The Digital Game Plan Is LIVE… Now What?
The Digital Game Plan Is LIVE… Now What? explores how manufacturers can turn digital strategy into action by creating a better, more frictionless buying experience. Curt Anderson and Damon Pistulka are joined by Noah Oken-Berg, Co-Founder & CEO of Above The Fray Design, Inc., to discuss how a Digital Game Plan for B2B eCommerce starts with understanding your ideal customers, buyer personas, challenges, and buying journey before selecting technology. Noah shares practical insights on e-commerce discovery, improving website user experience, reducing friction, and using customer behavior to continually optimize the buying process. The conversation also explores how manufacturers can use AI as a powerful tool without losing the human expertise, judgment, and strategy needed to make smart decisions. For manufacturers and B2B companies looking to strengthen their digital presence, this discussion offers a practical roadmap for moving from strategy to execution.
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Transcription
Curt Anderson 00:01
Hey Damon, what’s happening, dude? How are you, man?
Damon Pistulka 00:03
Oh, just getting ready for the day and the week. Rolling now, actually, it’s not getting ready. It’s rolling hard.
Curt Anderson 00:09
Man, are you fired up or what? So we we have a long time friend. I said so. You know, it wasn’t pre-COVID, but it was like early, early days days of COVID. I met this handsome gentleman, Noah Okenberg. Noah, how are you, brother?
Noah Oken-Berg 00:23
Hey, good, Curt. Thanks for thanks for inviting me in.
Curt Anderson 00:27
Absolutely. So, hey, give give us a quick overview above the fray. You guys are e-commerce phenomenons. Who’s above the fray, and how do you make the world a better place? And then we’re going to dive into little digital game plan conversation today. So, who’s above the fray?
Noah Oken-Berg 00:42
Yeah, sure. We’re we are a digital commerce outfit based out of headquarter here in Portland, Oregon, working primarily with people that make stuff, build stuff, produce stuff, and and distribute it. So manufacturers and distributors.
Curt Anderson 00:59
And so, from an e-commerce standpoint, for our friends out there, you got you kind of cover it all a little bit, right? You Shopify. Talk about like the platforms that you guys. What solutions do you do you service?
Noah Oken-Berg 01:11
We’re you know, as I think technically we’re considered a solutions integrator, so we are platform agnostic. You know, we do have teams that specialize in you know, shopware, Magento, Adobe Commerce, Big Commerce, so a variety of different code bases. But you know, our our job is to bring the best tool to the to the table and and not to make you know people forced to use a saw when they need a hammer, right? So a saw
Curt Anderson 01:40
when I need a hammer. I love it. So you. So we’ve worked on multiple projects over the years, and one in particular was very special. As a matter of fact, I just ran into the owner last week. Our dear friend Kyle, and she was just a phenomenon. And they are name of the company is Styco, and as a matter of fact, I’ll pull up the website and let’s take a look here, and let’s just talk about. And she was actually on the show. We did a whole little case study on the work that you did. And all right, can you guys see my screen? Yeah, there you go. And all right, Noah, talk a little bit about you know how you handled this project. What was so exciting about working with Styco?
Noah Oken-Berg 02:19
Yeah, I mean, I first of all, when I I first met her, she had the she had the the hats behind her, and one of them was ATF, and I was like, we’re we’re bound to work together. I never forget that it was all you know the three letter hats and stuff that they work with. It it was a it was a really fun project. I think you know this was one where, in some cases, we do you know deeper, longer, more expensive discoveries and pre-discoveries. We we took we tried to take a little bit more of a rapid or accelerated approach, where we could foreshorten some of those and and really get something live quicker, and then iterate from there.
Curt Anderson 03:02
Yeah, I love it. And what I felt where you and I partner up and team really well, we started with them working on our little digital game plan process. And so you know, it’s a contract. You know, whether it’s a contract manufacturer, manufacturer with a preparatory product line, and just you know, when they get when they’re new to marketing, and you know, and respectfully, a lot of the manufacturers’ website just is not a top priority. That was the case with Styco when we tackled this project; wasn’t an absolute top priority. And so they’re like, “Hey, we want to get into e-commerce. And so going through that process, what we really focused on, and this is part of that digital game plan process, is that buyer journey. Damon, any thoughts, takeaways from you remember this project here? What what are your takeaways? What are your thoughts here?
Damon Pistulka 03:46
No, I’m just listening because this is good stuff.
Curt Anderson 03:49
So the big thing was what we started with, and I don’t know if Damon, we had a wonderful woman on our team. We dug into like the buyer personas, and you mentioned ADF, and they these guys they do amazing work. As a matter of fact, next we have an anniversary coming up-not a great anniversary, but an anniversary coming up. And and I don’t remember when Kyle was on the show. They talk about a lot of their antennas, a lot of their wear is for 911, and so and I always get chills and choked up every time I say that phrase. But she does an amazing job. So they’re supporting first responders, you know, folks driving an ambulance, you you know, you name it. And so, from out of 911, they found a lot of new solutions for their product line. Understanding that buyer journey, Noah, I know that’s a huge part of your process at Above Afraid. Like understanding that seamless demon. You always talk about like frictionless buying experience. No, what what’s so important from your perspective? Like really helping that buyer make a seamless, easy buying process. What are your thoughts there?
Noah Oken-Berg 04:51
Yeah, I mean it’s it’s funny because there’s kind of this ongoing saying in in the e-commerce world, you know, like e-commerce doesn’t save lives. But you know, in this case, it actually does getting these, you know, these this equipment out into the right folks that need it. It it actually literally does do that. So that that was a meaningful piece of this project and this ongoing work. And I think you know, when when you’re talking about folks that don’t traditionally sort of think about online and digital commerce and web and things like that. It’s even more important to to make it so that user journey once they hit the site is that much more intuitive, frictionless, and and just you know literally easy button. You don’t. I mean, already people’s attention span is short. Folks that are not used to or don’t typically do like online purchasing or any kind of work, maybe it’s typically offline. They’re going to have even less of a patience and threshold for you know if if if the link isn’t obvious, if the search isn’t showing up the right thing if you know they’re they can’t quickly get to what you need or what you’re thinking about or what you’re looking for just going to go elsewhere. So
Curt Anderson 06:10
yeah, absolutely love that. And Damon, what do you got from that? Any any anything that you want to add?
Damon Pistulka 06:16
Exactly right because there’s there’s people if you’re if you’re bringing somebody from offline purchasing experience to an online, it better be easier. They’re going to go back to another supplier they can find that they can call up and do it, and get them through that process the first and second time. Clean, easy is critical to to making them a long term repeat customer, especially in this kind of business, where they would be a long-term, you know, replacing vehicles, need more antennas or wherever they need the antennas, and and as their their fleet changes and grows or gets damaged, they’re going to need that all the time.
Noah Oken-Berg 06:56
And I would I would add something else too, Curt Damon. You made me think of when you’re you’re talking there. You know, there isn’t always like a right answer that you know that that fits. There’s best practice that you can implement, and you can. But but you sometimes the best feedback you get is once the site is live, calibrating it, figuring out, do some heat mapping, figuring out where people are dropping off,
Damon Pistulka 07:19
yeah,
Noah Oken-Berg 07:19
where where they’re not clicking the right button, you know. Maybe it’s a you know making it a blue button instead of a red button, or whatever. You know, moving it to the left, to the right, or you know, whatever how navigation works. So, having the patience to say, and the expectation to say, hey, look, we’re going to do this the first time with best practice in mind and whatever data and research we can put into it, but let’s consider that this is going to be an ongoing calibration because that’s your users will give you all the answers you need.
Curt Anderson 07:49
Yeah. So Noah, if you could take it one step further. So you and I were talking recently about like that discovery process. When you meet up with a client for the first time, what like what are things like you’re almost playing a little bit of detective to deliver the best product, best solution possible. What are some things that you’re looking for in that that early stage discovery process on your end?
