Barrett Thompson: Hello, this is Barrett Thompson here with a special edition of B2B Reimagined. As many of you already know, Zilliant will be hosting our fantastic customer conference called MindShare in Austin, Texas, June 13th through 15th. MindShare has always been the highlight of our year as a company, as it brings us together with our customers in a really intimate way. As this is our first in-person event in North America since 2019, we're going all out to make it the very best possible experience for attendees.
During this episode, we'll be hearing from a variety of voices across the organization, as they share what to expect from the conference and how to get the most out of it. To begin, we'll start with a few words from our Chief Executive Officer Greg Peters, highlighting his expectations for the MindShare conference. Greg, please take it away.
Greg Peters: One of the things that I've missed the most over the past two years is just the direct face-to-face customer interaction that we haven't been able to do because [00:01:00] of travel issues or different corporate rules. So I really miss that. I'm really looking forward to having a lot of customers get together here in Austin.
You know, our customers tell our story better than we do, but I'm really looking forward to getting all of our customers together, letting our customers talk about the things that they've been doing with us, relate their excitement and the benefits that they've seen, and then allow everyone to get the networking opportunity that they have obviously with us, but more importantly, with other customers and prospects who will be there in attendance.
It's going to be an exciting few days. I can't wait.
Nathan Rabold: Hi, I'm Nathan Rabold. I lead our customer success and customer support team. And I'm here to tell you as a current customer of Zilliant, why MindShare 2022 is well worth your time. First off, it's incredibly exciting to be back in person after two years of virtual events. At the conference you’ll get plenty of opportunities to meet with [00:02:00] industry peers who are facing many of the same commercial challenges that you are.
We'll be hosting an appreciation event on the first night where you can network with other customers and members of the Zilliant team. And there'll be tons of networking opportunities built into the agenda throughout the rest of the event. On the main stage, six of our customers will be telling their story.
So you'll have great opportunity to hear firsthand how B2B distributors and manufacturers are utilizing the Zilliant platform to get more strategic about responding to the macro conditions we're all facing such as inflation and market turbulence. You know, year after year, these sessions are the biggest hit of the conference, and there's no more valuable messenger of what we can provide than our customers who are working with us on a daily basis. On June 13th, we'll be hosting a customer success workshop, which I'm particularly excited about. I'll be leading the morning session, covering our first ever customer benchmarking exercise. So for both Price and Sales IQ customers we’ll walk through, you know, where do you stand in terms of revenue and profit [00:03:00] increases, model accuracy, data quality, and team structure?
This will be followed by an afternoon session led by our customer success directors who will walk you through real-world Price Manager, Campaign Manager, and Real-Time Pricing Engine use cases. I look forward to seeing you and meeting with you at MindShare 2022.
Barrett Thompson: Barrett Thompson coming back to you again, I'm joined by Lance Golinghorst, regional sales director at Zilliant. Lance, welcome. And you have such strong experience with our MindShare program. What is it that you tell B2B companies when they ask you about the event?
Lance Golinghorst: I tell them they’ve got to get there. And this year is going to be exceptional.
After a couple of years of having to go virtual being in person. I tell them this it's not a Zilliant sales pitch. This is an opportunity to learn a bit about Zilliant and meet some folks. But mostly it's an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas with other folks that are leaders in the pricing space and doing similar things in the industry.
There's just [00:04:00] a lot, there's structured conversations. There are great presentations. And then there's the hallway conversation and so many interesting connections and thoughts and levels of competence are gained and learned through those conversations. And you just, you can't create those opportunities more effectively than a conference like this.
Barrett Thompson: You mentioned the customers themselves. Our customers, people who are using this technology to solve their pricing problems as a key source of learning. And I agree with that. What could attendees at the conference expect to learn from those customer presentations, for example, that are made on stage?
