MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast

Stephany Lapierre | Tealbook

November 30, 2021 Rusty Pepper & Dana Small Episode 13
MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast
Stephany Lapierre | Tealbook
Show Notes Transcript

This week on MarPro we sit down to talk with Stephany Lapierre the CEO and Founder of Tealbook  the leading supplier data foundation that autonomously maintains supplier master data, powers e-procurement technology, drives supplier diversity, and enables supplier performance. Using AI and ML, TealBook gathers, predicts, and refines supplier data to build the world’s most comprehensive supplier intelligence.

FOLLOW:  LinkedIn/MarPro 

LISTEN, SUBSCRIBE, & SHARE: 




Dana:

Hey everybody. This is Dana small, and

Rusty:

this is rusty

Dana:

pepper. And welcome back for another edition of Mar pro

Rusty:

the marketing procurement podcast.

Dana:

So rusty it's been a long one since we chatted

Rusty:

last, a couple of we had a nice fall break. It was, we took the little break here and the kind of in the fall And. Yeah, it was nice. I know you went off to Disney you and had some fun. Yeah, I took

Dana:

the kids. It was great. I would not suggest going on the weekends because even to try to get a burrito at a Stan takes you 25 minutes, uh, going during the week was great. And to see the excitement on my kids' faces, that's just invaluable, right. To see. Innocence and love for life and everything that is magical. And yeah, it was great. He does a good

Rusty:

job. They build that customer service is on point. So I'm glad you had a good time and Hey, I'll obviously I know we just wrapped up the Thanksgiving break and everybody's

Dana:

Yeah, can I say I'm looking forward to it? Cause it tends to be our busy time, but, um, I know you're pretty busy too. So

Rusty:

it is, it is definitely a busy time, but I think I I think there's right around 20 business days left in a year. Really? She was just insane. And what really fast speaking of going fast, we should probably She has been growing extremely fast and as somebody you've known for quite a long time, and it is also if I'm not mistaken, a supplier of yours. Yeah. Yeah. So

Dana:

it's super cool. Um, it's this technology called teal book and it's actually changed and evolved, I years that I've used it, but it's grown massively from, you know, having maybe five employees to now over a hundred loss of investments, things of that sort. And since we're at the beginning stages, I got to know the CEO, and I thought it would be good to bring her on and talk about, you know, what it can do for. Sourcing procurement and where it's headed in the future and things of that sort. So why don't we kick it over to Stephanie to introduce herself and start to discuss.

Stephany:

So, first of all, thanks for having me. And, um, so my background, I started actually, I started in marketing, I don't know if they didn't knew this, but my first real job out of university, I Um, medical communications and advertising for pharmaceutical companies. Um, and then from your sense, now it's all making sense. I already had the bug for entrepreneurship, but being I was employee number four and by the time I left, I think they had 50 or 75 people. And then I went and worked for a pharmaceutical company. I was in sales and then marketing. And, um, it's where actually the idea of. Tilbrook originated because as a marketer and I was in a pretty competitive space, Like where are there's innovative suppliers are doing great things. And all the suppliers that invited me for lunch and coffee that promised me innovation, 98% of the time, I would walk away going like. Not super innovative. It's the same thing they can, you know, how do I find innovation? It was very time-consuming. And so a few years after that, I, um, I got pregnant with my first daughter. I've got three daughters now. So about 15 years ago, I decided to start my own business. And the premise of that business was to help mostly pharmaceutical And, um, and mostly marketing, like where do I find these suppliers that can help differentiate my brand based on some of the challenges And a lot of that came from suppliers that were doing things that are innovative or bringing suppliers together to brainstorm on something that could be innovative. And I really, you know, I love that because I was able to, um, build a process other functions to come to the table prepared with the same expectations. And, um, and the suppliers that were coming were also, uh, setting expectations and the process works every time we ran the process, it generated really. Cool ideas and it gave business to the suppliers and then And so that's, that was called matchbook. And so that was my consulting business. Um, and the, the way I got into procurement is because the process that I had built was a six weeks process innovation. And at the time procurement was start to build a strategic story saying as a way to bridge the gap between procurement, that was traditionally saving money. And, and the business I was looking to spend money. And so my clients start asking, could you teach our procurement And so using your process. So my firms start to build strategic sourcing function. In the early days. And when I would hear teens that would build a seven step process I came from the business side, thinking like seven steps just means Can you not give me the information? And he always took, you know, from the business perspective, it took time. It was not adding value. And to me that the problem came around, not the resources It was just that if you don't have information, you can't influence, you And so I saw a lot of friction there and then a lot of my friends went to biotech companies that were raising a lot of money and they were. You know, spending a lot of money and, um, recalling me initially for really ad hoc things and then realizing they've never built supply chain before. They've never built procurement and they didn't love procurement because for Roadblocks friction about like procurement. We actually rebranded to say, it's not about procurement. It's about capital efficiencies, right? You're you're, you're buying from supplies you need. You know, some biotech companies, even pre-commercial, we'll Like you need so many suppliers along the way. And if you don't buy, if you're not efficient with transparency and you're hiring to do their job faster, you're gonna end up with a lot of duplication of effort, a lot of friction, a lot of contracts you shouldn't be signing. And so my firm was building procurement functions for these And I did that for. And about nine years and I worked across hundreds of companies. And so now what led me to tail book is in that, in that working with these biotech Again, soon as we started to do things, systems to automate invoicing, payments, We start creating disparity in the data. And then suddenly we lost transparency. We had more friction, you know, more need for services to maintain all of this information or collect information or supplement information. And I could see us very quickly running into the same issues. And then I became convinced at the times, like it's not a software problem. It's like, People problem, it's really a data problem. And then I decided to make it my mission to solve it.

