Omnichannel Marketing The What, Why, and How with John Bruno

It’s an absolute pleasure. Appreciate the invite!

Yeah, I am a Bostonian, born and raised, and I’ve actually worked for several years to remove as much of the accent as possible. But I grew up here. I went to college here, I started my career here, and then I found myself kind of looking at those around me, and they were all more worldly than I was, if you will. So I up and left for a few years to Washington, DC, but that didn’t last long if I found my way back.

That’s one way most wouldn’t describe it.

Fairly uncommon here in Boston, going to Fenway Park is, is probably more akin to going to church.

So immediate family is not that big, mother, father in my head, and older sister, but I’m Italian, so as you might expect, I’ve probably got more cousins than I can care to account for or even remember so big family, a lot of 3pm Sunday dinners, if you will, dinners and quotes, which is macaroni and sauce and meatballs religiously.

Yeah, a couple of things. So growing up my father, this is actually kind of where I got so enamored with all things B to B. My father was actually the owner and founder of a paper distribution company, super exciting, yeah, in the greater Boston area, largely serving things like restaurants and take up places with pizza boxes, wax paper, plastic utensils, things of that nature. Yeah. And he had a kind of a B to C side of the business as well that did, like party favors and balloons. And so I got exposed to a lot of crazy things, kind of growing up in wild experiences. You know, when I was about 10 years old, I used to do voice voice over radio commercials for Radio Disney. Got exposed to family friends who own businesses with ice cream trucks. I, you know, drove an ice cream truck for my formative years in high school and early into college. So you name it. I feel like the past times of holding odd job, odd jobs has largely gone away, but I’ve got a few under my belt.

So I moved back about eight or 10 years ago, and I live in the suburbs now, so I’ve kind of graduated from living in the city. One thing you’ll hear from anybody in the air, always from Boston. Even if you don’t live in Boston or born in Boston, it’s just easier to say Boston and do your Goodwill Hunting reference earlier, everybody knows somebody that was in Good Will Hunting did that movie. I’ve been back for a few years now.

I did proud alumnus of Boston College. There we go. And then what was your major? I actually did a double major in given my career has been really centered in technology. Interestingly, my majors had nothing to do with technology, so I majored in economics and philosophy, which brought along a lot of questions prior to graduation. So what are you gonna do? Think about making money?

So, actually, I was working in college, and it was my sophomore year where I was like, I need to make a few, a couple of bucks, something that’s convenient close to college, something that kind of marries some of my passions as well. Ended up at working Apple retail. So there was a store close to the campus. I started working there, then started doing trainings, and then started opening up stores all across New England. So, you know, the launch of the flagship store right across, you know, down the street from Fenway Park, or, you know, the first store ever in Maine. I would travel, and I would train and launch new stores for them. And it was upon graduating, you know, everyone who came to Boston College had a different story. They were from different areas, and I was the local guy who pretty much could walk to college from the house that I grew up in. And so it was that point in time. So my first kind of, quote, unquote, real job, if you will, was I moved down to Washington, DC, and did a big government consulting with Booz Allen Hamilton.

There’s actually one close to where I lived. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, outside of DC, but there was one close to there, so I’m familiar with the chain.

Yeah, the background has been pretty eclectic, and at the risk, well, probably more than risk, but the risk of sounding cliché. My career has always been somewhere between business and technology, always at the intersection, and sometimes leaning more to one side than the other. So while I was down in DC, I was doing technology and strategy consulting for federal government clients, working depending on, you know, three days a week, a lot less exciting than you might think. Fun fact is, when you start the tour of the pending on a civilian tour, the first fact they tell you is, it’s the world’s largest low-rise office building. And that’s pretty much all you need to know.

And then I was looking to kind of move more into private sector, more technology. And I was looking at Google, I was looking at a couple of technology firms in Chicago, and then I ended up actually moving back to the Boston area, working for a company in Cambridge called Pegasystems, probably the leader in business process management, software automation technologies. Now they’re in CRM, robotic process automation, a whole nine yards. And there I worked in the consulting arm, and so I became a certified architect on the solution, but largely I was supporting the business internally. And so helped develop a lot of applications that power their business. And eventually, you know, some of the stuff that they use that they now sell commercially out there in the market. That’s what led me over to Forrester Research. So, you know, one of the leaders in the industry research market, specifically around technology. And I joined Forrester, and over my time there, had responsibility for the research practices of CRM, of configure price quote, which PROS plays in. And then ultimately, I own the research practice around e-commerce for the final couple of years while I was there. And then that led me to wanting to actually enact change and not just tell people what to do. And so I left and went to a small startup in Vancouver, British Columbia, called Elastic Path. And there I own the product organization. So product management, user experience, engineering and everything under the sun, there always had a soft spot in my heart for PROS. I had been working with them for years prior to that, you know, dating back to my Forrester days. And so I joined the organization to lead strategy. I also am the interim leader for product marketing as well.

