Debunking the Colossal Myth of B2B Consumerization with Jason Nyhus

Michael Lander (00:00.519)
Jason, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to have you with us.

Jason Nyhus (00:11.907)
Perfect.

Jason Nyhus (00:25.55)
Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael Lander (00:27.347)
So very simply, who are you, what do you do, and something unusual about yourself.

Jason Nyhus (00:32.172)
All right, well, I'm Jason Nias. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I'm a general manager here at Shopware, who is a e-commerce platform that serves the complex mid-market in B2B e-commerce. Something unusual about myself, this is a fun, it's a tricky one. It's not as interesting as some of your other guests, but I was once in my 20s,

Michael Lander (00:57.823)
Well, we'll find out!

Jason Nyhus (01:01.282)
I was hanging out at the pool in Las Vegas for March Madness, which is a basketball tournament. And I was sitting at the pool bar and up walks OJ Simpson and he sits down next to me and starts talking to me. And this was post-murder, pre-conviction for stealing his own autograph stuff. So right in the middle sweet spot. And after a while, he said, what are you guys doing later?

Michael Lander (01:12.392)
No!

Wow

Michael Lander (01:25.13)
Wow.

Jason Nyhus (01:29.624)
let's go trolling for girls and I'll be your bait. And that scared the heck out of me. And I went back to the pool and we got out of there. So my one thing that very few people know is I had the opportunity to hang out with OJ and I turned it down.

Michael Lander (01:33.877)
No!

Michael Lander (01:46.079)
Wow, okay. And none of that is litigious. We can publish it. That's all fine, is it? Just checking. We're good. Okay, so we're good to go. Okay. So without further ado, Jason, let's talk about the kind of big topic and then obviously the subtopics below that. So.

Jason Nyhus (01:53.25)
Well, he's he passed away. So you're you're we're good to go, I think, at this point.

Jason Nyhus (02:01.358)
Woof!

Michael Lander (02:12.713)
You want to talk about, and rightly, the myth of B2B consumerization and what the future of B2B commerce sales looks like. So let's get into the first part of that, which is what are we talking about in terms of B2B commerce? Can you give us some use cases, make it clear for the listener exactly what the scope of this topic is about?

Jason Nyhus (02:34.7)
Yep. Well, I think it might be helpful, Michael, if I go back in history a little bit. I have been and... Yep.

Michael Lander (02:40.435)
And by the way, Jason, call me Mike, absolutely fine. In fact, the person who called me Michael, predominantly, was my mother. So I think, God bless her soul, she passed away. So call me Mike.

Jason Nyhus (02:51.246)
Mike, you got it. You got it. Well, I will. So I've been in e-commerce for 25 years now. And I was at a company called Digital River for 20 some odd years and shopware for a few after that. Every single year, Digital River, my old company, we would look out and said, how are we going to grow in out years? And the answer was almost always B2B. And when I look around at the peer group,

Michael Lander (02:58.815)
Right.

Jason Nyhus (03:19.982)
And at the time it was competing with companies like Hybris and Demandware and Magento. And I look at their filings and they talk about next year is going to be the big year of B2B. And it's always it's free beer tomorrow, effectively.

Michael Lander (03:32.277)
Right. It is. is. Yep.

Jason Nyhus (03:39.336)
And so then I started paying attention to the language that the commerce platforms were using. And they started talking about consumerization. And it's a thought leadership topic that the platforms have gotten a lot of mileage out of. Because what it basically means is we're not going to evolve our B2C product to serve the unique needs of B2B. What we're going to try and convince you of is to come our way. That our promotions, that our

experience that the way it works should be more to be to see like not B2B. So it's a very smart way of avoiding the real complications of what B2B actually requires. And so this is why I call the consumerization of B2B as the biggest lie the software industry has ever told.

Michael Lander (04:29.429)
Because I think, yes, if I think about it, even for a second, the dynamics, the buying behaviors, the buying cycles, everything's different. even a simple thing. If you look at redesigning your own home, yeah, redesigning your own home, you're gonna like do a renovation. It's personal money. You spend $50,000, every dollar counts. Every single dollar counts.

