Excellent, expected. The inspirational business advice podcast. Hey, hey, hey guys, welcome to Excellence X Spectre. Thank you so much for spending this 30 minutes with me and my fantastic guest today.
Now, is your business ready for digital commerce? And actually, do you understand that what digital commerce is? Is it the same as e-commerce? Is it wildly different from e-commerce?
That is what we are going to define, challenge, and conquer today with my fantastic guest. Someone who has really, really taken the bull by the horns in this arena and writes all over the place, online, creates so much fantastic content, contributes to TED events, writes over its small business trends, and is an expert in digital commerce, office tools, CRM, infrastructure, and of course, small business. So it gives me great, great pleasure to welcome to the show. Chai Verdul Pali, how are you, Chai?
Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure being on your program today. I appreciate it involving me in the conversation. You are very welcome.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do it. And just before we get to the issue at hand, because I think it really is a curious distinction we're going to make today. And just before we get to that, what is it that you do, Chai, what do you do for people? What's your business and what's your background?
So I am one of the co-founders and also Chief Marketing Officer at Mailer.com. And our platform, Powers and Native Commerce Portals, what we do is really provide is like a mini Amazon for your community. So you can aggregate product and services that can really cater to your community and your brand. We also have as a mobile store, which is a turn key, very easy to use, and it really focuses on the generation as well as commerce, the digital commerce piece of it.
So it's a holistic solution that we have built. And the third product that we have is really the digital ready analyzer. It really helps our business to really look at how ready they are and they can pick and choose from what are the areas they need to focus on, monthly basis or yearly basis and conquer and be ready for the digital world. That's what we do.
So you understand digital. That's the thing that I'm taking from that. You have been in digital for a long time and you get the entire digital approach. And what kind of clients do you work with?
What kind of customers do you work with? What's the typical kind of person you help? So we work with enterprise companies. We work with publishers and we work with small businesses.
And also we work for organizations, which are local economic development boards. We're really thinking about how do I help my community or businesses to tap into the 4.2 billion people who are shopping online. How can I get them in front of them? So we work with them too.
So really a plethora of different types. But our really focused would be enterprise companies who care about small businesses. I love that. Enterprise companies who care about small businesses.
That's a really nice line. And let's talk digital commerce. What is digital commerce? If you were to define it, how would you sum it up?
So digital commerce is also called as Decommers. It's really an electronic commerce solution used by an organization that helps them to deliver and sell products and services online. It is used by companies to either sell products, services, news, subscription, document, or any kind of electronic content. When you are tagged as a digital commerce company, you can easily collect payments, handle customer refunds and billing and managing all the other accounting functions for the customers online.
In a very simple way, when you look at a differentiation between e-commerce and digital commerce, the key word that you need to focus on engagement versus transaction, e-commerce really focuses on transaction only. What is a digital commerce is really a solution to attract a local or a global customer who can engage with you, not just transact with you online. So engage with me as customers that the customer can recognize the company and its brand. They can transact online or offline, recommend you to others or come back for more to engage with you.
And I guess that so many people that you start to work with, let's think about the early days of a relationship with a potential client for you. I would imagine that a lot of people do things very similarly, so they perhaps have the same problems, they're perhaps making the same mistakes. What are some of the things that we all do wrong in small business or enterprise level? What do we do wrong in this arena?
I think it's the perception they have about commerce online. Usually what I have personally seen is when we talk about commerce, they immediately think about, oh, I'm not ready for commerce online. But what we are talking about is let's say you're an publisher and you want to distribute and sell news. When the online are offline, depending upon where you have to collect the subscription, you have to host events online and offline, you want to sell and share any digital content.
So what it requires you is to have a mechanism to collect payments, handle those refunds, build a customer using digital tools. That is what a digital commerce looks like. If you are a retailer or a restaurant, you should be able to easily share your recipes, your coupons, your menus, online so that customers can engage with you. And then when you look at from a commerce perspective, you can sell gift cards, special vouchers and gift cards, what do you call it?
Your coupons, you will be able to do all that thing in one particular platform. Right now what we are seeing in small businesses is there's a lot of fragmented solutions and small businesses are getting overwhelmed because now they have to learn technology. Second, they have to learn how to create content for online. That's a big learning curve.
And third is marketing. Once you have the products ready to share. So there are three things that they have to learn. I think it's very overwhelming for them to really transform their business for digital corners.
You're absolutely right about the overwhelming nature of certain things. I mean, when you think about entering any kind of new channel, any kind of potential new revenue opportunity, you do very frequently. I have to manage so many different moving parts. And it becomes so challenging because that completely puts you off, doesn't it?
