In Episode 160 of The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce, hosts Isaiah Bollinger and Timothy Peterson sit down with Stephen Metts, Vice President of Solutions and Innovation at Zaelab.
Stephen's role sits at the intersection of client exposure and market observation. Seeing patterns across many different customers and industries — and connecting those dots to build reusable solutions — is what the innovation function is designed to do. It's not just about finding new technology. It's about finding the repeating problems that customers don't even realize they have.
With over 18 years of experience spanning B2B commerce, B2C commerce, and CPQ, Stephen brings a rare combination of technical depth and practitioner perspective to the conversation. The result is an episode that is as grounded as it is forward-looking — ranging from the early days of homegrown eCommerce systems to the ServiceNow and Logik.ai convergence reshaping the industry today, and ultimately asking a harder question: what does it actually take to drive meaningful transformation in complex B2B environments?
From Commercial Printing to CPQ: A Career Built on Complexity
Stephen's journey into B2B commerce started in an unlikely place: a corporation of about 70 commercial printing facilities across the United States, back in 2006 and 2007 — well before Magento or Shopify existed. His team built their own in-house e-commerce platform to manage personalized print orders and route them to the right manufacturing facility, even automating digital printing machines and bindery machinery end-to-end.
One of the more remarkable footnotes: that same platform was responsible for managing all of Apple's commercial printing business at the time. When you hit "order" on your iPhoto calendar or photo book, the order came into their custom-built system.
"It was kind of a natural evolution from real configuration in the e-commerce sense to the technology maturing to actually handle what a lot of people then, and honestly still today, manage through things like Excel worksheets or a Big Chief tablet and a pencil."
That early hands-on experience with complex, configurable commerce set the stage for Stephen's deep expertise in CPQ — Configure, Price, Quote — the category of software that governs how B2B companies handle products too complex for a simple shopping cart.
What CPQ Actually Is (And Why It Still Matters)
For anyone new to the term, Stephen offers a clear definition. CPQ is most relevant in B2B selling scenarios where a standard point-and-click purchase experience simply doesn't cut it. Think: a highly specialized manufacturer where a buyer might need to answer 30 or 40 questions just to identify the right product for the right problem.
CPQ solutions use rules-driven software to guide the buyer or sales rep through that experience, ensuring the right product gets selected and priced correctly. It sits squarely between the front office (sales, CRM) and the back office (ERP, fulfillment), and its role is only growing.
The Demographic Time Bomb Hidden in B2B Businesses
Many B2B businesses are sitting on a ticking clock when it comes to institutional knowledge.
The people who have run business processes for 30 or 40 years are approaching retirement. And the knowledge in their heads — about products, processes, pricing rules, exceptions, customer relationships — is deeply difficult to transfer to the next generation of workers who are less likely to stay with a single employer for decades.
The natural choice for trying to memorialize that expertise and that knowledge is technology. And that's also where CPQ comes into play.
“With CPQ, you can begin to systematically memorialize that expertise and that knowledge into an actual technology system that anybody could come along and pick up and use.”
This framing reframes CPQ from a sales efficiency tool into something more strategic: a system for capturing and preserving organizational intelligence before it walks out the door.
The Most Common Mistake: Forcing New Technology onto Broken Processes
When asked about the biggest mistakes he's seen across nearly two decades of implementations, Stephen points to one pattern above all others:
"Taking an existing business process which may have flaws, that are not optimal for the goal, and just trying to stick that into any new or existing piece of technology."
The result is predictable: adoption fails, value doesn't materialize, and teams end up frustrated with a system that wasn't really the problem in the first place. The underlying process was.
The better approach, in Stephen's view, is incremental. Start small. Learn. Adjust. For a manufacturer aiming at full self-service CPQ, that might mean:
- Phase 1: A discovery experience that helps prospects understand products and drives lead generation
- Phase 2: A digital quoting interaction
- Phase 3: Full self-service capability
Each step generates real feedback, reveals what's working, and avoids the compounding risk of a massive, multi-year program that could be obsolete before it launches.
"Where you think you're going may not be anywhere near where you actually end up, because you learn things along the way."
Technology Is Often the Easy Part
What's hard is the people and the processes. Getting organizations to recognize what they don't yet know about their own situation. Stephen describes his role as "technology therapist," leaning heavily on listening and empathy before any product recommendation enters the room.
The starting questions at Zaelab are deliberately people-first:
- Who are the actual users of this tool?
- What are their frustrations, needs, and goals?
- What does the full business process actually look like?
Only after working through those questions does the conversation turn to technology. The inversion matters because many vendors in the CPQ space lead with the product catalog and the data model, and that approach tends to produce rigid solutions that miss the real problem.