Dana:

And that has been a heck of a mission in the past five years. I have to say deal book is definitely gone, at least in my opinion, from really Change. I think the industry in that space, right? I mean, there's no other products that do exactly what teal book does. And I think it's cool. All the technology, you have the AI going

Stephany:

and even influence it, inspired your logo on online

Dana:

without it, you know, I mean, there is that teal part to it. So actually on that though, I speaking of teal wordy the name teal book.

Stephany:

So the first inspiration for this whole idea, when I started was exactly, they know the colors of Mar pro was teal and grape. And I was at a large, large client. And before I left their office, she said, Steph, I need to introduce you These guys, like I knew them from before they started their own startup. And they've been adding a lot of value to my brand. And I was like, oh great. Like I'd love to meet them. And then she bent and she grabbed a two inch binder under Cause that's what, but what it was, it was a binder full of business cards that She was in marketing and she spent 10 minutes flipping through this binder. Define this business guy, she couldn't remember the name. Cause it was like a funny acronym. Just hold on. When I see the card I'll know. And when she found it, she gave it to me and says, can you write their contact Cause I don't want to lose it. And as I'm sitting there, I'm going like, this is insane because I had to be in the room with her, for her to think about recommending leveraging this information across all the different brands and Earl and company to promote this amazing company that she's worked with. And I also knew that corporate was trying to consolidate their supplier base by 50%. Remember that like could reduce the supplier base by 50% and They're doing it based on spend and risk, not being. You know, not having a visit with these amazing small companies that were doing would have champion rights introduced to the business and, and onboard them, which And then I was thinking about the supplier and the binder, like what's the use get promoted across the organization to generate more visibility for your For other people across globally, that's looking for innovation to be able to do. Just at the tip of their finger, find a supplier that's delivered And so, you know, the concept of having this virtual binder, this card book, this really useful for people making decisions everyday and accessing this information. Um, in a way that they can better influence business decisions and then give corporate the kind of visibility across all the suppliers that they're spending $20 million with, or a hundred bucks, right. Depending on who's delivering value, that would be, to me, it And that's where the word chill green was taken by the IRA. At the time, it was a bit now we're not just in farm about that. We're across all sectors, but at the time it was like a kind of a geeky spin on the orange book as the FDA, the purple book is the biology book. And so it was a teal book, kind of your and steel corporation, open, transparent. Right. So it's sort of, and it inspired my wallpaper,

Dana:

which I do. Like, it looks really

Stephany:

nice, but what I found out was I can't wear leopard. It's too much jungle though. So you have to actually decide what I'm going to wear or green,

Dana:

That's kind of funny. No. And, and I remember when, you know, in the early days thinking, It's like a LinkedIn for suppliers. And that I think was our original intent of going, Hey, we're This is ridiculous. We don't need 50 translation suppliers. We don't need 50 agencies. And because we don't have people talking across the organization, which I think. Commonplace everywhere. Right? Not just pharma. I think it's such a key, uh, kind of technology that can just simplify that you can go in and search and say, Hey, I don't have to find a new supplier. I can already, I already have one on staff. I already have one under contract and I can just go with them pretty quickly.

