It was an exciting year for Zilliant’s B2B Reimagined podcast, which launched in December 2019, and has steadily developed an engaged audience over the subsequent 21 episodes. The show is tailored to B2B leaders who are looking for easily consumable insights into commercial trends and industry-specific strategies. Over the past year, we’ve featured unique expert content for the following vertical industries: 

  • Shipping & Transportation 

  • Building Products 

  • Medical & Life Sciences 

  • Media & Advertising 

  • Industrial Parts & Equipment 

  • Auto Parts/Aftermarket 

  • Specialty Chemicals 

  • Electronic Components 

  • Food Production 

In addition to the vertical expertise, our guests have shone light on macro trends like eCommerce, COVID-19’s impact on the role of sales, and supply chain disruption. Listeners have learned how leading B2B companies are conquering these challenges with investments in cloud-native architecture, price optimization and innovative data science-driven sales tools. 

In 2020, the show featured in-demand guests from strategic partners SAP, Oracle, Modern Distribution Management and more. Look out for more big-name companies joining us in the first quarter of 2021 as we continue to offer quality content on a bi-weekly basis. 

What would a year-end recap be without a list? Here are the top five most downloaded episodes of 2020, with links included so you can catch up on any you might have missed: 

Top 5 Downloaded Episodes 

5. Episode 13 – How to Achieve Dynamic Formula Pricing 

Host: Zilliant General Manager of Commercial Excellence Barrett Thompson 

Guest: Zilliant Sales Director Mick Naughton 

Featured quote: “There’s very, very smart analysts and folks with great industry background in some of these roles that spend a lot of time crunching numbers and just keeping up with the volume of work that needs to get done. Doing work that technology could do. If you could unleash these people, you can tap into all of this potential,” said Mick Naughton. 

Listen:

 

4. Episode 19 – From “Why?” to “How?”: eCommerce in B2B Manufacturing 

Host: Barrett Thompson 

Guest: SAP Global Industry Principal Jonathan Burdette 

Featured quote: “You can go online and put a bunch of things in your cart and then there’s the big button: CALL FOR PRICING. Who wants to do that? I want to get a great price served up to me on eCommerce, I want to push the “MAKE IT SO” button, I don’t want to call for price. And if you’re the manufacturer, that’s what you want too,” said Barrett Thompson. 

Listen:

 

3. Episode 6  The Uneven Demand Problem in Medical & Life Sciences Distribution 

Host: Zilliant Vice President of Customer Success and Support Rick Chappel 

Guest: Mick Naughton 

Featured quote: There’s technology available that can deliver this information right to the rep that says, Hey, you’re losing volume at a customer, or there are categories that a customer could be buying, and that helps protect you in this ultra-competitive, no elective surgeries environment. It may provide some opportunities to sell some things you weren’t before and take that business away from a competitor,” said Rick Chappel. 

Listen:

 

2. Episode 14 – Commercial Challenges in Specialty Chemicals Distribution 

Host: Barrett Thompson 

Guest: ValueBizBooster Chief Executive Officer Dr. Steve Laborda 

Featured quote: “Distributors have been seen for many years as just a logistics partner  the last 10 years those companies have tried to differentiate themselves by, among other things, shifting slightly to a manufacturing role where it’s possible. That leads sometimes to stronger partnerships with manufacturers but also to some competition with their suppliers, which makes it a bit complicated,” said Dr. Steve Laborda. 

Listen:

 

  1. Episode 11 – Virtual Roundtable: Oracle CPQ + Zilliant 

Host: Zilliant Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Duran 

Guests: Oracle Sr. Principal Product Manager Ellen Beres; Oracles Sr. Product Manager Ekta Paliwal; Oracle Strategic ISV Partner Manager Neil McHugh 

Featured quote: “(CPQ) is a very transaction-focused process. It is less so a decision support focused application and this is where the partnership with Zilliant really complements CPQ so well. Zilliant provides the segmentation, price sensitivity analysis, price list administration and management for deciding on the appropriate prices and then releasing them into CPQ to apply them on a particular transaction. They complement each other beautifully,” said Ellen Beres. 

Listen:

Be sure to sign up to be alerted each time a new episode drops in 2021 and beyond at www.zilliant.com/podcasts.