Lance Golinghorst: There's a few things. One, we'll talk practically about how it's being used in their business. One thing that I see engaging with customers and future customers - everyone's business is different, but there's patterns that are very similar along the way. When you have the chance to listen to somebody, talk about their business, all of a sudden dots start to connect.[00:05:00]
And so I think there's a lot of dots connecting conceptually or where, where things that may be concepts, especially for folks that are just on the journey of heading down the path of implementing and bringing structure and rigor and intelligence to their pricing systems. Right. It's hard to think past what you're doing today and hearing about how folks who were in your shoes a couple of years back have moved into action mode and are doing that.
It becomes real. It's a real thing, tangible thing to talk about. And you uncover the tactical pieces. You understand more about working with Zilliant and you also think about just the change management that goes on within organizations as you drive adoption and think about all the other things that pricing touches.
I think it's a little bit of a quest. You may come to MindShare thinking, “I want to learn about these three things.” And find out that there's another one over here on the side that you didn't even expect, which is the biggest takeaway, and that could have the most impact on your business.
Barrett Thompson: What feedback have you received from people who've attended MindShare for the first time? Is there anything that stands out to you?
Lance Golinghorst: Some of the themes we just talked [00:06:00] about. It's, “Hey, I didn't think about something or we're going to stay in touch on a regular basis because we're not competitive. And there's things that his business or her business, that's similar to mine. And we agreed that we may almost form an informal mastermind group, so to speak, to share something.”
Barrett Thompson: If a B2B business is on the fence about investing in new pricing or sales technology, how can MindShare help them clarify the opportunity there, or clarify the cost of inaction or clarify the work plan that might be feasible for their business?
Lance Golinghorst: I think it just, it boils back to confidence. In order to take the step to do something different than you're doing today.
Obviously if you're considering that there is a reason, there's a problem to solve, but usually the gap is having confidence to believe that doing something different is feasible and that the pain of change. I mean, it's disruptive to do something different and to have the confidence that doing something different is worth the effort to do it and having the opportunity to speak to folks to not only know that they have[00:07:00] but to hear the stories about how they've done it to learn maybe the things that they were fearful of, the things they expected, the big issues in their process, that weren't right. And maybe some of the things you haven't even thought about that going in eyes wide open will help you recognize and deal with those before they become an issue.
Barrett Thompson: This sounds so right to me, you have a chance to speak to those. Who've done it and live to tell about it. So you know that there's life after and you get a chance to sort of go to the head of the class. And see what others have done, what they would do differently. What were the success factors for them?
And then double check your own plan. What kind of opportunities do attendees have for one-on-one interaction with the Zilliant team, including yourself or others?
Lance Golinghorst: There's several opportunities. Well, you would definitely get some exposure to Zilliant leadership, Greg Peters, our CEO, will spend some time kicking off the meeting and he's around.
He's very available. Our product management, who are faces and names that are very familiar to existing customers. are also on the stage early and you see them early [00:08:00] on, on stage. And then it's mostly our customers talking, but the nice part about seeing them on stage early, as you can pick up on their personality, you can pick up on the face.
There may be something in the conversation or in the presentation they mentioned that allows you as an attendee to grab them. There's a dedicated couple of dedicated meeting rooms, that if we wanted to schedule some time to go a bit deeper, we have the ability to do that. And then also there's lots of opportunities to have follow-up conversations.
The week goes fast. There's a lot going on. We try to create downtime for folks to have a chance to think and share ideas and network. And so people will be running a bunch of different directions, but there's always, everyone's open. They've cleared their calendars to be available during the presentations and between the meetings.
And have got really slick ways to schedule follow-ups if any specific topics need more time to go more deeply.
Barrett Thompson: I’ve seen that mealtimes and social times, et cetera, just become an extension of the conversation that was begun with the formal presentation. And Austin has a reputation for being a very [00:09:00] warm, even hot climate Lance.
And I know you're from the Midwest where it's cool and comfortable. What's attractive to you about coming to Austin?
Lance Golinghorst: One thing that always excites me about coming to Austin is I get to break out my cowboy boots.
Barrett Thompson: And you don't stand out in the room, huh? Just fit right in. That sounds great. Looking forward to seeing you at MindShare, Lance.
Lance Golinghorst: Thank you so much. Likewise. See you there.