If you're instead renovating, I don't know, a huge building in New York, this commercial building, and it's gonna cost $20 million, well, the odd dollar here or there is fine as part of the scope creep or slippage or whatever it might be. And it's not personal money, it's corporate money, and the decision makers are all different, and the governance is all different. Everything's different. So why...

Yes, why do we talk about the consumerization of B2B? It's basically not true. So dig into it a bit more. What are the three big challenges in B2B commerce and sales?

Jason Nyhus (05:33.08)
Yep. Yep.

Jason Nyhus (05:41.326)
Well, let's dig a little bit deeper. I'll answer that question. you look at the commerce platforms today, and there are, I believe, 18 on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. And half of them, more than half, claim that they do B2B and B2C, which is totally true, by the way. But when you dig into it, there's different flavors of B2B. And there is kind of...

Michael Lander (05:51.903)
Right.

Michael Lander (06:07.827)
And just Jason, just pause a second for anyone listening, just give an example, a simple example of B2B, a commerce platform that's in B2C, just so we ground ourselves. Commerce platform in B2C. Okay.

Jason Nyhus (06:18.006)
Yeah, well, let's talk about Shopify because they're kind of the market leader in simple commerce. So if it's relatively easy to do because of catalog size and promotion requirements and all those kinds of things, Shopify is one of the greatest boxes ever invented for commerce. When you think about Shopify's ability to serve B2B, they are really good in wholesale, which has a lot of B2C-like motion. So this is where the consumerization piece is actually partially true.

Michael Lander (06:40.799)
Right.

Jason Nyhus (06:48.458)
Okay? But when you start to get into distributors, as an example, the requirements of a distributor, first and foremost, before you get into any technical requirements actually, a distributor universally survives on very, very razor thin margins. Okay? They're a middleman and they add a lot of value in the process, but they live on thin margins. To pay anybody a revenue share out of that really thin margin,

makes no sense. None.

Michael Lander (07:19.295)
So this is just explain again, just explain that kind of chain for people listening. So you've got basically you've got in the B2B world, you've got product suppliers. So there's a product supplier out there and it's a true product, a B2B product. And they have to get that product out to their customers. Now they can sell direct, they can go direct to their business customers, but obviously to scale very attractive, can they go through distribution? So they would sell their product through a distribution channel.

that distribution channel sells it onto the end customer. And then obviously there's margin involved in all that. But obviously if you're a B2B distributor and you're distributing lots of products from lots of different companies and you've got a very large market, I'm thinking of the IT kind of reseller distributor markets where they sell networking equipment, for example, they've got massive buying power. So they're gonna squeeze the supplier on the margin so that they can make their own margin. Is that broadly the case?

Jason Nyhus (08:16.942)
Yeah, broadly the case. Absolutely. the other thing, let's take an example. if Acme Corp wants to sell their products to a distributor, they might sell them for...

Jason Nyhus (08:33.038)
$46, which gets sold to the distributor for $46. The distributor then can sell it for $50. And so they make $4 or in this scenario, 8%, which I think is kind of high for a distributor. It's usually lower. But in that scenario, for a distributor to take a consumerization of e-commerce approach, they would have to pay 2.25 % of GMB for payment processing.

They'd have to pay Shopify 40 basis points for the commerce platform. They'd have, you know, they have other expenses. And when you net it all out, the distributor who's already on razor thin margins had to share too much of it. So the business model no longer makes sense. These distributors are a high volume, low marginal business. And so anything that eats away from their operating expense or adds to the operating expense,

Michael Lander (09:14.088)
Exactly.

Jason Nyhus (09:29.28)
eats away their margin. And so this is why the consumerization of B2B just on a financial use case alone for complex B2B makes no sense at all. Doesn't work.

Michael Lander (09:40.479)
Yep. Yeah. So, so how do you make it work?

Jason Nyhus (09:47.926)
Yeah. Well, so the first part of the conversation has to be all around CapEx versus OpEx. The actual ability to buy the software, to install it, to run it, to manage it, and to get it as a capitalized expense, meaning you pay for it once and you use the hell out of it, that becomes a way that B2B brands, especially distributors, can actually enter the conversation around e-commerce. That's kind of step one.