You can stop doing it just because it becomes so difficult. And what are some of the barriers that people do generally face? I'm thinking more specifically around you give a fantastic example of a restaurant. What are some of the challenges that the bricks and mortar kind of businesses face when they're trying to become digital ready?
Are they in a different positions of people that are already trading online? Or do they share the same problems? So the first before I think I talk about the barriers, I want to kind of talk about the potential of why you need to have a digital commerce. Once you have that, then I can talk about the challenges that the business face.
The first reason why you need to be digitally ready and you are able to do commerce online or able to do digital commerce, one is discovery because more and more consumers have their mobile phones, they are searching, researching, and you want to be discovered when the customers are looking for stuff. So if you're not found, you basically have lost your opportunity. Now discovery can happen in multiple ways. In the old, like, let's say 10 years ago, the discovery was, oh, do you have a website and they can go to it.
Now consumers are so smart and they're so technology advanced and progressive. They're looking for product and services. They are not looking for websites. They're looking for, I have this problem.
What is the product that can get me close to it? How can I get information about that product as quickly as possible? Right? So that's the first one that every business has to think about is, can I be discovered in a way the consumers are looking for me?
Number two is the convenience. Can I provide the convenience for the customer? So they don't really have to drive to my store. They can basically look at all the information about me and they can make the decision quickly so that there is a convenience factor for them to transact with them.
And third is the conversion. Can I convert the consumers from discovery to transaction, actually discovery to engagement then to transact with me? Can I make it as seamless as possible so that they are able to take the action? And the last one is because more and more customers are online, am I able to add or attract new customers on a consistent basis?
Because every product that you put in, it will bring you a different set of customers. So let's make sure that we have as a channel or our distribution model for attracting new customers. When you look at those four reasons, Mark, now you look at a traditional or a small business, you say, first, is my website really ready? If it's not, first is get that right, get that your business card, your digital business card, I call it as your website.
That is really modern. It's looking good and you keep that current. Then you slowly extend yourself saying, okay, do I have set of products that can attract the kind of customer? It can be one or five or 10 or 100, depending upon what your business is looking for.
Can I create those products set that is available for customers? So when they're looking for it, I can be discovered easily. The third piece is now that they like what I do and what I offer, what you do is really make sure you provide them really a teaser offer for them to take, get a taste of your product. Then you can do is upsell because now you have the email list, you can engage with them on a consistent basis.
Those are kind of the steps. So barriers right now we are looking at is really how do I get discovered, how do I create content, how do I create products so I can get the right customers to buy from me. And the last one is the market. How do I do marketing online?
Because with the outburst of social media, email, traditional media, where do I spend my dollars and how do I think about marketing? Let's just pick that last point apart because I think that's something that so many people really, really struggle with. Where do I spend my dollar? It's a really fantastic point.
How do you guys define that? How do you guys work with people to say, well listen, this is perhaps the channel for you or here's the mix of things that we think would really work for you. Is there a process to that and is it something that varies person to person? Yes, Mark.
There is a process to the madness, right? It's very simple. What you're trying to do is I would give you an example. I think it would help.
First is, let's take a look at Costco. It's a big wholesaler and you go there, you get some amazing products and they have really good products. When you go in, you're not just picking a product because I want to buy there. If you know you're less, you go pick up your product.
But they also do something unique is they tease you with the product. They give you an exploration of products that are there in Costco. Same thing you need to think about online. When a customer is coming to your site, first you need to really focus on, am I really represented correctly?
Is my brand represented correctly? That one right. That means writing your profile, image, profile story of your business, making sure that you have the right way for customer to engage with you. If there's any questions they can engage with you.
The second thing is really focus on lead generation. It's really that invisible sales person you want to have on your website. You're giving them some kind of a freebies, I would say is a teaser products or something where they are actually interested. Really, you're giving them how to use my product or some kind of a white paper that they can download for free.
They're giving something in exchange as the email address. That should be your focus strategy. Since they have given your email address, you're focused on conversion. You're giving them is the right basic product that they can buy right away.
Then you can do a sell. What I've seen in the small business world is they have a website and they expect the customers to buy a high ticket of price right there without really building your email list, focusing on building your email list or where you can communicate with them. Then giving them is teasing them with the right offers as you go through it. Doing the right segmentation, making sure you can engage with them on a consistent basis.
But another couple of things that we have seen is businesses are doing Facebook marketing or let's say email marketing without really knowing is what is my end goal that I need to do? Don't just do marketing. You need to do marketing with intention is list generation or commerce or conversion in the commerce. We have built as a bootcamp for businesses to go through an entire planning to really building up setting up their systems.
