S4E11: Beth Segovia

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Alright. Welcome to episode 11 of Commerce Famous. Today, we have another special guest, Beth Segovia. Beth, CEO of TradeCentric. Pleasure to have you on the pod.

Thanks, Jason, for having me. I'm excited to be here. Absolutely. Well, let's start off by talking a little bit about your company, TradeCentric. Who is who are they?

What do they do? Give us the give us the elevator pitch. Yeah. So TradeCentric, provides an integration platform that integrates commerce with procurement, so that we can automate transactions. And we can really put the supplier right where the buyer wants to do their job every day and really improves the buying experience and takes friction out of the process.

So we were born, some fifteen, sixteen years ago now, and I've been at the helm for the last three years. Fantastic. Where's growth coming from? What what are the exciting days here at TradeCentric? What what is the big unlock?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I feel like this might be, the elephant in the room, but AI has everybody talking about what gains can come from automation and thinking about things in a different way. Right? So we've been through multiple sort of adoption cycles. Obviously, we still see adoption opportunity in ecommerce.

We've seen adoption opportunity in integration and in Punch Out. And now with AI, we feel like all of those conversations are just, sort of energizing again. Right? So people who thought maybe that they were really behind are seeing an opportunity to leap forward, and so it's really putting a lot of active conversation on the table. So, we see a lot of growth potential in the future, once things get real.

So I think there's a lot of talk about what's coming. And so I think as that gets formed and as, suppliers and buyers are both experimenting, there's just a lot of conversation happening as a result of that. I think you're right. Change has been good for new technology, and TradeCentric's got some pretty good modern tech. To talk a little bit about, how AI changes the buying interface without breaking compliance.

I think this is a really important detail because everyone knows AI is going to, it has and will continue to disrupt it, but not at the, there's certain things you cannot break. So how does TradeCentric view that? Yeah. So we have spent, you know, our entire existence focused on deterministically automating transactions. So we build an integration connection between two systems, and then we automate the trans you know, transition and transfer of documents today.

And we do that because a supplier wants absolute accuracy as does as does the buyer, and they both want compliance to contracted products, contracted pricing, terms of their agreements. And so they're both looking for that security, that, authority, that authentication. Right? So they're looking for that secure buying experience, and both sides are looking for efficiency. So they want a purchase order to add a add you know, match an approval.

They want that purchase order to match an invoice. You know? So, deterministic automation solves that problem. As AI enters the process, none of that changes. Right?

So we're looking to leverage that existing infrastructure that's already been built between two platforms and support the entry of agents. So we believe, you know, agentic commerce is gonna change the way people discover and shop, but that buyers will still want compliance to contract. They'll still want spend under management, and suppliers will still wanna be protected the same the same game, but with a different level of complexity. Now we have different systems on both sides, and we have agents on both sides that all will need to continue to be governed. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants.

More than 50,000 clients already processed over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. So you're thinking that you think transactions in the future are gonna run on the same rails? We do. We do.

There might not be the same requirements. Right? So you might be able to go directly to a product API. You might need to skip a few steps. But we do think that integration infrastructure is gonna play an important governance, aspect to making sure that contracts are honored.

So in a lot of ways, you're seeing the rapid change be an accelerant in people's interest in your solution. How are they solving for this compliance layer without a product like TradeCentric? Is this spreadsheets and human middleware, or how's it getting done? Well, we you know, without in today's world, right, without AI, you know, we think they can solve it maybe one by one with an integration that they do themselves. They may not be complying at all today, so they may be forcing their buyer to go directly to their commerce web site to get out of their procurement system.

So they may be a special circumstance today, which doesn't create more revenue. It creates friction in the buying process and could mean that some of that opportunity is going to a competitor that is more likely to comply or already integrated into the system. So today, they could solve it, not solve it. They could solve it by themselves one by one. That gets complex pretty quickly.

We've won plenty of customers who have tried to build their own infrastructure and who have gotten in over their heads. Right? It's building it is not necessarily the hard part. There are use cases that are complex and not so easy to solve, but it's maintaining it, as all the variables on both sides continue to move and change, that becomes more difficult. So we've seen, customers try to do it themselves, and then get into a degree of complexity that, is untenable.

