--- title: "The Dare Dialogues - S01E03: Making Waves" description: "Tim Benniks and Sonja Keerl will dive into the findings of the latest Forrester Wave™ for B2C Commerce, unveiling something noteworthy: the leader quadrant remained empty." date: "2024-06-15T10:46:55.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/misc-streams/001-1tjmq5b0fmc" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TJMq5b0fMc" playlist: "misc-streams" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1TJMq5b0fMc/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["composable-architecture", "ai-engineering", "product-strategy", "devrel"] --- # The Dare Dialogues - S01E03: Making Waves Tim Benniks and Sonja Keerl will dive into the findings of the latest Forrester Wave™ for B2C Commerce, unveiling something noteworthy: the leader quadrant remained empty. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TJMq5b0fMc ## Transcript most these things and had to do that for work right right yeah we're live we are live and we were just chatting about our subject because today is a chatting show much more than others it's not structured we're going in almost unprepared because there's so many opinions we're just gonna go for it I guess so I I'll try to do a slightly formal intro and then we'll just let it go right formal I don't know what formal means I feel okay so Forester wave came out b2c Commerce yes and I said in my post this there's commotion and then Sonia said that's way too polite we're all over the place with all the feelings are spilled and so son knows a lot about this stuff and so I'm just in this context I'm the tech guy looking at it from a distance and not understanding too much sometimes and I do understand some parts business all that stuff but this is my opportunity to ask all the questions so Sonia let's start with the controversy or controversy I don't know how to say these things what what is it what's happening what was the big HOA about the yes exactly right so in this year's b2c digital Commerce Forester wave there was no leader that means that whole upper right part where every vendor every buyer looks at and says they are the best is exactly has that ever happened before I've tried to find out and I couldn't find one so if anybody in the audience has experienced any evaluation be it marketscape from IDC magic quadrant from Gartner Forest W that didn't have a leader then please let us know because I couldn't find one and it's also very like counterintuitive to the idea of these evaluations because every analyst will tell you the evaluation is relative so the higher the scores the more ahead of the rest of the vendors in the evaluation you are so you would almost think that by definition that demands that there always is a leader because it Compares right it is there's no absolutes in these evaluations uh yet there I guess but does that maybe mean that their model to make an evaluation like this is so granular and so good maybe it just shows the market maybe it's it's funny say so granular and so good um because I think that's where a lot of the emotions and a lot of the waves that the waves make actually came from because so granular and so good or so granular or is that actually bad is one of the coners ation strings that that I've seen um I have I have very different opinions on this depending if I look get this through yeah yeah actually I always do I always have debates in my head it's like a little debating Club in Sonia's head so if I look at it through sort of the academic how should those evaluations be structured lens I have one opinion and if I look at the Commerce Market I have another one which do you want to hear first um the market one please the market one okay so I look at the Commerce market and I see a very very polarized um buying side of the market so there is those buyers that are very digitally mature and that want to do composable Commerce and you know the mark world that you and I are at home home in and then I see the majority who are more comfortable with having everything sort of out of the box and don't actually care if the architecture under the hood is composable or not because what matters is I have the functionality that I need and I can move on exactly exactly and then the ambition if I look at at research of the majority of the Commerce technology buyers is yes we want to go composable but the reality of actually um being set up to do that successfully or actually even interpreting the term because everybody says we're composable all of those nine evaluated vendors have that big on their homepages right um that there is a big gap in there so if I look at this wave through the lens of a company looking for a new Commerce solution then more interesting even than the fact that there is no leader is that the spread of the nine vendors in there is horizontal so normally Tim the ideal axis for the dots like the trend line would be the diagonal the diagonal between the offering and the strategy that's the two axes that you have yeah and in this case the current offerings all pretty much in a horizontal cluster which leads me to the second part why because the analysts are mandated to give a view on a market give one view one dot one set of dots that reflects what the buyers are looking for and you know what the vendors are having in the context of buyer need but then if you have so polarized opinions of what people are looking for and you have to aggregate them back into one perspective you get everything kind of on one line and that's