ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Increasing share of wallet among existing customers is a huge priority for manufacturers and distributors. On paper it looks easy. In practice, marketing blames sales for not selling more into the base, sales blames marketing, and both blame IT for not prioritizing their stuff.
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Floyd Blaikie put a third suspect on the table: maybe neither is the problem, and the problem is actually data. She and Matt Johnson of Pivotree took that to Sam Schwartz, who took the data side and stayed there. Her position: the data is accessible. It's probably in your ERP somewhere, probably in a catalog somewhere. What's hard is prioritizing it, and that comes down to fear and ego at the leadership level.
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The conversation gets into project-based quoting, the backwards search from a spec to a SKU, the order desk as the place where AI is landing hardest in B2B, and how to build a product data business case an exec team will fund.
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👤 Guest Bio
Sam Schwartz has spent about 17 years working for distributors and manufacturers on product data, digital transformation, and technology adoption programs, including senior digital roles at Jensen Precast and Midland Industries. She now runs her own consultancy, Sierra Summit Digital, working with mid-market B2B companies, and she is Global Director of Practitioner Experience at the B2B eCommerce Association. She took the data side.
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📌 What We Cover
- Why siloed thinking between sales, marketing, and IT stalls customer expansion before data ever enters the conversation
- The sales team that had decent product data and still couldn't cross-sell, because the only thing in their tools was what the customer bought last time
- Why the real blocker is prioritization, not access: the data is probably already in the ERP or a catalog
- Fear and ego trickling down from leadership teams, and what accountability looks like when a CEO's vision gets ignored to his face
- Cross-category and consumables campaigns, and where they work in a broad-line catalog
- The backwards search: bids that arrive as "2,700 units of a three-inch steel pipe" instead of part numbers, on lists thousands of lines long, and quotes that take weeks
- Why the order desk is where AI is making the biggest impact in B2B, and why it depends entirely on structured product data
- How to build the business case without asking for a million dollars: quotes won, speed to quote, cost to acquire, and sales team time
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
- Sam Schwartz on LinkedIn (she responds to messages quickly)
- Sierra Summit Digital, Sam's consultancy for mid-market B2B companies
- B2B eCommerce Association
- B2B eCommerce World, Americas event in Indianapolis, November second and thirdㅤ
- Pivotree integration services: integrations in half the time and half the cost, monitored in production for a fixed monthly fee, starting with a free integration sprint