Michael Lander (10:17.781)
Because so in simple terms in your P and L therefore, you're not incurring an operating expense every time you use the platform because you've capitalized it. There's depreciation, amortization, et cetera, but as an operating expense, it doesn't exist. Because you've capitalized it's a capital item.

Jason Nyhus (10:21.603)
Yes.

Jason Nyhus (10:28.13)
Yes, you've capitalized.

Jason Nyhus (10:35.732)
Exactly. So all of the transaction value you capture, the margin, all of it goes into your P &L as opposed to sharing it with the payment provider, the commerce platform, the tax engine, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just a simple different model, but it matters.

Michael Lander (10:51.017)
Because at the EBITDA level, which is obviously what lot of companies measure for valuation, it's earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization. So that depreciation bit comes below the key metric that a lot of investors or buyers would look at. So that makes perfect sense. You're going to capitalize it if you've got the capital.

Jason Nyhus (11:03.918)
You got it.

Jason Nyhus (11:15.054)
cover if you have the capital. The other thing that's really, really a positive, again, thinking about distributors, distributors, again, high volume and the more volume they effectively handle, the more money that they make. A revenue share is largely a linear cost. So if your revenue goes up, your costs go up. Okay. That's a problem for distributors because it's inherently competing with their way they make money. This is why this capitalized expense makes so much sense because the more you grow,

you start to get economic benefits of your scale. So it's better the way that you book the expense, but it's also better in the way that as you grow, you take more of that revenue to the bottom line.

Michael Lander (11:54.919)
as you scale. Exactly. That makes perfect sense.

So just explain a kind of a B2B commerce platform. So I've got my head around a B2C commerce platform is obviously Shopify, good example. I might make scarves. I don't sell scarves to consumers. So I would put it onto my Shopify store and then I'd attract people to my Shopify store and sell my products to consumers. But a B2B commerce platform, I'll be talking about the same sort of thing, which is a company makes a product.

network router and it wants to sell it and therefore the B2B commerce engine is the way that a distributor might use that or might be able to build a catalogue and sell it to the end business. Is that what we're talking about?

Jason Nyhus (12:46.538)
yeah, it can be. So this is part of the reason for the term consumerization is because just because it has doors and windows and locks doesn't mean it's the same type of vehicle. Yep. And so, yes, the catalog exists, the images, the pricing. But I always think about B2B e-commerce platform more as an orchestration engine. It tries to orchestrate the business processes that an organization requires to book revenue.

And one of the fundamental differences in B2B is the way that companies operate in a lot of ways is their secret sauce. The way that their reps engage with their customers, the way they manage their territories, the way that they price and offer discounts, the way that they do loyalty, maybe even the way that they ship. There's a whole bunch of things in there that become the secret sauce as to why a company buys from X versus Y other companies.

Okay. And B2C commerce platforms, the ones of scale have done a really nice job of creating a box and making a bunch of choices for you. And if you fit in that box, you should buy from them. B2B is different. B2B done right is saying we've got this box of 60%, 70 % of what most people need. You can change any of that out to your preference and you can customize and configure the other 30 to 40%. So

Yes, it has catalogs and pricing and promotion and a website and all the things that you would expect in B2C, but how it's delivered and how it's orchestrated and how it's managed is the fundamental difference.

Michael Lander (14:28.821)
Okay, and presumably these B2B commerce platforms are sold to distributors and also to the product manufacturers because they may want to sell direct to their customers or through distribution. Now, how do you stop channel conflict?

Jason Nyhus (14:38.424)
Yes. Yes.

Jason Nyhus (14:46.966)
Okay, finally we got there. This is the topic I wanted to talk about. So, all right. Okay, perfect. No, so this is the heart of the matter. So, Shopware, so I joined Shopware about two and a half years ago. And I remember the first call I got from the recruiter. And they said, we have this leadership role at Shopware, do you have any interest? And I kind of laughed it off. And I said,

Michael Lander (14:48.885)
Hahaha!