why you need to go one level deeper and you actually need to look at the the detailed breakdown of what are the characteristics that are leading to the positions and every every evaluation gives you Tim the opportunity to say well if I look at the characteristics my need is actually I need have a composable architecture I want to make sure I have order Management in there I want to make sure I have personalization in there I don't care at all about product catalog because I have my pin I don't care about I don't know I don't care about user experience you're developer right so I don't care about user yes I get it it's all good their level is do something that's much more hatless first myself you would exactly but the thing is wait hold hold hold because when you do that and you can when you say my waiting is different to the generic waiting there will be leaders yes clearly there will be leaders but people people especially in the vendor Community they're so upset about this they're missing the opportunity to tell that story yeah diversify or put yourself in a niche and say this is what we do and look and in that case we are a leader right but that yeah and I bet you when you look at this detail and unfortunately we can't because I think there might be some petulant in the vendor Community I couldn't find a single reprint of the wave you know normally the week every wave everybody just puts it on their website look we're in there and now I I haven't seen one right do you think they all came together and we're like we're not we're not licensing these three prints or yeah I don't know like I'm thinking here yeah you were still making your points or I just I have so much bubbles up when you say certain things you know so my point was anybody who's looking to buy this don't look at the dot look at the the detail criteria figure out what is it you want what does your business need to be successful if you're looking to a platform and then you'll find out which one is the best solution for you and the dots will move on your personal View and dear vendor also look at the detail because probably the way you've positioned yourself the way your ICP and your differentiation goes it's probably in line with where you got the highest points or the lowest right and that's an opportunity yeah there's a huge like people always look at something like a headline and then scroll on and SK to away and that's kind of almost sad because you can really go a bit deeper like you say and figure out okay so we this I don't name let's not name any names of whatever fendors are in there but let's say you are super awesome at being very granular with your features and you can you sell se you sell them separated and it's super headl it's just surfaces well on certain scores in that table you're scoring a five absolutely if your ICP is actually tech leads at Brands looking for that you are the leader yes and it's a relatively easy marketing thing now to do I would say you could literally make a campaign next week that says everybody's upset with this thing because there's a fine line like that like everything goes horizontally but we've specialized in this and if you look at the scores we're literally the leader on three points and you have some and then you have some fancy tagline and a webinar and there's your prospects crazy brilliant again it is really hard though as buyer I feel now because before this discussion I've been thinking a little bit like okay if I did Commerce and I was a brand what would I choose and I could only come up with like this super technologically savvy thing that I know pretty well but I wouldn't still know who to choose because in the end for example let's say I do this business with my wife and she has she has a web shop and she runs it on Shopify she doesn't want want to mention numers oh but it's my wife maybe this is It's a small shop no no impact on our space let's say it like that she sells Fair no imp impact on our space but the thing is and this might translate to bigger Brands she doesn't want me as a tech person near that thing she will install her plugin in her app and it works perfectly yeah and so you just need to figure out your like there's maybe too many icps now to do one wave maybe that's it maybe subwave it well yeah but you see that's the responsibility not of an analyst but that's the responsibility of the vendors to start actually speaking more clearly to their ICP and sift through that we only have nine vendors in this wave and by the way I just got a quick message uh from Forester analyst actually who I shall not name who is listening apparently that um the payments wave also had no leader so we really the payments W but yeah but but to to come back to your question if I look at the digital Commerce vendors and I have actually done that and I have this amazing spreadsheet here and you look at the way they're marketing their Solutions everybody is everything to everyone and that means you're nothing to nobody so as a vendor it is your responsibility to be really clear who can be most successful with our solution and the analyst look if they would start having to look at b2c Commerce for I wouldn't even know how to phrase that would you say for majority clients that doesn't even make sense because we know that the majority of majority thinks they're early adopters even when they're not right so they still would read the wrong piece of research that's why you can talk to the analysts and you can honestly and openly speak to them as a brand and say this