Noah Oken-Berg 08:09
I mean, back to the right tool for the job. I think the first first thing is like, is it are are we needed? Can we provide value for what we do? Is this is this the right initiative that you’re even trying to undertake, and you know, don’t automatically assume. I think in business development and sales, there’s you know the certain section of folks that just you know want to make everything work and fit, and they want to you know. So part of the the sort of duty that we have is to really say, is this is this the right thing that you’re trying to do here, you know, or or is it the right time for it? Ask the hard questions about that. You know, and then if those answers are all yes, then it’s starting to you know whittle down the form and shape of it. And you know, there’s so many. It’s it’s again to make something that’s simple is super complex to do, right? Like all the stuff you know, the all the stuff that goes into it. You really have to to drill down, and so I use the analogy. Oftentimes, I I was lucky enough at one point earlier on my life to to live in Zimbabwe for a while and to do a stone sculpture apprenticeship with some of the Shona sculptors down there. And what we’d do is we’d get these giant boulders out of the ground, and you know that’s sort of like, oftentimes how you know. And if you think of the website and the final version of it is that final sculpture, you know, when you first start speaking with somebody, a merchant or manufacturer, that’s that giant boulder, and you got to chip it down into shape. You got to use you know large tools to get it down there until you’re finally down to like eight grades of sandpaper, you know that you’re you’re fine tuning it, and so the there’s a there’s a a desire to want to get into that sandpaper before you’ve taken out the the pickaxe, you know, and started chipping away at it. So you you really hopefully that analogy makes sense in in terms of what we’re talking about here, because it really it lands with me deep. It it
Curt Anderson 10:00
does. You keep keep chipping away. You know what they say. You know the the famous. You know the artist that chips. You know it’s a piece of rock. You just chipping away, and then all of a sudden the masterpiece appears, right? Right. So or
Noah Oken-Berg 10:12
like there’s a Segao Familia that just they said they just finished it after how many centuries or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully your web project doesn’t take that long. Yeah,
Curt Anderson 10:22
yeah, yeah. Good point. We don’t we we don’t have centuries. All right, I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna do shamelessly show our little digital game plan. And this what works so well for us, Damon, is like when we dive in for somebody. And what we try to do is like, how can we help make Noah’s job a little bit easier of get that discovery process going? What are their core strengths? What are they absolutely best at? Dive into that that buyer journey, go through our digital game plan process, and then we take it as far as we can go, and then we bring in the experts, we bring in the muscle, my dear friend Noah, and then he takes that project and just blows it up to a whole new level. So I’m going to share this screen, so you guys can see this screen Here, okay. So basically, this is our we’re introducing doing our our launch on the digital game plan process. And what we do is we take a company like here, like Styco, we do a digital game plan. Now I’m not going to show Styco’s digital game plan; it’s preparatory. But Dame and I have been talking about our Penn State Creamery, wonderful ice cream out of Penn State University, and so we dive into their core strengths, their opportunities. We go into their buyer persona, and then we go go into that buyer buyer journey process. Okay, and we like to call it that soulmate success path. So here, where we get that handoff for Noah, we go into that buyer and we understand like, hey, what’s the trigger? What’s the challenge? What’s the pain point? And Noah, I don’t if you remember when we first met with Kyle. You know, she was like, you know, they wanted to. They saw competitors were starting to come up on Google search. They had some other folks that were starting to get into e-commerce. What were some of your thoughts, or your do? What are your memory of when we first started working with Kyle? Any thoughts there? When like the challenges or pain points that she was expressing?
Noah Oken-Berg 12:04
Well, and I think the the challenge was everything you mentioned, so sort of the nuts and bolts of it, and also layered that on top of having not done this before e commerce wise, and so not having the time and budget like line item on the budget to to kind of do this deep dive discovery to to take all that time. So there was the the real world problems to solve that anybody might have, but yet since it hadn’t hadn’t been addressed before, you know there there was that gap, and we had to figure out how to bridge that gap, or else it’d be a knock starter. It would just never have gotten off the ground.
Curt Anderson 12:42
That’s right, and the thing, the big thing on your end, and again, you guys. So you you offer full fledged services, marketing, and so on the buyer journey process. Again, we call that so many success paths. You’ve got the awareness stage. I feel like one of your superpowers, Noah. When you guys above the fray come in, you help with that exploration stage, and really when we get into that valuation stage, now with e-commerce, it’s taken it to a whole new level. Where without that e-commerce element, you know, people are just like, I don’t want to pick up the phone. I don’t want to call you. I don’t want to, you know, like go back and forth. Like, I just want. How can I make decisions quickly? You know. So I think that’s a big component that you bring to the table again. Thinking of the multiple projects we’ve worked on together, is that you help people elevate that e-commerce buying journey experience, just making it so much easier. Any, any, we’re going to start winding down. Any parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share from an e-commerce standpoint, going through that buyer journey.
