B2B Reimagined 2022 Highlights: The Essential Episodes
By Zilliant
Dec 13, 2022
Table of Contents
Zilliant’s B2B Reimagined podcast continues to be a go-to resource for commercial leaders across the industry spectrum. You can catch up on every episode of the show here, or start with these seven favorites from the past year.
B2B Reimagined: Seven Must-Listen Episodes from 2022
The mission behind B2B Reimagined is to provide consistent thought leadership to help our listeners gain strategic control of their commercial performance. We do this by bringing in unique and authoritative voices from a wide range of vertical industries, technology fields, consulting backgrounds, and data science domains.
This year’s 24 episodes served as a companion to practitioners and executive leaders alike as they navigated through another turbulent economic cycle.
Here are seven episodes that stood out with our audience in 2022:
Rush Enterprises Overcomes Supply Chain and Inflation Challenges with Data Science (Episode #62)
“Once you have a portfolio that's over 5,000 parts and you have thousands of different customers, the matrix starts getting so big that the benefits of having the tools that are available through this type of software really give you results. The ROI is fast, you will be proactive instead of reactive, you can be driving your business instead of reacting to your competitors, and you will be able to implement your strategies faster.”
Gonzalo Benitez, pricing and data analytics manager at Rush Enterprises, brought us a first-hand account of the modern complexities of the heavy-duty truck parts industry. Gonzalo describes how his team has worked creatively to manage supply chain issues and rapidly rising supplier costs. We heard about how data science has been the differentiator for the company.
Listen:
Building Materials and Construction: Perspective and 2023 Forecast (Episode #67)
“The most important thing that I can stress is that building material dealers are frequently the experts and the most reliable sources of information that a distributor or a manufacturer can turn to, to find out what is the relative demand of a product? What kind of prices are people paying? What is the future demand going to be? If the construction supply industry suffers from anything, I would say one of it’s the lack of communication from the contractor all the way up the chain to the manufacturer and then back down the chain again.”
Few know the building materials and construction sector better than Craig Webb, president of Webb Analytics and a seasoned industry journalist. Craig came on the show to help us make sense of the past three years, his expectations for various construction markets in 2023, and what companies need to be doing now to get ahead of the next economic shift.
Listen:
An Argument for Investing in Pricing Before CPQ (Episode #66)
“I'm a strong believer that pricing should be first before CPQ. Everyone knows if I am doing a CPQ solution, I am looking at selling faster, selling better and selling more. What if I'm selling faster, better and more with the wrong price?”
Accenture Managing Director Mo Beshir made a compelling argument for pricing software and how it adds value to any CPQ investment. He tapped his own experience to warn of the downsides of using CPQ without an integrated pricing solution and explained why Excel-based pricing puts companies behind the volatile economic times.
Listen:
Stop, Drop & Roll Won’t Extinguish Your Selling Pains (Episode #50)
“If your clothes catch fire, what are the three things we’re supposed to do? Stop, drop and roll … however when I ask professionals what are the three things that you do when you face pricing pressure? People just stumble and they don’t have an answer. Someone usually shouts out ‘Stop, drop and roll,’ which is kind of true because what they do is they stop what they’re doing, they drop their price, and they roll over.”
Dynamic keynote speaker and B2B sales expert Ian Altman brought our listeners an energetic, insightful point-of-view on how companies can improve their selling approach. Learn how combining revenue operations and intelligence technology with proven sales coaching methods can accelerate success.
Listen:
Your Value Prop is More Than a Tagline (Episode #46)
“I think the critical path in all of this, and this is true of all marketing, all sales ever, is clarity on both the seller's part and the customer's part on the value proposition. And that often gets overused to mean like tagline. And I don't mean it that way. I mean, the true truth of why somebody should buy X from you at Y price.”
Jose Palomino, president of Value Prop Interactive, helped us kick off 2022 with a thorough examination of what separates the great sellers from the average, and how software can help sellers hit their numbers while delivering for their customers.
Listen:
Elevating the Pricing Role (Episode #60)
“In talking with a lot of pricing leaders, people say that they do get some support from their top management, but sometimes their top management sees pricing and revenue management as an ATM - where they just hit a button and all this cash starts flying out. It's our job to let them know that it doesn't work exactly that way. We need tools, we need training, we need to stay current in order to keep the cash flowing.”
Professional Pricing Society President Kevin Mitchell joined us to share what he sees as the three biggest issues for pricing practitioners today. The conversation then turns to why, despite the challenges, we’re in the midst of the most exciting and opportunity-rich time to be in pricing.
Listen:
Inflation, Value-Based Pricing and Trucking (Episode #61)
“No one knows when the inflation wheel is going to stop exactly, but they know it's coming. What you don't want is to get caught way ahead of the chain in a continual price increase when the recession hits. Because then you're gonna lose market share pretty substantially.”
Carlisle and Company’s Gene Metheny helped us examine the macroeconomic landscape broadly, before narrowing down into how inflation and supply chain phenomena are impacting the trucking industry. He also talked about how value-based pricing can and should be implemented.
Listen:
