Loading summary
Transcript51 lines
- [00:00]
Sree Rajagop
Retail media is rapidly becoming the go to channel for brands, aiming to engage consumers with measurable performance along the path to purchase. Retailers are increasingly empowering brands to accurately target meaningful audiences based on their longitudinal purchasing behaviors and execute media impressions across on site, off site and in store channels throughout the entire marketing funnel. For brand marketers, effectively incorporating retail media into their marketing budgets is essential for growth in today's omnichannel landscape. To address this critical need, Cornell University has partnered with the CPG Guys, along with leading industry executives and visionaries from around the world to launch the first ever retail Media Strategy Executive Education program. This immersive four day program at Cornell Tech May 5th to the 8th, 2025 brings together industry thought leaders and renowned faculty to share best practices for building compelling retail media platforms. You'll discover how to collaborate on creating best in class tech stacks, measure performance to ensure brands Access the necessary KPIs based on Campaign objectives and establish strong partnerships between brands and retailers. In addition, the program covers optimizing brand strategies using AI driven campaign design at scale to achieve marketing goals. By the end of the Retail Media Strategy program, you'll have gained a deep understanding of the retail media ecosystem and how both brands and retailers can accelerate organizational transformation to thrive in the future of performance marketing. See the link in the digital liner note to this episode to learn more about the Retail Media Strategy Executive Education Program at Cornell Tech May 5th through the 8th, 2025.
- [01:40]
Greg Pulsifer
I'm Greg Pulsfer, SVP of E Commerce at Sam's Club and you're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [01:49]
Sree Rajagop
Welcome to the CPGuys podcast. Your host, Sree Rajagop and Peter V S Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.
- [02:08]
Peter V S Bond
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course sri co founder and co host of the CPG Guys and also co founder and partner of Think Blue Consulting who has builders, connectors and amplifiers. We shape the future of commerce to drive your growth. Get in touch with us at sri@thinkblueconsulting co that's co not C O M. Please do listen to my older daughter Rhea Raj's music. That's www.rhea r aj and a new song, Hot Couture has now been out for a month and of course doing millions on Spotify and my younger daughter Lara Raj is a member of the Geffen Records Universal Music Group Katsai whose socials are now in the multi millions. Both Spotify and TikTok have crossed four and a half million each and my daughter of course has multi million followers herself. Joining me not able to join me today is my fellow co founder Peter Vs Bond because he's up in his home country of Canada and when he's not co hosting this podcast, he serves as head of Industry and Client Engagement at Flywheel, the E Commerce acceleration division of none other than Omnicom. Before we get to our guest today, let me ask you to consider following us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating there. The rating tells us how we're doing as a podcast. A review actually tells us whether the quality of conversations that we're having with our guests is exactly what you want us to now let's get to what you've been waiting for, which is the main event on this episode. Our guest is none other than the E Commerce leader for Sam's Club and I want to thank Sonali Batra from Sam's Club. Corporate Communications has been generous enough to offer us two guests this year. If you for those if you have forgotten or you haven't heard the episode yet, we had none other than a leader from Sam's Club to open up our Women's Month. I'm not going to tell you who. You'll have to solve the mystery yourself. First week of March, go to LinkedIn on CPG guys and look for Women's Month and you'll find that as the first episode. And today we're lucky enough to have another leader from Sam's Club, none other than the E Commerce leader and svp Greg Pulsifer. He comes with a solid background in digital, including brands like vf, My alma mater, General Mills, and Apple. Prior to this role, he's also a member of the NRF Digital Council. And of course it'll be a mess if I don't ask him what that is all about. I also had the chance to be with him on a panel about five years ago in Denver, Colorado, which we thoroughly enjoyed in the Digital Line episode. Of course, we'll include links to his LinkedIn profile and Sam's corporate website for listeners to access while we go on with our conversation. Craig welcome to the CPG guys. How you doing man?
- [04:35]
Greg Pulsifer
I'm doing great. It's great to see you again. I can't believe it's been five years since we were on that panel together.
- [04:39]
Peter V S Bond
And that means, Greg, it's been over. It's been five plus years since COVID happened as well, which is insane.
- [04:45]
Greg Pulsifer
If you time is flying by, I do want to say, you know, first of all, thanks for having me on. I listen to your show all the time. You've had a lot of great Walmart Inc. And Sam's Club people on, so it's an honor to be included with them.
- [04:59]
Peter V S Bond
We couldn't wait for you to be on the show so we can have a very good conversation today about the omnichannel aspects of the club. So I can't wait to get started, so I'm going to jump right in. And Greg, one of the things we'd love for you to talk to our audience about is what people care about is they want to understand careers. You made it to one of the most important roles, I would say, in Omnichannel E Commerce today that exists in America, which is leading omnichannel and E commerce for Sam's Club, specifically E Commerce. So tell us about you, the human, the person. Take us to your career growth journey in digital and E commerce. How got you. You have some spectacular brands in your background like vf, General Mills and Apple. How did all that happen?