Noah Oken-Berg 13:39
No, just that it can be really time-consuming and really expensive to do. And when you can find ways to, to I don’t let’s say shortcut’s the right word, but to truncate that timeline and budget, that’s huge for a lot of folks. That you know, especially like somebody like a Styco that, you know, just you know, if a company’s doing you know a billion dollars a year, they can they can afford RMD and they they take time to have whole teams do market research and to to go out and interview you know and that stuff is highly important and and valuable, but if you’re not of that you know you don’t have that time or budget you got to figure out how to do it in a different way
Damon Pistulka 14:17
yeah
Curt Anderson 14:19
that’s you know what? I’d be remiss if I didn’t hit this. We’ll take one more minute. AI, right? Obviously, AI. You know, like what’s AI doing from e-commerce standpoint? What, like, how are you staying current, staying on top of things? What, what’s your perspective on AI for folks out there that are trying to? First off, if you’re getting trying to get into your e-commerce journey, reach out to Dave myself. We can get you connected with Noah, or feel free, please connect with Noah on LinkedIn. He would love to have a conversation with you. But Noah, what are you thinking? What what are you hearing boots in the street on AI?
Noah Oken-Berg 14:52
Well, it’s fantastic. You know, I think like anything, it’s it is you have to balance it. But by and large, it’s it’s opening up a lot of avenues for folks that you know back to that time and money thing, right? That it’s it’s becoming more of a grand equalizer, so people have access to type of work that you might not have had before because it was just cost prohibitive, time prohibitive, knowledge prohibitive. The the flip side of that is is doing more with it than you you should and before it’s ready and so I think for for us and and anybody a lot of other folks that are you know have this similar observation is you know our our job is to kind of help consult on like what’s too much and what’s not enough we have some folks that we work with that are just, you know, like we’re gonna do everything with just put everything into Cloud and you know, like erase. You know, they can erase their whole ERP overnight and never get it back. You know, all their data, like because they just type something in sideways or whatever, or they could build, you know, layers of code with built on hallucinations, but they have no idea because they’re not a developer, so they don’t know how to QA properly. Then we have the folks on the other side that are like AI adverse. We’ll never touch it. It’s not going to be part of our organization. You know, it’s it’s it’s security risk. It’s this. It’s that and the other. And it’s like no, it can do some really important stuff. And in fact, you’re going to get left behind if you’re not utilizing it for the for the right stuff. So, I think you know, like anything in life, it’s finding that balance, and and it’s so new that people are learning. The experts are still learning for the first time. So, you know, anybody that says that they are like the full blown expert in AI, understand what those credentials are. Mean it’s maybe a couple years at the most of expertise, you know, like so, and and it’s changing so rapidly that you know they they better be like spending every day. The people that I know that are the most knowledgeable with it are the ones that are staying up to date daily on on how it’s evolving, good and bad.
Speaker 1 17:00
Yeah,
Curt Anderson 17:01
Damon. Thoughts? We got a question here, real quick. What are your What are your thoughts?
Damon Pistulka 17:05
No, I agree. I mean, you there. It’s the thing that I I see in what you’re talking about. No, I think people when they try to do too much and you don’t understand the difference between something that is hard coded, something that’s you know AI gets to decide the outcome, and the and one’s black and white, and one can be awfully gray. That can hurt you a lot. Yeah,
Noah Oken-Berg 17:30
the devil’s details, right?
Damon Pistulka 17:32
Yeah, it is, and and and you know, because you can you can hook, and you said hook up to your ERP system, say, hey, I want you to run this, and it says, well, you know, it takes liberty on something, and like you said, all of a sudden every order is gone because we really didn’t want to do that anyway. It wasn’t the highest profitability or something like that, and it can hurt things. But yeah,
Curt Anderson 17:51
let’s let’s grab this question here. So AI moves at an incredible pace. New tools become available daily. What’s the best way to keep up with that, Noah, my friend? What do you think of what’s your response for that question?
