As a rapidly growing SaaS organization, we only succeed when our customers succeed, and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. To better serve our growing customer base and help them maximize the performance of their B2B deals we plan to gather, listen, and act on customer feedback. That’s why we were thrilled to have hosted our first-ever Customer Advisory Board event across 2 days virtually!

This new Customer Advisory Board event which we will run twice a year, will provide strategic insight, guidance, and feedback that will help shape the future of our product and the B2B deals space. These sessions serve to deepen our understanding of our customers’ goals and current and future needs and will provide a platform of which we can work together on solving customers’ most pressing rebate challenges.

Who attended?

The session across the UK and US was hosted by our executive team and brought together an esteemed group of forward-thinking leaders in rebate management and B2B deals. Representing both new and long-standing customers spanning many verticals, including distribution, manufacturing, building materials, buying groups and retailers.

We also invited guest speaker Peter Hindle, MBE whose career spans 4 decades in the building distribution industry. Peter has a historical and vast understanding of the industry’s roots, the way it operates; its customers’ needs, wants and desires and its evolution. Peter spoke to the group on how he successfully used these insights to lead and grow Jewson in his role as its Managing Director for over 12 years. Thereafter, Peter led Jewson’s transition to Saint-Gobain, the global construction material leader.

• NetPlus Alliance
• Steel Plus Network
• Stemco
• Steves and Sons
• Sysco
• The Commonwealth Group
• Thomas Somerville
• TIAA
• Wolseley Canada
• Advance Auto Parts
• Haldane-Fisher
• Keystone

• Lawsons
• P&H
• Polypipe
• SIG
• Travis Perkins
• Wolseley UK
• Alsford Timber
• ATC Electrical & Mechanical
• CDW
• DCS Group
• Grafton

What was on the agenda?

Our CEO, Andrew Butt kicked off both sessions with a look at Enable’s story and vision of Intelligent deals connecting every trading relationship. Then he introduced Peter Hindle MBE who discussed how he first met Andrew and was shown Enable, Peter has been instrumental in helping to shape our product evolution so far. He also delved into the many benefits of Enable such as less manual effort, ability to calculate complex rebates and more accuracy.

Next came a customer led innovation session with our customers Bob Gay, Customer Profitability Manager at Advance Auto Parts, Mark Gilham, Finance Director and Kevin Betts, Finance Manager at Grafton on how they operate and use rebates to their full advantage. Both, who before Enable depended on Excel to manage their deals which led to errors and miscalculations. Both organizations manage their rebates very differently, there's no one size fits all approach with so many different terms and trading agreements hence why we are continually making product updates to satisfy our customers wants and needs.

After learning about how Enable helped two of our largest customers, we looked at our strategic roadmap with VP of Product Cesare Rotundo which has three main objectives:

• Delight customers and new products
• Collaboration and marketplace
• Faster, deeper time-to-value

Then finally we held a workshop on “Creating momentum surrounding special pricing” led by Director of Product Strategy Andy James. He discussed why Enable is building a module for SPA’s, how it works and how we’ve been working closely with Charles Pearce, Commercial Manager at Polypipe Building Products, who right from the outset of this initiative really recognized the opportunity to streamline the management of Special Pricing Agreements.

Finally, we rounded of the jam-packed day with a fun activity of Sommelier led blind wine tasting.

The outcome of this 2-day event included insightful dialogs, lively debate and invaluable feedback via polls and discussions to help us shape our product roadmap moving forward.

Watch this space for our next Customer Advisory Board Event!