- [05:43]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah. So first of all, I appreciate the kind words, you know, and I love the, I love starting off this way. One of the things that I've been spending a lot of time with recently and, and maybe that's because of, of the time that we've spent in the industry is a lot of younger people are, are asking me, you know, how did you get here? How did you, what was your career path? So great first question and I'll start, and I love that you want to start with the person, you know, who I am as a person. So I'll start with that, you know, as a person, you know, the most important part of who I am is my family. So I'm married, three kids. I have two girls in college, one at Oregon and one at lsu. And then I have a son in high school. Work keeps me pretty busy, but when I have time, I do love the outdoors, especially mountain biking. I feel fortunate. I live in Northern California and we've got great mountain biking and I'm in Bentonville at least twice a month and there's some of the best mountain biking on earth there. So feel pretty lucky on that side. Really enjoy playing the guitar, you know, collecting and listening to vinyl music, love cooking, you know, and travel with my family for sure. You know, from a career standpoint, kind of pivoting to that. You know, I've been in E commerce since the late 90s, so there's a lot to the journey. So I think I'll hit on the parts that I think would be most entertaining for your listeners. And I'll start my journey with the beginning, which, believe it or not, is still relevant today. And it'll be fun as I go through this because I feel like we've had a lot of shared experiences. So I think some of these experiences will resonate with you. So I'll start in college. I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was the late 90s and I really just wanted a job where I didn't have to work the weekends and I could use computers. So pretty low bar. And my first job out of school was at a software company. And I had two roles initially. First half of the day was tech support and then the second half of the day was a trade show manager. And when I look back at it, it really was the perfect first job. So having everyone in the company, especially new hires, start in tech support gets you close to the product, the software company. So you had to understand the product deeply and you're talking directly to the consumer and that's still a formula for success. And I think it's relevant today. We certainly do that at Sam's Club, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But going back to this job, we had a fancy thing called a website and our customers could download our software from it and when they downloaded it, they got a 14 day trial code and then they could send us a check in that 14 day period. And then when the check cleared, we would email them back a code to unlock the full version of the software. So I think you see where this is going. A few of us, we were young, you know, we had, we had more time than anything. A few of us went to our boss and said, hey, we're hearing that this E commerce thing is going to take off. You know, can we try it here? And the initial response, like any innovation was like, like, you know, that's, I don't know if that's a good idea. No one's going to put their credit card online. It's not safe, you know. But we did have a manager who jumped in and was like, you know, what if, if you all want to figure it out, you know, go ahead. So a group of us got together and we figured it out and it kind of quickly became a thing. So I was in that role for around four years. And then since I had four years of e commerce experience, I tried my luck at a dot com startup that unfortunately was the victim of the dot com bust. And as that was going down. I got an interview at Puma and it was a role where they wanted to move their e commerce platform from Yahoo Shopping. Believe it or not, Yahoo used to have a commerce platform way back when. So way ahead of its time. It's kind of like a SaaS platform version of E commerce and we wanted to bring that to an owned direct to consumer platform. So I interviewed for that and I got that job and we launched that D2C business. And I was responsible for the US E commerce business at Puma. But it really was my first experience working in an international company and my first experience in an overall global business. And I loved it. I loved going to Germany. I'd never been to Germany. I'd never been to Europe at the time. So being able to go there for work and experience, that was pretty awesome. I loved the nuances in the business between the us, Europe and Asia. And it was a lot of fun. Right at its core, you have items and a platform and you have customers who want those items. So you just really like to simplify it. You really just want to get those items to customers. But how people paid platforms, they used delivery fulfillment methods, I mean that was all fascinating to me. So this was in the early 2000s and I think you remember this, this is a gold rush for e commerce professionals. So recruiters were reaching out a lot and I had an opportunity to lead interactive marketing for New Balance. And you know, digital wasn't a word yet, but in essence it was a digital marketing role. And interviewed for there and got that. And New Balance was great, you know, privately held. Going from a, you know, a big, you know, public company to a privately held, big company, family run business that really was on the cusp of some amazing things. So did that for a while and. But I mentioned, you know, it was a gold rush time. And a few years later I got a call from the North Face to launch their D2C business in California. And I was in Boston. I'd always want to live in California. And my. At the time I had just two kids and they were little. So it was a, it was a good time to try and move. So I interviewed and got that job, moved out west in 2007. Like I mentioned, I was living in Boston. And then we launched that business. I still remember this vividly on August 4th of 2008. And I've told this story before to a bunch of different people, but I still remember our first order and we stayed, we were up all night getting the site ready. You know, the, the Final, you know, dotting the I's and crossing the T's. And we turned it on at like 7:30 in the morning, California time. And a woman named Sarah, I won't say her last name but she bought a moonlight ivory borealis backpack. And I remember that first order came in and it wasn't like I, you know, I was excited about E Commerce. I knew it was an industry that I wanted to stay in. But seeing it happen that first time was like the ultimate shot of adrenaline and I knew that this was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my career. So especially you know, we, we worked on that site, we built that team from scratch and that team worked so hard and for almost a year nonstop we worked on that. And to see that order come in was, was certainly a highlight of my career. So that was a rocket ship business. I did that for around five years. And then VF asked the parent company of North Face asked if I could lead digital for all of vf So I did that for another five years but they made a decision to move to Denver and tough choice for me at the time. Me and my family, we just couldn't leave California. The kids were in school and thriving and it was just something I couldn't do. So I did a stint at NCPG at General Mills. I know you spent some time there too. And I got exposed to a whole new industry which I certainly appreciated and met some amazing people and, and got to solve some, some really interesting challenges and work with some of their really iconic brands. So then fast forward. Apple had reached out a few times prior to that, but they reached out again. So I connected with them and interviewed there and ended up getting that role. And I worked in a couple of roles there. First on the channel side, believe it or not, at the time that I started there in 2019, Apple didn't have a deep digital strategy for their channel business. So we worked with a really talented team there developing that strategy for the channel partners, accomplished that main objective in that role. And then as I was doing that, the folks over on the Apple retail side reached out. I put a role on apple.com leading digital merchandising for the Apple online store. So interviewed for that and then moved over to the Apple online store. So feel pretty fortunate. Had two really fun roles at Apple and did that for around four and a half years. And now I'm at Sam's to your point earlier and I lead E Commerce for Sam's, which is a ton of fun.