Third is building up the lead generation capabilities so making sure that they know how to build leads or collect leads and the fourth one is how do you convert them into customers in a very simple and easy way. It's a very systematic process but it's very simple and you just kind of feed the marketing engine and you know exactly why you're doing it. Let's pick up on engagement actually. I think that's a lot of people here but they perhaps don't quite know how to tackle.
They don't know how to make it tangible. They don't know how to integrate engagement into their business. What are some of the examples that you can give of a company that engages well with its customers? How can we demystify this word engagement?
So let's start with basic engagement. Let's say I have to build a relationship with you, Mark. You are like, let's see a potential customer. So I want you to be our customer.
What would be my first point of view? First is we would do is a way that we can add value to you. Let's say your challenge is around list building, for example. So what we would do is work with you and say, let's help you build your list and here are ways to do it.
Here are ideas to do it. Here is how a customer has done it and we would love you to kind of go through it. So first would be is why don't you just do is analyze your business using the six-dot digital analyzer. So I understand where my customer is before I can recommend what they should do.
Second is providing them relevant information for them to get better. What I have, my mentors have told me is it takes like anywhere from 7 to 21 impressions before a customer is going to even engage with you. So back 7 to 21 steps or impressions, you need to provide them something really interesting. It can be either a giveaway, it can be a free stuff, it can be a recommendation, it can be just following them on their website.
You have to show value for them first, your customers. So you have to engage with them and then you provide them is your offer, whatever your teaser offer is. So the customers can really taste it, really feel it, seize the value and then you provide is your full offer of what you provide to your customer. So mark it depends upon every customer but you have to really understand is the engagement can be as simple as writing a blog post so they can easily get access to it.
It can be as simple as bringing them into a webinar so they can listen to what you have to offer. You can get them connected to an expert so they can help them with that. What is you are actually providing them templates and tools so that they can save time. You can do as simple as donating to their cause that they believe in, attending their event.
So kind of engaging in multiple ways so they feel like you really appreciate them as customers or potential customers. I like the idea that engagement looks different for everyone because I honestly believe that so many people in small business feel overwhelmed by this. We're all really packed out trying to do what we're trying to do. We see these, I want to say the buzz words as such but they're just extra things that we need to worry about.
Like you mentioned earlier, there are the moving paths that we need to take hold of. What you said there about engagement could be as simple as a blog post. I think that really removes the barrier for a lot of people. I think it makes it accessible and it gives them a sense of positivity of forward motion.
So if they do do this, it's just that first blog post one month, then it's twice a month and then once a week and suddenly the periscope and suddenly they've got. It's amazing to see that develop. When you actually work with people, when people come to you with these, let's say worries or their fears about the time that they need to spend doing this, how do you actually encourage them to get started? Do you give them a very specific plan?
Do you tell them very specifically what do they tend to find out themselves, what fits for them? So we start with our six-door digital analyzer. It's really organized in six core areas starting from infrastructure to productivity of the business to discovery commerce, marketing and communications with your customers. So it's kind of like six areas and it's broken down into 42 areas.
So once they take, it's a self-assessment, it takes 15 minutes. What it gives us is lends into how the business is looking holistically, right? It has all the levers that you need to know. And once you do it, then we really focus on starting with building the right infrastructure before you go and start marketing to your customer.
We kind of start with saying, if you don't have your right, I have seen small businesses still using XP computers and trying to do Facebook marketing. That is like just an extreme end because the systems don't work on XP and you cannot do a lot of things that you could do on Windows 8 and Windows 10 or maybe complementary products like Windows 8 and 10. So when you are using old and redundant systems and you're trying to do cutting edge marketing and engagement with customers, it's going to be extremely challenging. So you need to kind of understand where the problem is.
And once you identify, usually you say, okay, now if you have $100, here is what we would recommend you to spend. It may not be commerce. It may not be marketing. It may be as simple as getting an accountant to help you organize your finances or it can be as simple as, oh, you need as a CRM solution to start tracking all your customer lists and engaging with the customers a little bit non-traditionally, then what you would, you know, people are recommending.
So it kind of starts with that assessment mark. Everything is going to be very unique because every business is at a different transformation level. But not knowing your blueprint where you are, I think it becomes very hard for them to say, okay, you all have to do Facebook marketing. I have seen where I've told someone Facebook marketing is not the right one for you.
You really need as email marketing. So really focus on email marketing. And I have seen businesses who are doing display marketing. I'm like, no, that's not the right one.
You need to focus on Facebook marketing. That's what you really need. So it depends upon what you really are and where you are. And having that blueprint really gives us the window into how we want to work with our businesses.
And then the bootcamp that we have really offers them to really take on the right steps, the right systems and really gets them to be ready in four weeks. It doesn't take like a whole year, literally in four weeks, they are up and running. They have all the intelligence that they need. And we empower them to be more of empowered small business to, you know, to make an impact on using all the digital tools.
