Lindsay Duran: Welcome to B2B Reimagined. My name is Lindsay Duran, and I'll be your host for this episode. I'm joined today by [00:01:00] Michel Safi, Vice President for Zilliant in EMEA. Michel, welcome to the podcast.
Michel Safi: Thank you for having me.
Lindsay Duran: So, we have you on for this episode specifically to talk about our upcoming Mindshare Europe event.
I know I'm very excited to be back in person for an event and see our customers and our prospects and partners in person. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the customer speakers that we have in store for the event?
Michel Safi: Yeah. Sure. Before I talk about the speakers, let me assure you one thing.
This is not a recording that you will be listening to sitting in your living room. Right? This is the first, after a long time, where customers of Zilliant and employees of Zilliant will get together discussing great topics. And we will be in Paris. And we will have three main customers - Zilliant customers [00:02:00] speaking on stage.
The first one is Spandex with our speaker Jose Vela. To describe, basically Spandex is a distributor of graphical design products and they are expanding very aggressively through acquisitions. And how spandex is basically pushing their sales organization to track opportunities to grow the business by cross-selling, upselling, discovering white spaces that they can come after.
So, this will be our first customer speaker. Then we will have a food service distributor company that's widespread in Europe called METRO. They have both cash and carry stores and they have field sales organization. They're going to speak about their multi-country - I think we're at the country, number 10 now, but we will go up to 25.
All the challenges they're [00:03:00] facing with a multi-country pricing. And a huge rollout will be covered by Peter Obzondek, their head of pricing. And lastly, we will have a large global staffing company who happens to be also one of the largest users of Salesforce worldwide. I think they have more than 20,000 Salesforce users.
And how basically this organization decided to use data science to price a short-term spot business, but also a long-term agreement with Zilliant.
Lindsay Duran: Thanks, Michel. That sounds like a really great lineup of customer speakers. I know I'm looking forward to hearing all three of those presentations and as well as the questions from the attendees live.
We'll also have a handful of partners in attendance and two will be speaking. Can you tell us more [00:04:00] about the two partners that will be available in the breakout sessions?
Michel Safi: So, we will have two partners. SAP is the first one, Magnus Mayer, the SAP Vice President and Global Head of the wholesale distribution business unit will be with us physically.
And he will deep dive into the challenges that the distribution business is facing globally with all the digitalization that's happening. I'm looking forward for this session. Magnus is a great speaker. You will enjoy this one. And followed by Oracle who will be our second partner speaking there. And Oracle is a partner of Zilliant on the CPQ side.
We are actually the only partner of Oracle on the CPQ side, complimenting their offering with our pricing optimization solution. So that's on the partner front, Lindsay.
Lindsay Duran: Excellent. Yes. We've had both SAP and Oracle as guests on the B2B [00:05:00] Reimagined podcast in the past. So, I’d encourage our listeners to go back and take a listen to those episodes.
We'll be sure to link those in the show notes. Not to be outdone, we'll also have a handful of Zilliant presentations. And I know our customers always very much enjoy the product overview session that our Head of Product, Pete Eppele, well deliver as well as our CTO, Shams Chauthani, who will be delivering a very informative presentation talking about how companies should think about cloud-native architecture when they are investing in software solutions, to make sure that they have the right level of scalability and flexibility that will work with their business in the long term. Michel, one of the major benefits that I see, and that I know I've personally missed from being at [00:06:00] in-person events, is really the networking opportunities that these types of events afford that are so much better than what you can do over a Zoom call.
Can you talk more about what attendees can expect in terms of networking and connecting with the other folks at the event?
Michel Safi: Yeah. Obviously, networking and spending quality time discussing pricing and sales among peers is the benefit that we can get out of the face-to-face conversation. And we've made sure to secure three large networking breaks during the day to allow people to get together and exchange on those topics. But also, we will be hosting, the night before, a nice gathering around, obviously, some best quality drinks, and particular, wine, because we are in Paris. And listening to some jazz music and get to know each other.
Lindsay Duran: Excellent. I know I'm personally looking forward to tasting some of the great wine that France [00:07:00] has to offer.
So, I will certainly be there for the jazz club reception as well. So, I hope you will consider joining us for our Mindshare Europe event. This is our first in-person event in a while, and we're thrilled to see as many faces as are able to attend. The event itself is on November 30th with the reception the evening prior on November 29th.
Michel, thanks so much for joining us for the podcast for this episode. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with folks that are thinking about registering to attend the event?
Michel Safi: The more we are the better. So don't hesitate to ask any questions to the team here on how we can assist in making your travel easier since this is a first, since a long time. France is open again, so no barriers to entry that you should expect.
Lindsay Duran: Perfect. Thank you so much. We will include a link to register for the event in the show notes. And we hope to see you [00:08:00] there. Thanks again for listening to B2B Reimagined and please join us for the next episode.