- [13:32]
Peter V S Bond
Greg, I'm going to call something out here because you're the first person to come on the show as a guest and do something that, you know, week or week, episode over episode, are scale Guests here hear me always open the show referring to my two daughters. Why do I do that? Because it's important. Family matters and it should matter much more than everything else we do in life. You're the first guest that when I asked, tell me about you, the person you started with. I'm married and I have kids and I deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate that man. My hat's off to you because in the journey of life, can't fail there. So. And of course, our responsibility to the brands we represent matters equally. But you cannot fail in the journey of life. So my hats off to you for doing that. Also, I thoroughly appreciate that you patiently described your career because our guests do want to know how one gets to be an SVP of E Commerce at Sam's. Like, what are the stepping stones one takes? While no one's career is the same steps or ladders and journeys, you know, bestowing that kind of knowledge helps others be inspired. And you bought back quite a few memories of mine. You know, my first trust with computers was back in the early 80s as a child. My dad was a CFO of a British multinational in Kolkata, India. And he took me and my older brother, two years older, to the mainframe to see how automation was being executed in printing via punched cards. And of course, being 8 and 10 year olds, all we did was take away the badly printed punch cards too, so that we could draw stick figures on them and play with them. If only we had known better. And then I still remember getting my first email back in 1994 at Virginia Tech when I was a student. I was actually on mainframe and eventually I talked my way into getting a scholarship and being the computer lab monitor for the school of Business. And my first job there was actually to make sure that the dot matrix printers never fail. You know, those ones that would go back and forth. You could see the cartridge printing. So you brought back some pretty cool memories from back then.
- [15:38]
Greg Pulsifer
I remember in college to check your email you had to go to the library. That's what I had to do to a computer. We have to go to the library and check email. And it would be. Yeah, it was funny. I still remember the first time I ever went on the Internet and it was Telnet. Do you remember? Telnet was like very well.
- [15:57]
Peter V S Bond
Yep.
- [15:58]
Greg Pulsifer
So we used Telnet and I remember it was for school and it was. I was Taking a computer programming class which I struggled with. It was so hard because of the preciseness of. I understood it logically, but just how precise you had to be in the attention to detail. And I remember asking a question, thinking it was just going to go out there and then someone responded and I was like, oh my gosh, there's like a real person on the other end. It was absolutely.
- [16:21]
Peter V S Bond
Then another funny one Greg is this past weekend one of my kids was complaining about not having a gigabit speed because there's some downloads, they're very active on social media and some downloads. I had to tell them what a modem was and the noise it used to make and you brought back some serious nostalgia back today. But in any event, I'll keep us moving. So thank you for again taking time and sharing your personal life story to be where you are today. But now you're at SAM's, you're leading E commerce as SVP. Take us through the SAM's E commerce strategy and then one quarter into the year, what is the big Aha. The 2025 Focus.
- [17:01]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, yeah, perfect. So you know, I'll start with we have and you know our business really well, but just for your, for your listeners, you know, we have an interesting business model and that members pay to shop with us. So think about this, right? They are giving us money before extracting any value and that's a lot of responsibility and it's important for us that we're clear with the benefits of our membership and that we build it.
- [17:25]
Peter V S Bond
Greg, the word that comes to my mind is trust.
- [17:28]
Greg Pulsifer
They trust you, that's why they do it 100%. So as we talk about building trust that is a huge part of what we do on a daily basis to make sure like high integrity trust offering value, you know the other thing kind of to that point it's a membership business, right? So that means that we know. So if you're buying a membership, we know what we know you. We know 100% of our members, right. And that gives us some amazing opportunities. The one that comes to mind immediately is around personalization, right. So we can personalize the experience for them wherever they shop, either in a club or online. And that's something that as going back to like having a lot of different E commerce experiences. Think about the unlock that, that, that any E commerce professional would love to have by just knowing your member. And the members expect it. They want, they want us to know them. They, they've told us that explicitly. So I say that as a background to try to answer your question more directly, but I think that background is important. So our strategy and our focus for 2025, in essence are the same. And it's kind of like what's old is what's new. And I'll kind of go back and forth and I'll tell you what I mean by that. But the goal that we have across Sam's and you talked about, the trust piece of it is that we want to offer members disruptive value on a curated assortment of items and services. And by services, I mean things like pharmacy and travel. And to make sure that our members get the most out of their membership to the point where it pays for itself multiple times over. So that's a big part of it. Again, trust is a big part of that. They have to see that the value that they're getting from their membership is very real. And we're truly an omnichannel retailer. You talked about that too. Right. And we really are. And I can give you some data, I'll give you some data points to back that up in a little bit. But, you know, we lean into convenience and this is again, something our members have told us. And we lean into convenience and telling members not just on the items that they want, but how they want to shop. So that could be curbside pickup. We have a delivery business, so deliver from club. We also have an express delivery option which we launched recently, where items can arrive in two to three hours. And that continues to grow in popularity. And then we round out the options from a convenience standpoint for members that they can also have those items shipped to home. So I mentioned we're an omnichannel retailer, but I think, you know, we, we, we work in the digital space and you need data to back some of these points up. So I'll give you two data points to back that up. First and foremost, you know, more than half of our E commerce business is fulfilled from a club, which is pretty cool. And Then second, about 40% of our in club shoppers. So these are, these are members who go into the club have visited our site or app a week before making a purchase. So those are two stats among many, many, many other stats that speak about how omni our business is. And I think so again, we talk about, you know, data to back things up, but also what's the why? Right. And why is that important? And I think these data points are important, but I think what's also important, especially for your listeners who have worked in businesses where, you know, you have different channels and sometimes those channels operate separately even though it's one company. I think what's been most refreshing to me about my time at Walmart and Sam's is that there's literally no line between the club business and the E commerce business. To our members, to our associates, to our leadership team, our CEO and my boss and the extended leadership team. It's all just Sam's Club. There's literally however we, however our members want it, we want to be able to service them. There's no competition between any of the channels. It really is pretty refreshing and it allows us to run as fast as we possibly can for our members.