We're only 14 minutes in. Amazing.

Jason Nyhus (15:15.288)
Who the hell is shopware and why does the world need another commerce system? And because I'd seen the other 17 and I've partnered with most of them, frankly. And it was the way that this question is answered that got me really excited. What is the difference between shopware and everybody else? And how does it actually address B2B commerce and the complexities versus others? And especially that question around channel conflict. So most people

Michael Lander (15:24.372)
Yes.

Jason Nyhus (15:45.698)
in the commerce B2B commerce system are pushing this narrative of the consumerization of B2B. And what that ultimately does is inherently push channel conflict further and further and further. Because ultimately what you're doing is you're making your e-commerce site compete with the reps, the people who ultimately carry 90 plus percent of the number. So we talk about putting up a website, allowing customers to self-service.

Michael Lander (16:05.14)
Yes.

Jason Nyhus (16:15.298)
That's all well and good. That is kind of the consumerization. But we call that the easy 10%. At most, 10 % of your business will go online and buy in that through that mechanism. The hard 90 in B2B, the hard 90%, is when you actually give products and capabilities to a rep. And here's the catch, Mike. It has to make the rep.

Michael Lander (16:27.743)
Right. In B2B. In B2B.

Jason Nyhus (16:44.95)
make more money. If the technology you give them is a mandate, like a CRM, they will not adopt it because they don't see a direct line between them using it and them making more money. The product that we've got is called the digital sales room and it's gold. And here's the fundamental difference. We sell to the person, the guy or gal who owns inside sales,

Michael Lander (16:58.857)
Yeah, makes sense.

Jason Nyhus (17:15.016)
or the field of reps who own 95 % ish of the company's revenue, who have a quota. And fundamentally, if a rep has 50 accounts, power loss says they will make or miss their number on 10 of them. Which means by definition of the 50 accounts, if they make or miss their number on 10, that means 40 are probably underserved.

Michael Lander (17:45.301)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Nyhus (17:46.222)
They're not getting the latest information on products and services. They don't know what discounts they're eligible for. They rarely get an on-site visit. They're just underserved. So we've launched about a year and a half, two years ago, this concept called the digital sales room. It's a product that comes available as part of the shopware solution. What it does is it does to B2B e-commerce what telehealth does to healthcare. And in America,

Michael Lander (18:14.151)
explain that. Yeah, so for people in the UK or in Europe or in Latam or wherever, what is that and how does it work?

Jason Nyhus (18:23.278)
Well, the US people should not be talking about healthcare with any real authority because we haven't got it figured out. what telehealth is, is the ability for you to see your doctor, for them to have all of your history of all of the medications and all of your previous tests in a very efficient one-on-one video conversation, just like a Zoom or other things. And so 75 % of all

Michael Lander (18:29.162)
He

Jason Nyhus (18:53.038)
hospitals and clinics in North America have telehealth as an option. And why do they do it? It's because it's significantly more efficient. I can see my doctor in 30 minutes as opposed to driving there, waiting, doing it, leaving, driving home. So it's roughly 75 % more efficient. But I still get a...

Michael Lander (19:02.495)
Correct.

Michael Lander (19:12.285)
It also, doesn't, it doesn't clog up the system. So you don't clog up, you don't plug up the physical buildings, the healthcare system with people that basically could be seen in 15 minutes on a call, as long as you've got access to their records. Yeah.

Jason Nyhus (19:15.82)
And it doesn't clog with the...

Jason Nyhus (19:27.874)
Exactly. And more importantly, I'm able to actually do it as opposed to put it off because of the hassle. Okay. So you have the massive efficiency gain, but you also have the people opting in to actually use it where they wouldn't before. So you get benefits of adoption. Okay. So now apply that to B2B e-commerce. The sales rep has the ability to take all your past purchase history, all your eligible promotions,

Michael Lander (19:35.081)
Yeah, precisely.