Noah Oken-Berg 18:03
Yeah, I mean, the the part that I would focus on that question is the word tool. Remember, it’s a tool, and so you know, like keeping your end goals in mind, keeping what you’re trying to do with as a north star is kind of a sanity check that I’ve found works, you know, because you know if if you don’t if you can’t afford or or it just doesn’t make sense to hire somebody who’s your sort of AI sherpa that’s doing that work for you and you don’t have the time to spend learning all of it, you know, then you just focus. You know, don’t don’t focus on all the noise and distractions of it. Focus it on the the use case, the thing you’re trying to do with it, and then figure out you know how AI has improved that. Again, AI is just another tool or another layer for everything else that we’re doing. Now it’s a very pervasive one and powerful one, but you know don’t kind of make it more than that in your mind because that’s where you start to. I mean, at least personally, I start to go down that rabbit hole, and you know, drive myself crazy. So, you know, it also is helpful. Just you can use AI to learn about it, but you know, with a grain of salt, you can you know you can ask it questions, and and then, but you know, sometimes you get hallucinations on it. I’ve said, you know, for the for the questions that don’t feel right. I mean, I was trying to put a front license plate on my car because it didn’t come with one, and and it’s like drill here, and I’m like, are you sure? And it’s like, yes, drill here, and I’m like, like just pop this thing off. And I took a picture, and it’s like pop that off. I’m like, I think that’s the front camera. No, it’s not. Just pop it off, and like you know, and and you can plug this thing in there. And then I’m like, no, it’s really not. And I looked at the manual, and it’s like they were wrong. I would have pried my camera out. So just use some common sense, you know, like when you’re when you’re when you’re asking it. Like just don’t forget to use your brain. Don’t let it replace it. And I say that tongue in cheek, but there is actually studies that are already coming out that people start using less of their brain when they start using more AI. So you know, don’t don’t lose that that that human part of ourselves, right?
Damon Pistulka 20:04
Yep.
Curt Anderson 20:05
Damon, your thoughts?
Damon Pistulka 20:07
Nah, he’s exactly right. I think you you gotta you gotta know what you’re doing, and then see how the tool can help you get there faster or better. That’s all. The tool may not help at
Curt Anderson 20:19
all. Yep.
Damon Pistulka 20:19
And it may not get you there the right way, but you just have to, like you said, Noah. You have to keep making sure we’re going in the right way, and if the tool’s helping us, great. If not, we have to use something else. That’s okay.
Curt Anderson 20:30
And I know, Damon, you’re doing some amazing work with everything that you’re doing with AI. One last thing, we’re going to run. Esther says AI is a great tool that helps e-commerce. I think there’s not enough information on how best to utilize it, and a lot of persons are threatened by the tool. Noah, your thoughts on that comment?
Noah Oken-Berg 20:48
Yeah, I mean it’s it definitely is changing the workforce, and it’s changing how we do things. You know, the fact that there’s not enough information on it, how to best utilize it, is because that’s actually being invented as we speak, and
Damon Pistulka 21:03
then
Noah Oken-Berg 21:03
have all the extra noise of people that claim to have figured it out. Like that’s it’s impossible because it’s evolving by the nature of how these things are built, the LLMs and all of that. They’re they’re evolving based on every interaction with them. So you know, again, just bring it back to common sense. Like, if you’re looking to write code and you haven’t written code before, if you’re looking to build software, have somebody that does that review it or or work with them as you’re building software. You know, don’t be scared off of trying it, but also don’t rely on it as like it’s if if you weren’t already an expert in whatever you’re using an AI tool for, then find somebody who was an expert without AI and work with them because they’ll know the difference. You won’t, right? Like so, like it could it could tell me something about you know astrophysics, and I’d be like, oh yeah, that sounds really reasonable because it makes it sound so plausible and reasonable, right? Like, and so definitive. You know, I I saw the funny the funny kind of gallows humor cart cartoon the other day where it’s like, is this poison is this mushroom poisonous? And it’s like, no, absolutely not. And then and then and then it’s like, then the AI is right by the grave saying, “Sorry, I got confused. Would you like to know more about poisonous mushrooms? You know, it’s by by a grave site. Like it’s like, you know, ask somebody who knows about poisonous mushrooms. Don’t ask AI. You know, like you know, and use it to shortcut it, but verify it with X.
Damon Pistulka 22:36
Yeah, you know. So,
Curt Anderson 22:38
all right, excellent, excellent advice. All right, we’re gonna wind down, close it out for today. Noah, thank you, brother. Appreciate you jumping on with us, geeking out about this amazing, wonderful program that we had with Styco. And do us a favor, connect with hey, connect with Damon, that handsome devil over there on LinkedIn. Connect with Noah, and we wish you an amazing day. If you have any questions on e-commerce, Noah’s your guy. Hey, if you have questions on AI, ask Damon. He knows. So, all right. Hey, and Jay, check this out. How about this guy?
Noah Oken-Berg 23:08
Hey,
Curt Anderson 23:10
nice Chris. Are you kidding me? Hey, hey, go Ducks! Hope you guys have a great season. So, Chris, great to see you, brother. And all right, guys. No, hang out with us for one second. Wish you guys an amazing rest of your day, and we’ll catch you soon.
Noah Oken-Berg 23:24
Sweet, thank you.