The sell sheet that turned into a product data audit

Episode 18 - The sell sheet that turned into a product data audit | Davide Feinleib, Founder and CEO, It'sRapid - Transcript

Matt: Welcome to Data Versus Commerce, where we explore the messy middle between database and doorstep. I’m Matt Johnson.

Floyd: And I’m Floyd Blaikie. Let’s dig in. Hello, we’re here with David Feinleib from It’sRapid. David, I’ve decided to introduce a new segment to the podcast — at the beginning, I’d like to ask some icebreaker questions. So I’ll ask you, David: what’s your least favorite icebreaker question?

David: Ooh, that’s a tough one, so many — “How did I start the company,” “Where’s my favorite place to go for a bike ride,” any of those.

Floyd: Okay. Have you ever gotten, “What would you put on your dream sandwich?” I think that one might be interesting, but I’m still A/B testing.

David: You know, I’ve got to go for the classic peanut butter and jelly — I have two kids, and I think you really can’t go wrong with that.

Floyd: Yeah, I love it, it’s classic, it works, it’s perfect. So tell us a little about yourself, and specifically what you do, and what you’ve built that may interest the product data world.

David: Yeah, well, Floyd, Matt, great to be here, thanks for the invite — great podcast you’ve got. We’re a company called It’sRapid, and we take product data in all its forms and turn it into different kinds of marketing collateral — sell sheets, price books, brochures, flyers, posters, you name it. But the thing is, we use a lot of automation and AI to do that, so we make it a lot more efficient, repeatable, and scalable.

Matt: David, that is so exciting, and I’m really a big fan of digital and print assets myself, coming from a background in print marketing and spending a lot of time in digital marketing too. In B2B — this other world I play in a lot — these assets the marketing team is responsible for are kind of a big deal. In fact, a lot of salespeople would say, “I can’t work without them.” So I’d be curious to hear a bit more about how you came across this need, and what prompted you to say, “I’m going to fix this”?

David: Yeah, it’s so great to meet a fellow marketer who needs to create collateral. And it is sales, right — when you’re in front of the customer, you want the collateral to be great, up to date, and you don’t want to have to think about it, because you want to focus on who you’re talking to and the moment. The last thing you want is something out of date, or with the wrong info, wrong prices, things like that — you don’t want to worry about any of that when talking with your customers. That’s really where this need came from. As with so many entrepreneur stories, I suppose, we were with a customer one day talking about a bunch of data stuff, and they said, “By the way, you do a lot with automating the creation of all this content” — at the time it was banners and images, we do a lot of that at It’sRapid — and they said, “Could you create PDFs off that same data set?” So we went back, did some engineering, and said, “Why, sure, we can do PDFs, we can do PowerPoints.” It really rose out of a customer need. This particular customer happened to have thousands and thousands of SKUs, so they really felt the pain — they were changing the data all the time, changing the configuration of products, making swaps to images, they went through a branding refresh, stuff like that. Those are all things that are time-consuming and really hard to get done without any automation. So when you tell them, “You can take this data set and this tool and produce all these assets, and they’re always up to date,” they kind of breathe a sigh of relief. So that was the starting story.

Floyd: It’s almost a meme at this point — sales wants the sell sheet or spec sheet, marketing’s sick of getting the requests for it, they go back and forth, and everybody’s like, “Well, marketing didn’t make it,” “Sales wouldn’t use it anyway.” When you multiply that across hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of SKUs, the problem scales up so quickly, and PDFs — you make them, and they’re not like a web-based asset, they’re hard to change, hard to produce. So it sounds like this is solving for that.

David: Yeah, and you’ve sent them out, sent them in an email, they’re on your website, B2B, you’ve provided them to your distributors and resellers, and so on — they really are assets that live on.

Matt: I was just remembering back — for those listening who are like me, a Millennial trapped in all kinds of nostalgia moments every day — I think back to when I was working right out of school in a marketing department for a manufacturer, hundreds of thousands of SKUs. By the time we got around to the next flyer or brochure in our queue, the data had changed, or a product was discontinued, and the amount of back-and-forth was insane. This is happening all the time, and a lot of people don’t realize how often things change in these catalogs, with this downstream marketing go-to-market effect.

David: Yeah, I think it’s a great point about the data itself changing — and then you have other aspects, a branding change, or you change the style or look and feel of your marketing collateral, or something changes in the environment, maybe a regulatory change, where you need to put additional info in these sheets that wasn’t required before, or it looks different now. All of that contributes to this need to keep things refreshed all the time.