And so that's usually when they turn to a solution like ours. As, you know, as customers prepare for AI, you know, they aren't yet being demanded to move, and we think that buyers are gonna lead the way as usual. Right? So suppliers tend to have to comply with what the buyer is looking for in terms of an experience. And so, you know, we think that as buyers begin to use purchasing agents and as buyers start to call on product APIs in a different way, that the supplier is gonna have to meet those requirements, and that's gonna be just another level of complexity, that's gonna have to be managed.

And so, you know, we think that trying to do that without a solution like TradeCentric is gonna be pretty difficult. Yep. So it sounds to me like the people who are most who are your best customers have probably gone through some level of pain and appreciation for the automation that you deliver. Is that a true statement? That's absolutely a true statement.

So many of our customers sort of start in the same place, which is one of their largest customers demanded that they integrate and move. And once they went through the pain of that initial exercise, they realized, and many are surprised, that that buyer is buying more from them and that they're experiencing benefits that did they didn't expect. Right? So their team managing purchase orders, their team managing invoicing, You know, everything ends up getting to be less of a manual burden, so they start to see benefits. So, usually, they get forced the first time.

And then they start to see, well, wait. Maybe other buyers wanna buy this way, and they start to reach out to their other customers and see who else might be interested. And we generally see them work with customers that just want to, right, that want to integrate, have already started an integration trend. But then I think the real turning point comes when a supplier realizes that if they integrated their top 20 or 25 customers, that that's where the real benefit comes. So you take all the noise out of your processes of all the manual back and forth and all the invoices that failed and all the POs that didn't get processed properly.

They take all that out of it, and they experience growth across their largest customers. Then they're proactive. Right? So they've kind of gotten through the pain of being forced to do something they didn't necessarily want to do, and it turns into a proactive program where they start to build, you know, a cadence and an e procurement effort because of all the benefits that drives their business. You've got a really interesting psychological process there from being voluntold to do it all the way into being an advocate to utilize it more.

Have you guys ever mapped out what that looks like? Because I have a feeling there's a lot of your customers are on different parts of that journey. They definitely are. And, you know, one of the big recipes or or needs to become a recipe is the things that I mentioned. So revenue growth, manual effort to process purchase orders, manual effort to deal with collections.

These are not the same teams. Right? So your people that are interested in growing revenue are not the same people that are interested in how do I get a PO shipped, or is my PO clean so I can actually ship it, are not the same people that are trying to make sure you get paid. And so when you bring a benefit to the organization that affects multiple teams, they don't necessarily your economic buyer, as we say, right, might not experience all of the benefit directly. And that creates a super interesting dynamic.

You know? So we end up having to cultivate within our customers. Let's bring some people to the table. Right? Like, yes, as the leader of your ecom team or as your revenue officer, you get why this is important because it's gonna drive growth for you, or you're gonna lose a customer if you don't do it.

Right? So you get sort of the entry benefit. Let's bring a few friends to the table. Right? Let's get your supply chain team involved.

Let's get your finance team involved, and, eventually, let's show your CFO what benefit you're driving the business end to end. Because there's not too many integration prod you know, projects or IT projects that are gonna deliver both a revenue benefit and an efficiency benefit. And so when we finally get, like, the right team talking to each other, that's when things really start to change. So we've got a beautiful customer that we've had some videos that we've been sharing, Volvo Financial, and they've really talked about how they started with an IT problem. Right?

They had an invoice problem. They had invoices failing. They had a team of seven people dedicated to fixing invoices that were failing, and there were all kinds of extra things that had to be on an invoice in comparison to what they need for a purchase order. And there it was just a huge headache for them, and so they solved that problem by enlisting TradeCentric, and we automated invoicing first. That's not a typical entry point.