is kind of what I need this is what my orc looks like this is what my strategic goals look like now knowing that dear analyst what do you think I should they must have an opinion I'm sure they're allowed to share it but they must have some sort of f feeling of what goes where so do you think that this happened that there's no leader because all these companies in that space started with their Tech and now they're fitting their Tech to the marketing and then finding an ICP because if you do that this tends to happen is that the way or did they just think like apple back in the day what does my user need and I'll fit the attack to it or did we all write the wave of you know um Ed CDN whatever came oh as an architect myself I see the possibilities of this let's make a product in that space and then mold the tag to whatever we want to sell it to we'll see and I cannot speak for all these people but I it's hard right I think it's all of the above Tim so five years ago it was all about features and functionality and capabilities three years ago four years ago all of a sudden it started to be all about architecture and what you know and also when we were sitting down and when we founded the mar lines and we were thinking about what is the world going to look like in five years it was clear the Legacy vendors would start making their Solutions more modular more composable and the composable vendors would start to buy more functionality on top of it and that's just normal because these things converge right and we're in the middle of that so yes the marketing and the messaging has already converged but the reality under the hood has not yet and that is insanely confusing for buyers exactly so we're in a race through the middle in a recession where lots of the brands don't have the tech stakeholders yet and give them jobs may not the budget yeah exactly right so you also need to have that you're making a very good point because I think one of the other HOAs in Emily Pier's blog post She Wrote This is as much a wave for making a buying decision as it is for making a retention case and I think that's what a lot of people also not amused about but the point here is too in a in a world where everything kind of looks same seems the same where you have to very carefully decide how do you invest your digital Commerce Tech budgets and your resources there's got to be a really really good Advantage for you to now start a rep platforming projects and I'm not saying they're not there but it's not anymore the oh gosh we haven't done this for five years shall we yes I've been in that world back in the day when I was agency we we would even play that card and it kind of worked yeah I would I was in pictures saying to people yeah you're now on this Java stack it's five years what have you found that worked not much right you're struggling let's do a do that stack this time go to a different Cloud we literally built the same thing but then in a different stack I won't name fenders but you probably know what I mean and that's very interesting right but that's also a a um a mentality that comes from when you and I were still installing software in server rooms oh yeah I remember reace the first Cloud terrible so but but look now most of these vendors are prop assess and they're releasing new functionality right rolling so much of the tech debt has moved to the to managing by the vendor yeah and that too makes rep platforming a little less uh cyclic there needs to be less Cycles what's the how do you say that in English you don't need to do it every five years if your vendor keeps up right and if your business users don't hate the vendor if it's flexible enough and also and this is one that we don't say often the people that actually have to use it rather than the people that build it so not the tech folks but the people that have to use it day to day the higher their threshold for pain and it's high I can tell you they won't complain that much and they will probably not need like if you still sell and you're still able to adapt to a market change relatively quickly you're good is all these folks that were still on Legacy when Corona hit and pick up in store became a big thing right all fenders even if they were on Legacy and they managed to make that change that was an org organizational success the tech didn't really matter of course the folks that had composable Tech had a lot easier job but it still kind of worked and that's a case of maybe we stay with the thing if it you know if it work why fix it yes absolutely well there there are some arguments because if you there's a cost of doing nothing if you're on a managed hosting for example and we don't have Leon here like Leon be like C of doing nothing exactly so you will spend money on just keeping it running versus having something in the cloud so there's a point to be made and there might be a point of why certain fenders even in that horizontal bar were kind of Below on the lower end true and and those companies who are still running on premise somewhere because they didn't get to rep platforming I mean there is there's a number of really old school vendors that are also not in this wave I would still recommend get you know get onto modern SAS Cloud native or Cloud first at least technology so you get out do managed hosting you're very close you know what I mean yeah no managed hosting I'm not a fan of I have there's an allergy factor I have there that that for me is just lipstick lipstick on a I know oh clearly but it and this is a nice