Jason Nyhus (19:56.162)
the threshold at which you're off from earning more discounts, the ability to actually schedule time with you to walk you through it. And what was really powerful is you can co-browse and co-shop in the same exact experience, but you can do one to many. So if the rep wants to meet nine people from the same organization and be co-browsing and shopping all at the same time, you can do it using the digital sales room.

So now what the use cases we've seen is the reps still drive to those 10 customers they need to hit their number. They still over-serve them because that's where their bread is buttered. But now in between, they have the capacity to serve the 40 they've underserved. They can interact virtually, can send them promotions, they can curate the catalog. One of the other big challenges,

Some of these B2B distributors have catalogs of millions of SKUs. It's a phone book of e-commerce. So when the rep is involved, what they then do is they can precure the content that they need to see it. So instead of sending them the phone book, they send them the commerce dedicated to you and your company and what you need. So not only is it more efficient, not only is it more effective, the reps adopt it because, all the way back to the beginning,

It allows them to make more money. So that's the fundamental change. And so we aren't selling only to the B2B commerce owner inside of a company. We're selling to the inside sales team and the sales team as well. And that's how you fundamentally solve channel conflict is you give them the tools to sell more, not compete against your own internal capabilities.

Michael Lander (21:49.823)
So just to wind that minute, again, so channel conflict, so my simple understanding of channel conflict is, let's say I'm an IT manufacturer. So I design and sell network equipment because it's easy to think about. So it's a network box. And I sell that to businesses because it's a commercial network box rather than a consumer one. So the way I can get that to market is either my sales reps can

pound the streets and go to businesses and sell to SMEs these boxes, or, and or, I can go to distributors and they can sell. And so the channel conflict for me is if I overcomp or over-incentivize the channel distributors, then my reps get starved because my reps end up pounding the streets to customers bluntly who distributors are serving. And if there's any price differential, now you're really in trouble. So.

That's my kind of my old school perception of channel conflict. So just unpack how and whether it's your solution or someone like your solution, because clearly we're not here to promote anyone's product. By the way, listeners, I'm not compensated. There's no promotion. There's no sponsorship. This is about how an industry works. How do you solve that problem of, well, the conflict is I've got either I've not defined the territory for the distributor correctly or they've got different incentives.

and my own internal sales people are disadvantaged by this channel that has got this B2B commerce platform in it that basically is working against me. How does that problem get solved?

Jason Nyhus (23:30.54)
Yeah, well, said it. Well, doesn't. So fundamentally, you've put your finger exactly on it, Mike. There are two separate systems, two separate incentive processes, two sets of ways of thinking for a customer interact. By the definition, if you have two choices and you make the customer choose, one of those two divisions of your company and routes is going to lose. If someone loses and someone wins, that's conflict. And so our whole approach

Michael Lander (23:53.439)
Yes.

Michael Lander (23:57.192)
Exactly.

Jason Nyhus (23:59.822)
is trying to take the capabilities required for that merchant, for that wholesaler, or that distributor, and say, do we digitize it in a way that does the easy 10? But we put an expectation around it. This is never going to be 100. And at the same time, we offer the sales reps the abilities to make more money. And the combination of the two doesn't create winners and losers. It creates a

a mechanism at which it's more of a fair fight. It's more of an even playing ground and it's more of the ability to kind of avoid those conflicts. Because I promise you in a meeting where you start talking about how the e-commerce channel is tripled over the last three years and our sales team is flat, that's the definition of conflict. You can see the heads of the rep saying, do I need to leave to make more money because that thing is over there stealing my money? Or is the pie getting bigger and we're all going to

Michael Lander (24:36.585)
Right, because

Michael Lander (24:49.429)
You can.

Jason Nyhus (24:57.304)
continue to make money. That's the calculus the reps are doing. So you have to get rid of that narrative and you have to kind of adopt digital across the whole landscape, not just in the e-commerce world.

Michael Lander (25:00.788)
It is.

Michael Lander (25:10.761)
So, okay, so if I'm getting this right, you give the same tool set effectively to the sales reps, the direct sales reps, as you do to the distributor sales reps. And that way, the customer sat there going, well, it's the same digital experience, either direct or through distribution, but I may choose to go to the direct sales force because more solution selling, more expertise around.

