Jason Greenwood Consulting:  Ecommerce Strategies For Highly Regulated Industries

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Jason Greenwood from Greenwood Consulting. Jason explores how COVID-19 rapidly transformed B2B sales, pushing businesses to embrace digital solutions. He discusses the challenges of transitioning from traditional sales methods to e-commerce, particularly around managing product and customer data. Jason also delves into the complexities of selling in regulated industries and the importance of compliance, scalability, and customer relationships in the B2B world. Tune in to learn how to overcome these hurdles and succeed in the evolving digital landscape.

Insights In This Episode

• B2B companies were forced to adopt digital strategies quickly when in-person sales became impossible.
• Regulatory compliance is key for e-commerce in industries like firearms, cannabis, and supplements.
• B2B e-commerce isn’t just about “buy now” — customers seek to self-service with functions like tracking orders and downloading product data.
• SaaS platforms allow infinite scalability and efficiency for B2B companies, freeing them from managing technical infrastructure.

About Tactical Business

Tactical Business is the weekly business show for the firearms industry. The podcast features in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs, professionals and technologists who are enabling the next generation of firearms businesses to innovate and grow.

Episode Transcript

Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Show. I’m your host, Virginia Beach based firearms entrepreneur and copywriter Wade Skalsky. Each episode, we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a business owner in the firearms industry. We’ll speak with successful firearms industry entrepreneurs about their experiences building their companies, leaders and legislators who are shaping the industry, and tech executives whose innovations will reshape the future of the firearms industry. Let’s get after it. Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. I’m your host, Wade Skalsky. And today I’m talking with Jason Greenwood from Greenwood Consulting. Jason, how are you doing today, sir?

Jason: I’m doing super great, man. I’m super stoked to be on the pod. Super stoked to be having this conversation with you and just looking forward to it.

Wade: A lot of times we’ll talk specifically with firearms businesses, but I’m really excited to talk to you today with a little B2B e-commerce strategy, a little B2C e-commerce strategy, because I write for the firearms industry as well. So I can talk about this stuff all day long. So I’m excited to talk about those things. But before we do that, let’s chat a little bit about how you got to where you are. I know you had a round the world journey too. In terms of geography. I’d love to hear a little bit about that. So just give us a little warm up on how you got here.

Jason: I’ve lived an amazing life and I’ve been very privileged to live the life that I’ve lived. I grew up in Southern California, moved to New Zealand in my early 20s, lived in New Zealand for almost 30 years between a mix of Christchurch and Auckland. When I first moved to New Zealand, lived in Christchurch for a decade, then lived the rest of my time in Auckland, married a Kiwi who’s my wife, and my brother in law’s, also a Kiwi who married my sister, and I’ve got lots of friends and family down in the ANZ region altogether. In fact, my sister and brother in law, two nephews and my mom all live in Brisbane, Australia. So I’ve got lots of connections down in that whole ANZ region. My grandfather was a Kiwi. That’s how we came to be connected with New Zealand in the first place. And then a year and a half ago we moved to Mexico and we spent all of 20, 23 traveling around Mexico by car, did about 20,000km by car in 2023, which is we covered a lot of ground. We covered most of the major areas in the mainland, didn’t do Baja, but did pretty much the whole mainland, all the major cities and centres, and we ultimately decided to put down some roots in Pueblo. We’ve just recently bought a townhouse here in Pueblo City, which is about two hours southeast of Mexico City in the Great Central Plateau. So we sit at about 2000m of elevation here in Pueblo City. So it’s nice and temperate. It’s not like a furnace. It’s temperate, almost like a San Diego climate, like year round. So it’s really nice. And we do lots of traveling. I have lots of clients in North America, so I spend a lot of time traveling to the United States to speak at conferences and be involved in in e-commerce.

Jason: But I’ve been specifically operating in the e-commerce space for over 24 years now. So this is my 24th year in the e-commerce space, and I’ve built and run brands. I’ve built and run agencies, and for the last four years I’ve built and run my own independent e-commerce consultancy. And for the last few years in particular, I’ve specialized in niche down really heavily in the B2B e-commerce space, and I consult across the whole of the commerce stacks, not just the e-commerce front end, but all the operational systems in the back end, the ERPs, the CRMs, the CDPs, the PIMs, point of sale systems, system integration, order management, warehouse management, etc. and so I consult across both Solution Engineering Platform Search and select Partner Search and Select as well as overall solution design, integration architecture, data sharing, all that sort of stuff. And although I don’t work specifically with people working in the firearms space. I have worked with a number of merchants working in heavily regulated industries, and so I’ve got a fairly broad and deep experience in regulated industries. And it is a unique it’s a unique, it’s a unique situation that merchants find themselves in. And they have to cross lots of T’s. They have to dot lots of I’s, particularly in the United States, where almost all regulated industries have some element of national versus state level and sometimes even city level regulation. And that starts to become a real challenge for these merchants selling into these markets. And so yeah, that’s a little bit about my background. My wife and I love traveling. We don’t have kids. We’ve got a dog. So for us traveling is life. And seeing the world through other people’s eyes is really what we love to do.

Wade: That’s amazing. There’s a lot to unpack there. So there’s some actual marketing powerhouses down in New Zealand. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Sean D’Souza down there and Psychotactics the guys. The guy’s a genius. I follow his stuff. And so there’s a lot of Cool. I guess a lot of time to think down there in New Zealand, right? So there’s a lot of open space, a lot of thinking time. When you were running around Mexico, was it? Did you do it for the purpose of trying to figure out where you were going to live? So let’s test it. Let’s get a little minimal viable product for a location here and see if we like it. And then we’ll put down roots.