bridge to the next thing about the marketing because I was thinking if the wave is like this it's horizontal and you cannot just change your attack overnight of course you w what what role does marketing start to play what do if you are let's say you're a product marketing manager or a FP of pmm you see a wave like this what is your first response of course you know a lot about that so that's why I'm asking what would you do what's your first response ah what would Sonia do yes I would and if any of the vendors are listening like go and license this reprint because nobody else has and buyers will still want it right people want to still see it right there's detail see it it's not one page there's more pages here there's more pages and and Foresta clients can of course but not not all of your buyers are Foresta clients and then use the detailed criteria to your advantage be different be very very clear this is what we're great at but I'm also one of the marketers that that follow the philosophy of I want to be as clear about a proposition and is clear about my ideal customer profile with the market so that the resources I put in my sales and marketing actually lead to return and what I see the majority still today do is blanket marketing we'll say all the great hype things because then we'll get as big as a pipeline as possible and the poor sales guys have to start siing through qualifying and disqualifying at the end of the day and I don't think that's a very good way to manage investment on the vendor side so that's how I would personally play it and it's a great way to already in your marketing you know disqualify those brands that are looking for something that you are not because they'll find out in the demo in the proof of con well but it is disqualify early is the best thing but the hardest thing yeah it's not incentivized I wish sales leaders would start incentivizing incentify good disqualification but it's not right lead is a lead I understand this because especially in this time having customers not knowing what to choose if somebody comes in you'll talk to them yeah it Mak sense but so can I give can I can we can we play tagline can can I give you taglines and you guess who the vendor is oh please I love this so we're we're actually preparing a one exactly but for for the realness of this thing for transparency are these taglines of companies that are actually in that wave or is it just anything whatever oh there are in that W shall I list shall I list the vendors real quick I think that's public knowledge I think that's an I think they they know it by okay if it's not enforc a citation managed to listen to this and I'm disclosing information I'm really sorry we'll cut the feed um if you tell us to okay so here's the vendors in no particular order oh important are you ready yes yes see I'm doing that no particular order I'm trying to do it alphabetically actually so it's um I'm doing it alphabetically I think I can manage that adobe big Commerce Commerce tools a b c d e elastic path and that and elastic path now I'm skipping this because I can't do my alphabet in my head um Keo Commerce Salesforce sap Shopify and Vex got it right yes and so Adobe is they their Commerce is that PHP platform they acquired a few years ago that's that Magento yes I imagine yeah yeah and then and sales forus demand wear yeah X demandware yeah okay that's right it's going to be a hard because a few of those I know intimately and a few others like not at all so see okay so I'm just going to give you three so what we're going to do next week is we're going to have these categories like let's talk about experience let's talk about trust you're going to get a a people talking about like their awesome architecture right so here we go um An Elegant set of composable apis for building e-commerce experiences Commerce Stills elastic path oh makes sense future proof your business with a robust secure and scalable Commerce architecture it it feels a little big Commerce and it feels a little sap and it is Commerce tools I'm so bad at this no no no it's okay we've played this with vendors and they didn't recognize their own tagline so you're totally F okay and then here we go compose your own eon Commerce architecture to deliver Innovative and optimized electronic Commerce experiences electronic isn't to keep a straight face like so not with coins right I cannot tell you let me think you actually picked up on the clue for this electronic Commerce experiences okay I I I'm not going to answer what is it it's sap oh really people like e-commerce are you kidding me electronic Commerce experience this is not the 80s you guys no but it feels like they're French because they're French they still call emails like your electronic letter right like they yeah they're very proud of their original words right oh yeah I French so to me like the first one that you said kind of spoke to Commerce tools for me because they're so good at like having this platform with services on it that you can choose and use and they're super super duper flexible that one would have fit quite well there but then the other I have a line like that for every single of the lers clearly but it's in it's this is so incredibly hard if you have to say something about your b2c Commerce platform whatever you want to call it they're not different enough to say something different so I would say make it quirky and make it fit and focus perfectly well to your ICP because certain in these categories are some are bit midmarket other are a little