- [21:04]
Peter V S Bond
Greg. No doubt about that. It's one club at the end of the day, that's the trust that you know, your guests, actually your customers pay and have with you. And we know you guys are pioneers at many things. We call it out many times on the show. We've had many people from Sam's Club over the years scan and go. I still call that an industry pioneering outcome that you'll gave for your guests a while ago. I know many have followed through now, but you guys are the OGs of that particular service and at least in the CPG guys eyes. And one of the things I did want to follow up and ask you Greg, that the data point that you just gave, you know that people seamlessly, they look at the app, they look at the website and then they're coming in store. Right. Which means content has got to be paramount for you guys. Any thoughts on content?
- [21:53]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah. So it's from an online perspective, right. The content is what is building the trust for a member to get that conversion piece and it's certainly driving it into the club. I think one of the things going back to some of the, the, the, the what we want to lean in in 2025 is certainly storytelling. So I spent a lot of times at brand, a lot to my career, majority of my career has actually been in, in footwear and apparel at brands. And the importance of being able to tell those stories through content is paramount. It also helps justify price points and again going back to building trust. So content has to have to have excellent content. It has to also it can't come at the expense of slowing down the digital experience online. I think these are things that can sometimes fall through the cracks. But I think running an excellent business and sticking to the, and understanding the fundamentals of everything, even like it may not be the most fun thing to talk about in a meeting when you're looking at some amazing Content to be like, what's going to be the impact to the speed? Right. So, you know, we have mobile is a huge part of it. Sometimes mobile connections aren't great, depending on where you are in the country. So we really do want to be able to tell those stories, but we balance it with a lot of discipline to make sure that we're telling the story, we're driving conversion, we're building trust, but at the same time, it has to load quickly because if you're just sitting there with a slow site, it's not going to help. You know, one of the things I'll just kind of briefly you talked about Scan and Go. Scan and Go is one of my favorite things. You know, Scan and Go's NPS has a 90 and it peaks at 92, but it averages around a 90 NPS for us, which is, which is pretty incredible if you understand how NPS works. Those are some kind of unheard of numbers. And what's great about it too is it quite literally is the connective tissue between the online and the physical world, right? Where we said around 40% of our members who are going into a club or visiting the site a week before making site or app week before making a purchase. Well, that connectivity piece when they're in club is, is Scan and Go, right? So for your members who don't understand how Scan and Go works, walk into a club, you open the app, you can scan items as you're shopping, you can pay for those items and then bypass the traditional checkout lines. Like no one likes to wait in line. Right. So we've solved that from a SAM standpoint and taking that friction out of the shopping experience where now members can just walk out and ping it with their app. And it's a, it's been a huge win for us. And our members tell us over and over how much they love it.
- [24:22]
Peter V S Bond
You know, most of our audience does care about the NPS score and it means a lot. Those numbers are crazy good. They're actually insanely good, to be honest with you. 90, a steady 90, peaking at 92. But then that's why in Peter and my eyes, the CPG guys, you guys will be the OG of that particular capability in the hands of the consumer. So let me roll over to, you know, as I was looking through your bio on LinkedIn and I know what you do on this, but you're on the NRF Digital Council. The NRF is such an important forum for the industry every January. What does being on the NRF Digital Council mean? And then how are you and Sam's club actually contributing to make it a better industry for all of us?
- [25:06]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, totally. And, you know, one of the things you talked about earlier that people are interested in is, you know, how do you. How do you advance your career? How do you, you know, how do you learn more? I think one of the things that's important is the ability to get out and meet people and the ability to get out and network for yourself and learn and be humble enough to know that you don't have all the answers. And so that was kind of the genesis for. For me joining. It actually started for me, I think, going back, like 2013. There was. It used to be called shop.org and I was a member of the shop.org and again, going back to these old stories, believe it or not, there was a time in corporate America where the E Commerce business was marginalized. We would have to fight for the last five minutes of time in a meeting to give an update, even though we were growing at an incredible rate.
- [26:00]
Peter V S Bond
Man, you're bringing back memories big time today. Right?
- [26:03]
Greg Pulsifer
Like, you had, like, I remember, I would, I love to prep. I'm like an over preparer and I prepare for meetings and I'd have my. My normal preparation. And I'm like, all right, well, if we get squeezed, here are the three things that I want to get across. And if I get squeezed again, here's the one thing that I want to get across. And just being.