Jason Nyhus (25:20.866)
Exactly.

Jason Nyhus (25:37.934)
It's a fair fight. It's a fair fight. you, and by the way, it's the same thing that all companies who have sales teams deal with. It's territory management. How did this deal come in at attribution? This is the normal stuff that salespeople are used to. And so if it's a fair fight that I've got digital tools and digital capabilities, but the customer opted to go on the website. Well, that's a completely fair fight as opposed to we're investing everything in digital reps. guys suck. You're making too much money.

Michael Lander (25:39.368)
Yeah, it's more of a fair fight.

Michael Lander (25:48.084)
It is.

Jason Nyhus (26:08.275)
We're not giving you any new capabilities. That's where the conflict really starts to exist.

Michael Lander (26:13.663)
So you get the same digital toolset to both to level the playing field.

Jason Nyhus (26:18.99)
And maybe it's not exactly the same digital tool set. Maybe it's just everybody gets digital tools that are materially impacting their ability to be successful.

Michael Lander (26:28.019)
Yeah, and that kind of out of the 50, the kind of the 40 that get neglected, that 40 presumably has a high churn rate. Because if I'm neglected, basically go somewhere else. So you're increasing customer retention as well for repeat purchase.

Jason Nyhus (26:43.712)
Exactly. by the way, this is OK. So in my history, I used to work at a company called Digital River, and it really made a splash in the digital business because it helped companies like VMware and Adobe Autodesk really go direct and disintermediate a lot of of the processes that were in place, the definition of channel conflict. But what they did.

Michael Lander (27:09.895)
Exactly.

Jason Nyhus (27:11.694)
is they started, universally, they started with who are our underserved customers. And they looked at, in this scenario, the 50 that rarely got touched, and they figured out ways to provide digital experiences and digital capabilities, but also crediting back the rep. And so they didn't view it as competition, they viewed it as a way to still get credit when digital was being adopted.

but they only did it again in the underserved segments where the reps weren't spending time. So that's another tactic and another use case strategy to really drive adoption.

Michael Lander (27:43.433)
Yeah, yeah,

Michael Lander (27:48.701)
And presumably also going back through your old customer list over the last five years, it allows you to kind of reawaken those customers that have gone off and gone somewhere else. You've got a new conversation to have with them.

Jason Nyhus (28:02.39)
Exactly, yep.

Michael Lander (28:04.969)
So, final question, Jason. If you're in B2B commerce sales, what are the three kind of big tips you'd offer to grow your business?

Jason Nyhus (28:15.222)
Well, curation is number one. Nobody wants to see your full catalog of a million different pictures of a screw. They're trying to solve a business problem. And so how do you curate your content that only shows them what they should see? So think of Trump Club in the B2C context for B2B, right? So that'd be number one. Number two, I think this concept of the underserved is a really powerful one.

Michael Lander (28:24.617)
Yeah.

Michael Lander (28:34.356)
Right.

Jason Nyhus (28:45.55)
Every business I've met, there's underserved customers, every single one. So you just got to identify how do you efficiently serve that set of customers in a unique, different way? And I think there's big unlock for growth. And I think the third is this concept around this efficiency of using digital experiences to actually help the reps make more money. So really embracing tools like digital sales room from shop where other companies probably have could.

cobble together similar type solutions, but that's really what it comes down to. So put the rep in the center and try to find a feed him or her capabilities that help them make more money. So those would be my big three money.

Michael Lander (29:25.779)
Yeah, perfect. And having been an ex-sales director, know, hitting sales quota for my reps, it's like, how do I help them hit quota? My job's to help them. But if I've helped them and they don't deliver, then there's a tough conversation. But if I've not helped them, that's my fault. You if I've not given them the right tools, that's entirely my fault. A bit like with, you know, just to kind of round off the conversation.

Jason Nyhus (29:44.545)
Exactly.

Jason Nyhus (29:49.324)
You got it.