bit higher up other are like basically through the line like a Shopify for example you should say different things right yes absolutely am I still here yes oh sorry am I still here yes we're good no like it's this a little Frozen but it's an okay freeze oh lucky am I back yet no absolutely you no you're still frozen but it's okay it's not it's not a bad it's not a bad I need to reload yes now you're back and now need to tilt it again exactly so what interests me here and this is a very annoying thing we just did because I worked at Agency for the longest time and then we would have this amazing copywriter writing copy for a campaign for a Big Brand we would work on then we go to a boardroom and then six white men with beards 10 years her senior would then by a committee change this copy oh I know horrible I've had that like every agency I worked at this happens often we just did that because we don't know how well we I think we kind of know how to do it but after the fact this is so complicated so annoying if people do that to you and stay and being bold and staying bold after you got all the comments from your internal or and all the opinions of people who seem to know better is really really difficult Founders but it does yeah for instance I mean a Founder even if a Founder just says you know I often think they don't realize how much weight that carries and it's crazy mhm so so I do think you know the Dare here for the vendors is stay true to what you've got own own it own your differentiation talk about your differentiation and just stop doing and saying what everybody else is saying that's just and my dare to the buyers Tim is don't look at the DOT don't look at the look at the detail call researching analyst and and you know go a level deeper please because it's not understand data a little bit that's a huge one but I kind of understand where these marketing de lines come from a little bit because I've been speaking to a bunch of startups that are not at this level but a bit below they were all starting with product La growth free te selfs serve go up and up and up do amazing things realizing it's really hard to sell now so we'll do some sales let growth as well let's do both you can do that right of course you can but everybody is doing it well that's the same with this marketing of course you're going to write something that fits all of it I have too many anecdotes about how complicated that bit is it is and it needs to be a very deliberate choice and a very deliberate execution and it is two different things you're doing so you need to also make sure you do product L growth and sales L growth in the way it needs to manifest without clashing at any point in time that is not easy and that I think it can be done folks who've done this before of course yes and there's great examples out there but it needs it it needs a very strategic um you know marketing and Communications approach and it's not something you can just do I think the just and organically grows and you forget that you you don't actually realize you're doing it so my opinion on this and this might not fully be for this episode but I'm coming from the developer relations bottom up side of things right and so if you want to do sales let go you can clearly do that because all these people the high level people you talk to and take to dinner for example are they will tell their developers go and try this thing and so you can easily do both if they're on boarding as long as it doesn't Clash no exactly and of course you cannot scale these dinners so maybe it's a silly thing for me to say but it's it's a nice extreme to to go to Sal growth with anyways we're coming up in half an hour now is there something else we should go over I think we've gone way over than we wanted so if there's any comments from the recording we're probably going to be grilled how do you say that burned I mean people are not gonna like things but the thing is there's no leader because most of these fendors do similar things without actually showing this is what detail is awesome in whatever we do and then nobody wants to reprint this thing and put it on their blog look we're on this thing there's a problem more of the space than of the analyst right oh 100% I think this was a super gutsy really bold move and do not name a leader I thought that the data doesn't lie or the system is wrong but that's too far to say because they've been doing this for so many years maybe the space is more Diversified now than ever that might be the case but yes we should all kind of adapt and in my opinion but that's me as a developer I wish it wasn't paid for and I could just always see it and analyze it that way and then talk to customers but of course but would it be great if you would well you know actually let's stay there for one second as the last thing because I've heard this I've heard in one comment on LinkedIn someone said I didn't pay to play so I can't read the report but I think it's first how much truth is in that well there's two things to that first look my little em oh no if you haven't read the report if you haven't taken the time to read each vendor write up and listen to the criteria please do not form an opinion because it's an uninformed opinion if you only look at the dots and then second what does that mean I haven't paid to play why on Earth would any analyst firm give these reports away for free are you developing stuff for free is the software of these vendors for free can you just play around a little with an Enterprise