Jason: It was both. It was a delayed honeymoon. My wife and I got married during Covid. And for those of your audience that don’t know how New Zealand handled Covid, the way they handled Covid is actually one of the reasons we left. It was one of the most locked down countries in the world for three years, and our borders were shut, and my wife and I are huge travelers and we couldn’t travel, we couldn’t leave the country. And so or we could leave the country but couldn’t get back in. And so that was the real challenge for us. But you’re right, a lot of powerhouses from a digital e-commerce perspective and the whole ANZ region, e-commerce is not that big in New Zealand. It’s in the low. It’s in the low double digits of e-commerce penetration. It’s only about that 12 or 13% mark of total retail in New Zealand. But it’s it’s over 20% in Australia. So Australia has a much stronger, bigger, more vibrant e-commerce market. And I had a lot of clients that were based in Australia, and I spent a lot of time in Australia traveling around Australia too. But the purpose of traveling specifically around Mexico was twofold. One is it was a delayed honeymoon for me and my wife post Covid. And then two, we had a short list. We had a short list of about ten places that we thought looked like a place we could possibly make a home out of here. And ultimately, none of the places on our short list is where we ended up.

Jason: Pueblo was actually a waypoint between Mexico City and Oaxaca, so we were driving from Mexico City to Oaxaca and we were going to we we’d stayed in Mexico City for about a month, and we were going to stay a month in in Oaxaca, which was also on our short list. And we did one overnighter in Puebla on the drive because it’s a very long drive, and we just loved the city and we ended up we had six months left to go on our trip because my wife had pre-planned the whole route and we joined. We jointly planned it together and the places we were going to stay and the Airbnbs and all the things we’re going to do. While we were on that trip, we had six months left to go. So we’re like, well, we could probably stop here right now, but we’ve got this rest of this trip that we want to do. So we carried on. We did the rest of the entire East Coast. So basically all the way down the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico, all the way down into the Yucatan Peninsula and Quintana Roo and Merida and Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum, and then back up to Veracruz along the coast there. And and yeah, we just fell in love with Puebla. And we said, well, look, if we find something better in the final six months, then great. But if not, then let’s come back to Puebla and let’s spend a bit of time here and let’s see if it’s as good as we think it is, which we did.

Jason: We came back at the end of our trip, and we initially stayed in an Airbnb for a month here, and we continued to love it. And then we had to go back to New Zealand briefly for my wife’s sister’s wedding. And we also had an off grid tiny house in Auckland that we needed to sell. So I sold that while we were there. And then we brought that money back. And that’s what we put into the into the townhouse here. So it’s been a journey. But from the firearms perspective, firearms license holder and New Zealand had lots of lots of firearms in New Zealand when I was there. But Mexico, it’s almost impossible to own firearms here, so I don’t have a firearms licence here. I don’t have any firearms in Mexico, but I have lots of friends in Texas and lots of friends in Florida. And in fact, the last major trip that I took to Texas, my one of my good friends from Australia who now lives in Texas with an American wife, he he’s right into his firearms and he’s about five minutes. He lives about five minutes away from his local gun range. So we spent we spent a full day out at his local range and shot a whole range of firearms. So I’m definitely a firearms enthusiast, let’s put it that way.

Wade: Well, and I think our audience will appreciate the the freedom loving aspect of actually choosing to uproot your family and move out of a country because you didn’t appreciate the way that they dealt with your civil liberties. And I think that’s very that I think that goes, at least for me personally, that goes a lot farther along than you telling me what kind of guns you own or don’t own. Like that’s easy to do, but to pick up your whole family and move your move your wife, move your business to to a totally new country. I think that speaks volumes about sort of your mindset around freedom, and that definitely translates on the two way side. All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit. And I’d like to unpack a little bit about the some of the e-commerce stuff, because I think the one interesting thing about the firearms industry is that a lot of people come to it because it grows out of a passion that they have. So they may not have a business background, I would say. But we do have a lot of people that we that I’ve interviewed and a lot of people that we talk to that have come from other industries, but we do have people that don’t necessarily have an e-comm industry. And it’s it’s almost like they do things on a legal pad, right? That’s how much they, they go. So walk me through sort of your process for when you were going to bring on an on board a new client. Do you assume that they don’t know anything? Or do you suss that out as you go? Or how do you approach that problem?

Jason: I meet them where they are. So sometimes especially B2B brands, meaning that they’re selling to businesses, they’re so so let’s say, I don’t know, let’s say it’s a firearms manufacturer or an ammunitions manufacturer or a tactical equipment Picatinny rail manufacturer, whatever it might be. And they’re selling to firearm stores, for example. And so they are selling wholesale. They’re either a manufacturer or distributor and they’re selling to the retailers of those goods. Now, historically in the B2B world, e-commerce has not been a thing in the DTC and B2C world. So the direct to consumer and business to consumer world e-commerce has been mature for a decade, right? You wouldn’t start a new retail business and not do e-commerce. It would be strange. Even if you have physical stores, you would also do e-commerce in the B2B world. That’s not true for them. In the B2B world, oftentimes orders are done via a spreadsheet that gets emailed to you with a Po number or something like that. It gets manually entered into your accounting or your ERP system, and then the order gets shipped out. Or there’s EDI, which is basically the buyer’s ERP system or accounting system, placing an order directly with your ERP system, and the order gets sent out automatically, or punch out, which a punch out is an e-procurement system on the buyers side, talking to your system and placing the order via a pipeline. An electronic pipeline between the two. So self-service e-commerce, meaning your distributors if you’re a manufacturer, your distributors and retailers being able to log in to your website and buy in bulk off of you.