Sam Leung: My name is Sam Leung. I'm the director of product experience here at Zilliant. I lead the user experience team as well as our documentation department. Our team is really focused on what you need to react to volatility in the market. We're really excited to see everyone in person after two years of virtual Mindshare events and show you what we've been working on since last year, our product team and UX team have been working really hard and engineering team as well, really hard to bring you new innovations to our product suite and our platform. [00:10:00] As you're probably dealing with today, the post 2020 phenomenon, where we are seeing a lot of inflation, supply chain, disruption, inventory shortages, uneven demand. There's so much going on right now in the market.
And if you're waiting for things to settle down and get back to normal, you'll be waitingfor quite a long time. And so leaders like you are seeking to invest in the right tools to become proactive and strategic in today's market. We have to be more agile and predictive and even prescriptive about how you run your pricing and sales processes in your business.
So we really want to make sure that our products are empowering you to maintain stability, profitability, and growth, no matter what the broader market is doing. On the main stage in Austin, we'll be giving you a look behind the scenes - that exclusive first look at some of the things we've been working on that will bring more value to your business and react to the market [00:11:00] quicker.
So you can expect us during that demo to dive into how you can master inflation and volatility in the market using our full product suite. And we'll dive into how each of our products will help you do that. And also give you a sneak peek at what is coming next on the Zilliant product roadmap. And I'm excited to meet everyone there and see you in person.
Brian Hirt: Hi, I'm Brian Hirt and I'm the director of product management at Zilliant I'm here with Matt Knaggs, one of our engagement managers today. We're here to give you a glimpse into a breakout session we're very excited about delivery at our upcoming MindShare conference.
Matthew Knaggs: Brian and I both have firsthand experience in sales enablement for large B2B companies and at Zilliant we're laser focused on empowering companies to sell more efficiently and effectively through any channel and take manual sales, marketing, pricing, e-commerce processes and automating them.
Brian Hirt: That's right. We're really looking to make sales enablement[00:12:00] easier, more actionable, more measurable, and more creative in the process. And so at MindShare, we're going to lead a session to talk about how Zilliant Sales IQ and Campaign Manager products, not only power these capabilities, but can expand the horizons of what you can expect to do within marketing and sales operations, working with your sales teams.
Matthew Knaggs: Yeah, we're really thinking about talking about big picture ideas about what could be possible if you're utilizing our solutions in a way that is really future thinking. Right? So that's why we're calling our session “Dare to Dream: Novel Ways to Drive Revenue with Sales IQ and Campaign Manager.
Brian Hirt: Matt, I wonder if you could just start by telling me why you're particularly excited about this session.
Matthew Knaggs: So for me, while I'm relatively newer to Zilliant as an engagement manager, I'm not new to Zilliant products. I actually used to work for a client of Zilliant’s and Sales IQ, and [00:13:00] Campaign Manager were like my day to day. I owned those products where I came from.
And have a lot of firsthand experience in thinking about what are the best ways to actually get adoption and get the most bang for the buck out of these tools. And I actually worked with Zilliant to try and iterate on some newer solutions as well. How about you, Brian? What are you excited about with this presentation?
Brian Hirt: Yeah. Great. So I've had the opportunity to work with a number of customers now who are using our new Campaign Manager solution. Some of them for well over a year. And really some of my favorite conversations I have are when we sit down and talk about new applications, they come to some idea of, “Hey, I see how I'm using it to generate recovery or growth actions or price actions, but I've got this other use case that I want to focus on.”
And we're able to sit down and have these conversations where in many cases, in 45 minutes, we're sort of working through a use case. We're using the available data that's in the [00:14:00] system and crafting a campaign that they can then publish and get out to their teams right away. And so that back and forth and sort of uncovering those use cases and ways to utilize the tool is really fun.
It's, I'm hoping to sort of have a thought exercise with the audience in the same vein of sort of understanding their use cases and talking about how we can address it with our tool set.
Matthew Knaggs: Nice. Now, if I'm a client and I already have Sales IQ and Campaign Manager, why should I attend this session?