Typically, we automate punch out and purchase order first, and then invoice comes, and then and then the customer sees, like, this dramatic impact when we finally do all three. Well, Bobo started with the hardest thing, and then they backed into, well, now we have the invoices. Can we do the purchase orders? And maybe they wanna buy through punch out. And so, you know, they created this belief system by solving different problems, and now we have, you know, a gentleman from their finance team that is the biggest advocate for the solution, and they've brought us in to see where else in the business they could use the same sort of integration and infrastructure because they're trying to replicate the benefit now across the business.

And Volvo is a very large enterprise. Right? So it's, very interesting to see how the pain turns into action, turns into a belief system, and then turns into something that grows over time. But you're right. Customers enter at different places.

They go through the curve in different ways, and we just try to share the stories and try to help them see the pain, so that when they under you know, when they finally experience the benefit, it starts to really make sense because we're we're trying to save them time, by learning faster from the examples of other customers. Fascinating. You know, it's, it reminds me a little bit of how how great it would be to be a company who sold point solutions to one economic buyer, how easy that would be compared to trying to sell horizontally across different competitive you know, different corporate goals, missions, etcetera. Because you gotta bring the politics into the same room, which it probably has its own sets of challenges in a sales cycle. Well and it's interesting, especially I don't know if you guys have seen this.

I'm sure you have. You know, the wave of IT spend and where IT spend is being prioritized today versus a year ago versus two years ago. Right? I don't know what your AI budget looks like internally, but mine has completely changed. Right?

It's gone from zero a couple of years ago to a monthly spend that's probably five x to what it was six months ago. And so as and we're not spending more money overall. Right? So we're moving dollars around to fund this, you know, AI technology that we're gonna need to serve our customers and serve ourselves. And so I think we're not unique.

Right? All of our customers are going through a similar kind of thought process and change, and so there's no new money being created. Right? I tell my team all the time, there's no new money here. Right?

So we're gonna reallocate dollars. We're gonna spend differently, and our customers are doing the same thing. And so in an environment like that, you know, where they're making a bet on something that might have a return, and we're bringing a story to the table that definitely has a turn, a return and will eventually have all of this AI capability harnessed. You know, it's just a super interesting environment to be working with customers. Right?

It's just, getting them to make decisions and helping them find the clarity to make those decisions is difficult, especially when you've got a a cross functional team that you have to, you know, meet expectations with. 100%. Some of this is technological, some of it's psychological. You know, I I I think I like the way you articulated, where AI is gonna fit in your product suite. I think that's a really coherent point of view.

I share it. I think there are things that you have to count on that have to operate at near perfection and there are things, that you can vibe with. And so to me, a product like yours is a system you have to count on. It has to be near perfect execution and you can vibe to make it more efficient to interact with agents, but that's on top of the core value stack that it provides. So I think that's a really coherent way to buy software for any merchant out there listening.

That's kind of the the most pragmatic approach. Well, we're trying to protect the thing that we've worked so hard to create, which is if you've already achieved deterministic automation and you've already got accuracy and you've already taken the humans out of the loop, why would you wanna replace that with a probabilistic outcome that's gonna require a human in the loop? Right? So there's all kinds of little things popping up on the pyramid side or on the commerce side where they're using, you know, AI assistance to go try to take all these manual different types of purchase orders or manual invoices and approximate an automation of those things. You know, why do you wanna do that when we've already solved the problem deterministically and we've already got a 100% accuracy?

So that's not where you wanna introduce AI in our opinion. Right? You wanna introduce it into the process where it makes sense. So we do think they're gonna be agents empowered to purchase. Certainly, you know, in b to b, reordering is a super interesting use case.

Right? I'm always buying safety vests for my crew. I'm always gonna need new ones on a regular schedule. You know, why don't I let my agent go buy those things for me instead of wasting a very expensive person's time on doing that? Right?

So I think there's a lot of use cases that are really interesting. So let's allow those agents to, you know, interface. Right? Let's create a way for them to do that, but let's automate what they do. Right?

We should still deterministically automate the purchase order, the invoicing process, right, and leverage, you know, AI to support that shopping experience. That makes a lot of sense to us. We also think, you know, onboarding of customers, completing the integration itself, the AI is super helpful with that. It makes it go way faster. Right?

