MarTech Edge Interview with Vinesh Vis, Chief Revenue Officer, Kibo Commerce

Can you tell us about your background and how it led you to your current role as CRO?

Before joining Kibo, I led the teams at Oracle that were responsible for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) and B2B Commerce. Then in 2018, I joined Kibo to lead the sales function and transitioned to the Chief Revenue Officer role following the spin-off of Kibo’s personalization business in 2022. By folding the sales and marketing teams under one function, we’ve been able to implement a holistic go-to-market strategy that helps leading retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers embrace composable commerce across the entirety of their commerce operations, including and beyond the storefront.

How do you approach revenue growth, and what strategies have been most successful for you?

First and foremost, we focus on strategies that will help our clients accelerate revenue growth—no matter where they are in their digital maturity. We’ve worked with companies with existing composable architectures and companies on a more traditional commerce approach with composable on the roadmap.

Modern composable commerce goes beyond the storefront, and we’ve been making thoughtful investments to build composable solutions that span across order routing, inventory management, subscriptions, cart and checkout, and more. We continue to invest in our partner ecosystem and provide them with tools that help them innovate and drive a higher ROI for our shared clients, including pre-built storefronts and starter kits. We’ve recently partnered with Builder.io to provide a seamless integration and unified frontend commerce experience, and we’ve launched a series of co-marketing efforts, including a video series with Ignitiv and PeakActivity and in-depth how-to guides with Cognizant and Wipro.

Can you discuss any trends or recent changes in the industry that are impacting businesses? 

We’re starting to see a shift in how people think about composable commerce as more businesses—both B2B and B2C—seek composable solutions for supply chain, fulfillment, customer service, and other areas across their entire enterprise.

As the commerce world moves away from feature-function solutions and towards composability, these companies need to ensure that they’re solving their unique use cases. There are composable solutions out there that provide the APIs, but you still have to build out your functions, processes, and workflows in another platform. Kibo provides 100% universal API coverage of commerce services within a single admin UI so users can easily extend and compose the platform.

How do you align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth? 

Companies have so many options in the market that it’s becoming more complex to pinpoint their unique use cases and find a solution that can solve them. Our sales, marketing, and client success teams work together to simplify this process, starting with the first introduction to Kibo. Our sales and marketing teams introduce use case concepts externally through white papers and videos and bring them to life through on-demand webinars and interactive demos. The client success team focuses on capability adoption and ensuring clients understand how to unlock maximum value with our composable solutions.

Why are leading B2B companies adopting a composable commerce approach, and how are you different? 

Gartner suggests that B2B companies with digital commerce as part of their offerings will see 30% more revenue compared to competitors. By adopting a composable commerce strategy, B2B companies can scale their digital commerce ecosystem and more easily pivot as buyer expectations evolve. For example, Coastal Construction recently implemented Kibo’s composable eCommerce and Order Management solutions, and they now have a unified omnichannel B2C-like experience with streamlined B2B processes.

B2B organizations are historically less digitally mature than B2C, so Kibo built an omnichannel starter storefront to help them get to market quicker using modern technology that won’t be a risk to them in the future.

How do you measure the success of your revenue growth initiatives? 

We measure our success based on our clients’ successes. We prioritize helping our clients understand the broader and long-term value of composable commerce to ensure they maximize their ROI. If you want to see Kibo’s successes first-hand, visit acehardware.com as a shopper, which is powered by Kibo eCommerce and Order Management, or Google Ace Hardware—they were recently ranked as one of the top 10 franchises in the world for 2023 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

What do you think is the most effective marketing channel that, in turn, helped you drive more revenue? 

Our clients and partners have been our most effective marketing channels—when they see great results from Kibo, they recommend us to their colleagues. Analysts like Forrester and Gartner have also been effective in helping solidify Kibo’s place in the market. Kibo was named the Leader in the Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022 report, and we ranked highest for the B2C Digital Commerce Use Case in the August 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce Platforms report.

Would you like to shed some light on your technologies and how they help drive revenue? 

We use a variety of best-of-breed marketing technologies—with care—to ensure we’re providing the right information to the right people when they need and want it. We focus on delivering educational content for each stage in the buying process to help companies understand composable solutions for Order Management, eCommerce, and Subscriptions and determine if Kibo makes sense for their business.

How does Composable Commerce help deliver the desired results? 

The desired results for anyone pursuing composable commerce is to be able to satisfy customer demand in whatever way that might shift based on trends in the market. Kibo’s composable commerce helps companies simplify complex commerce by giving developers the freedom to innovate and business users the flexibility to create optimal experiences. Kibo’s end-to-end commerce capabilities seamlessly deploy, upgrade, and function in any combination to help companies meet consumer expectations and achieve their business objectives.

How are unified commerce and headless commerce revolutionizing the customer experience? 

Many of the benefits of headless are around performance—something as simple as improving the page load time at cart and checkout when multiple discounts are applied can make a huge difference in the customer experience, as proven by City Furniture. Home Hardware switched to headless and composable commerce with Kibo, and as a result, they saw a 3,000% increase in site speed.

Unified commerce is more than the customer experience—it’s about unifying the technology that powers customer experiences. For example, with Kibo’s headless and composable solutions, companies can bring inventory data to site search to ensure relevant results and boost product discovery.

Here are a couple of ways Kibo’s clients are achieving unified commerce:

• ExperienceNow, a ticketing platform for experiences, is currently using Kibo Search to deliver lightning-fast relevancy at scale and automate search suggestions to ensure customers have accurate experiences.
• Boscov’s unified their commerce technology by implementing Kibo eCommerce and Order Management—making it easier to roll out experiences like buy online and pick up in-store, which resulted in a 40% in-store upsell rate on BOPIS purchases.

What do you think lies in the future of composable commerce?

Three main things lie in the future of composable commerce:

1. Usability: There will be more focus on building composable solutions with daily business users in mind and enabling them to build ‘anywhere’ customer experiences.
2. True focus on unified commerce and composability: The market thinks these two things can’t live together without a significant amount of effort. Kibo has proven this untrue with our fully composable platform that allows companies to deliver unified experiences quickly.
3. Consolidation: We expect to see the consolidation of smaller solutions competing for their niche in the market.