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Your E-Commerce Strategy in a Recession

As I write this, we are just days from kicking off the 2008 holiday shopping season and I know a lot of retailers are holding their collective breaths in hopes that holiday sales aren't TOO flat this year. And while I think that online retailers need to keep their head down and hope for the best over the next 3 weeks or so, the elephant in the room is the state of the economy, and what happens once the holiday season is over. Online retailers clearly need to be thinking about how to run their business in an economy that's not necessarily conducive to consumer spending.

There's already a lot of good content out there to help online merchants over the next several months, but I'd like to throw my two shiny pennies into the mix as well. I had the fortune of starting and running an online business for several years, and grew it into an Internet Retailer Top-100 business. Not every year was a boom for us, and I learned some things about when to grow and when to hunker down. This is obviously going to be a "hunker down" year!

Here are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind over the next 12-18 months:

Cash is King: That line item in your online P&L statement that says "Net Income" or "Operating Income" is your new boss. There are times when you will want to focus on top-line revenue, or customer acquisition, but this ain't one of them. I would strongly rethink any strategy next year if the result isn't increasing the operating margin of your online business. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend money or invest in the business; you just have to be smart about it.

Don't Give it Away: One of the most important things you can do to maintain profitability is to protect your gross margin. This will be the hardest thing to do, because the economy is going to put pressure on the consumer to make purchasing decisions based on price more than ever before. Understand your margins in each category, and pay close attention to your competitors. If you can compete on price without cutting into your margin, then focus on other areas to swing the pendulum in your direction.

Dissect Your Market Spend: First off, if you don't know what the cost-to-revenue break even point is on your marketing dollar, stop reading this now and go figure it out. I'll wait....OK, got it? Good! The reason that you need to go through this somewhat painful process, is that otherwise you'll never know which marketing programs have the biggest impact on your bottom line. And those are the programs in which you should look to invest over the next year. Conversely, if you have programs that are barely above your break even line, then consider shifting some of those dollars to more profitable programs.

Invest in Analytics: This is one of those recommendations that makes sense, no matter what the economic conditions. However, when you are trying to squeeze everything you can out of your KPI's (conversion, AOV, margin, etc...), a solid foundation of analytical tools AND people are one of the most important investments you can make in your business. If you've talked to me more than 5 minutes on this subject, you know what my position is: If you have an analytics budget, spend 80% on people. If you don't have an analytics budget, or if it's in danger of getting cut, then go fight for it tooth and nail. If you look at the Top-100 online retailers, and I don't care who's list you use, you will find a common denominator of a strong analytical culture within their business.

Focus on Customer Satisfaction: Note that I didn't say "Focus on Customer Service", because it's not the same thing. When you say the words "Customer Service" in most retail organizations, they immediately think of it as a cost center and a bit of a necessary evil. Customer satisfaction is what will turn a first-time buyer into a loyal customer, and is what will keep a loyal customer coming back and spreading the word to their friends. Empower everyone in your organization to do what they can to help keep your customers happy. You can start by simply providing opportunities to start conversations with your customers on Twitter, GetSatisfaction, or FaceBook. Those conversations will create some transparency between your business and your customers, which will ultimately have a positive impact on customer satisfaction.

These suggestions aren't a silver bullet for surviving the next year or so in one piece, but should be a guideline for your strategy. At some point, someone is going to take a hard look at your P&L, and the easiest path to trimming the bottom line will be to cut people out of the SG&A expense. In the end, you may not be able to prevent this from happening, but a proactive strategy that shows some focus on the bottom line will hopefully make this a last resort.

Quick Commerce

Over the course of my current career with ATG, I've had the privilege of talking to a lot of companies -big and small - about their eCommerce strategy. One of  the things that continues to amaze me is the number of companies that over-think the execution of their online presence. The concept of eCommerce seems so enourmous to some, and as a result they never leave the starting blocks.

When you distill eCommerce down to it's most basic form, it's pretty simple: You are asking people to pay you for goods or services. Yes, it's important that they find your web site, and whatever your selling needs to be easy to find. But in the end, the weeks and months that you can spend trying to wrap your head around SEO, usability analysis and Google Analytics is a poor excuse for not getting started. Call it "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", or whatever lame analogy you want to use, but it all comes down to lost revenue opportunities.

I was reminded of this recently, when my friends at FormSpring announced their new integrated payment features. For the uneducated, FormSpring simplifies the tedious and often time-consuming process of building online forms. It seems that many of their customers were using their forms as a gateway to an eCommerce transaction with PayPal or Google Checkout. Unfortunately, those services force the user away from the site where the forms are hosted, so FormSpring decided to integrate several different payments types into their product in order to streamline the transaction process.

FormSpring is one of those little gems that can help companies impliment what I call "Quick Commerce", and it's impossible to overthink! You can go from concept to execution in a matter of hours, and begin accepting real transactions immediately. This is not only a great tool for the budding retailer or entrepreneur where time-to-market is critical, but also for larger corporations that need to get a proof-of-concept out the door with limited resources.

Using the right tool for the right job is essential, and marketers shouldn't overlook tools like FormSpring when it comes time to stop thinking about something, and start transacting.

You're Doing It Wrong: The Corporate RFP

As I write this, I'm taking a break from working on a response to a "Request for Proposal", commonly referred to as an RFP or sometimes an RFI. 150 pages of light reading, with probing questions like:

"What quality control processes have you implemented in order to mitigate the frequency and severity of errors in future releases of your software?"

Look, I've been on the other side of the table and I totally get it. This is going to be a very big project for the company in question, with a lot of internal stakeholders, and is not a decision to be made lightly. Making the wrong decision here would seriously compromise their ability to grow their business online. The first reaction when faced with an undertaking like this, is the get out the old fine-tooth comb and start combing.

Unfortunately, most of our prospective customers anchor this process with the corporate albatross of decision making: the RFP. Which is fine...if it was 1982.

The RFP was a necessary evil back in the dark ages, when corporations would only open the kimono when forced to do so through a bidding process. In fact, most RFP's were done as away to force vendors to blindly bid against each other as a way to get the best price. Somehow, the RFP has evolved into a magic document that too many companies think will actually help them make these business critical decisions.

Let's get real about this process for a minute:

- On the corporate side, hundreds of man-hours are spent preparing the RFP.

- Vendors are almost always just going through a copy-and-paste exercise when responding. And they will never - I repeat - never give out their best pricing in an RFP.

- The result is hundreds of pages of information that has to be processed by multiple people in order to be remotely useful.

I've seen this process in action as an eCommerce executive, and many times over in my current role. Not once have I ever seen anyone make an educated decision to select a vendor based on how they responded to an RFP. Even when RFP's are involved, the decisions are ultimately made by smart people who take the time to talk to each of vendors in detail, research the company and it's products, and more than often they rely on their most valuable asset: their gut.

I wish I had the reach to convince every corporate IT and Project Management office to just stop perpetuating this dinosaur of a process, but obviously I don't. The irony of it all, is that almost every company that drags us through this forced march is telling us that they have two major objectives in mind: increasing their time-to-market and return-on-investment. In both cases, they're starting out behind in the count.

Social Marketing & eCommerce

The team that I work with at ATG is putting together a corporate sponsored blog for our customers on the subject of eCommerce Strategy and Best Practices. The blog is still in pre-launch mode, but I wrote a post for it yesterday that I thought would be good for a cross-post here.

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Part of the Solutions Strategy role at ATG is to keep abreast of eCommerce trends, not only with our own customers, but in the market as a whole. I know first-hand what kind of time and energy it takes to run an eCommerce business, which leaves precious little time to keep up on best practices and emerging trends, so hopefully our team can help shed some light!

One question that we seem to be hearing a lot is, "How can I leverage the explosion in Social Networking trends as part of my online marketing strategy?". This has been a fairly hot topic at just about every eCommerce event in the past year, and  there really isn't a simple answer to the question.

There have been a number of ambitious, yet failed, attempts to try and recreate the same energy and sense of community of a MySpace or FaceBook on retailer web sites. The problem with these experiments, is that your typical Digital Millennial consumer knows when they are being marketed to, and an overt invitation to come to a big-box retailer to "hang out" and connect with other consumers usually comes off as patronizing and makes the retailer seem out-of-touch with that consumer.