Especially in determining, like, what's different about this one and how do we make it go faster than the one before it. Like, AI is super useful in that. So, yeah, let's use that where we are for onboarding. Let's use it for self-service use cases. Right?

If a customer's trying to change a configuration, AI can help them do that, and we don't need humans in the loop for that anymore. So that stuff makes total sense, but we really are working very hard to protect what is already amazing. Right? So we've already achieved a 100% accuracy, so why would we break that? Yep.

And I really like the way you're describing deterministic versus probabilistic. It's almost like you went to Harvard or something. That's a very smart article about it. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the role of agencies.

So what you described is is a a problem that exists in almost every b two b, digital business in the world. Mhmm. It is a very political driven kind of multiple function organizationally. They all have different challenges. So they look at the problem through a different lens.

I have to imagine that scaling up TradeCentric to the amount of sales people and delivery people is probably not the strategy to kind of do world domination. It has to be with and through partners. Can you talk a little bit about the role companies like American Eagle and others play at helping sell the value, identifying the issue, and integrating it in? Yeah. A super great question, and I really appreciate it.

I mean, we think that there's two kinds of partnerships that really serve us well in finding, potential new customers that are really ready to make a decision. Right? So one is the platform provider. So, obviously, you guys at Shopware are a great example of that. You know, you have customers already that have deployed commerce that maybe are now faced with these integration requests from their customers.

And you're also looking to serve new customers that are thinking about making a platform change. So you know when customers are shopping for a new commerce platform, and that's very helpful for us. What an SI or an agency partner helps us understand is, like, timing. So I have a customer that's acting right now. So many of the suppliers that we work with do not leverage an in house IT team to do any of this sort of we would call special teams integration work.

Right? So they have relationships with system integrators. They call on them to do a wide variety of projects. So they're gonna implement their commerce platform. They're gonna do any special add ons or apps on top of that integration platform to serve their needs.

Maybe they're even doing some in house integration connections to make sure that those platforms are functioning. And so one, I think the value of the system integrator is they have a relationship with customer. They know the IT shop. They're already a trusted adviser to that customer, and they understand when the timing is right for a decision. Right?

So they know when the customer is considering this. They know they have a problem to solve. And making sure that the system integrator community is educated about what TradeCentric does. We've met a whole bunch of them who, when faced with the customer that has integration needs, they might just go build a solution. Right?

So they'll design an in house thing. They'll go build a solution, and either they'll run it or then they'll turn it back to the customer to run themselves. It it's kind of a natural thing to do. Right? You have a problem to solve.

You have a handful of customers that need it. We'll just do it for you. And so we've been working really hard in the last six, twelve months to make sure that the system integrators, that matter understand who we are and what we do so that they don't have to do that work. Like, our whole philosophy is, why would you use in house resources, either add a customer or add a system integrator to build a solution that already exists, that's already proven, that's already tested, that's already got thousands of pea of companies transacting, that's transacting billions of dollars in revenue. Like, it's proven.

Somebody already solved this problem. Like, use your resources to go solve that thing that is unique to your company that nobody else has solved yet or that's so critically important to you and unique to you that you have to solve it yourself. So we think the system integrator is super important and also lends you know, there's a a whole set of credibility that comes from I've got an integrator that's implemented all kinds of, you know, platforms that's seen all kinds of movies, that's seen all kinds of uniqueness. And when an, system integrator like that endorses the TradeCentric solution as a great choice, that's super helpful. So, we really rely on our system integrator partnerships to help us, find those customers that have a need that we could solve.

And there's at least I I I can there I think of two off the top of my head who I know you know your solution really well. The first is American Eagle. Brandon Campbell knows it better than I do. Definitely does. And then, Atwix, who I know we're doing a build with today with Shopware and PrintCentric.

So those two agencies, and I'm sure there are many others, really understand the value and why you just buy something that exists versus create something from scratch. Yeah. Absolutely. And we're really focused on, you know, not necessarily going and finding thousands of integration partners. Right?

