Make it Big Podcast: How to Be Successful in B2B Ecommerce with Brilliance

Welcome to The Make it Big Podcast, a bi-weekly audio series about all things ecommerce by BigCommerce.

BigCommerce Content Marketing Manager Shelley Kilpatrick sat down with Founder and CEO of Brilliance Business Solutions, Lori McDonald, and Director of Project and Product Management, Eric Dingeldein, on the Make it Big Podcast to discuss the evolution of B2B ecommerce over the years and what the future holds.

All episodes of The Make it Big Podcast are available on Spotify, Apple and Google. 

The Make it Big Podcast: Episode 38

Shelley Kilpatrick: We started by talking about how B2B has changed over the last five years. So now let’s look toward the future. How do you see B2B ecommerce changing going forward five years? What’s the future? Predict that for me.

Lori McDonald: “I love conversational AI. I’m really excited about conversational AI. I was excited about it even before Chat GPT. Honestly, right now, I think many B2B companies aren’t at a point of investing in that yet. 

“When we think about the buyers, they want a seamless, effortless experience and the technology is doing things like scanning an organization’s safety data sheets, as an example, and then someone in a chat who’s looking for a specific product, they’re leveraging the data from from that manufacturer to figure out, ‘Oh, here’s the product you’re looking for.’ Or, you can go into your live chat and ask, ‘What’s the status of order 5432?’ and it’ll come back and say, ‘Oh, that’s scheduled to be delivered tomorrow,’ in your chat. And it’s calling BigCommerce’s APIs to figure out that answer.

“There are so many improvements happening there. And you see many banks and insurance companies and other types of industries that are leveraging conversational AI. I really believe that’s going to move more into B2B ecommerce in the future. I think it will be a really exciting development.”

SK: I’m so in love with this, and we might have to keep talking about this. Okay, Eric, tell us what you think of the future.

Eric Dingeldein: “Mine is too around AI, it’s just the evolution around AI. You really see that start to really pick up in the B2C space and we are starting to leverage that more in the B2B space. I really see AI, personalization, all of that just kind of continuing to evolve over time. It’s possibly because I’m a big data nerd and I grew up a big data nerd, but you know, integrations to me, I think that’s one of the big things. 

“You talked about marketing, but how can I get data from all the different aspects of my company and make it work together to provide value to my customers, or attract new customers, or provide value to my partners that I work with? There’s so much data stuff that you could do and integrations are just a powerful thing. And being able to link as much as you can together — I think it’s huge.”

LM: “Absolutely. I know there’s so much talk about, like, a 360-degree view of your customer. That sounds great in concept, but it’s actually really challenging to achieve. The great thing for B2B companies, we talked about how much data they can get digitally, but they actually already have so much data on them in their offline systems. In many cases, they have a lot of data about their customers.

“So, finding a way to bring all of that data together — you’re right, Eric — along with the AI tools, that’s really powerful stuff.”

Be sure to also check out more episodes of The Make it Big Podcast on Spotify, Apple and Google.