I like the idea of it's not one size fits all. I see so many people saying, I need to do SEO. I need to do Facebook. And I love that you're saying that it's not always the same.
You've got to find the channels that work for you and really think it's so, so important to do that. Absolutely. Let's shift it a gear. Let's move it into the famous soon to be famous excellence expected actionable takeaways section.
So I know you've put together three actionable tips for people that maybe want to dig a little bit further into making sure their business is digital ready digital commerce ready. Even let's talk through each of those steps. So actionable tip number one, I what do you have for folks out there? I would, you know, call upon all the small businesses and also, you know, small to medium size businesses to take digital ready assessment to understand the state of digital readiness.
If you don't do this step first, it really will start to impact you. I know there are lots of assessments out there, but the reason why we want the businesses to do is we work with Microsoft and Boston consulting research to, and they did a research with 4,000 small businesses and they found that the businesses who are digitally ready, they are 11% more profitable. And number two, the cost to get them ready is literally was a $400 difference between a laggard versus a leader in digital, you know, digital ready business. So really take that assessment.
It's being done by some of the most smartest people on the planet who have put together this analyzer. And it was really done in a very collaborative way to identify really the key areas of businesses that needs to be, you know, ready for you to be called as digital ready business. Once you are there, then, you know, once you know where you are, then you can really start putting your dollars in the right place, your resources in the right place. Not having that.
I personally feel as you are not doing a justice for your own company and for your own people and your customers, because you are probably missing something, you know, something for the businesses to take the right steps. So this one would be our first thing. It's free. Please take that assessment, get to know where your business stands today before you kind of get all your experts to come and help you what to fix.
You wouldn't build a house without serving the land first. I think that's absolutely absolutely. So this is like a serving tool. Perfect.
And the second actual tip, what do you have for us? We are working with Dell and it's the initiative called is Entrepreneurs Unite. We are supporting United Nations goal number eight is to really creating the next billion jobs. The reason why is what we have found is the if you have to create the next billion jobs to support all our youth coming into the workforce, the segment that can really take on and create the jobs as the small businesses.
So we are working with them closely and really would like you guys to pledge and make sure that, you know, we can't really provide policies that are favorable to small businesses and we are organizing ourselves as one team. And what it does is by being part of this program, we can really figure out solutions, whether it's access to new markets or access to talent, access to, you know, funding or access to technology. Those are all things that are available and favorable for small businesses to create the new job. So really having you guys to really support that program and come together as one community to really help each other to be successful as we go forward in the 21st century.
Super, super, super, super. And the third and final action will take try. What we have is the bootcamp for digital commerce. It's called as accelerate.
And if you really are interested to make a business digitally ready as well as digital commerce ready, we would definitely recommend you to join our free series and start to look at is that something that you want to invest in before you kind of jump 100% kind of get the taste of what the bootcamp looks like. But it is really for businesses to really understand why I need to go and get my business commerce ready. And second is what does it take for my business to support a digital commerce business? What does it take?
Because people don't really understand. And kind of like an example is, oh, I got this new operating system. I want to upgrade. Well, that's good.
But do you really know what you're going to what would it take to sustain it and maintain it and really, you know, get the benefit of the new system. So you really want to understand before you jump in. If you're not clear, we would say don't do it. So I would really recommend you guys to kind of sign up and learn more about it before jumping 100% into becoming a digital commerce ready business.
Super stuff. Check it out guys. We'll put all the links in the show notes as well. Don't forget everything will be there for you.
Chai, thank you so much. That has been a fantastic conversation. Just before we stick opinion on that, where is the best place for people to connect with you online, please? You can go to mailer.com.
That would be the place you can go and get connected with me. And my LinkedIn is another place where you can get connected with me directly. Super stuff. Check it out guys.
We will put all the links inside the show notes so that you've got really, really easy access to them. Chai, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure chatting to you. Thank you, Mark.
Appreciate it. Super stuff. Check it out guys. I'm going to put everything over at excellence-expected.com now.
Here's something for you. Every Friday, 12 p.m. UK time, you can join me over on Periscope for the small business lunge. It's a short 50-minute Periscope show where I define, challenge and conquer something that crops up during my week, something that someone's asked me, something that I've really struggled with myself.
And I'm going to be putting that, as I said, over on Periscope. Follow me at Mr. Askwith. Jump on, hashtag small business lunge, and there are going to be replays available on Periscope for 24 hours after we finish.
And then I'll be popping them over at excellence-expected.com. Can't wait to see you there. This Friday, guys, we've been having a blast. So far, 12 p.m.
UK. See you there. And don't forget, the more you expect from yourself, the more you will excel. Goodbye.