Stephany:

Um, and I'll say no right. If people can't find the information and they go on Google, they call consultants. And they introduced new suppliers to the organization. And if you think of like just a searching, sourcing, contract diligence, records on all these new companies, there's a huge cost and a liability. So many new companies, and it's not that it's not helpful. There's some categories where you need to introduce new suppliers because you need to increase competition or introduce innovation. Or if you have diversity target or sustainability target, et cetera. But there's some categories where you don't really need it, because if you have not take like recruiting firms, say you have. 400 recruiting firms in your system. Like that means you're maintaining 400 relationships with different recruiters and most of most people across the organization will have no idea. Who's using those recruiters where those your recruiters are good for. Are there MSA in place with pre-negotiate pricing? So you can't leverage each other's information versus going in somewhere recruiting firm for salespeople, right in pharma and the us. And who do we do business with? What's the spend. Are there other suppliers that are similar and then suddenly you can start tagging It turns out. So that you can naturally consolidate 400. You know, if you, if you have 20 that are connected in tags, suddenly anyone that will look for recruiting from those suppliers are going to come up first. Right. So right away, you're already increasing spend and compliances And so like you can see a pretty big reduction in the number of Um,

Dana:

one of the key goals, I think in like marketing well in procurement in general, but marketing procurement too, right? Tons of agencies, tons of spend market research companies everywhere. And if you can kind of tap in and say, oh, what is this brand using? Or who are they using? Or like, oh, we know they use somebody, but they weren't good to have that Cause I think. Originally, when I heard about your company, I was like, well, the P to P systems or systems that already have like supplier data? Right. And it didn't, it was at that point, right. As crowdsourced. And we could tag and it was fun. It was like LinkedIn for suppliers. Now it's completely AI, so that it's even better. But, um, I think there's a huge differential in that space of like for suppliers and the suppliers having to maintain it now would be.

Stephany:

Well, it's not completely AI, right? The AI piece is what we, we circumvent the need for customers to give us their data and suppliers to come to a portal for us to deliver value. That was the key. Like if we can autonomously grab all this information, the value is not in grabbing and collecting and validating records on suppliers of values. Having the data. The things that you need to do, and then you add the value, getting the Right. But that that's that seeding of the network. That's always been in platforms that have been portal based, relying on people And there's so many portals that suppliers just don't go to them. Like they're burned from another fricking portal. Right? And, and, and most portals are very limited to a specific use case, right. Or of the suppliers. So then you have to go to another portal for something else. It just doesn't happen. Not at scale. So that prevents our customers. If they go portal based, they don't get the scale and the speed that they And, um, so that's baseline is how we augment the data. Then as soon as we get master data of customers, we don't share that information, but it augments the relevance score or refresh schedule. It expands to find suppliers are most similar to those ones. We can augment the date of those suppliers also. And so you've got, you definitely have an AI feeding in and removing the dependency Now our clients can augment, they can touch their record. They can. Add to it. They can tag still. They can make themselves a category manager for category There's a lot you can do in the interface and suppliers can come And so we're building now more and more, uh, ways for suppliers to come in to, to We do, we're doing a survey to supplement some of the ESG stuff today that we can grab at scale, but we're always going to be technology first. Like what can we remove humans from doing? Because in our space, there's not enough humans and procurement To do this critical mass, like we see in the consumer side.

Rusty:

When you look at your user base within an organization, you've got your So I'm curious to see Dana, what are the top three things that you really get excited about when you think of what are the different user groups? What's the value for each of those?

Dana:

It's actually interesting because I think, you know, in talking with stuff before every client uses Tilburg a little bit differently. Um, and so the way we've used it, it's kind of morphed and changed. Teal books, morphed and changed, but originally was Like I need to know one. Do I already have supplier? Do we have, who do we already have? Right. So we're not duplicating efforts or we're not bringing somebody new. If we have tens of buyers now Tilbrook is morphed into a place where I can go, oh, We need to hit golf. Let me find one of those or, Hey, I've got sustainability goals. I need to find a supplier as diverse and sustainable. Um, and then on top of that, they also provide back with, They can say, Hey, based on your spend data, your supplier master, All pharmaceuticals have to report out to the VA, right. Which saves us months and months and months at a time. Um, if

Stephany:

not FTE. So that has

Dana:

been our specific like use case of we really needed internally. Right. We're a really small team. I can't be, I can't understand every single supplier and vendor

Stephany:

but if I had this and I have

Dana:

access to it, it gives me. You know, legitimate ones to bring up during meetings and, you know, build partners that, Hey, you know, we do have some service that can help you and, you would be interested to see on how other companies have used it because we've been. Brown for, you know, doing it five years. So