- [26:19]
Peter V S Bond
The funny thing, Greg, I remember is I remember this. At my days at Revlon, E Commerce would be the last to go. Even though I was SVP of sales, that particular portion, it would get squeezed down to 10 minutes and then we'd stay over 50 minutes because everybody in the leadership team would be curious. That's just hilarious the way it would play out back in the days.
- [26:38]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, for sure. No. And it'd be. And oftentimes almost every time, it's probably the fastest growing part of your business then too. Right. And the fact of having to go last and getting squeezed was I was like, why does that happen? And in a way, it was kind of the genesis for me to reach out and be like, all right, there's got to be other people who feel this way. And I joined the Shop.org board of directors, and again, that group turned into the NRF Digital Council. So I did that for a while. I took a little bit of a break from it when I was traveling a lot for work, and I felt like I just needed to remove my seat and give someone else a chance to be on there. But even when I was off that I stayed connected to everyone through LinkedIn and social media. And then I recently rejoined this past year and it's been awesome. So as you know, I mean, you know that, that group. Well, there are so many E commerce legends on that council and people that I've been able to make great friendships with. It's funny, you know, prior to the meeting starting when we're all just kind of, you know, waiting to jump in our seats, the stories that people have told and this, like, it's just, it is a trip down memory lane. And, and the other part too is that a lot of these same people, you know, they're in the same position that you and I are in where, where now their kids are, you know, in college. And you know, my middle daughter has told me that she wants to get involved in E commerce, which is incredible when you think about it. Right? Like I, I was just, it's, it's so humbling and it's so, it, it's such a great, like, you know, it's just an interesting journey, right? I would just say it's an interesting journey. And I think one of the cool things about the NRF Council is that there's a lot of people who've been on that journey and there's some new people who have, who have joined it as well. And then I guess for your, just for your, for your audience, the, the nrf from an NRF standpoint, just to kind of fill them in. So the National Retail Federation, right. The mission is to advance interests of the retail industry. They do that a number of different ways. Advocacy, certainly communication, education. They also provide industry research and insights which help, you know, businesses make good decisions. And this is kind of what I was talking about earlier and it started with shop.org is when you're, when you're internally in an E commerce business and especially a long time ago when you're trying to pitch an idea, you know, data is super important, but also having a kind of a third party kind of validate that for you. And shop.org and NRF play a big role there. You know, I think for Sam's Club and really anyone involved in nrf, you know, we're able to get back to the industry with some of the non competitive insights that we see in behavior. You know, we have a big business so we're able to share that back. And on the flip side, we benefit from the insights of other thought leaders. And then I'll Say, just also, you know, it's a great support group for problem solving too. So chances are if you have an issue to solve, you know, someone else in the group has already solved it, or someone else in the group can certainly point you in the right direction on trying to fix it.
- [29:30]
Peter V S Bond
Now, the CPG guys, Peter and I want to say thank you to you for doing that valuable role of being on the NRF Digital Council. It's one of the councils which can influence the industry, but most importantly, also be an advocate for a channel of growth which still continues to deliver across the board for brands and retailers. So sincerely, thank you for being a advocate in the industry and not just being an SVP of Ecom at Sams. Now let's get to the interesting moment we've seen. You know, prior to the recording of this episode, we kind of said it's been five years, six years since we saw each other, since that fateful day being on a panel back in 2019. Since then, Covid hit pretty hard. You know, E commerce went from, as you mentioned, you know, back in the days and I was very much a part of a be last on this presenter for the strap plan to the number one topic across the board in brands and retail in the industry for a period of time. Of course, now it's plateauing, given where the industry is and different issues in the industry, etc. But if I look purely at just E commerce, right. How did it fundamentally change over the pandemic? And then what has been the next big shift? Right now with a bunch of trends coming in, like AI data is starting to become more and more of a commodity. I'll give away the plot and say we had Diana Marshall here to kick off Women's Month and she said something very important to us on the CPG guys, which the industry cannot wait to get started working with. Y'all is. I know it's in beta and in test mode, which is ltv. Brands do not know how to do ltv. Y'all will become an OG second time over in our eyes with ltv. Right, so take us through, you know, how you think about what happened during the pandemic and then how you're preparing for this post Pandemic in Ecom specifically.