The good news, is that we are starting to see some very promising examples of retailers starting to bridge the gap of social expression and eCommerce:

Leverage the Voice of the Customer: There is no question that the use of user-generated content, primarily through reviews and ratings, has been one of the most effective marketing and merchandising tools to surface in the last 2-3 years. It has quickly moved from a "let's test this and see how it goes" initiative into an eCommerce best practice. I have long been a proponent of ratings and reviews as a merchandising tool, and saw the impact that it has on conversion in my own business. If you aren't doing this today, I would encourage you to reach out to one of our partners, BazaarVoice or PowerReviews, and find out how to leverage this on your site.

Blogging: This starts to get into murky water. The key for any retailer that creates a blog, is to try and create an environment that provides relevant content to their customers without coming across as a scrolling billboard for merchandise. There are a number of pretty poor examples out there on how to do this, but I'd like to focus on the retailers that I think really nail it.

Wal-Mart's Checkout Blog: What Wal-Mart has done here is quite surprising for a company of their size: they have turned some of their corporate buyers and merchandise managers loose on a public blog, and encouraged them to write about what they think is interesting/hot/cool/fun.  The posts are informative and written by people who actually know something about their subject! As you would expect, there are many links back to product pages on the Wal-Mart site, but they are all within context of the blog. This definitely feels like more of a branding play more than anything else right now, but you can certainly see how they are also using it as a way to creatively merchandise products and categories. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be promoting it very prominently on their web site, but I think that will change as the user base grows.

Bluefly's Flypaper Blog: This has always been one of my favorite examples of a retailer's blog, and I have often pointed this site out as the benchmark for what I think a retail blog should be. The content is fresh and written by people who understand what their customers want to see, and it's done in bite-sized posts that are easy to digest. What I've always liked about the blog is how it transitions well into the Bluefly site. They promote it on their home page, and carry over the same design elements, even using the same shopping header.

Video Blogging & YouTube: Not for the faint of heart, obviously, but there are a few brave souls that have embraced this medium and seem to be using it to their advantage. The key to success with video, is the presence of a strong personality to help drive the message. Some great examples:

Ice.com on YouTube: If you've been in the eCommerce business for very long at all, you either know who Pinny Gniwisch is or you've seem him at industry events. Pinny is the VP of Marketing at Ice.com, and has posting videos on YouTube for almost a year. While this is purely a branding play, I think it's a great way to get the Ice.com brand exposed to a different consumer.

Wine Library TV: It would be impossible for me to mention video blogging without including Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary is the Director of Operations for Wine Library, a wine shop in Springfield, NJ owned by his parents. During the last few years, he has helped guide the business from $4M to $50M in annual revenue, and his embrace of video blogging has been a big part of their success. He posts videos 5 days a week, and has more than 60,000 viewers each day! This has been a huge branding success for their online (and off-line) business, and there's no question that it's had an impact on their revenue.

Twitter: This is definitely a trend that I would put in the category of "emerging", but it's gaining momentum and should be on everyone's radar. Twitter is a "micro-blog" service that allows users to send short updates to other users in their network - think blogging as a text message. You can "follow" someone on Twitter just as you would add them as a "friend" on MySpace, FaceBook or LinkedIn. There are over 1 million users on Twitter right now, and that number will just continue to grow. The corporate applications for Twitter aren't fully exposed right now, but we are beginning to see some movement. Comcast is monitoring the "Twitterverse" and reaching out to customers who are complaining about customer service issues. I would expect to see more brands begin to try and leverage this network as their users continue to increase.

The common theme that you see here with all of these examples, is that they are using some aspect of social networking to reach out and create a dialog with their customers. Whether you want to call it branding, marketing or merchandising, the net result is going to be a higher level of customer satisfaction and a positive impact on top-line revenue.

The Long Tail vs. The Paradox of Choice

I was catching up on some blog posts after returning from vacation, and was intrigued by Chris Webb's take on Borders' decision to display more book covers in their stores, which in turn will reduce a typical store's inventory by 5% to 10%.

There are a lot of different opinions on what kind of effect this will have on not only their in-store business, but the web business as well. In my opinion, this is a big fat WIN all the way around for Borders.

In-store: In a physical store - even a "big box" like Borders, you have limited shelf space to merchandise your product. This environment is where you see The Long Tail and The Paradox of Choice collide.  Borders can cram every book they can on their shelves in order to maximize inventory, but it's all for naught if the end result is a shopper so bewildered by choices and poor merchandising that they ultimately elect not to make a choice.