digital Commerce solution and if you're not selling stuff oh well no this is what their intellectual property is this is their service right of course of course you need to pay to get the evaluation and to get any any report and so the big question is and this is from my silly technical brain of a developer who is not in that business if I don't have a developer or sorry don't have an analyst ation person or I don't actually have an affiliation with any of those people which as most startups have it's true will I ever be on one of those waves oh 100% yeah completely different discussion exactly yeah yeah and that's that's a completely different discussion so what I was referring to is only Forester clients can read Forester research only Gartner CS can read Gartner research and so on and so forth so as a vendor you do not need to be a Foresta client to be evaluated absolutely not to participate there you go well let's let me talk about in a second and then that's maybe a great conversation for a future episode you don't even need to participate in order to be evaluated right the analysts can evaluate you without you filling out the spreadsheets and handing in your customer references and so on because the analysts decide which vendor should be in this wave now having an analyst research agreement really helps because you understand the perspective of the analyst and you get a chance to actually you know also get guidance from the analysts on where do they see the world going and of course that helps because you're starting to use the serm terminology and you you can find more common ground in the way yes you articulate your message and that will help an analyst to faster understand what you're looking for and then having an AR professional in that capacity is really really helpful to manage that process and manage the engagement um so that you're actually getting value out of a research agreement and are not just paying um lots of money and never actually have these conversations 100% And for every vendor like now is when they start working on the next wave um that'll come out so that that really does help a lot I'm not gonna not going to lie but you do but it's not a requirement you can do a fantastic job without being a Foresta client and still be a leader and there's many examples of that that's very important because um now that I have you I'm going to ask these questions that as a developer I just don't know do I need a specif we're at 35 minutes oh yeah I'm too late last one do I need a specific amount of ARR or users to be on one of those waves or quadrants yes um every wave has inclusion criteria and that is different um there is different inclusion criteria per category and wave and they change um per year so it's also when you read the report it's clearly stated it for instance in you know a space it might be more than 50 million Revenue in another space it might be 100 in some spaces only be 10 million but also things like you need to have Global coverage you need to have awareness in the Forester or Gardener or IDC client base so if you have a fantastic product which might be the best product in the world but Foresta has never heard anybody ask about you or mention you you're probably very unlikely to be included in a wave even if you meet the rest of the criteria those sort of things play as well yes yeah this this is this is the um how do you call this the the we have we need this in our space people that can actually explain this in such a nice way because I've heard so many developers like all these analysts are they developers they don't know this stuff it's like dude shut up actually listen pay attention and there's more but this comment is the most funny this is like therapy for product marketers true true true because you I think right now product marketers and sales people have probably the hardest job in this space at this time at least from my perspective problem maybe the the the problem and the opportunity with product marketing is that it sits at the intersection of the orc and that means everybody will come to you with their specific lens the sales people with their sales lens the marketing people with their marketing lens the people and then CEO somewhere on top of it and you got to manage all these stakeholders and you got to get something together that honors customer success let's not forget customer success that honors all the different perspectives um and everybody thinks they know it better it doesn't matter what term or what campaign you come up with someone's going to hate it and you got to have a really thick skin and good relationship with leadership to live through that yeah I just learned who this was from I know who's from now and they're awesome and they should know that I know a few pmm and I know how they feel now it's it's it's rough yeah it is but that's never going to change like when you sign up for product marketing you got to have a thick skin who knows maybe product marketing can actually change these Forester wave things now because they're all everybody's in the same thing so maybe stand out then again it's evaluated against teaches so we don't know any I don't know anymore anyways we're over time I I the more I learn the less I know yeah 100% this was fun thank you I um I'm curious to see the comments of folks and if you have questions later just add them in the comments and we can talk about them maybe next time we will cheers everybody thank you so much for have a good one indulging cheers bye bye bye no are we offline