Jason: As a B2B customer, that’s not really been a thing. And one of the reasons for that is because typically sales in the B2B world have been done through field sales reps, customer service, Bdrs, Bdms, SDRs, those things like that. And so what happened was, is that the B2B world got tipped on its head during Covid, when sales reps couldn’t physically go and visit their customers on site or in store and take those orders on site through an iPad or whatever it is. All of a sudden, the B2B industry realized, geez, we need to really rapidly figure out some digital routes to market because our salespeople can’t go and visit customers for the foreseeable future. And that’s when really the kickoff of a mass forced maturation process started to happen in the B2B world. So across the manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors in that world, all of a sudden they started to get digital religion and they realized, man, we just don’t know how to do this digital thing. And I recognize that during that time, and it was like trying to drink out of a fire hose in terms of trying to take care of all the customers that wanted to stand up an e-commerce website really quickly. But the bigger challenge oftentimes is data. And when I go in and I start talking to these customers for the very first time, they oftentimes have product data that’s spread across their sales reps, heads, network drives.

Jason: It’s on desktops, it’s in physical printed catalogs. So oftentimes their product data isn’t anywhere ready for e-commerce sales. They also oftentimes don’t have their customer data ready for e-commerce sales. So they bob the sales rep or Jill, the sales rep knows Jane down the road that the the wholesale customer. And that’s how they deal with them. But they don’t have their customer data at the organization level in a way that can be then linked up to an e-commerce experience, so that when those people log in to the e-commerce experience, they get their right pricing, they see the right catalog items, they get the right moqs their minimum order quantities, they get all the trade terms that they’re supposed to get. They see their credit limit and how much they can buy. They can download invoices and statements. They can make quote requests, all that stuff, all that stuff has to be enabled by a really well structured account layer within the back office system, so that we can get them and surface them through the e-commerce experience. And so that’s usually where I begin. I do a full blown discovery. My discovery questionnaire is about 150 questions. But where in addition to that I asked them to give me a sample of their product data, and I asked them to give me a sample of their customer data. And by the time I spend ten minutes reviewing both of those sets of data, I can usually tell them where most of their problems sit. And that’s the.

Wade: Leverage, right? Like your ability to identify where’s the inflection point and then where do we start. Right. And that comes from the experience of dealing across these different verticals. Yeah. No. That makes perfect sense to me for a bunch of different reasons. And one thing where I always try to talk to the businesses that are in the firearms industry is like, look, yes, you have to have your relationships. Yes, you have to do your kneecap to kneecap with regards to the industry, because it’s a very small industry in some regards. Right. Everybody knows everybody. But if you can adopt some of these mainstream business ideas, you will have a huge advantage over your competitors that don’t. Right. And I’m seeing that where you’re seeing firearms businesses launch completely off of non-traditional channels like Twitter for example. Right. That’s their all their marketing is they just do Twitter. People like what? So I get excited when you start talking about the data because I’m a data driven person on my writing clients. It’s like we want to see what’s working, what’s not working, and then pivot. And in the firearms industry, you do have a lot of data, right? Because you have all these inventory concerns, you have all these these you do have. And because it’s so regulated, you’re almost forced to get the data. Does that make sense? Walk me through a little bit your experience. Like other regulated industries, about how that’s actually can be used as an advantage in terms of versus, in essence, a disadvantage because there’s some drag and friction, but how can you use that as an advantage?

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So oftentimes digital systems are better equipped to help you comply with local, state and national laws around regulated industries because you can put rule sets in those platforms about where you can sell to, which addresses which catchments you can sell certain products into, what kind of data you need to collect at that point of sale, whether it be identification, whether it be a certification to be able to carry these types of products and sell these types of products, whether it be their business number, whether it be a whole audit trail of where this product is going into, down to the serialized numbers. In some cases, obviously, like with firearms, they’re serialized. And so therefore we need to be able to tell the government, okay, we’ve sold this serialized firearm to this retailer. And then if the government wants to go and find out who they sold that gun to, then they can go and do that. And so in this same set of restrictions or challenges applies to many other industries. So I’m thinking supplements here, drugs, over-the-counter drugs, regulated drugs that you need actually a prescription for. There’s alcohol. There’s many different regulated industries in addition to firearms and firearms accessories that are regulated in similar ways, meaning that there are local laws, state laws and national laws that we have to comply with. And sometimes there is even gateway specific meaning that if I’m taking payment via credit card through my website, then different gateways will have different regulations or rules about the items that you can sell through their gateway and take payments for.

Jason: So, for example, the cannabis industry has faced real challenges around this because as local and state laws have loosened up, but the federal laws have not. The gateways have in many instances, they’ve taken the hardest line possible, meaning they’ve adopted the most strictest laws within the land. And usually those are the national laws. They’ve adopted those as the rules for their gateway. And they’ve said, look, these are the rules. And if you can’t abide by these rules, even if you have maybe a local or a state permit to sell cannabis, for example, you can’t sell it through our gateway on your e-commerce website because we don’t allow it because we adhere to the federal laws. Right. And so this is a challenge across many regulated industries. But if you can navigate this by bringing in governance rules and implement governance rules in your e-commerce platform about where you can sell certain items and which gateway you use or which payment processor you use for that to make sure that you are compliant with their rules. Then that again, it builds a moat around what you’re doing because it is harder. It takes some time, it takes some effort. And even when it comes to taxation, because taxation of heavily regulated industries is often unique to that industry as opposed to your standard local, state and national sales tax. Oftentimes, regulated industries have unique taxation regimes associated with them to disincentivize consumption of those items, like, for example, vapes and cigarettes and alcohol, they’re taxed with unique excise taxes.