I think there several reasons to applaud this change:

• It's a ballsy move, and goes against what most consider to be conventional wisdom.
• They actually tested their front-facing strategy and saw a 9% increase in revenue in those stores. Border's 2007 revenue was just north of $4.1B. You do the math.
• They increased revenue in those stores, while reducing inventory. A 9% increase in top-line revenue while decreasing your cost of goods by 5% to 10%?? That's real money, baby!
• Customer research in these test stores revealed that most customers left with the perception that they were actually stocking more books, not less!

So, what does this mean to their web business? At this juncture, probably not much. On the surface, it would appear that a drop in inventory levels should have a negative effect on web sales. But, this is also a business where it's pretty easy to leverage distribution channels with Ingram and Baker & Taylor to model a "virtual" inventory system.

In the end, I don't think it will have a negative effect on their web business because up until just recently, they didn't really have one. If you look at Borders' last quarterly report, it shines a light on their web business through last year:

" The Company, through its subsidiaries, has agreements with Amazon.com, Inc. ("Amazon") to operate Web sites utilizing the Borders.com and Waldenbooks.com URLs (the "Web Sites"). Under these agreements, Amazon is the merchant of record for all sales made through the Web Sites, and determines all prices and other terms and conditions applicable to such sales. Amazon is responsible for the fulfillment of all products sold through the Web Sites and retains all payments from customers. The Company receives referral fees for products purchased through the Web Sites."

This, folks, is what we call a glorified affiliate program. No risk - no reward, and you pass on what could be your best customers right through to your biggest competitor.

So, did they make any money in their relationship with Amazon? You tell me - remember, this is a $4B retailer:

"Other revenue for the Borders and International segments primarily consists of income recognized from unredeemed gift cards, as well as revenue from franchisees. Other revenue for the Borders segment also includes wholesale revenue earned through sales of merchandise to other retailers, as well as referral fees received from Amazon as part of the Web Site agreement. Other revenue in the Waldenbooks Specialty Retail segment primarily consists of income recognized from unredeemed gift cards. Other revenue has increased $2.0 million, or 31.3%, to $8.4 million in 2007 from $6.4 million in 2006."

This is a quarterly report, so you can probably extrapolate some annual number out of this and get to about $40M, which lines up with their Income Statement disclosure of "Other Revenue" accounting for 1% of total company revenue. And keep in mind that this number includes revenue from unredeemed gift cards, international segments, wholesale, etc. and not just Amazon referral fees.

I'm guessing that in just a couple of years, Borders will be in a position where they will have no choice but to consider the effect that a decision like this would have to their online business, but today it's a zero-sum equation...and then some.

Hello, it's me...

In the immortal words of Jim Anchower:

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I got a lot on my plate these days!

If you're one of the 2 people that read my blog when I first started it, you remember that I made some vague references to some upcoming changes in my professional life. Well, that has seriously come to pass, and I've been drinking from the fire hose for the last month or so, and haven't had a moment to catch my breath and devote some time to my blog.

Shortly before the end of last year, I came to the realization that I would be leaving my position as Director of E-Commerce at Finish Line. I was in that role for 7-years, and very proud of what I accomplished over that period. Unfortunately, like any other relationship, perceptions and expectations can change over time, and it was time for me to move on to a new challenge.

After much deliberation, and some really great opportunities in front of me, I decided to take a position as a Solutions Strategist with ATG. I had been a client of theirs for quite some time, serving on their Customer Advisory Board for a couple of years, so I was very excited when the opportunity presented itself. In my new role, I'm going to working in a consultative role with prospects and existing customer, helping to align the technology with the real-world demands of their online business.

As some of the members of my new employer like to joke with me, I've crossed over the "Dark Side" now. As funny as that sounds, I'm jacked about sitting on a different side of the table than what I'm accustomed to, and it's just the challenge that I've looking for!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...Part I

As I originally alluded to when I started this blog a few months ago, I was on the verge of some changes in my professional life, the first of which has come to pass. I have officially decided to leave my role as Director of E-Commerce at The Finish Line in order to pursue other opportunities. What might those "other opportunities" be? Well, I'm not prepared to say just yet, but I'm definitely excited about the conversations that I've been having, and what the future might bring!