Floyd: This is really interesting — it’s kind of continuing a theme I think we started back in episode six, where a lot of the time when we talk about the intersection of product data and AI, we’re talking about really futuristic stuff — you log in, upload your BOM to some AI interface, and get quotes that show up on your doorstep, magically delivered by some robot butler. But what I think is really happening is AI is being applied to product data to make the more traditional stuff work better. We talked about field sales being improved by feeding good data into AI in a way that makes sense, and now we’re talking about literally the good old PDF that everybody knows and loves — we’re taking that product catalog and using it in reverse. We’re not necessarily discovering straight from the catalog in this case, we’re using it to make these kind of retro, throwback, but still super valuable pieces of sales collateral. I just think it’s neat how we’ve got all these theories about how things are going to get so advanced and next-level, and what people really want is a faster way to make PDFs, frankly. Is that what you’ve heard from your customers?

David: I think it’s so interesting, because we use all this AI and technology behind the scenes to make this capability work — we might use AI to parse your existing PDFs and turn that into usable data, we might use AI to build your template designs — but eventually, in B2B, you’ve got to get in front of the customer, and the customer might be coming to our website, or at a trade show. We have a flip-book version of the same offering where you can flip through it on your mobile device or tablet, but in the end, you’ve got to have something to share with the customer. We’ve added more formats over time — PDFs, we do PowerPoint now, digital versions, links in the PDF so you can click through back to the website, so we’ve made them interactive. But you can apply all the tech, which we really have fun doing, and it’s all about having the right info to share with the client or customer.

Matt: Yeah, and Floyd mentioned field sales and that theme — absolutely, this is the beauty of what AI is doing in traditional B2B, because we’re not going to lose the human touch, it’s so critical. If I’m a field sales rep and I go on-site to visit my customer, there’s very few things as powerful as putting a custom-priced, custom brochure right on their desk — that says something to them about customer experience, commitment, and understanding of who that customer is. I’ll put it this way: are print PDFs, print catalogs, flyers like this, dead? Just ask yourself — would you rather receive a printed birthday card in the mail, or one of those cheesy e-cards?

Floyd: Not the e-cards, the dancing elves — come on.

Matt: You remember that?

David: Now, we love digital too — we also do banner ads, product detail page images, all kinds of different collateral for customers. But it really is incredible — there’s a stat I read the other day that these technical PDFs, especially in B2B, are the most-asked-for asset type by B2B buyers.

Matt: I believe it.

Floyd: All the info you need in one place, but you want to feel confident it’s current, so it’s the right info. The entire conversation could be, “Are PDFs good or not,” I’m sure there are spicy takes on either side of that, but really what we want to get at is that, like almost everything else in B2B commerce, you need good product data as the foundation to make any of this work. When we were speaking ahead of the episode, Dave, you said a customer came to you in the past and said — not as an accusation, but — “I didn’t realize I bought an audit tool.” What happened? What did they find out about their data when they started using it?

David: Yeah, well, as we all know, no data in these implementations is perfect, but it really comes to light because we’re producing hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of different documents, multiple regions, languages, all of that. When you look at the document, you see where the data gaps are — because, Floyd, to your point, you could have the scorecards and all the analytics on the data, but then you get that marketing collateral and see a gap on the page. One of these customers actually called me and said, “Hey, this is kind of like an audit for our data,” because this is really where it comes to light if you’re missing spec info, or an image, a diagram, whatever’s really important for the customer. So in some ways it does act like an audit tool, but in other ways, it’s a driving force for the organization — you’ve probably been asking people to fill this data in for some time, and then everyone kind of sees, “Oh, this is going to help us sell more in the end.” That gives urgency to getting those images, schematics, and spec info all into the repository, so these sheets have all the info they need. But yeah, that’s a fun story.

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Floyd: Thinking about a typical customer for you — is there an amount of scale required to even need a tool like this? If I’ve got to make 15 PDFs a year, no offense, probably not going to try to automate that.

David: By the way, we have a design team, we’re happy to build a few PDFs for you. But yeah, it tends to be more for these scale projects.

Floyd: Yeah, so once you’re producing, like, 10,000 sheets, what happens when one field changes? What does that look like the old way versus this new way, where if you’ve got good data, you’ve got an advantage?

David: Yeah, what a great way to think about it. The old way, if you will — I’ll ask customers, “How long does it take you to do this today, what’s the baseline we’re trying to beat or help you with?” And they’ll say, “Well, it might take three months, it might take six months.” With price books, the customer might very well tell you, “We can only update the price book every 12 to 18 months, because it just isn’t possible” — to Matt’s earlier point, the data keeps changing on them, and they literally can’t produce it any more frequently. That’s the old way — very manual processes, you’ve got all this data, you’re literally trying to write custom scripts using classic tools to put that data into different templates, and then you’ve got to go through a review process — your data, your designs, review, marketing, legal, all have to sign off.

Floyd: And by the time you’re done with all that, hey, just kidding, there’s something that needs to be updated. That’s the legacy workflow — we’ve all been there.