Jason: And so you have to be able to also collect the appropriate amount of local taxes and state taxes that govern your industry. And that’s where platforms like Avitus or Avalara come in and can help you comply with those regulations across your industry. And so like I said, there’s definitely more effort, there’s more research, there’s more configuration. And also when we go to search and select for the platform itself. E-commerce platform itself. Some platforms handle regulated industries better than others, and so we try to match up the technology and the stack to match the regulations of the industry in question. And sometimes, like in the case of Australia, I architected an e-commerce solution for a company in Australia that was operating in the natural health supplement and natural health space. But for some of their goods, the manufacturer themselves would only sell via practitioners, and those practitioners had to at least virtually have a meeting with the customer or the patient before they could prescribe that product. So they were practitioner only item. So some of the rules were state and national rules in Australia, some of them were manufacturer rules in Australia. And so what we had to do as part of the e-commerce Configuration, we had to create a way whereby these regulated products that were practitioner only, they actually had the seller. This retailer had practitioners on staff. So for those practitioner only items, we had to take the customer and we had to find out whether in the back office system, they had already met with a practitioner on staff had been approved to buy those goods, and then their account was flagged with the approval to be able to buy those goods through the website.

Jason: If they weren’t flagged with that flag, then we would automatically pop up a message saying that this was a practitioner only item you needed to book in with one of our practitioners, and there was a booking form right there on the screen as pop up, so they could book in with one of the practitioners to get permission to buy that. Good. So these are the types of things that you have to think about whenever you go in into any regulated industry. There are not only the regulations about who you can sell to, where you can sell to, but there’s the taxation question. And then also having the audit trail across all these facets and functions of the business to where, if the government comes calling and says, well, show us the documentation that you’ve done everything right, you’ve crossed your T’s, you’ve dotted your I’s, you’ve got the right permits to sell into a state, for example, we’ll show it all to us and show it in relation to these individual transactions. So you have to be able to have an audit trail across every transaction that you do to make sure that you’re compliant, and that the compliance costs in regulated industries is one of the biggest costs the business can bear.

Wade: Yeah, it can be an advantage though because there’s a barrier to entry. Right? So correct. You can navigate that less expensively than your competitors. Then obviously that’s going to show up in the bottom line. And I think what people aren’t they don’t understand is even if you’re in a firearms adjacent business, you still have to deal with these things because just because something is legal doesn’t mean that a company or a vendor is going to want to have you do it anyway because they’re nervous about it. So, for example, I write for a holster company and they Washington state has gotten real kind of dicey with regards to everything. So Amazon won’t ship their holsters to Washington State even though they will from their website. So there’s these issues with vendors like, no, Amazon is like, no, we’re not going to do that. So you have to be able to navigate those. And I think the second thing that you really touched on as well is that is so take cannabis for example. The whole cannabis industry can be thrown into an uproar because of a statement by the government.

Wade: So recently the government just said, hey, we’re going to we’re going to revisit reclassification of cannabis after the election. Right? So all the cannabis stocks this last week tanked because they’re like, oh, no. And so firearms is no different. If there’s a if there’s a, some sort of some there’s some sort of event like big event that involves a firearm that can affect the industry. There’s some state like New York. And the other thing too, is that certain states, even though that they may have they may be higher on the enforcement level because they’re less friendly to firearms as well. So I think all of those things are you touch on some really good points. So let me ask you this. So when someone comes to you and you’ve identified the leverage points and then you say, okay, so here’s here’s where I think that we should go with you. Here’s where I think we should fix. Do you have a growth mindset in terms of okay, here’s not what we should shoot for going forward? What is your sort of your philosophical approach on that?

Jason: What I don’t do is I’m not a digital marketer. I don’t provide digital marketing services. I’m not going to help you run campaigns. I’m not going to help you do digital marketing. But what I will do is and what I am often tasked with doing as part of the discovery and solution architecture process, and then also the search and select process for both the technology and the the partner. My work usually culminates in what’s called a bird, a business requirements document, and it’s basically translating business requirements into technical requirements and technical solutions. And then that can be given out to agency partners, for example, and say, okay, give us a proposal of how long is it going to take you to build this? How much is it going to cost? What’s the resources you’re going to apply, etc.? What’s your project management process, etc. but also one massive part of this that most brands overlook and what I encourage them to do even before we get into the scoping phase. And the solutioning phase is do you have an adoption plan? And what I mean by that is both an internal and an external adoption plan with your customers. Have you even thought about that? Have you even canvassed your customers? Have you had a conversation with your B2B buyers? If you’re a manufacturer, are you talking to your distributors? If you’re a distributor, are you talking to your retailers that are buying off of you, etc.? Are you asking them whether they even want self-service e-commerce because your whale customers, they’re going to be integrating with you via EDI, your mid-market customers that are really tech savvy, they’re probably going to be integrating with you via E-procurement.

Jason: So it is the SMB buyer, your business to business SMB buyer. They are the ones that will most likely adopt the e-commerce capability. Self-service e-commerce, where I can log in and I can place an order through your website. Those are the ones that are going to probably adopt it, but your EDI customers and your E-procurement customers still probably want a whole swathe of digital services that you don’t yet offer them, but you won’t know unless you ask them. And so oftentimes I’m tasked when I come in with actually running the customer interviews on behalf of the brand and getting a cohort of their customers, a cross-section of their customers, maybe 2 or 3 small customers, 2 or 3 mid-sized customers and 2 or 3 whales, and get them on a 30 to 45 minute call and ask them a series of questions. And what comes out of these interviews is super interesting for the brand that’s selling to them. One oftentimes in the B2B world, people do not use the term e-commerce. It’s very rare that they use that term. They’ll use terms like a buyer’s portal, a purchasing portal, a trade portal. They’ll use completely different terminology. A click and collect is will call. In the B2B world, for example, they don’t use the term subscription. They use auto replenishment, for example.