I've been asked by several of my peers about why I decided to leave, and all I will say is that it was simply time for a change. I presided over a period of incredible growth during my tenure, and I'm proud of everything that I accomplished. But in the end, I feel that my professional reputation was being compromised by a final product that I simply couldn't put my name on any longer. There are still a lot of very good people there, and I wish them the best of luck.

That said, I do know that Finish Line is currently looking for a VP of Direct-to-Consumer, so if you are interested in the position, feel free to email me and I can direct you to the right person. I don't have a job spec, but I have seen it and they are looking for nothing short of an Internet/Direct Marketing rock star.

Omniture's Integration Play

I haven't posted in a while, which I can blame on being in the middle of the holiday season as well as a nasty case of procrastination. I do have a few topics of interest that I want to get to, so hopefully I can get back into the rhythm of things.

I followed a press clipping yesterday to a demo of Ominture's new Genesis product, and I have to say that I'm impressed at first blush. While Omniture has always been one of the premier online analytics firms, I've held the opinion that their reporting interface seemed somewhat awkward when trying to measure traditional E-Commerce KPI's.

Granted, I've only seen the online demo and Data Sheet so far, but this looks like a step in the right direction for Omniture. It certainly addresses one of the biggest pain-points that we have to deal with on a regular basis, which is how to take analytical data from multiple sources and capture it in a way that enables you to make actionable decisions about your site. There's an adage in this business that suggests that if you have a $100K annual budget for site analytics, you should spend $10K on software and $90K on someone to manage it for you. A bit of an exaggeration obviously, but I think it illustrates the point that it's very difficult to properly manage the sea of qualitative and quantitative data  that exists for any E-Commerce business.

Here's the angle with Genesis that may enable them to stand out from their competition:

They acknowledge the fact that most of their customers use a handful of marketing applications from other vendors (email, affiliate programs, site search, SEO, etc..), and most of the common applications are already integrated into a simple drag-and-drop interface. They have basically created a common reporting platform to manage all of the disparate data that marketers have to sift through in order to make decisions on their marketing campaigns and site usability.

This is obviously Version 1.0, and everything looks great in a Flash demo, but I am certainly looking forward to getting a closer look at the Shop.org First Look event.

Community-Driven Commerce in Real Time?

I'm "thinking out loud" a bit in this post today, so please bear with me...

Since I've been involved with E-Commerce and the Internet in general, there has always been this school of thought that you need too make your site "sticky". This can mean many things to many people, but in terms of selling on-line, you typically want to build long-term relationships with your customers, and provide content to keep them on your site longer. The obvious net result is that repeat visitors buy more often and have a higher AOV. And certainly the longer you can keep them kicking around on your site, the more opportunities you have to merchandise relevant product to them and ultimately increase your conversion.

Sounds simple, right?

Wrong. The two biggest problems that I have encountered are that:

1, ) Not all of your customers really want a relationship with you. They may be very loyal to your brand, and they could be frequent shoppers on your site, but the vast majority of them probably choose to express their loyalty in a very simplistic way: they are buying from you instead of someone else. Yet, there are no shortages of E-Commerce sites that are designed only for their own definition of  a customer relationship: you either have to be a part of their loyalty program, or choose to submit yourself to building some flavor of "My Something", which is typically nothing more than profile building.

There's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, except that while it works great for the roughly 20% of your customers that choose to participate in this process, it's typically done at the expense of the long tail of your customer base. What are you doing to foster a "relationship" with your customers that don't want one? Pounding them over the head with your loyalty program or repeatedly asking them to build a profile isn't the answer.

2) Your customers probably don't trust you as much as you think they do. No matter how powerful your brand equity or market share is, there's very little that the customer will take at face value. One of the biggest hurdles that any on-line retailer has to face, is building trust with the customer at every inflection point in the shopping process. We can't really communicate with the customer while they shop, so all that we can do is try to anticipate potential problems and address them as often as possible on our site.

Enter the concept of community-driven commerce and word-of-mouth marketing. While your customers may not trust you all that much, their trust in the collective opinion of other consumers is on the rise. According to an Edelman study earlier this year, consumer's trust in "a person like me" has gone from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.

