Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) finish their discussion about custom pricing groups and lists, as well as the important characteristics to look for in a buying group developer.

Part 4 of a 4-part series (Click to return to Part 3)

CHRIS: Ron, I'm curious what your thoughts are on this and some of the experiences you've had, and what you've seen, maybe around this integration side that you want to share here for folks as well. 

RON: Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah. So Chris covered the important one, which is the internal integrations with your own back office platform where you're really synchronizing your data between your CRM and your ERP and your PIM and your warehouse management system and all that stuff. The other part of that that he alluded to that I've got more on the screen here about is the external integrations right. 

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RON: If we're doing a lot of external connecting where you're not doing the warehousing, your vendors are in your supply chain. And that's what I've highlighted here, so I wanted to make sure to make sure that Chris and the screenshots we brought up a few seconds ago really are talking about all the internal integrations. And that's where it all starts, that's automating your business processes and we've literally done thousands of integrations.

I mean, pick your poison, we've probably integrated it, and if you want to schedule the demo and get on with me, I'll be happy to show you all the integrations we've done and talk through. I keep a list of all the recent integrations we've done over the last couple of years, and at last count, and I've been here ten and a half years, we've done over 4000 integrations. I'm usually pretty surprised when an application comes in that I haven't heard of. I've only had three in the last two years that have come in that we hadn't integrated before, and we actually integrating them just fine. So really the platform has to be able to handle any and all types of integrations, whether that's EDI, API, database, file formatted, custom, it doesn't really matter. You need a robust platform that can integrate all of them.

As Chris said, all the internals of being able to automate your business practice is huge. And then a couple of things just to touch base on mine, I'll focus a little more on the external. Chris talked about the customs and duties and shipping costs and things like that, and that can be both internal and external. It could be on the outbound side of putting together and preformatting the shipping label so you send it along with the order. Conversely, on the inbound side, it could be that while somebody is trying to put together their order from the warehouse in Taiwan and they're in Canada, how much is it going to cost to ship? You want to be able to give them an accurate shipping cost if it's relatively expensive. And so you need that inbound information.

Chris alluded heavily on the stop counts and things like that. That could be coming from your own warehouse, that could be coming from hundreds of vendors. And so you need to make sure that, when we have these external integrations on the outbound side, we're sending and preformatting the orders on the buyers group platform to those vendors for drop shipping appropriately. 

If that includes if it's an international shipment, then does that also include any customs and duties forms? Do we auto-charge VAT tax or GST? If we have to, do we include and print the shipping label, which we've done all of those historically before with different projects. What happens if we connect? We've got one client right now that we've connected with 18 of their distributors and they we did all of the eCommerce store fronts for those distributors as well. 

So one of the things we automated since we...the master distributor came to us first, the supplier came to us and had us build their system out and integrate it with their back-office ERP, which happened to be a NetSuite integration. And then they said for all of their master 17 distributors, they want us to build their storefront so they can sell the products there. But then they wanted us to integrate all 18 NetSuite installations. So if a distributor were starting to run low in stock, they didn't have to worry about it. Our platform automatically knew what that was and automatically generated the P.O. and sent it to the master distributor who then backfilled in their inventory. So we fully automated their inventory and warehouse scene for all 18 distributors across the US.

Next, automated price changes. As gas prices went up and price changes went up, the master distributor could update the price and then every other distributor had their prices calculated as an uplift off cost. And because the cost was updated and we propagated that to the other 17 distributors, it auto-uplifted the appropriate amount. So everybody still had their margin. So there's a lot of different optimizations there with that integration that you can do. And those are just a few. I love to get on a call with you guys and talk through some of those.

The last section here, Chris, that I'd really like to talk about is, how do you increase revenues? Improve loyalty, improve conversions, improve retention. It's just a simple thing. I mean, we work literally with clients for years to try to increase revenue and there are a hundred different ways to do it. But one of the easiest ways to do that is with eCommerce reordering, and this is one of my philosophies: make it easier for your customers to reorder from you than it is to order from any other option.

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RON: If you do that with eCommerce reordering, it's really easy to improve customer retention and customer loyalty. Because if I offer the ability to go in and create a shopping list, I'll just give an example of a shopping list here. I've got five different shopping lists because Clarity has five different buckets of types of employees that need different hardware configurations, backend integration specialists, need 27 monitors and a really robust machine. 

The marketing people just need lots of monitors, right? And a laptop. The ops team, they're doing all the invoicing and everything, so they need a different machine. So we've got all these different configurations and desks and monitors and all this stuff. And because we're 100% remote every time we hire a person, we need to place an order for a package of 40 different things besides the desk, the chairs, the monitor, computers, mouse, printer paper, all that stuff. 