Jason: So even the terminology that your buyers use in the B2B world is completely different to the terminology that is used in the traditional DDC or BDC world, and so making sure that we’re speaking the same language as the buyer and making sure that we understand when they use the term e-commerce and when they use the term e-procurement, what do they actually mean by that? And what we find is that oftentimes, even if the buyer says, no, we wouldn’t use an e-commerce website if you had it, but we would log in and we would track our orders and our shipments till the time it arrives to us. We would log in and make quote requests. We would log in and make a return request. We would log in and check stock availability research products, download collateral point of sale collateral. We would download spec sheets, materials safety data sheets. We would download PDFs. We would download exploded drawings. We would self-service a whole bunch of things through this buyer portal. But we wouldn’t necessarily hit the buy now. But what we also find is that whilst they might say that within sort of six months after launch, even if they use only those other functions, we find that they naturally migrate to also completing and executing the transaction through that portal. So these are the types of discussions that I’m having on behalf of these brands when they say, help us make the business case for investing in e-commerce. And then what we do is we also have to develop an internal adoption plan, which means that if I have salespeople inside the business and they feel threatened by e-commerce and they feel like you’re going to be taking money out of their back pocket and commissions for anything that comes through e-commerce, then of course, there can be a lot of subterfuge and sabotage of any e-commerce activities within the business when actually you need your sales team on board because they’re going to be the ones literally sitting side by side with the buyer and helping them through the first one, two, three, four orders that go through that portal.

Jason: They’re going to be holding their hand to make sure that adoption happens. So when I go in, I’m oftentimes seen as the biggest enemy of sales teams. And then within 15 minutes of chatting to sales teams, I’m their best friend because I am actually a massive advocate for offloading the crap jobs that salespeople are often asked to do in terms of administrative duties, and manually keying orders into accounting systems or ERPs. I want to take all that pain away from them, and whilst also in many cases, I recommend to manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors that they give additional commission incentives to their sales teams for all digital channel orders. And I tell you, you get what you incent, and if you incentivize salespeople the right way, they will do almost anything you need them to do. So I’m a big advocate for salespeople and human beings.

Wade: This episode is brought to you by TacticalPay.com. Every few years, it seems large banks and national credit card processors suddenly decide that they no longer want to process payments for firearms and firearms related businesses, and so they drop these businesses with almost no notice, freezing tens of thousands of dollars in payments for months on end. If you want to ensure your partner with a payments provider that is dedicated to supporting the firearms industry. Or you just want to find out if you could be paying less for your ACH, debit and credit card processing. Visit TacticalPay.com. Again, that’s TacticalPay.com. One thing I want to do is some of our audience might not be familiar with the term SMB means right. Yes. So so what does the term SMB means then? I have a follow up.

Jason: Small and medium sized business. And that will differ by vertical market and region. But typically any business that’s doing less than $100 million a year in revenues in the United States is considered a small or medium sized business.

Wade: So and the reason why I wanted to be clear on that is because I think a lot of people might be listening to you talk and be like, oh my God, this seems like so complicated. And there’s like a lot going on. And I think it’s really important that we understand a couple of things that you said. So number one is most of, I think firearms Industry. Businesses that are B2B will be working in the SMB space 100%. But if you can get your vendors right, or the people that you sell, the businesses that you sell to, and you make it easy for them to go into a portal and have asymmetric meetings right where they don’t have to get you on the phone, and they can do whatever they want to do it, and then you train them up on that. What that does is that creates a stickiness with those customers because they don’t really want to go anywhere else, because they get habituated to doing it with you. The way that they do it right. And what that does is that creates stability and continuity in your business because people are people. It doesn’t matter if you think this is, oh, this is fortune 500 company, or if it’s mom and pop store down the street.

Wade: People are people. If they do something, they get used to it. They like doing it that way. It’s very hard to get them off of that. And so if you can create a system that gets your other businesses to go to these portals, regardless of what you call them, I call them what they want to call them, then that will make those businesses more sticky with your business. And so that’s nice number one so people can understand that. Yes, it seems like it’s a pain in the neck to do it yourself, because all I want to do is make ammunition or build firearms or holsters or whatever. Great. Give it to you, let you do everything, make it super sticky, and then what happens is then you also if you scale everything, if you have to scale quickly, everything’s already in place, right? So talk about that a little bit like because let’s say that you something big happens. And I’ve seen this with a couple of the ammunition people where the holy smokes their business just scales immediately and they don’t have the systems in place to do that. Is does what you do. Does that assist the scaling?

Jason: Yeah. So I, I engineer most of the systems that I architect for infinite scale. So almost in all cases there are SaaS platforms. They’re software as a service platform. So they’re not self-hosted by the manufacturer the wholesaler distributor, they’re hosted by the vendor of the software. And so scalability for that software, security for that software. Pci compliance of that software. All of a sudden now that’s the vendors problem. That’s not your problem. You’re logging into your e-commerce platform or you’re logging into your back office system, just like you would log in to Facebook. You’re not thinking about how many servers Facebook has. They have to worry about that. So that’s the first thing is I work almost exclusively with SaaS platforms for that very reason, so that they bring infinite capability to any business from right from the time they’re a startup, right, to the time they’re potentially a multi-billion dollar business. So that’s the first thing. Second thing we have to remember in the B2B world is that margins in the B2B world are incredibly thin, right? Both from the manufacturer to the distributor to the retailer, that retail margins are typically much better than any layer of the wholesale channel. And as a result of that, anything you can do to bring efficiency to your business in the selling process and in the servicing process, that’s additional margin that you don’t have to give away through human beings having to provide that service to your customer. Secondarily, on the buyer side, so let’s say it’s a distributor buying off of a manufacturer.

Jason: They are making those purchases. Those are not discretionary purchases. It is part of their job. They have to make these purchases. It’s not like my wife browsing a fashion website for inspiration and going, oh, I like that dress. And oh, I like that set of earrings. And oh, cool, you’ve recommended that as an accessory to go with that. Oh, cool. Here’s a lookbook. And oh, I’m inspired, right? People don’t go to trade portals to browse and be inspired. They go to make a purchase as part of their day job. And also, another thing that your audience may not realize is that over 60% of B2B buyers in the United States today are now millennials, so their expectations have changed. Right. The old school way was, oh, I’m going to ring up Bob down the road because he’s my accountant and my account rep, and I have a beer with him every Friday night, or we’re on the same bowling team or whatever it is, and it’s the good old boys club. That’s not entirely the case anymore. Even in tight knit industries and communities like the firearms industry, the buyers, they’re doing this as their job. They don’t necessarily want to do it. They’re doing it to make a living. And so when they come to your trade portal, they want to get in, make their trade purchase and get out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Because again, this impacts their margins.

Jason: The more efficiently they can make their purchases, the more margin they save. And which means the more margin they make, which impacts their bottom line. So if we look at it through that lens and removing all the buying friction we possibly can, that automatically, by definition generates loyalty in the B2B world. The second thing that generates loyalty in the B2B world is how difficult it is to create these trade relationships, because usually, as the buyer, you’ve got to apply for a trade account with the supplier, with the manufacturer or the distributor, you can apply for a trade account. You’ve got to fill out a bunch of forms. You’ve got to make sure your credit worthy. You’ve got to be assigned to trade account. They create the account in their ERP, they create the account in their e-commerce platform. And that might take anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks to get approved for a trade account with the supplier before you can even make a purchase. And so, by definition, relationships in the B2B world are more sticky because it’s not like logging into your favorite fashion brand and ordering a new dress where I just fill in my name, my address, and my credit card details and you send it to me. It’s not like that in the B2B world. So by definition, relationships are more sticky in the B2B world. And if you can remove friction for the buyer and increase their revenue margin as a result, they will love you forever.

Wade: Well, I think you one of the biggest fears that people have always is you get to, you got to lead. You develop the lead. You turn that person into a buyer and then something happens downstream which burns that relationship because there’s just someone on the fulfillment side screwed it up. Right. This is like Salesperson’s worst nightmare all the time. It’s like you spend, especially in B2B or high ticket. You spend all this time developing this lead and firearms people. My experience at least, is that in the business side, they’re slow to trust, right? It’s not it’s not there’s not a high trust level if they don’t know you. Right. Because it is so it is so integrated with regards to coming from the armed forces or whatever. Right. So like if you were an armed forces person or a veteran. Then you might have some cachet that might get past that. But, you know, someone like me or whatever, if I’m dealing with it, it takes a long time to call people out. And so it really is. You do not want to spend all that time and then not have that relationship secured on the back end, which is exactly what you’re talking about, especially on these high ticket B2B relationships. And so you estimate put some work in the front end. But, you know, if you just save one business client on the back end, more than pays for it 100%.

Jason: And to your point, in the B2B world, we’re shipping cartons, pallets, and containers. We’re not shipping one off single items in most cases. Okay, maybe you’ve got a site or something like that that maybe you sell ship one of, or if it’s supply constrained or whatever it is, we ship small parcels, but in the main the CLV or the customer lifetime value in the B2B world is massive because the cart sizes are massive. Each individual order tends to be 30 order lines, 500 units all up across those order lines, and they’re ordering once a week or once every two weeks, or whatever it is that they’re trying to manage their cash flow. And as a result of that, when we’re doing the outbound shipping, it’s cartons, pallets and containers and even the carriers that we integrate with to make that happen are very different than in the B2C and B2C world, where we’re shipping a single dress inside of a yellow pouch or something like that. And so that’s when I come in. I’m architecting everything from the customer experience lens backwards. What do we need to do? You tell me the type of experience that you’re trying to create for your B2B buyers, and I will help you architect that experience for them, using technology as the bridge to make that happen.

Jason: And that’s really where I come in. And I provide that firepower, because oftentimes these B2B businesses, they don’t even know what technology is available out there for them. They might have heard of Shopify before as an e-commerce platform, but they haven’t heard of the dedicated B2B. E-commerce platforms are out there that are specially designed to work with heavily regulated industries, or they don’t understand the middleware technology, the PIM systems for managing product data, the ERP systems for small and medium sized businesses that can help them be more efficient in the back end for fulfillment and integrating with their local three PL carrier, their third party logistics carrier if they don’t do the shipping themselves. All those considerations that B2B have, because their business model is ultra complex, they don’t know what’s possible. And so really, my goal when I go in and I start consulting with them as an independent because I don’t have a delivery team behind me that I’m trying to feed with build jobs, right? I’m not trying to sell the next stage of the engagement. I’m an independent consultant, meaning I just want the best possible solution for my clients and I help them get that solution. And when you first start going into demos, when you do the discovery and you start to get a picture of what their needs are, and then I base the recommendations around technology based on the 8020 rule.

