This November, we held our second CAB event across two days for our North American and European customers to meet, network, and provide input and direction into strategic initiatives as we continue to scale. 

Our customers are experts in their own industries and as a customer-centric business we rely on their expertise to guide our decisions. Therefore, it is important for us to truly understand their needs, help solve any challenges that our customers face, and take stock of industry trends, disruptors and issues that are prevalent in the deal economy. 

What was on the CAB agenda?

We invited key people from customer organizations spanning a range of industry sectors and geographic locations to connect with our executive team to define strategies, product roadmaps, and drive the future of rebates and B2B deals. 

• David Oldfather, President and CEO, IDEA was our first guest speaker who gave a background of his company and how the Enable and IDEA partnership will work by collating, analysing and giving clean data back to distributors and manufacturers. The aim is to create a deal ecosystem for the electrical components industry.
• Jim Skidds, Director Financial Programs at Affiliated Distributors spoke about how Enable has been helping AD grow since 2014. Enable’s efficiency has allowed them to stay lean and the open dialogue and roadmap enhancements has been integral. Having managed their rebates before in an Excel environment, Enable has allowed them keep up with the volume of rebates with the same number of resources and find complete accuracy.
• Kerry Atlas, VP Operations & Finance at NetPlus Alliance discussed how they have gained a competitive advantage by using Enable to expand the depth and breadth of their deals. Along with forward looking analysis, Enable has helped them free up time, their close process has gone from 5 days down to just 2 days.
• Chris Cottington, Operational Design Director at Wolseley UK talked about transitioning from an on-premise to cloud solution and the lessons learnt along the way. He mentioned that the journey is different when moving from spreadsheets to a system vs system to system. Plus, how your team needs to be open to change and iteratively testing what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your trading programs.
• We also had another guest speaker, Shahid Javed, Chief Procurement Officer at Aimbridge Hospitality who talked through the criticality of rebates in procurement and where they fit in the procurement lifecycle in enabling value and growth.

• VP Product Management, Cesare Rotundo led an interactive roadmap panel, detailing the results of what our CAB panel told us last time including integrated finance business processes, SPAs, incentive and market insights, and harmonizing product data. He also delved into 4 strategic drivers of our roadmap and an 18-month product strategy.
• For the final part of the 2 days, we conducted a workshop on “Special pricing priorities and direction”. Director of Product Management, Andy James went through the goals of the special pricing solution along with Senior Product Manager, Amar Hayer who talked about the use cases.

We've received some great feedback from attendees and want to extend a huge thank you to those who came along, your input and effort is very much appreciated! 

The learnings and new perspectives from the Customer Advisory Board meeting will help frame the direction of Enable’s offerings. It’s our continued goal to engage with our customers as often as possible and determine that our efforts at improving the product and user experience is heading in the right direction.  

Watch this space for our next Customer Advisory Board Event in 2022.