Yeah. Well, I think for me, it kind of goes back to the fundamental four P’s of marketing, right? You’ve got your product. And today, your product could be a product. It could be a service, anything that you sell. The second P is, you’ve got price. And so what’s the value that you think that product or service is worth out there on the market, including how you package things. So increasingly, in the subscriptions world, that’s looking a little bit different as well. Then you’ve got your place. Where are those things, and where are you going to be found by your customers and your prospects out there in the marketplace? And then lastly, the promotion. What are you doing to create more of that awareness or entice prospective customers into converting and being customers? Well, in this whole kind of omni channel world. All of those things are very important, but I think the most important of those is the place, right? And so ideally, you’ll know everywhere your customers are, or you’ll be able to influence where they go and how they interact with you. But today’s world, you know, a lot of that control is kind of coming out of the hands of, you know, the manufacturer. Or the distributor or the retailer, etc., and you’ve got these marketplaces that are around. So I always encourage businesses that I work with who ask themselves with the question, Are you present everywhere that your customers or customers that you want to have are? And so I think that’s the most important thing, is making sure that you’re present, and then when you’re present, then you can start to meld the other three P’s around that. You know, what products are you going to make available or showcase in that channel? You know, from a pricing standpoint, are you creating compelling offers out there that are going to entice those customers? And then from a command standpoint, how are you going to get them to stand out from the pack? You know, whether it be around an offer that you create or some sort of other captivating way to draw the attention of customers and win some of that mind share and well.

Well, I would say it’s important for all businesses and where we are right now in B to B, you know, it used to be a walled garden. It used to be something that you had ultimate domain over, right for most organizations, you know, they start interacting with their customers through their own sales efforts in Salesforce, and they could control that entirely, but that only gets them so far. You know, if you really want to truly grow and scale, you know, doing it on the backs of your own Salesforce is not the way to do it. Yeah. So a lot of those organizations have entered into some sort of partnership, you know, it could be a distribution partnership or retail partnership, or something in between, and that helped those organizations grow tremendously. But you kind of fast forward into this millennium, and everything is seemingly digital, and if it wasn’t before 2020 Well, 2020 certainly made sure that it was front and center. And so that means your own or your partner’s digital properties, your brand.com, or shop.brand.com, and then increasingly, you’ve seen, you know, major players out there in the market start to shake things up. You know, Amazon, less than five years ago, launched their B to D marketplace, and it’s already been growing like gangbusters, the fastest growing business unit in all of Amazon. And so the number of locations in which you can find your customers is, I would say, probably at the early stages of exploding. And I use that word very purposefully, because the rate of growth in the myriad of channels in which your customers can engage with you through is just mind blowing right now.

Yeah, so I wish, I could sit here and say that it’s the same as B2C. I wish I could say that it’s about having, you know, the right story in digital marketing and paid placements and all this kind of stuff to kind of, you know, capture that I would say, not in a derogatory way, the more emotional buyer, right? In the B2B world, you know, the buyer is more rational and not buying because they are like you and me and get really excited about, you know, the latest Apple product or piece of technology out there. Their motivations are: they have a job they need to get done, and they need to buy products to support their ability to complete that job. So in reality, their needs are more about, you know, taking the time from identification of their intent to the action, you know, completing the transaction or completing whatever job they need to get done. And so for them, it might sound a little bit more mundane, but the data piece of it that kind of sits underneath the hood of every experience or everywhere you might interact with a brand, manufacturer, supplier, distributor, what have you, becomes more important. So helping customers shorten that time between intent and action you’re talking about. You know, am I providing the right product? Information is the way that I’m talking about the product aligned to the specific pain points that they have. Again, it’s about solving a challenge, not necessarily catering towards that emotional buyer. And then lastly, because B2B is built on the backs of so many long-standing relationships, there’s typically something about that relationship that exists. It might be, you know, commercial offers. It might be negotiated pricing, you know, volume-related discounts, things of that nature. So what you’re showing those customers is it representative or indicative of the long-standing relationship that you might have. And so it would be great to say, hey, you know, anchor on the flashy messages, you know, the social media posts and ads and things of that nature. But in reality, if you can do a good job in manifesting those meaningful relationships now through digital mediums, you’re going to be set up for some early success.

Yeah, so kind of going back to that data story, right? Our legacy has been built on knowing pricing really, really well. So for those of your listeners who aren’t aware about PROS, PROS has been around for over three decades, and where you might not recognize we are, but you’ve probably interacted with us, is that we actually price a majority of the world’s airfare. So we have kind of two parts of the business, one that focuses on kind of the airline and travel industries, and the other that focuses more on B2B, manufacturers and distributors. So we grew up solving some of the hardest problems that airlines face in pricing their fares and all of the various permutations around that, which naturally leads to the questions that we always get. So you’re the folks to blame for my prices changing every time I log in to buy an airfare, in short, kind of.

Well, the glory about what it is that we do is we’ve actually been doing artificial intelligence since before that became the cool thing to say. And so our solutions look at everything from, you know, our customers, customers, the products they sell, you know, the different historical transaction price points they’ve been able to sell those items that their customers use our AI to personalize the offers for their customers. So I wish I could tell you it’s as simple as, you know, shoot me a note after this, and I’ll get you hooked up with the best fare imaginable. But that’s the secret sauce of our customers. They just leverage our technology to produce the output.

Yeah, and if you take that, and, you know, airlines have some of the hardest pricing problems in the world to solve, for sure, but if you take that and extend it well, so B2B organizations, because they’ve got this mixture of these long standing relationships, these agree to prices, maybe for this product assortment, but not these other things. So how do you make sense of all that when your typical B2B organization has 10s of 1000s, if not millions, of permutations of prices, let alone the ability to update those or deliver the right price at the right moment? So that’s the world that we play in. And then about the early 2010s we acquired a company out of France that does product configuration and quoting as well. So there’s the pricing side of it, and then on the B2B side, you know, there’s, how do you execute on that price, how do you sell? And so it allowed us to kind of get into the world of digital selling, and between those two sets of capabilities. Or the configuration quoting, and then the pricing side, you know, able to add some, some really cool flair and personalization to self service experiences.