Stephany:

I think when you think of marketing, what marketers are looking moving faster and faster within pharma or outside in CPG, it's even more, right? Like you have to stay so competitive. And if you're in procurement, To me, it's such a window into the world. Like you get to be exposed to so many things and you know, how do you do that while driving value while hitting your priorities? Right. And all the other things that we need to do every day. And so to me, the power is to have a conversation with someone in marketing and they're looking for something, your ideas are there. Maybe they've heard of a term or there's something that they they'd the suppliers in a certain space and be able to just pull it off. Like, Hey, let me look at who are the suffice that do this? Hey, these three we've done business with, I mean, look at the connections are similar, but we've never done business with, but they look like And then there's these other 40 that we can look and invite to learn more from Out of that, there's 10 that are women owned kind of interesting So right away you're gaining trust and the marketer will be most likely to say, Can you send me a list or do you mind kicking off the process and, and then keep Uh, point of conversation and you're building trust and you're adding value. Otherwise you go back to your desk and you're like chicken you're Googling, and you're asking people around and then you'll come back with them. And I remember I had a story, a big pharma company of a director I can't remember what it was, but he didn't know anything about So he's like, yeah, yeah, we can help. And then went back to his office and looked at his team. Okay guys, what is this? And then two weeks later you walked in the hallway, saw the stakeholder, any duct, like you turn the corner because he didn't have the answer. Yeah. And he didn't want to be in front of the stakeholders saying like, I And he was embarrassed. I'm like, okay. A 40 year old man should not have to duck. Right. To help someone in the business looking for a certain type of student, I will that stakeholder has gone on Google, call their friends, called a bunch And if you lost the opportunity to impact. And so to me, it's like, it's such a competitive advantage And what I love about Tilbrook, there's a lot I love about too, but what I a, if I'm in procurement, I can start using to book to create my own list. So I can create cheat sheets. I'll say I'm in a meeting and someone's like, Hey, we're looking You can start searching and you can start creating personalizing lists of suppliers and you can filter by those lists and you can add suppliers to those lists. And so imagine, right? Like you've gotten now your marketing, you've got different types someone that does case studies to digital marketing, to animation, to. You know,

Dana:

that's one of my favorite features on Tilbrook. It's super cool. It's kind of like Amazon, like if you like this, buy this tool book is like, if you have these suppliers on your list, why don't you try these suppliers? Right. These are similar suppliers.

Stephany:

Yeah. And it's like, you have similar suppliers, but then you can Right. So then in the future, you can just go back to your cheat sheets and you can start creating, um, your con your own competitive edge. Really? To me, it's, it's. It's because you only have like

Dana:

one supplier. Sometimes people come to you and like, I know this one supplier does You can go to that one specific supplier specifically, and it'll Hey, these are other similar suppliers. Now some of them not always are exactly the same. But, I mean, at least you have it now, a new list to bring to

Stephany:

their contact information with their relatives or with the connections internally with the spend the relevance, you can embed your contracts. You can put them as strategic preferred,

Dana:

like. It is cool that you can find the needle in the haystack. I would say my experience, you know, they were like, we need an agency Who's a pede endo. And like the list went on and on you're like, how am I going But I did and was able to do it right? You're like, this is the most ridiculous request.

Stephany:

And we had a demo last week, public.

Dana:

Well, it was just, it had so much information in and I was able to go through it and say, I need a pediatric endo. And because the supplier was in there and had certain experience from the other companies and had tagged them for it, I was able to reach out to them. Um, which is another feature. I love

Stephany:

reach out to them on their websites, or they have case studies or We're pulling that and we create a. And so we use our tags for augmenting search in generic machines. But it's really useful when you're searching. You, maybe use a words versus someone else how they would say it, but we combine and harmonize these terms so that you can search with as much granularity. Sometimes you get too granular, then you have to back up a bit, but it's no Right? You add something else and then there's no. Um, but you have to go pretty deep now, like we were doing a demo and but we had the public board of, um, for, for schools, um, at invited us. So we had 700 public sector procurement on the call and our solutions consultant like, okay, well, Heather, I wanna, I wanna, what do you guys want to buy? Right. But he's totally testing. Five years ago, even four years ago, I've been like, oh my God. But now typically is so powerful. And so they're looking for standing desks and then they'd like specific to be manufacturers of standing desks in a certain region. We want them to be women own and small businesses like, and then they came, it was like eight manufacturers, a standing desk. In north America, you know, that were women own. And I was like, so proud, right? They're like, oh my God, this is not magic. I didn't do this. Right. I had the smart team they're continuously improve the quality of our data and the. And then expand, um, you know, the number of suppliers today, we We have 5 million profiles that, that means that our machines I've identified that we have enough information and it's complete enough. It's not always perfect. Right? That's the, you can't assume that the data is going to be perfect, but it will And, um, and we have enough confidence in the quality of the data But of course, if the suppliers connected to say zero company into your book, until book, there's a lot more data on the one that has 70 clients, because we understand the overall spend, we understand the relationship, right? There's much more relevance and familiarity in that data. And most likely at that point, the supplier has also come Someone's asked them to validate a record or upload something. And so they may have touched it, but they don't have to You don't need a supplier to come to, to your book to put their information. Um, and it helps when say you buy a scout or you buy like a sourcing Now what I value with Jagger, we just announced GP, super exciting. We have partnerships with, uh, EcoVadis rapid rating and. And so we're able to, um, syndicate, essentially our data to their solution suppliers is augmented through machines instead of waiting for the suppliers And we have the search engine now that can be integrated into a sourcing tool. So if you're about to launch an RFP and traditionally you'd be like, okay, Z or, oh, I know one or two companies and I've got a Google for the other. You can just punch, like it just taps into tale, book, it augments, It expands it. So you can find similar companies, create your list and then punch back traditionally by then you can include small, diverse, local, sustainable And so it's really cool that we're now able to fully integrate. The process of running an RFP as you, now you have the information now at your

Rusty:

So are you able to integrate within a Reba or other third-party to be able to pull that data in or do they have to export that themselves?

Stephany:

No, no it's fully integrated. So our search engine, they couldn't think so. The data itself it's through an API. So we pushed data. Like we don't do files directly into a system. And then our search engine, they're using our interface. Cause our search engine is really, really good and much more intelligent than if you don't rely on this type of technology to do a search. Um, you know, because if you get search results that are kind of garbage or through all the garbage recommendation, but if you're getting, you know, results that are really good and relevant, you may still have to filter through it. I think Dana said one time, it was maybe a year ago we were chatting and I'm always curious, like, Hey, how'd the deal book, help your job in the last. Year. And she gave me an example of when you're saying that you needed information for that would have taken you two to three days and using Tilbrook, she still had she needed, but it took us, it took her a couple of hours, but it's a couple of Days. Right. So, and going

Dana:

and going and getting benchmarking. I think, you know, any sourcing person will know the pain of trying to specifically find what this new business partner wants. Just a little bit different than somebody else on the brands. Um, and it gives you the ability to do it quickly. We're in the past, it's like, all right, let me call up some colleagues. I got a Pfizer. You know, Genentech, see what they're doing, who they're using. Okay. Let me Google it. See what else I can find on, you know, um,

Stephany:

reports,

Dana:

you know, it would take a while

Stephany:

it takes a while. And the only thing we do at our machines is we grab, if suppliers have customers So the society doesn't have to tell us, or we don't have to win all these customers to tell you that the customer did those suppliers is X, Y, and Z. And when the supplier does come to the table, if they want to, they So then it kind of, we call that an, a building their social currency. So the more we know about them, then more we can help put them in front of customers Right. So it helps us to apply a fine. Basically get in front of customers that are most alike, their own customers, and it streamlines that business development process. Right. So, so

Dana:

somebody like rusty who's, you know, would want to go in They'd be able to go in and create that

Stephany:

experience. And

Dana:

then, yeah, the great thing about it too, is the contacts, like, I you're in procurement and sometimes people are like, we can't find a contact I can go into Tilbrook and there's phone numbers. Like I can call somebody up.

Stephany:

You know, and there's a lot of refresh on the contact, So the email addresses the

Dana:

phone calls and then you can get a, was it recommendations So to me that's like huge. I sometimes am emailing everybody. I can find on LinkedIn. Can I contact you? You know, it can be rough. Um, but the it's just one of those little things of like what could be a pain point in procurement that is easily solved, um, with this. But I just want to know, you're trying to be like the data master of the

Stephany:

universe. We are trying to be the data master of the universe. I mean, we, I mean, that's the, that was always a dream, right? If we can be the most trusted source of data, Um, that means our clients can They can send a gate that data to their system. And not having to connect systems to each other. And then it's the ability to improve the quality of that data and generate insights Um, and then for software providers, their customers are asking for faster and better data at scale and the software companies who sold right. You can get access to good data through an STP or. Whatever, they just can't deliver the speed and scale with a type of insight. And so, and we've seen this in other sectors. If you look at Salesforce, access force came out and it was like the it was massively adopted, but it was a false notion that Salesforce was going Like it requires a lot of, you know, compliance and services And so they try to buy data.com. They try to buy jigsaw, or they did buy. And it's still then give them, they still did not succeed at being a data company. And then you have ZoomInfo right. Talking about marketing, who is enhancing the CRM so that you get better And they also have built now so much functionality in zoom info that you can also access ZoomInfo directly to get access to that quick data. So we see ourselves very much as being the zoom info to the buy-side. Right. So.

Rusty:

Okay, this is very similar. As far as the outlets that you get is so similar to assuming info and the integrations with the CRMs and being able to manage that data.

Stephany:

Okay. I think it should be differences that we get master data from multiple customers. Again, we don't share that, but we use it to augment. And so. Over time. The idea is to build insight that our customers would be okay with, right. It could be around trends or buying cycle or budgets, or who's your competition and what type of sector so that on the sell side, you can become a lot more. You know, competitive, you can have better information that Because it's all done without the insight on the buy side. And the other thing for the sell side. So for suppliers that we've launched last quarter is, and that was propelled by our customers who want their suppliers to do supplier diversity as well. Right. Because the impact of not only asking, you know, getting. Spend from your tier one, like your direct suppliers. But if you're working with an agency that's not small and mid size anymore, that before they would win, if they qualify and were certified, but if they and they report that to their client, that gives them a competitive advantage. And so our clients have started because our implementation Most of it now is automated. All we need to do is get the master data and we can then give a report of qualification, the classification, and, and that supplier can assign their own spend based on what their customers are reporting. And, you know, I think from a client perspective, they see an Cause we typically uncover significantly more expensive It's more accurate because it's all done through machines. We don't rely on suppliers to come to the portals and update their information and they feel like they're not adding a burden to you. So they're asking you, Hey, rusty, you know, if you have a lot of spend, like we small, most businesses, 95% of businesses that even qualify are not certified. So, if you can give them an advantage of saying like, Hey, you could report this. It cost nothing. All you need to do is, you know, um, put your data into Tilbrook and messaging around what that looks like, and that could be scary for supplier Um, but we've been very successful now showing them that we all share their data. We give them the value of seeing that report. And now we're seeing suppliers going like, Hey, I'm actually interested use it to report to other clients that are asking for the same thing. Cause now. Automated. And I don't have to build this entire infrastructure that Dana was talking at portal and services and validating and collecting certificates like matching Now can just do. That without having to do anything else. So there's a big competitive upside. And what we're now seeing is the suppliers are becoming customers of sailboat because they want us to kick off their own diversity program. And so that to our clients has started to open. Like it's just, it's just visibility. It's also getting a much bigger impact on. Yes G goals, right? Because now they can account, they can invite 40 suppliers to do this. They can invite a thousand to get invite 20,000 suppliers to do this. You know, there's a huge upside, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars which is huge, you know, report that to your CEO and your board, like amazing. So, um, you know, we have a platform fee and so that gives access to Cause we pushed new announcement to production every week. And then we have, uh, licenses. So depending on who you are, if you're a CPO, if you're a super user, if you're a or even if you're a stakeholder, you could have access to tail book. And so we have clients who want to roll out to book to the entire organization. So that's number of licenses. And then if you want to send a gate, our data to another software, then it If it's a search integration, it's one type of integration. If you're trying to send a Cate records to another system, then

Rusty:

will be an example of somebody syndicating

Stephany:

their data. Oh, it depends on how many suppliers they have. I give, they have 5,000 versus like the average contract size rest to No S on the small, small scale, like one license to start, it would be maybe in the 25,000 or bigger clients are now in the 400, 500,000. And then our clients are starting to add right licenses. Cause they're starting to see like, Hey, there's a lot of value. I want to expand this to this team. I want to have more people engaged to find what they need. I want to integrate my, so it typically grows from there, And honestly, often our clients are starting with supplier diversity. The upside for the investment and the level of risk is so big and it's not, you know, it's, it's really fast to be able to report that back. We had a large, large bank who bought us. I mean, they spent like $50,000. They had a couple of licenses and then were able to find $50 Right. So that went to their CEO. It went into their sustainability report that was published to the shareholder. So it creates energy. They're seeing something like this and it empowers our customers. Recently. We had someone saying like, I never used to meet my CEO. And now I meet my CEO every week and I have the data to show them the impact that we're having, because they're a university. They get funded. If they show supplier diversity, spend. And, um, and also they have for every bid that they go over a certain amount, they have to show best effort to extend those opportunities to small diverse businesses. So now they can actually show both. So it's giving her a seat at the table. So it's a great use case to start with. And then we're, you know, we're doing more and more from an education perspective to know how our clients can unlock additional value through the data on use cases. And, and so we're, you know, especially with. We're making significant investment on the exterior of that journey, So it happens more and more on the platform. Um, you know, it's an ever evolving investment, right? When you build a tech company, it's not, you build it and sell it. It's always gets better. We can always better. Well,

Rusty:

especially when it comes to data, because you're constantly You're finding new ways to use cases of how companies can leverage it and use it. And it sounds like there's a lot of value that we've already been able to And that's obviously why you're so successful. Where do you see the business and you had a crystal ball, where do you see it? In three to five years?

Stephany:

I think we can go public. I think. The type of opportunities. That's so big. Every single enterprise in the world today is challenged with having good quality It's a reality and there's more disruption, there's more requirements and then every software in our space or that touches the biocides, not It's finance, it's legal, it's compliance. Um, we're talking a lot more to CIO, chief data officers How do we enhance data? We just landed a large credit card company. We're enhancing 400,000 of their merchant data, right? So that house with peak card spend and things like that. So now we have a really big opportunity. And, um, and if we are wishy-washy about someone approaching us, you know, for an Software companies see this as a huge competitive advantage, but one, we would diminish the value of Tilburg because of values and being Gnostic. And if I would entertain slightly. You know, an acquisition, how would that partner trust to bring Right. If they're scared that a competitor comes in and acquires them. And so it's been very important to exude the level of confidence We're making, you know, we're building a special and a really big company. And we want to be the trusted source of supplier data. We want to be that data foundation to the market. And if we sell off, it would be just a huge disappointment, I think, to their customers, the industry, because then who's left, like, right. You're stuck back to integration that in Bradstreet, supplier intelligence, subscriptions, you know, portal base XL, SharePoint, it's a mess. And no one wants to go back to that. No one wants to go back to fax machine, you know, and land. It sounds like stuff though, that

Dana:

you've kind of changed your business, um, the way you were Right? So I know where we started off there.

Stephany:

Lucky Dana came as our first customer and was a marketer

Dana:

Yup. Yup. I helped her mock up Tila book 2.0 and do some speaking vines, but it sounds Cause it's different. Obviously our deal is different, but that it's changed so And I always said that stuff. I want a free tail book access for a while. I'm like, that is what I want. Um, I just want to be able to go in whether I'm with, Because I've

Stephany:

got that company clients, the end users ask, and And so what data's referring to is that if I'm a category manager and I'm and building my lists, adding tags, connecting with suppliers, um, maybe I can read them within my company. We don't share ratings between companies, but there's things that you can add until. That can be a massive competitive advantage. If you're moving around, we can strip all the com all the information about the relevance of contracts, the status, the relationship internally, and then you own competitive, and imagine plugging that in, into your new organization. Now it gets. Basically activate with all the new spend all their relationship. And you can see out of all these suppliers, I've built relationship with which one have a contract with my new organization. What's the span. What's the connection. So, boom, like you can become like a huge competitive advantage to your Right that information to your new organization. So that's something we've talked about for a really long time. And, um, we'll be, yeah, we're, we're doing investments on the data process, or machine learning projects so that we can enhance more and more. But on the interface, it's some of those things that we're working understand, like what's the value of using tablets every day, right? How do you leverage it to make yourself a competitive advantage? And this is something that we've, we've talked about for a long time, um, to like

Dana:

tilt tilt book to me is a Def differentiator as a tech In the sense that if we have feedback, like I know, like I said, I mocked up, I said, this is what I think textbooks should look like and send it over to you. Right. Like I gave you tons of feedback and you always took it and were able to say, yeah, Okay. Let's, let's move. Right. Where I see a lot of tech companies are like, yeah, that's nice. We w we're not changing what we're doing. And that is,