- [31:16]
Greg Pulsifer
Okay, so here's a. A fun fact. Diana Marshall is the one who actually hired me at Sam's Club. So that episode was amazing. She is, she's an incredible leader. We are, we are so fortunate to have her in the role that she's in at Sam's. So Going back to Covid. So I was at Apple during COVID and I remember getting a phone call when I was driving to work to say to turn around. It was like a fri. It was. I think it was a Thursday or Friday. And they said, oh, turn around. There's this thing. We just got to figure it out and, you know, just. Just work from home today. And I was like, oh, interesting. And then Monday came and they said, yeah, you know, we're gonna. Just gonna wait a little bit. And then it turned into a couple of years. And then the entry into that even after was, you know, one day a week, two days a week, et cetera. So it was a wild time. And you're right, I think it's going to forever be a part of the evolution of E commerce. And I think how things have fundamentally changed and what we can do about it, I think it's a mix in a way. I think a lot of this stays the same. And I'll explain what. I mean, if you've ever worked with me in my teams, you'll hear me preach all the time about the importance of running a good business that's excellent in the fundamentals. And then obviously we need to control expenses. But I think the fundamentals are something that, you know, earlier I mentioned in the show, I mentioned, you know, page load time, like, don't take your eye off the ball on that. Right? Not the most exciting thing to talk about, but it is a. It is a key part of the fundamentals. You talked about content, right? Content. Critically important. Like, these are things that, that we know, drive conversion, you know, being in stock. Like, these are the things like just run the excellent business. So I think that part stays the same. But I think Covid was a great reminder to all of the businesses on the importance of that. And I think what's changed is really the heightened importance of pressure testing and disrupting yourself before someone else does it. And I love, you know, we talked about shop.org and the digital Council. I'm a fan of E commerce. I'm a fan of the industry. I'm a fan of the history of it. And it reminds me of that famous FedEx scenario planning case study. I'll just. I can recap it briefly because I tell my. I tell my teams about this all the time. They're probably tired of me hearing about it, but. So FedEx was building scenarios, and one of the scenarios they were building was during the avian flu. And during the avian flu, they were like, hey, we need to figure this out, because if this thing takes off and our planes aren't able to fly and they're grounded, we need to be able to continue to get packages to our customers. So they ran that scenario. The avian flu was controlled, so it wasn't as big of a pandemic as they thought it would be. But then the volcano. Do you remember there was a volcano in Iceland, had like a 26 character name, erupted. Right. And it grounded all planes in Europe. I remember I had a coworker who was on their honeymoon, and they were stuck in. They're like, oh, we're stuck in Europe. Like, oh, that's. That's not the worst thing.
- [34:06]
Peter V S Bond
Yeah. It was the height of the ash going up, way, way, way, like 3, 4, 5,000ft, which was impacting pretty much air traffic all of Europe.
- [34:16]
Greg Pulsifer
Yep, for sure. So you remember it well. So FedEx was like, hey, we're actually prepared for this. And they dusted off the playbook for the avian flu, they said, so our planes can't take off because of the. Of the ash in the air, but we actually have a plan to be able to reroute packages on the ground throughout there. So I think it's a cool story because, you know, they ran a play of a scenario that had a different origin, but the end result was the same and they were able to navigate the disruption. So going back to your question on Covid, I mean, that, that reminds me of COVID right? Like, how do you disrupt yourself and scenario plan your business so you can adapt and thrive, but at the. Again, again, you know, at the core, you have to run a business that's excellent in the fundamentals and to, to have the discipline to, to tell yourself, okay, we're going to run the business. And then. But how would, how would we disrupt ourselves? Right? Like, what would happen? Like, what would have to happen for our business to go sideways and have the discipline to run those scenarios? I mentioned I was at Apple during COVID but I'll give you one Sam's example that the team has shared with me on innovation and being innovative from a standpoint of solving problems. I talked about curbside as a part of our business. Curbside pickup started as an experiment during COVID and that was to provide members access to necessities during the pandemic. And now it's a critical part of our business and our value proposition to our members. Our members tell us all the time, they love it. We spend, spend a good part of my day. How do we optimize the business? On curbside, we visit clubs. We were just in Puerto Rico visiting clubs there. Not the worst business trip I've been on, by the way. You know, the curbside business there is great. We look at everything. All the metrics that you would look at in your regular e commerce business, we look at from a curbside standpoint, too. And that's something that started as an experiment during COVID Awesome.
- [36:02]
Peter V S Bond
Great. Thank you so much for that. Reminder to audience that I'm speaking to Greg Pulsifer, senior vice president of E Commerce at Sam's Club. So, Greg, no successful leader really gets there and can execute and be flawless without a team around them. So tell us about your team, how you motivate them every day. What does steam mean to you? And then what's your approach to people leadership?
- [36:26]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, this is a great question. Again, kind of goes back to some of the things that we were talking about earlier, where people are, you know, they're interested in your career and how you advanced your career to your point. And it's well said. The team is everything. Right. So we have great teams at Sam's. I'm really humbled by their dedication, and I really do consider it an honor to be able to lead them from a. From a standpoint of motivation. I mean, I think it kind of goes with my style of leadership. So I subscribe to Radical Candor, like Kim Scott's book on. On Radical Candor. And then just in essence, the way it works is you basically, you generally care about the people you work with, not just their performance. And I like this because it fits my personality well. But then I can build trust by being human and supportive. And then so for me, since I have the trust, I can also challenge directly, and that's with honest and clear and specific feedback, even when it's uncomfortable. And then I think what's been. I don't think I know what's been successful for me and what I try to build on my teams is that this goes both ways. So I'll tell you, my team is not shy about giving me feedback. So feedback goes both ways. They are very clear to me about what they like and what they don't like, and it's actually awesome. You know, I want the experts I've hired to be comfortable telling me what they think. You know, I certainly have my opinions and I hold the final vote. But this openness leads to healthy debates, you know, where the best idea wins and people feel comfortable speaking up. And I'll give you just a quick example to try to bring it to life, right? So if I were to, if I were to lead by saying, and I've had bosses like this, I'm sure you've had bosses like this too. You know, I'm the SVP, got 28 years experience. You know, I run the risk of people just waiting for me to tell them what to do, right? And our business is big and change is constant and I need to make sure that everyone feels like an owner of the business. So now every voice counts. So you're hired to do a job. You are empowered. We'll celebrate the wins, we turn the page on those and then in the bad news needs to travel fast. Some, something is wrong, we fix it immediately. But, but I think just to recap it, I mean, building the relationship with someone where you generally, you know, you want them to be successful, you, you generally care for them, you want the business performance to be great too, but you generally care for them. It allows me to, when something isn't going well, to be like, hey, this isn't good, right? We're not like, what are we doing here? Right? This isn't working. And then they tell me the same thing, like, hey, you know, those decisions weren't the best decisions, or they, this is how the team is feeling about this, or we probably should do this instead. And then we pivot and it's, it's been, it's worked really well. And I, like I said, I feel, feel pretty fortunate. The teams, all the teams I've led, I've led them the same way. As consistent as you can be. We, we do, you know, assessments on yourself, you know, Hogan assessments and Myers Briggs. And I can tell people it's, I literally have them from, you know, a decade and they're exactly the same every time. I'm like, I can tell you how this is going to come out and it comes out the same now.