Brian Hirt: So I would attend to hear what other folks are working on and some of the ways they're using the solution or thinking about using the solution.
I think that will be super informative. And then frankly, if you're already using it, we may have already had personal conversations about some of these ideas. And so this is just another chance to expand on that and continue to dive into the interesting ways you can leverage the solution that you already have.
Matthew Knaggs: What I think I bring to the table in this presentation, as well as having kind of lived in the trenches with it, you always want to do everything that you can to [00:15:00] improve adoption, right? And make it as seamless as possible to be able to benefit from all of the insights that come from Sales IQ and Campaign Manager.
So I'm excited even for the existing clients that we have. To maybe share with them some other ideas. They have to make it easier to fit into what their day-to-day is so that they can experience even more benefit from the solutions.
Brian Hirt: But yeah, I was going to say, I think that's a great point because a lot of our existing customers, they've got campaign actions integrated into vendor, their CRM platform. So they're pushing things out to sellers that way, but absolutely one of the things we want to get into is how do you get these actions delivered into other channels? And how can you have sort of a multi-channel approach so you have a sales campaign that you want to push out, but it doesn't have to be limited by the human and the ability to interact with it within CRM.
And so that's another topic we'll dive into.
Matthew Knaggs: Now if I don't have Sales IQ, should I still attend this session? It sounds like [00:16:00] this is about taking Sales IQ to the next level. If I don't have it yet, does it make sense for me to be there?
Brian Hirt: Yeah. So of course, absolutely. Right. We want people that are considering the solution to come and hear how others are using it.
But frankly, but my goal is to use sort of plain English business conversations to understand the challenges people have, how those can be addressed. In many cases, what we're able to do with our solution is to, you know, those existing use cases you have and often the execution of those is where the challenge lies and that's what can be solved.
So that's simple. For example, if you might have an existing business process where you identify products that you have too much inventory of, and you need to get those out to sales. Well, the current process might be, send out a spreadsheet to the entire sales team and hope for the best, right? You have the desire to take action against these but you don't have the tool set to do that. And so we'll talk through how to take a use case like that and make it so it's, you're getting the actions directly to the sellers that have the customers most likely to buy the product, how you could [00:17:00] have that type of recommendation dropping into your e-commerce platform so that when those customers log in, they immediately see, “Hey, here's the sale on this item that we have too much of just getting to that level of a delivery.”
Matthew Knaggs: Another way to put it: whether I'm a current client of Zilliant’s or not, if I have a pain point in my business, and I can use data or I'd like to use data in some way to address that problem and maybe right now I'm doing that through manual spreadsheet processes. Then this is exactly the session that I should be at. I mean, they're trying to resolve a pain point or look for other opportunities to intelligently grow and increase profit, find other business insights. Then this is absolutely that session. Now, as much as I like talking just with you, Brian, it'll be really cool to have the in-person audience to share ideas with as well.
Can you tell us a little [00:18:00] about what we can expect in terms of audience interaction?
Brian Hirt: Yeah. What I'm hoping for is a lot of audience interaction to bring your own ideas. So Matt and I will set up the session, sort of talk through the basics of Sales IQ and Campaign Manager and some of the existing use cases we address and ideas of other use cases, that we've helped people extend the solution to address.
But I want people to bring their own ideas. Right? Bring your own problems. Talk through sort of, maybe it's something you're addressing today, but you're struggling with the execution or you sort of have the data, but you're not sure how to act on it. And we'll, we'll just whiteboard and talk to how we can use the solution to address it.
Matthew Knaggs: Right. Well, I'm really looking forward to our time at MindShare meeting lots of new folks and getting some ideas about how we can solve their solutions as well with our tools and looking forward to being there with you.
Brian Hirt: You too, Matt.
Barrett Thompson: Thanks again for listening to our MindShare preview, and we really look forward to seeing you [00:19:00] in Austin. Go to zilliant.com/events to register if you have not done so yet. Also check out the show notes for a direct registration link. And with that, we'll see you soon in Texas.