David: The It’sRapid workflow, if you will, is we’re connected to your PIM — we receive the data directly from the PIM, could be other systems too, but PIM is really great — and with the help of AI and automation, that automatically goes into these templates, everything’s auto-mapped for you, and we produce these at scale. So to your question, when there’s one field that flows through to 10,000 sheets, we can literally just regenerate 10,000 assets for you. We had a client I remember who said, “Hey, we’re going through a branding update, and we’re going to have to change the logo on 10,000 pieces of collateral” — if you think about the legacy way, that would’ve been months and months and months. I was able to get on the call and say, “No problem, we’re just going to take these and regenerate them, and you’ll have 10,000 updated sheets.” You could just feel the relief.

Floyd: Phew.

David: Yeah, moments like that are very fulfilling, I’d say, for the company and the team, but also great for the client, because it really delivers on speed and scalability.

Matt: I think back to the days when you printed a catalog, or when people thought of e-commerce as projects — “Okay, here’s a six-month project, okay, done, yay, we finished” — and then you’re flipping through, testing the site, and you’re like, “Ooh, we’re missing a lot of information, okay, that sucks, I guess we’ll get to it next year.” So I can see where the ability to correct that is a real game-changer today with your tools. But my thought actually goes back to how we got to this point in the first place. Something we bring up constantly with data is it’s not necessarily a problem with the PIM, or with the marketing team — the problem often happens in governance, in that you allow things to come into your system, or allow things to become stale, and you ship them anyway. There’s a lack of gating, a lack of governance requirements to make that data available to tools like yours. I’m guessing if you had more customers with better governance, better process, the output they’d get from something like your tool would be much higher, much more efficient.

David: Yeah, 100%. An ideal state is we have something called a webhook, where as the data changes, we get notified, we regenerate sheets, and it’s all automated. But to your point, the higher-quality repository you have at the outset, the better the outputs once everything’s set up and running — 100% on that. And that also frees you up to really just deal with the changes or new product launches, innovation launches — you can focus your efforts on those and the bigger-picture marketing. The last thing you want to be doing is spending your time trying to piecemeal every last piece of data — you’d much rather invest that time in your larger marketing strategy and what else you could be doing. So having the right source of truth, good data quality and governance like you’re saying, and then having tools like It’sRapid to help deliver the assets — that’s what frees you up to think about your entire marketing and sales strategy.

Floyd: We’ve sometimes jokingly, but also not jokingly, referred to the concept of Data Versus Commerce as like couples therapy — these are two important, central figures in your business, and they really need to get along. I’m wondering how much you feel like a couples therapist yourself — when those gaps start showing up on the PDFs, and people start identifying unfilled attributes and products that got into the workflows without enough governance or oversight — does that turn into a finger-pointing exercise ever? What have you seen?

David: Yeah, such a great question. I think our version of that is probably data and design — I often think of it like the left and right brain. You’ve got your data, and it’s supposed to be in a certain form, all populated. And you’ve got your design — you need the branding, you need to be on-brand, look a certain way, present the products in a certain way, be easy to read, be great for the customer. You’re trying to take two different parts of the puzzle and merge them, and that’s often where we come in — we’re the point where the data meets the design, similar to your data and commerce. I think what it does is shed light on something people probably had a feeling about — some missing data, some missing design elements — but through no one’s fault, it was just never shown consolidated together, it was raw data, or brand specs and design briefs, but this is really the point where it comes together. I think what it does for the organizations we work with is really enable them to push forward with some of these systems implementations they’ve maybe been thinking about, data governance efforts they’ve of course all been thinking about, and maybe a design refresh — often marketing’s like, “Gosh, we really would’ve liked to refresh the look and feel of this, but we’re worried about aligning that with the data.” I think this is the great unlock, where you can bring the teams together if done right — and we have a lot of champions in these organizations, thankfully, who do just that. Then you see the scale they’re able to operate at — Floyd, we talked in the pre-show prep about a client who started in one region, and now they’re in seven or eight regions, multiple languages, different formats — I think that was always their aspiration, but they just didn’t have the tool set and capability set to do it.

Matt: Nerds and ninjas — design and data.

Floyd: I know, yeah.

David: I tell you, it’s super fun and super rewarding when our operating philosophy is: can you do it in a couple of clicks — one, two, and 10,000 assets. It’s really rewarding to see these customers operate at that scale.

Floyd: Okay David, PB&J enjoyer, data guru — where can people learn more about you and what you do? What’s the best way to get in touch?

David: Yeah, so It’sRapid, itsrapid.ai — feel free to look us up there, love to talk with clients and customers, take a look at your current data sheets, see how we can help. So, dave@itsrapid.ai.

Floyd: Fantastic. It all comes down to clean data.

Matt: Thank you for coming, Dave, enjoyed it.

David: Thanks for having me on the show.

Matt: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Data Versus Commerce. New episodes drop weekly. So if you’re responsible for any part of how products get from a database to a doorstep, subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.