Stephany:

the roadmap becomes complicated. There's a lot of competing priorities. So we definitely are trying to. To delay us becoming that. And hopefully don't become that. And I think it's staying connected to our customers and build it again in a way that we are able to push things to production fairly quickly. And so, and now we know what we're building, it's refining it's, but week and they were like, oh, can we explore the data to do something? And someone on our team was like, well, why do you want to export the data? And then they started giving us so much insight. As to why they want to explore the data. And I was like, well, was that not an opportunity to add the data to teal book for, for the purpose of our customers, leveraging more information. And then for our clients to do it on the platform, as opposed to trying to And so it's asking the why with our clients, what they're trying to drive with Tilbrook book and how can we deliver value. And the nice thing in the data platform is that you have a lot of flexibility because Right. So that's what. It's it's much flexible. Yeah. And to me,

Dana:

that's a key differentiator when I'm looking at different suppliers, which you obviously have to sell them to procurement. I'm looking at different suppliers in this space. And I'm like, if I know they're going to be willing to like, adapt, I'm one who were like, Hey, we have this issue with this type of module. And they're like, yeah, we don't care.

Stephany:

I mean, then you bought it, but it won't be available until like, Right.

Dana:

It's not on the roadmap, what year at a decade

Stephany:

or so. Yeah, I mean for it, yeah. You

Dana:

know, there's a huge differentiator as a company, as a procurement person. I see that as such value of like, you know, being able to say, oh, okay. We know what's going to go on and you know, things can adapt and change and it's we're stagnant all the time and there's, you know, it's not, it's not changing. It's not, um, you know,

Stephany:

We are excited. We know we're in conversation with a lot of those players document My clients are like, really? Yes, we need this. And so. I think the message to me is like software companies have been very good at selling They're being very good at selling that they're going to And I think, just look at history, it hasn't worked. Software companies are not data companies. And to me. It's the best in breed of both get a data platform and then you can You don't depend on the software anymore for the data. It's much more agile. It's much more flexible. You can build best in breed. You can augment your legacy systems. If you don't want to rip them out, like there's such flexibility And, uh, you know, we've been conditioned. It's actually easier to explain to a book to someone who doesn't How you've been doing things in procurement and buying into this vision. That was the most shocking things. Do you mean my habits? And I have a hundred employees, 95% of that. Don't come from procurement and they're all bought into this And so they get it. But in procurement it's been a very big change management and rethinking data. I mean, you think data is a service it's like sending my data I'm thinking data thinking dun and Bradstreet, and I buy a subscription My data as a core piece of your tax. Right. Integrated breeding, dynamic, always evolving is a completely new concept. But to me it's such a no-brainer, but again, I'm biased because well,

Dana:

into it, it pulls in, it speaks to the point of teal book Right. So not only do I have my vendor master, I have my spend data. I have my contract data. So I have all this insight of what's in my company. So I'm not going to. Three systems, right?

Stephany:

That's right. You can have it into one place. You still going to need your STP. You're still gonna need your sourcing tool. You're still gonna need your contract management system.

Dana:

Fast, you can get that type of information, whereas before RFP halfway down the road and you're like, oh no, what did I do?

Stephany:

How many times has this happened? Like how many times this happened? I've been in my nursing career. It was like, yeah. So often we'd pitch day and someone would be invited or walk by and I'm like, oh They're terrible. Or we have compliance requirements. Like we, they breached them. Like I know some compliance thing and we can't, we're not allowed to use them. Oh, my God, we didn't dragging them through 6, 7, 8 weeks of this process. And we could've all saved ourselves a lot of time. And that's what really, I was working with one of the largest And that's exactly what happened. They had innovation project and they said like, we need to find the suppliers. And it was this massive initiative. And to get information as basic as who has an MSA already with that company, And type of conversation. We had to get them in the complexity. And the weeks of weeks of weeks of just trying to get the data, just to And I was like, what if you had this thing called Tilbrook in my head, Right. So fast, so much more efficient. And, um, and it's all about business outcomes, right? Your stakeholders want to get their job done cause they have

Dana:

Yeah. And to your point earlier, everybody in marketing wants it done yesterday. And to me, this is a tool that allows me to help them get it done yesterday. Right. They don't want to sit around and wait for a supplier list for two weeks. If I can pull it up in a couple of hours and send it to them. Oh, my God, you just sent me this, you know, very good list a category manager, knowing, you know, Hey, this, these are good. These aren't I've used these in the past. I haven't and get it to them like that quickly. It's to me, it's a huge win on our behalf of procurement

Stephany:

like the.

Rusty:

Yeah, that's a quicker you can make. Can we live in that world, but that's probably a good spot to land this plane. I think we've covered everything we can about teal book. It's pretty incredible. You've been able to build in these five years. I

Dana:

can't wait for my free license.