- [39:16]
Peter V S Bond
You know, a fun exercise would have been for me to ask you what your MBTI is, but I'll share mine anyway because this, you just mentioned transparency. A lot of you might not believe my actual mbti, but it's actually entj. So for people who know what that is, I don't like the J part of it, but unfortunately it is who I am. So we can change that. But I also love that you said transparency. Transparency is something we owe to our teams and those who work with, even people that we work with on a day to day basis and people that we interact with as, whether it's brands, you know, vendors, clients. It really doesn't matter because your guest expects transparency back from you as well. When they come into the store, your customers expect that. That's the trust they place in you in the first place. Right. So that is awesome that you make it a center point. But the most important part of that was in that piece, what you said is it's a two way street, which means you're open to feedback, which is amazing because a good leader always wants to improve themselves. And one of the ways they do it is they seek feedback and then they use the feedback to do, to do better for the community and for their teams. So now I'm going to go to the fun question of the day, which is of course on the show. You can't get to visit us without me asking you something about retail media. So the truth about retail media, while it's still misunderstood heavily in the industry, is it's fundamentally changed shopping. That's our reality, whether everyone wants to accept it or not. So how are you in your role as a leader of E. Com being in such an important, pivotal role that connects the store with online, but most importantly, it's about one Sam's as you mentioned. So how are you partnering with your friends over at map, which is of course the member access platform and leveraging this for your customer experience, for your guests and customers?
- [41:05]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, it really, I mean, I think you said it well.
- [41:07]
Sree Rajagop
Right.
- [41:07]
Greg Pulsifer
Like it's fundamentally changed shopping. And I firmly believe that. And first and foremost, you know, you talked about our friends at map. I have a great partner in Harvey Ma. I know you know him well. We work closely together and we really lean in on the member experience. And I'll tell you, I think I thought I knew map. I thought I knew it well. But Harvey has been, he really is an innovator and a thinker in this space and he's really kind of pushed us to think of it even more broadly. But one of the ways to your question that we work together is really using the advertising to complement the member journey. So as you know, I'm sure from your, you remember, from probably many of your, your different experiences that you've had, is that some of our members are general customers. They make the same journey, right. They make it every time for their shopping trips. And there's benefits to that, right? Because you offer convenience, speed, you're removing friction, like those are good things. But at the same time, on the flip side of that, it's hard to get them to, it's hard to introduce new categories to them and new items to them. Even through personalization, because you can try to personalize the experience. But they're going in like, you know, they're reordering their items, which we love, which is a great feature and that we offer. They will go in. They say they know exactly where everything is. They search for the same items, they save their lists, they reorder their cart. Those are things that are great. But as I mentioned, it's really hard to get to introduce different items in different categories. And at Sam's Club, we have a highly curated assortment that changes. It changes based on what members tell us. It changes based on the feedback that we get through, how they're filling in surveys and what they're searching for. So we're able to leverage MAP to show members new items. And we're able to do this while. We're also able to do this while the members are in club. And we do that with Scan and Go. So we just talked about Scan and Go and. And how much our members love it. And it's that. That physical connectivity, it's the connective tissue between the digital and the physical world. Well, now we have Scan and Go ads. So which industry is a. Is a pretty competitive advantage. So we really lean in with the. The MAP team there to. To make sure that we're serving up the most relevant ads that we're testing. We test all the time. I mean, we're literally testing. There's probably, you know, a dozen different tests going on right now where we're trying to show the right items to members, the right advertising to members, and then we closely look at the satisfaction. Right. Like, we want it to balance. Right. We don't want to. We want to complement the journey. We don't want to distract members from what they're trying to do. So there's a. There's a balance that we look at there as well. But it's. I feel like from my standpoint, like I mentioned, I thought I knew a lot about it, but I've learned a ton this year, and it's something that we're really leaning into.
- [43:50]
Peter V S Bond
You know, the Scannon GO ads, again, are an OG moment again. Right. Like, I probably called you guys OG several times on the show because Peter and I deeply believe that's the case. But for brands, right, to get a. The ability to have an actual ad at the point of pos.
- [44:07]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah.
- [44:07]
Peter V S Bond
That is like, wowza.
- [44:09]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah.
- [44:09]
Peter V S Bond
And brands should pay very close attention to that and get in touch with map. Get in touch with you guys in terms of what that means and how they can actually use it. I can't think of a better way to complete the funnel in a full retail media today. Is full funnel no better way to complete the funnel than be at the point of purchase? So, Greg, let me wrap up this episode by asking you a very important question, which is what trends are you following these days? Right. There's AI seems to be a word that comes up again and again. There's been no guest in the past 100 episodes that doesn't refer to AI, are there. I'm guessing AI is part of what you're looking at. But in addition, are there other tech trends?