Can you imagine how difficult it would be for every single employee if they had to start from scratch every time and remember to order every single piece of equipment that they were supposed to order for every employee? Whereas if they had a shopping list on the buying group platform for called "Back End Developer, New Employee," and they go in and say, "We just hired three back-end developers." So they go in and change the quantity to three, add to cart check out, and then it comes to the split-shipping and they go, "Okay, we hired Ron, here's his address, ship one of each; here's Chris, ship one of each to him; and here's Janine, ship one of each to her."

Great. Makes it really super simple for the ops team, doesn't it? You know, they're going to come back and buy from you if they can do something in 10 minutes that would normally take them an hour or more to do from somebody else or potentially from other groups. They have to order parts of it from Staples, parts of it from whatever. Right, from different places.

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RON: So one of the things that I love, and I've titled this, "Lists create returning customers," the more lists you can have, the better. If you can create a list on the group buying platform as the procurement manager and then share that list with everybody in ops so they can reuse that list better.

If I have a wish list, that's a deprecated list, like somebody getting married, you put the list in as each person picks an item off the list, it deletes the item off the list. So hopefully the list dies and they got everything they wanted from their wish list, that's a typical wish list it self-dies as it is self-fulfilling. 

Whereas a shopping list, the one that I just said, I've got every single month we hire employees and I want a list that has a full-baked list of all 27 things that I need. Every time I hire a new back-end developer, I just want to be able to go in and change the quantity and hit Add to Cart. So that might be a shopping list.

You've got your favorites list. Chris mentioned briefly a minute ago about the scouts. I've got some favorites. Some things that we buy often, you know, let's say for Clarity, we buy a lot of computers, right?  We have a lot of people for custom development. We buy servers all the time. I think the last server we bought was like a half-a-million bucks and it was fully custom made.

But let's say we bought some cheaper servers. We bought them a lot and we bought them from a specific eCommerce website. Maybe we want to set up a scout and it has a list of the three different servers that we buy regularly. And so we want to track if those things ever go on sale below $X, automatically notify us because we're going to go stock up. We know we buy 10, 15, 20 servers a year and if they ever go on sale and we know we can save money, let's just go buy a few. And that would be like a scout that Chris talked about briefly a minute ago. 

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RON: So there's all kinds of lists. Something's out of stock. We know that we need it as soon as it gets back in stock. I need to be notified ASAP because I need to run back out and buy some of them very quickly before they run out again because they're critical to our operation. So, out of stock inventory lists. 

So we've covered wish lists favorites list, out of stock lists, scouting lists, buying group shopping lists. Any other lists or anything, Chris, that you can think of right now? I know we're talking strictly about lists just in the Clarity platform. And this is really something you're going to want to look at. We have eigclartht different out-of-the-box methods that people could come reorder from you. We've got a quick add capability. We've got a bulk import. If they've got a spreadsheet with a thousand items, they can bulk import that, add them all to the cart and one click. Eight different ways to make it easier to buy from you, then go anywhere else. That is the key, no matter what the platform is. Is there anything else you want to add to this one before we tie off this section? 

CHRIS: Just in general, I would say I think you hit on a lot of key things there. I would just reinforce something we talked about earlier, which is thinking about how you can add value to your members. It's a really nice option, especially within this space, to be able to see it as not just a utility that you're providing, but also being able to aggregate data and remove any sensitive information from it and then be able to present relevant essentially objective data about the space and make some really cogent recommendations for the users.

Think about it. You're probably in a position to make some of the best recommendations that they could possibly get. You could almost think of it as like a mastermind buying group essentially, where you're going to be able to provide them with information that doesn't put other members at risk, but can aggregate what's working well, what's selling well, what works for different scenarios and even provide training and resources to go along with some of these lists and concepts. 

That would be the only other thing I would say, Ron. And, you know, I think for folks who are listening, one of the things that we want to leave you with is that there are a lot of nuances per buying group. There may be specific integrations, there may be specific details around the pricing and the hard- and soft-stops logic that you have the split shipment, split payments, some of the logistics and the fulfillment customs and duties, really the list goes on. 

It can be very nuanced. That is why we encourage you to reach out to us for complimentary discovery. And we mean that—if there isn't a good fit, will certainly let you know for us to work together directly and help you find companies that you can work with that will be a good fit. And we really see it as a long-term opportunity for any clients that we are able to serve. That's why we like doing the complimentary discovery upfront. It really helps to put everyone into a solid foundation before moving ahead again, whether or not we're able to help you directly or not. 

RON: Thanks again. So before you go, visit us at Clarity-Ventures.com, schedule the demo, jump on a call with me. I'm happy to start that complimentary demo. And the last thing, smash the light button. Subscribe to the channel and hope to see you on a future webinar. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Bye for now, everyone. 

CHRIS: Bye for now.