Jason: Can the platform do and meet at least 80% of your needs out of the box without heavy customization. And if it can, it should probably be in our consideration set. And then when I start organizing demos and all that sort of stuff, they go, wow. Didn’t even know this technology existed. Didn’t even know that you could make our business 25% more efficient at the flip of a switch. Had no idea. Had no idea that you could make my salesperson’s life easier. And when we go in and we do an assessment because we we’ll do an assessment of the amount of time that a sales team member or a customer service team member spends on admin functions versus adding value to the customer. And in many cases, it’s between 20 and 60%. If they track time and they track activities against that time, we find that on average, 20 to 60% of a sales person’s time is spent on admin functions, adding no value to the customer whatsoever. We want to eliminate that. That’s the goal.

Wade: I think what’s also important to remember, too, is that a lot of these, not all platforms are the same. So let’s say if you’ve ever tried to say to yourself, hey, I want to have a CRM, right? And you just like Google CRM, popular CRM.

Jason: For.

Wade: What? Right. There’s like 50 of them. 100 of them. Right? And each. The nice thing about having an independent third party like you is that you’re not working for HubSpot, and it has to. You have to make HubSpot fit no matter what, right? Even though it might be, Salesforce might be better or some other, like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman, maybe something I’ve never even seen before, right? Like you don’t even know. So like, that’s you can pick specifically what works. And I think the other thing too, is that people don’t understand this thought process, especially like on the manufacturing side of businesses, that these things are, in a sense, consumables. Right. So you’re not consuming it as a like it’s not a beauty product as a person or I’m not eating food, but like if I make ammunition or if I make a firearm or I make holsters or whatever, I have consumables of things that I have to do and people sell to those industries. So it’s not just the people making the firearms that are that can benefit from this. It’s the people that sell the materials to those companies right there. I would say their firearms quote, adjacent, but they are selling the pallets and the containers and they have all these logistics issues.

Wade: So that’s number one is that these things are consumables in that sense. And then I think the other thing to think about when you’re going through this is that the firearms industry specifically really does have trends that impact buying. For the last three years, 4 or 5 years, everyone’s been on this certain type of AR kit, like, we’re going to make these Gucci AR’s and we’re going to go real high. And then they switch and now we’re gonna do the wholesale ones where we’re going to go super cheap. Right now it’s how cheap can you make them? And then that’s now saturated. Everyone’s going to Precision Rifle, right. Like all right. Now everyone’s a sniper, right. So you have these ebbs and flows and these trends. And if you’re not agile with your ability for inventory and to pivot to your manufacturing side, you’re going to be stuck with a lot of inventory that you’re not gonna be able to move. And that’s, I think, talk a little bit about that and how having the systems in place already can help you meet some of those challenges.

Jason: Well, the great thing is about once you’ve digitalized your transaction layer or at least largely digitalized your transaction layer, now we can integrate demand planning, demand forecasting and inventory management systems. We can plug those in to your digital stack. And so instead of having these crazy spreadsheets with these crazy macros that where you’re trying to forecast demand and you’re trying to set your min maxes, and if you’re a manufacturer, you’re trying to create the inbound flow of raw materials for your boms because bom bom bill of materials, let’s say you’re manufacturing an AR, right? Okay, cool. I’ve got the stock material, I’ve got the barrel material, I’ve got the carrier material, I’ve got these different I’ve got all these different components. I may have got springs. I’ve got the firing pin, I’ve got the charger. I’ve got all these different things. I might have 100 individual components that make up the Bom, the bill of materials for this AR. And I’m maybe sourcing those components from 50 different suppliers. And again, those suppliers oftentimes won’t offer e-commerce either. So they’re B2B. And so you can’t log in and just place your order. And so maybe you need to send them a Po, a purchase order with a spreadsheet attached to an email and send it to your your sales rep on their side. The supply side of the raw materials. And so what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to bring bring efficiency across the entire B2B supply chain to digitalize that so that we can allow our buy side and sell side systems to share data with one another to automate the procurement process as much as possible.

Jason: So, for example, let’s say I’m an AR manufacturer and I need a certain amount of barrel stock in stock that I can pull off the shelf and I can cut down to the right length, and I can manufacture it into my AR. Well, if I want a certain number of linear meters or linear feet of barrel stock in stock at any given point in time in terms of min maxes, as I sell through that and manufacture through that stock, when it hits a certain threshold, I may want my ERP or my accounting system to automatically trigger off a purchase order to the supplier of that product. Now, that necessarily means that I am effectively setting my min maxes, that I’m tracking the supplier performance and how fast they get items to me. What the bulk buying opportunity looks like and what that does to my margins. If I can buy in bulk or based on my moqs or whatever it might be with the supplier, there’s lots of inputs that have to go into demand planning and inventory management, and there are systems out there specifically designed to do this. But if you’re operating your entire business out of spreadsheets and you don’t have any automation in the back end at all, it makes it very difficult to plug these systems in. And so we can bring digital efficiencies across every single function in the business, not just the customer interface.

Wade: Well, and that’s on the demand side, I think when you are a small operation, yes, you can make things when they come in. Okay, I’m going to make this or whatever. But as you start to get bigger, if you don’t properly manage your supply side of things and your supply chain, you may be shut down for a month. If you don’t have like one part that doesn’t get what you need. And so that’s and again and this is a I think people always want to wait till after there’s a problem, to spend the money to fix these things. Whereas like, you can spend a little bit of money up front to take the time up front. When you’re small, that’s when it’s easy. And that’s what got me excited when you said it. And I’m going to master the term. But I think you said infinite scale. Is that what you said?

Jason: Infinite scale?