The "8 Portals" Problem and Why ServiceNow Changes the Equation
What is it actually like to be a customer of a large B2B manufacturer today? The common experience includes multiple portals for commerce, warranty support, product documentation, field service. None of them are usually connected, each requiring separate logins, and dead-ending the user at every friction point.
"I don't want to have to bookmark 8 different portals in order to do business with you. I want something that's simple. I want a single source of truth."
When forced to pick up the phone after hitting one of those dead ends, the damage is already done. Research shows that even a stellar customer service interaction can't recover a customer who's been forced to make that call — the NPS score has already hit zero.
This is where ServiceNow's architecture has genuinely differentiated. Rather than a collection of loosely acquired products bolted together, ServiceNow was built around a workflow-and-API-first core. That foundation makes it possible — not just theoretically, but practically — to unify experiences across commerce, CPQ, service, and field operations into a single platform.
ServiceNow also takes an unusually open approach to integrations, with publicly available documentation, modern API layers, and capabilities like zero-copy integration with Snowflake. For organizations managing a complex mix of legacy ERPs and newer systems, that openness reduces one of the most common sources of implementation pain.
The ServiceNow + Logik.ai Acquisition: Closing the Wall Between Commerce and CPQ
Historically, there has been a "virtual wall" between the commerce world and the CPQ world. They were separate software categories, declarative in nature, and rarely designed to talk to each other gracefully.
"At the end of the day, you're trying to ultimately just facilitate the best possible experience to get an order. Sometimes that's going to be more of what we would consider a pure commerce experience. Other times, you're going to have more complex scenarios that require CPQ experiences."
ServiceNow's acquisition of Logik.ai starts to dissolve that wall. Logik already has pre-built plug-ins for Shopify and Magento (now Adobe Commerce), providing a CPQ entry point into the ServiceNow ecosystem for organizations already running those platforms. But the longer-term opportunity is bigger: a unified platform that can handle the full spectrum from simple commerce transactions to highly configured, engineered products — all within the same workflow layer.
For manufacturers in particular, this convergence addresses something they've wanted for a long time: a single platform that can meet a customer wherever they are in the buying journey, without forcing them down a separate path based on product complexity.
On AI: Step 10 Doesn't Work If You Haven't Done Steps 1 Through 9
AI's potential is real, but it requires a foundation to be useful. Bad data, broken processes, and disconnected systems don't become better just because an AI label has been applied.
"It's not necessarily a good idea to leap forward and say, 'We're now AI-first,' when you have fundamental core issues."
For many B2B organizations, AI is step 10. And steps 1 through 9 — clean data, rationalized processes, integrated systems, a culture of digital adoption — still need to happen first.
What we see working, and working well, are internal productivity gains from AI at Zaelab itself. Connecting the dots across tools and workflows is producing meaningful efficiency improvements without any of the hype.
LogiKit™: Zaelab's CPQ Toolbox
LogiKit™ is Zaelab's proprietary accelerator built to speed up and de-risk CPQ implementations on ServiceNow. It delivers up to 40% faster deployment than traditional approaches, with working prototypes available in weeks rather than months.
AI automation validates over 50 pricing scenarios instantly and auto-generates configurations in minutes. Industry blueprints — purpose-built for specific verticals — start each project 60–80% complete, dramatically compressing the early phases of an engagement where so much time is typically lost.
Here is what makes LogiKit™ particularly well-suited to complex B2B environments:
- A Configuration Library with 49+ pre-built rules covering volume pricing, bundling, and regional logic.
- Industry Templates — intelligent blueprints tailored to specific sectors, so teams aren't starting from scratch.
- AI-Powered Automation that auto-generates product descriptions and validates multiple scenarios simultaneously.
- A CX Builder Visual Interface that lets teams design customer journeys in a single view, without the tab-switching that slows most implementations down.
- Pre-built integrations connecting ServiceNow to SAP, Salesforce, Epicor, and other core enterprise systems — eliminating months of custom API work.
The team has been using LogiKit™ internally across CPQ go-lives and is making it available to customers now. For organizations that have watched CPQ programs drag on for 18 months or stall in complexity, it represents what the phased, empathy-first approach looks like in practice: a delivery-backed framework that gets to value faster, with confidence built in from the start.
People First, Technology Second
Episode 160 is a useful corrective to the way digital transformation is often talked about in B2B commerce. The conversation resists hype, slows down on the human dimensions of change, and makes a strong case that the most durable progress is incremental, empathetic, and rooted in a real understanding of who's actually using the system and what they need from it.
The technology — whether it's CPQ, ServiceNow, Logik.ai, or AI — is almost always the easy part.
If you want to explore how innovation-led CPQ and connected commerce strategies can drive real outcomes for your B2B organization, Zaelab's work with manufacturers and distributors offers a practical starting point.
Listen to the full episode on Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