Michael Lander (29:53.769)
You know, a bit like people talk about AI and they put in a prompt into GPT or Gemini or whatever and they don't get the response they expect and I go, it's not very good. I'm like, but it's like giving an apprentice on day one, the challenge of building a Formula One car. Is the apprentice going to make it? Probably not. Doesn't know what you're talking about. Doesn't have the experience. Doesn't have the context. Hasn't been trained. You've got to spend time and invest.

Jason Nyhus (30:24.046)
Yep. Actually, you're on a really important point, Mike. The knowledge that exists on these products and services in B2B, both distributors and wholesale, is off the charts. These people know these products and services like no one I've ever met. And one of my favorite things to do is get the warehouse tour when I'm on site with these companies because it really unlocks the level of expertise that these reps have. And so the great unlock...

Michael Lander (30:45.011)
Yes.

Jason Nyhus (30:52.202)
is not to try and train a system to replace them. It's to give them better tools and capabilities for them to sell more. That's the great online.

Michael Lander (30:59.057)
Exactly. And to allow that customers, we know now from research that 90 % of the buying journey in B2B, we know now that 90 % is done without the use of a sales rep. Because it's easier to do research. So if 90 % of the buyer's journey is now digital, well, we've got to give reps the tools to

allow customers to self-discover, but in a guided way.

And so the more we can do that, and then when they do talk to a salesperson, now they're really engaged. Now they've got a real problem they want solving. They're well-educated and you can have a much better conversation. So it's about upskilling our reps. I also, as a closing point, Jason, I'd like to, so haven't rehearsed this, haven't asked the question before, but as a closing thing, I've got a bit of a bug bear and one of my friends has Laura as well about...

Jason Nyhus (31:47.126)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (32:04.117)
the downtrodden sales environment about you have a conversation, you're at a party, what do you do? I'm in sales. Everyone goes, I'll go and get another drink, shall I? I'll be back later brackets never. Because sales is seen as being, well, it's not really a profession. You're not an accountant. You're not a lawyer. You kind of fell into sales because you couldn't do something else. And it's just, I think it's just horrific that

The very thing that drives top line growth in organizations is the very thing that we believe, certainly in European cultures, is, well, it's a bit kind of dirty and it's a bit kind of like unprofessional selling. And I just think it's wrong. I think we've lost the magic, the understanding about how critical sales is and how we should be investing in the sales profession. What are your thoughts as a closing thought, Jason?

Hahaha!

Jason Nyhus (33:01.314)
Well, I, so, you know.

We aren't making, we aren't printing money unless we're the government. You have to convince someone to give you some of theirs. And that's the kind of the oil that makes the economy go round and the importance of sales. great salespeople are unbelievably effective and great to do business with and you look forward to doing it. But bad salespeople have the opposite effect. You don't want to go buy that car because you don't want to deal with that rep.

I think it's a more nuanced answer, but man, great salespeople who know the products, know the services, know who to sell it to, know how to price and package, they're a treat to deal with. And we need more great salespeople in the world, not less.

Michael Lander (33:38.825)
Yeah, I'd agree.

Michael Lander (33:52.221)
Exactly. And more, maybe, the barrier to entry should be higher to be a salesperson.

Jason Nyhus (33:57.686)
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there are very many colleges that have sales degrees. I think there are starting to be some now. Most people come at it from a whole different perspective. So that might be something that I think maybe raise the bar on what it means to be a salesperson. And maybe some of the new generation of tools like the digital sales rooms will enable that.

Michael Lander (34:16.167)
Exactly, exactly. And make it become a more attractive, interesting profession with lots of growth. Jason, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much for joining me. Where can people find out more about you?

Jason Nyhus (34:28.27)
So you can look me up on LinkedIn, Jason Nyas, N-Y-H-U-S, or you can go to shopwear.com and get to me through that process. But I really enjoyed spending time with you, Mike. Thanks for having me on the pod.

Michael Lander (34:41.663)
pleasure. I've really enjoyed it, Jason. Thanks ever so much for joining me. Thank you. And we're out. Okay. And we're out. Let me just stop this. Brilliant. Very, very good.

Jason Nyhus (34:48.105)
And we're out. That was good.