We're really interested in focusing on those that are really good at this b to b use case, really focus on commerce and on e procurement, that really have a set of expertise, and that are interested in doing this kind of work. Right? We don't wanna do a one off once a year or with, different integrators. We want really a a small set of really strong partnerships, that allow us to do a lot of business together. Right?

I think then the suppliers that we serve really can feel that trust, and they can feel the strength of that relationship. They understand we've had a bunch of at bats together and that this thing is built on use cases that are proven. That's what we already have and what we're looking to continue to cultivate. That's good. You're trying to be deterministic with your partnerships.

I like it. Well, we would love it. We'd love it. I I think you're probably gonna go through a similar cycle as your customers do, which is I'm being voluntold all the way to I'm an advocate. And I think the partner's model is probably following the same one.

Yeah. So it'll be really interesting as our con our partnership continues to evolve because you've already got us turned into advocates. So hopefully we're already at the end of that, that journey. Yep. Talk a little bit about I was trying to figure out how to work Pete Garren, his name into this podcast.

Talk a little bit about how your team engages in delivery. Do they sit aside the agencies? Do they sit next to internal IT teams? How does TradeCentric deliver the value that's been sold? So today, we really work alongside, the agencies.

Right? So the agencies are doing a piece of work on behalf of the customer. So the process is pretty simple. Right? We have to integrate the customer's platform with ours, and then we have to integrate our platform with their customer.

And so, typically, an integrator is gonna sit in between that connection of implementing the customer to us. And then, you know, the buyer's team is gonna be doing the integration work to us on the other side. And today, we work alongside them. Our plan is, you know, in the not too distant future, is to enable our, agency partners to be able to do as much of that work as they want to do. So today, we need to be involved to a certain extent, and tomorrow, we're working towards a time when we don't need to be involved.

If the integrator wants to do more of the work, then we're gonna enable them to do that. So we're pretty excited about, you know, putting this in the hands of more integrators. You know, not everybody's gonna want to be the implementer, the maintainer, the supporter. Right? They're gonna be interested in different aspects of the work.

And, look, we do all of it today, so we're willing to do as much or as little depending on the given situation. But we think there's gonna be a lot of agency partners that are gonna want to do more of the work, and we're working towards the platform enabling them to do that. Love it. And, you know, one of the things I I love about our partnership is we share the same ICP. This is the complex use case.

It doesn't fit into a box. It's a business that operates and performs the way that they want to to preserve their own alpha, and it's touching the lion's share of the company's revenue. The ones handled by rebuys, modified rebuys, sales reps engagement, etcetera. So I think TradeCentric from that perspective is a tremendously valuable asset in the b to b complex use case. Well, and I think also from our combined perspective, I think what's important is, you know, our customers do what their customers ask them to do.

And right now, especially with this whole AI conversation, it's really a buy side game. Right? So the buyers are really adopting use cases faster. They're integrating it into different parts of their workflow. It hasn't quite reached agentic shopping just yet, but it's coming.

And so, you know, you you and I and our teams have been watching our customers comply with buyer requirements for years. Right? So we don't think that, recipe is necessarily gonna change. But what we can do to arm those suppliers that we serve to make sure that they're doing it on their terms and in a way that protects their data and protects their contract and ensures governance. I think that model is really important.

And so, I mean, I know you guys are. Like, we are super focused on making sure that the supplier has, control as they enter into this agentic game and that we're really protecting them, and we're making sure that they can do this on their terms and to their benefit because I think they will see benefit. Right? You're there to help a supplier see growth. We're there to help them see growth as well as efficiency.

And I think in an agentic world, things are gonna change, and we just wanna make sure that they have the tools at their disposal to do it, within the parameters they define. Fantastic. Well, I mean, that was an excellent answer. I think we leave it right there. We're right at the thirty minute mark.

Beth, thank you for being our guest today and introducing the the world to TradeCentric, a tremendously powerful b to b integration platform for Punch Out and a whole bunch of other fun utilities. Thank you, Jason. Appreciate being here. Awesome. Thanks for have thanks for thanks for for joining us, and, see you out on the battlefield.