- [44:51]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah.
- [44:53]
Peter V S Bond
Are there the tech trends? Are there digital trends?
- [44:55]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah.
- [44:56]
Peter V S Bond
Are you reading more than you ever have? Like, what's going on?
- [44:58]
Greg Pulsifer
Yeah, sure. So all the above. I, I mean, I feel like I would be kicked off the show if I didn't start with AI. So I'm going to start with AI. So certainly AI by the way, we.
- [45:06]
Peter V S Bond
Wouldn'T do that to you. We never kick you off the show. We love our friends from Sam's club, so let's be clear about that.
- [45:11]
Greg Pulsifer
I appreciate that. I think what's, what's. I mean certainly AI and what's cool about AI is it literally changes every week. And that's been, that's been really fun. Walmart Inc. In general, so we're part of Walmart, Walmart and Sam's. They've been great on this front. So they are. We've had workshops, they are encouraging us to lean in. They're giving us access to tools and training. So we're increasing our productivity, which is pretty great. Right. But we're also using AI in a number of different parts of our business. So we, our personalization engine that we use to personalize the experience. As I mentioned, we know 100% of our members like that's driven through AI. We use AI to measure. You talked about content earlier, right? We use AI to measure content accuracy. Right. We have a lot of different items on our site. We don't have a billion people on our team from a team size standpoint. So we really need to use these tools to leverage the accuracy because of the content, because we know it's driving conversion and it's important we're building that trust. You're adding it to your cart and your purchasing. You know, looking forward, I've been reading a ton about agentic AI and I think the potential there. I know everyone, like that's probably the most buzziest of buzzwords right now. But there's something to it based on what I've read, it seems like there is a huge potential to unlock parts of the business. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that. I think in general we lean into, we talked about leaning into conveniences and AI certainly helps us with that. But outside of AI there's a couple different things that I look at as well. So I mentioned that half of our e commerce business is delivered from a club and we spend times at clubs trying to make sure that we're optimizing that business from a labor standpoint and a time to fulfill standpoint. So members aren't sitting in the parking lot for a long time. So I spent a lot of time looking at just overall last mile capabilities and trends. There are benchmarks from all over the world. So there are other parts of the world. Certainly China does an amazing job. India does an amazing job on last mile and speed. So I connect with the teams there quite a bit. I also just in general I'm just a fan of E commerce. I'm reading as much as I possibly can about that and I mentioned it's a super important part of our business and our members are continuing to lean into it and they've told us they like it. So we want to make sure that we're optimizing that. I think the last one that I'll mention again is it's really kind of fundamental. But we get a daily report card in e commerce. Everyone gets it right? Do your customers or your members like you or not? You get the report the next day in the morning. I love to know what's going on during the day. So real time analytics, real time monitoring is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. We have a really talented data and analytics team who built dashboards for us. We can see what's going on on the site. Now I have to balance, I have to balance the reactions to this so I don't wear the team out on what's going on and not but like it will tell you I've looked at it. I look at it so often I have it running in the background right now. Like I can see what's going on in the business if there is a problem. I mentioned earlier bad news needs to travel fast. If there is a problem we can get in front of it. Even a few hours at the scale of our business makes a big difference. So constantly looking at different types of monitoring tools to see how the business is performing from a top line standpoint. Right. Because item isn't shipped yet so it's really just kind of top line demand but it is a big part of what we look at things like obviously traffic conversion channels in which they're shopping items that they're buying, search terms that they're looking at. It really is we talk about this a lot. You can be successful in E commerce as an open book test, right? All your data is in front of you. You can make decisions based on the data. If you, if you look at the data and you stay close to your we are, we call them members but you stay close to your customers really. I mean you have so much wind in your sail to be successful. It's kind of right there in front of you. And then run that, that business that's, you know, based in strong fundamentals and like I said, you're going to grow. It'd be impossible not to and lead a great team.
- [49:18]
Peter V S Bond
Hey Greg, my hats off to you as a senior leader for wanting real time metrics and staying on top of it. That attention to detail is what results for the brand you represent, which in this case is Sam's Club, right? In your E commerce leadership role, let me remind our audience that you can find all of our content simply by going to a web browser and typing cpguys.com as the URL. And if you think you're your company is thought leadership to contribute to our community discussion here, drop us an email@contactpguys.com again that's contactpguys.com maybe you can join us on the podcast. Don't forget to drop us a reading@ either cpguys.com on the website on the navigation bar up top or on the Apple podcast. Both the rating and review mean the world to us to our LinkedIn followers. We can't say thank you enough times for the clicks, likes DMS comments, meeting us at conferences, wanting to be on the show, shooting podcasts with us on the go on the road at trade conferences. We can't thank you enough and to of course all our sponsors. Without you the show doesn't exist. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you Greg for making time today, bringing back memories and most importantly having a great discussion on omnichannel and E commerce. I can't say thank you enough time. So thank you for joining me on the CPG guys.
- [50:28]
Greg Pulsifer
I appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me on. It was a lot of fun.
- [50:31]
Peter V S Bond
That's a wrap of this episode. We will see you soon on another episode of Wait for it guys. The CPG guys.
- [50:50]
Sree Rajagop
The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPGuys, LLC or the individual author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPG Guys, llc. The views expressed by Guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. The views expressed by CPT Guys LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CPT Guys LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or other damages arising out of any individual's use of or reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we present in this podcast.