“We have reached an important juncture, where the lack of trust in established institutions and figures of authority has motivated people to trust their peers as the best sources of information about a company,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO, Edelman. “Companies need to move away from sole reliance on top-down messages delivered to elites toward fostering peer-to-peer dialogue among consumers and employees, activating a company’s most credible advocates.”

(And just to beat someone to the punch on this....yes, the irony of quoting Richard Edelman on the subject of trust is not lost on me.)

I'm a long-time proponent of this trend myself. We have been displaying very rudimentary customer ratings and reviews on our site for several years. This year, we handed off the management of this functionality to BazaarVoice, as it had grown far beyond our ability to manage it effectively in-house, not to mention our inability to truly measure the impact it was having on our site.

While I think that it's imperative to harness the voice of your customer, and I believe that this is arguably the best approach available today, it's still based on predictive behavior. You have to encourage your existing customers to rate products and write reviews, and then place that content where it will have the most impact on future customers.

As I was reading this post on TechCrunch today, it struck me that there could be an application here for E-Commerce. In short, Geesee is an embedded chat service, that allows consumers to chat about any subject, across multiple sites.

The social marketing implications of this concept aside, it immediately struck me that perhaps this could be the next step in community-driven commerce. What if there was a way for your customers to communicate in real-time with other customers who are also shopping your site, in a relatively controlled environment?

Shopping on-line has always been a fairly solitary exercise, but that doesn't mean that it has to be.  It's clear that consumers value the opinion of other consumers, so wouldn't the next logical step be to remove the lag in putting them together?

Are you a Customer, Vendor or Partner?

There are so many reasons to read Mark Cuban's blog, I'm not sure I would know where to begin to tell you why, and I don't have that much time. Just bookmark it or subscribe to the feed....trust me.

I found this post on his deal with the NBA and Sirius Radio rather interesting, and I think there's a lesson here regardless of what business you're in.

It's certainly no secret that Cuban is the most outspoken owner in the NBA, and does not suffer fools in the league office (or on the court), a trait which has cost him $1,455,000 in fines in the course of his ownership. What you may not know, and I certainly didn't, is that it seems that Cuban goes out of his way to help the NBA succeed behind closed doors:

Whenever Ive been able to help my NBA partners, I've always tried to. I have gone on sales calls with the NBA to try to close business. In one case where things didnt go so well with the Commissioner, I was brought in as an alternative. I have given talks , speechs and Q&A sessions with more than half the teams in the NBA. Whenever there is a Speakers Series held by a team , it seems like I am asked to speak. Teams refer me to other teams as being one of , if not the biggest draw they have had. In addition, if i get asked to speak by any group in an NBA city, I wont do it unless its before or after a game, and all the participants are required to buy a ticket to the game. Thats what good partners do.

That last sentence really resonated with me. Despite the fact that he's been fined enough money by the NBA for some people to retire on, Cuban still considers himself to be a good partner to their business. You may not care much for the public persona that Mark Cuban portrays, but you can't argue with his business sense. He frequently goes out of his way to help the NBA succeed, because in the end it will ultimately help the Dallas Mavericks succeed.

In my current position, I am clearly on the customer side of almost every business relationship, but I always try to urge my team to think in terms of partnerships with our vendors and suppliers.

I know that I have always been very accessible to our main partners; I've done countless reference calls, press releases, speaking engagements, and case studies for no other reason than to help our partners succeed. I've never asked for anything in return, but I can tell you that it rarely goes unnoticed, and I believe that we ultimately get a great deal of value from this type of relationship. This doesn't mean that I don't have to put my "customer" hat on occasionally. I'm  under constant pressure to keep our operational costs at a certain level, and I don't believe that our approach to our vendors diminishes our ability to negotiate the best deal we can. But in the end, we pick and choose who we decide to work with, and for the most part we end up working with companies that value a true partnership.

In Cuban's case, it's clear that something has gone very wrong with his relationship with the NBA, and they don't understand or appreciate the value that he brings to their business, which is mind-boggling to me. The NBA is clearly losing momentum with the public, and to say that they have an image problem to overcome would be putting it mildly.

Think about how this relates to your business. Most likely you are either on the customer or vendor side of a business relationship, and in many cases both, but how many of those relationships do you treat as a true win/win partnership?