Wade: Correct. I’ve never heard that term before. I like it. I’m going to steal it from you. But the goal then is like, look, it’s make sure that there’s no stress testing your business. If it’s if your SOPs and everything is done correctly, right? You don’t worry about it. So then you can be footloose and free with regards to going for things and you don’t have to worry about, oh my God, we’re going to have we’re not going to be able to handle all these orders as they come in. If you probably have the trigger set on the demand side. And so I think a lot of people don’t think that they on the marketing side, they think, oh, if you just build it, they’ll come. But then on the manufacturing side they’ll just say, well, when they come, we’ll build it. Yes. And both of those things are not good business approaches. And I think it’s safe to say that you solve a lot of those with a lot of the work and the consulting that you do. So we’re coming to the end of our runway for our time. So one last question then, how people can find you. And that’s so let’s say that I have I have a business I’m running. I’m decently successful right now. What are like three things that I need to like if I haven’t paid attention to these things now, I’m ready to. What are three areas I need to look at? Like right now. Like, okay, what are the things I need to make sure that I have my ducks in a row for to do. And then how can you help people do that? One of the first.

Jason: Things that I’ll encourage my customers to do is to have better conversations with their customers. What can we do as a supplier to you that would make your procurement process easier? And I was recently doing this with a distribution partner, massive distribution partner in the wheel and hub space for industrial wheels and tires and hubs. And when I started leading the interviews with the customer because they were considering putting in an e-commerce platform, one of the things that came up was without me as the buyer, emailing my account manager and asking them when the due date is for my shipment to arrive into my warehouse. I have no idea. I place an order with my sales rep, but I don’t actually know when it’s going to hit my warehouse, so I can’t set up my receiving team because I have to scale up and scale down receiving and move my human resources around the warehouse to receiving versus shipping. Right. Because I have people working across these teams, and I have to make sure that I have somebody in the warehouse ready to receive this container of goods that you’re shipping to me. But if I don’t know when it’s going to arrive, I can’t do that. And at the moment, short of emailing my account manager and saying, could you please find out when this thing is going to arrive into my warehouse, or give me at least a date range, like, is it going to be next Wednesday or is it going to be a month from now? I don’t know, I can’t resource appropriately on my side. And so they said, if we had a portal where we could just log in, where we could just type in, where we could just go to our order screen and click track and track it like I can in my personal life.

Jason: When I order something online that would make our lives so much easier. And this is a 50 year old family owned company where the sun is starting to take up ownership of the digital initiatives inside the business from the father who founded the company. And he didn’t. Until we had this conversation, we didn’t even know this was a problem. They didn’t know that this was a pain point or a frustration for their customers. So the first thing I always say is, have quality conversations with your customers about ways you can make their life easier and more efficient as the buyer, because it will be absolutely enlightening for you. Then what we need to do is we need to take stock of our current situation. What is that? And many businesses I go into, Bob doesn’t know what Fred does. Fred doesn’t know what Jane does. Jane doesn’t know what Jill does. We’ve got these very siloed departments within the business. And so when I go into Solutioning and when I go into discovery, they say, oh, we need to ask Bob about that, or we need to ask Jane about that, or we need to ask customer service about that, or we need to ask ops about that or whatever it might be. And things evolve, quote unquote, organically over time within these businesses to make themselves more efficient in their individual functions. And oftentimes that doesn’t get circulated around inside the business when those changes to process happen.

Jason: So what I would say is get your ducks in a row, even if it’s literally hand drawing on a whiteboard or hand drawing on a piece of paper, what your systems look like and what your processes look like for each function in the business. If you can do that so that you understand it, so that you can communicate it to someone like me, so that we can create either a digital equivalent or we can modify those processes to be more digital ready. Then we’ll be halfway down the track where when I get into discovery, many times it’s like, okay, I’ve asked all these questions, I need to go and speak to the CEO. For example, might go, I had no idea. That’s how we did that thing. And I need to go and talk to Bob about this. There’s many cases like that where they need to go away and they need to have an internal conversation because how the CEO thought something was being done is not how it’s being done today. And they get shocked and surprised. So those would be the top two things I’d say. Understand the state of your data. Understand the state of your processes, and then understand where your customer is coming from. And develop and hone and operationalize empathy with your customer. You have to operationalize that. And the only way to operationalize that is to be talking to them on a regular basis and asking them, what can we do to make your life easier to buy from us?

Wade: Yeah, it’s interesting, I think, and I think this is a great place to tie everything up, is that we want a transactional everything that we can transactional wise, so that everyone can focus on the actual connection part of the business. Right. And everyone wants to do it the exact opposite. They want to try to transactional as the connection part. And that’s that’s not a sound business advice in my mind. And I think you probably share that with me. So 100%.

Jason: Agree.

Wade: So anyways, listen, I geek out about this all day long and talk about it all day long. I actually I get into this type of thing and I know it’s been very enlightening for some of our people. So most of them, if they listen, or all of them, they should, especially on the B2B side. So I know the website is Greenwood.

Jason: Consulting dot net.

Wade: Greenwood Consulting. And is that the best way to get Ahold of you?

Jason: Linkedin is probably the best way to get Ahold of me. Can of course go to GreenwoodConsulting.net as well. But also I’ve got my own podcast, which is called the eCommerce Edge Podcast. It’s all across every podcast engine, including YouTube and Rumble. And yeah, so that’s the three places really is my website, LinkedIn and the podcast. And you can find me basically, if you Google my name, you can’t miss me. Jason Greenwood.

Wade: Amazing. Well, it was so good to talk to you. I’d love to have you back on the show in the next three, six months. I know you’re going to have some adventures to talk about and hang on. After we jump off. I want to ask you a quick question.

Jason: Okay, let’s do it. Thank you.

Wade: You’ve been listening to the Tactical Business Show by TacticalPay.com. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the firearms industry.