Exactly, and you and I both know that that this would not ever happen consistently and in a sustained manner if you were not being proactive, if you were not innovating, if you were not looking ahead of the curve, and you were not thinking on what’s next and even after that. That is a capability an organization needs, which requires good intellect, good humans, but also powered by technology. So if you wanted a crystal ball, to what degree or what would that crystal ball look like, and to what degree technology has been able to help, and where do you think it should further go? Because it’s gonna be very interesting as the time goes on. The speed of change, the disruptive, and flavor of the change is gonna keep getting more and more surprising and shocking.

John Wittig [00:39:08]:

Yeah. You are spot on on two things. One is I get double digit growth rates every year, pandemic or not. So it didn’t seem like much of a different year for me here, Sanjog. So I appreciate you acknowledging that.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:19]:

Well, I’ll get your two paycheck recommendation. Yeah.

John Wittig [00:39:21]:

Thank you so much, but secondly, and we focus a lot here on where we’re going, and, and everybody’s guessing a bit, but the one thing we do know is digital in our industry, digital selling, our digital platform, our B2B and B2C has continued to grow. It could be up at who, close to 20% of our total business, where it’s at 5.5 to 6 right now. So we see where we’re headed for sure, and the crystal ball to us and remember, we’re in a little bit of an infancy stage here even though it’s been $1,000,000,000 in revenue, but we really see a lot around AI, predictive, and the key learnings and the behavior that comes out of that that we can leverage, and I’ll go back to my earlier comments on the supplier community. I think a huge portion of our success, and we’re fortunate, by the way, to have a family owned company that is investing in a big way, double digit increase investments year on year the last 3 years in the digital space, that’s committed to this. So Anne and I are in great spot having the owners behind us, and it’s really up to us really to leverage that, and one way I’m leveraging for my chair is with our supplier community, and we mentioned earlier about the brand building that we have to do in the middle tier of the selling proposition, and what we’re doing now is bringing in our suppliers to advertise, promote, and share their content in a way they’ve never shared before on our B2B site, and believe it or not, from share for other industries that are listening, that seems like a very fundamental, but for us, it is a huge, strategic change for some of our suppliers, and in fact, they’re acknowledging that we may be ahead of them in this digital space, and usually, they see us as the tail wagging the dog. So we’re super excited about that. The energy around it and the collaboration with our suppliers has never been higher. So we really see that those activities and those marketing and sales activities through the digital space in conjunction with our supplier will hopefully help me Sanjog hit those 20% growth rates.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:18]:

Well, Anne, you have a tough job to get him his 20% and two paychecks. Right?

John Wittig [00:41:24]:

The paycheck part will be really hard.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:27]:

Absolutely. I mean, we can put in recommendation at least. Right?

John Wittig [00:41:30]:

Exactly.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:31]:

So, so with that said, so let’s do this. Let’s take a quick break. Listeners will be back, and, Anne, let’s talk about to what degree can technology because now we’re talking digital, so, yes, the spotlight is on technology, but then innovation, lot of companies talk about it too, but keeping it sustainable, making it matter, and putting it in actual use, and allowing all of that to happen while there are flux. There is flux in leadership. There’s flux in product mix. There is flux in so many different aspects, sociopolitical. You gotta keep going, and you gotta keep supporting it. So how in your role as a CIO, with all the blessings from your management, still you pull this off with all the different moving parts? Perhaps you need two paychecks too to be able to do that, but let’s talk more on how what you’ve done so far and what’s the road ahead and how are you gearing up for it. Please say to your listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:42:30]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network, with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com

Speaker 0 [00:43:11]:

You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:25]:

Welcome back. So, Anne, you need to deliver on the promises that business is making to its customers and also to just be in the race. We got to keep going forward. John needs to meet his 20% or higher quota. Everyone else involved needs to push forward, and now the spotlight is on you, the technology leader, and your team. How do you make it all happen? Or how do you think you’re gonna make it all happen when complexity and variety and the velocity of things that are changing will not even slow down. It’s gonna keep increasing exponentially.

Ann Dozier [00:44:06]:

So when I joined the company 7 years ago, John was actually one of the leaders that I interviewed with, when I interviewed for the position, and the word that he used in the discussion was pace, and after I started with the company, typically, I saw him use it three times in a sentence, pace, pace, pace. So it’s very important that we’re staying in tune with the business and that we’re not just focused on implementing technology for technology’s sake, but that we’re focused on how do we drive value through technology with our business partners, and so we have a concept within IT called tech evolution, and we’re always focused on how do we take the platforms that we have and make them better? And how do we make sure that we’re working with the business on various proof of concepts to think about how new technologies may bring value to our business long term? And the hardest part about that is determining how do you run an organization that’s responsible for keeping the ship moving every day, at the same time that you’re focused on having a small little speedboat going around it that allows you to focus on that tech evolution and be able to test, learn and fail sometimes to be able to continue to allow us to move forward. So a big part of our journey as we’ve continued to evolve our IT function is to think about how we can do both and make sure that we’re continuing to keep that ship moving, but at the same time have a lot of little speedboats going around it to ensure that we’re always bringing new technology ideas to the business. We also have a lot of great people in the business that are bringing new technology ideas to us, and we want to make sure that we have the capability to look at those opportunities and figure out how we might evolve them for our business. Right now RPA is really important. Obviously, we want to focus as much as possible on not doing the things that don’t add value. So the more that we can automate those repeatable processes in the back of the house, that then allows us to take funding and move it toward the front of the house is really important. We’re also looking at newer technologies like OCR to see if there’s a way that we can continue to use technology to be able to make certain roles like looking at a shelf and seeing what products are on it a lot faster and a lot less people intensive. We’re looking at crowdsourcing opportunities to make sure that we’re learning more about the marketplace, and we’re also, of course, looking at AI and machine learning, not only in the analytic space, but also in areas where we need to do those tedious data management and data quality processes to be able to connect data in a way so that we can use it effectively with our partners. So we’ve got a lot going on in IT. We’re very fortunate that we have strong relationships with our business, because the closer we are to the business, the more successful we can be, and we just recently made a change to our IT organization to create more of a product and a platform model so that we can embed our technology resources with our business partners to learn from them, to make sure that we’re in tune with what’s going on in the marketplace, so that we can focus on innovation. The other thing that we’re doing in partnership with John’s team is, we’re working with our chief growth office to make sure that we’re thinking about different ways of doing business in the future, and we’re doing a lot of test and learn with that team as well, and we’re tying that back to our core business. So that’s another outlet that allows us to continue to evolve our technology, even if it’s not related directly to our core.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:43]:

John, when you are looking at any of this cool buzzwords, right? AI, machine learning, RPA, cognitive automation, do you think, and this is the time when we switch focus from talking to IT people, but talking to business people, because a lot of IT leaders and our people say, only if business understood the value of what this does, I could have moved mountains.

John Wittig [00:48:11]:

That doesn’t resonate here.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:13]:

So my question to you is, how much of this geek stuff or this latest innovation buzzwords and or things, the semantic understanding, do you think you need and or you acquired for you to be able to help Anne deliver to your needs?

John Wittig [00:48:34]:

Well, the first thing I do is I get Anne on the phone and I say, what the hell does this mean, Anne? This word, and after I get clarity on it, that’s when the project begins, but on a serious note, we’ve learned and this goes back to my earlier comments. If Anne and I aren’t working closer together and if our digital teams and her technology teams aren’t working closer together, and any of these concepts come up, we are working closely together on how, a, does that fit our strategy? B, how does it fit our resource allocation? And then c, how do I implement both as I’ve mentioned with our suppliers and then our retailer community? So quite honestly, I’m having to do a lot of homework, and I am asking a lot of questions, and then my next project for myself and my leadership team is how do we make that actionable? How do we turn that and put it in a language that our customer can understand? And ultimately, they’ve got to explain certain things that they’re seeing, and in our business, I was watching 60 Minutes a couple weeks ago, they were talking about data is the new oil, obviously in the bio world, but it’s the same with us. Our customers now, and by the way, we feel against our competitive set we’re seeing that we’re leaps and bounds ahead and we’re continuing to press that first mover piece, but we’ve also learned that data can be dangerous if not used properly. So we’re working very hard to educate. We’re learning first and foremost from Anne and her team and I’m learning from my digital team every day, and as you mentioned, it’s going fast. So AI right now for us, for example, in the chain grocery stores, we have a tool that we put in place 3 years ago that’s already outdated in terms of the shelf and the display and the activities around that and what we were learning, and now here you have AI and face recognition and bottle recognition coming. So it seems like as soon as we’re putting something in place, it’s outdated. So not only are we having to educate, we’re really having to look at the resource allocation carefully and not just purchasing the next new shiny toy that hopefully would make everybody’s life easier.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:37]:

Alright. Thirty seconds to forty five seconds each. A simple question which is only connected to you and you alone one at a time. So, Anne, if you had to fix one thing in you, you are very accomplished, very experienced. One additional thing in you that you will fix and or improve upon, which will make you even more effective in being able to push forward and help the business pave the path to effective sales and marketing? In terms of your leadership styles, your DNA, and whatever else.

Ann Dozier [00:51:10]:

Continue to grow in speaking the language of the business. Making sure that all of the things that we’re bringing from the technology organization connects with the objectives of our business partners, and that we’re speaking in a language that’s easy for them to understand the value and the value creation that can be delivered.

John Wittig [00:51:31]:

I will go with patience. As Anne mentioned, pace, pace, pace, but I also need to learn when to take the governor and throttle off once in a while. So I’ll say patience and I do have a high appreciation, so I don’t want to put that in the same bucket, but I do need to appreciate sometimes how long it takes for our technology partners to build, to test. I think I have a new appreciation for UAT that I never had before as a sales guy. So I’ll chalk it up to patience, but I also want to build on what Anne and her team and our team have been able to establish and take some of those key learnings and move forward on that.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:13]:

Once again, thank you so much, Anne and John, for sharing your insights about how business and technology leaders and their respective teams can work together and collaborate and, as a result, pave the path to purchase with digital experiences. Thank you.

John Wittig [00:52:30]:

Thank you so much.

Ann Dozier [00:52:31]:

Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:32]:

And listeners, please like us on the different social media. Subscribe to our podcast, and once again, thank you for listening to CTN. This is your host, Sanjog Aul. Till next week, take care, and God bless.