Punchout: a five-lever turnaround across more than 100 e-procurement systems

1. 01 Connected

   Punch out, shop, return.

   Cart handoff

   Cart handoff: the cart returns to procurement for approval and a purchase order.

   1. Start in procurement
   2. Shop the marketplace
   3. Cart returns for approval

   more than100e-procurement systems

   I owned Punchout across them.

2. 02 Slowed

   Too few connected users were buying.

   Connected Buyingtoo few

   Activationand time to first order

   I addressed adoption and onboarding.

3. 03 Decided

   Five levers, each measured.

   • Sales Vertical-specific integration goalsSuggested measure (illustrative): Integrated accounts by vertical
   • Professional services A shared launch-readiness onboarding frameworkSuggested measure (illustrative): Days to first order
   • Product Self-serve toolsSuggested measure (illustrative): Self-service activations
   • Marketing Awareness campaignsSuggested measure (illustrative): Active buyers per account
   • Partners Partner-generated leadsSuggested measure (illustrative): Leads converted

   5 15 levers into 1 targetfive levers, one adoption target

   I wrote the go-to-market strategy across five levers.

4. 04 Tracked

   A weekly business review tracked it.

   One targeteveryone could see

   I ran the weekly Punchout insights mechanism.

5. 05 Learned

   Is the customer a buyer?

   • Partner availability
   • Sales interest
   • Completed configuration
   • First useful order

   First useful orderat the center of the launch discussion

   I learned a partner’s readiness is not a customer’s adoption.

   Separate Punch-in lesson: partner readiness was green, but customer adoption was well below goal.

   Shifted to demand-side levers

   Recovery actions: incentives, pilots, partner lead lists and funds tied to adoption targets for Punch-in.

What I learned

Put the first useful order at the center of the launch discussion.

Before

Punch-in: partner readiness green; adoption well below goal.

After

Punch-in: incentives, pilots, partner lead lists and funds tied to adoption targets.

e-procurement systems

more than 100

weekly Punchout insights in 2024, source note 1

Weeks 6–12

Source: this case study. Suggested lever measures are illustrative.

1 Amazon Business · 2022–2024. Weekly Punchout insights ran in weeks six to twelve of 2024.

• Diagnosis
  Growth had slowed and too few connected users were buying
• Economics
  Integrated accounts: more sales and more users per account
• Five levers
  Sales, services, product, marketing, partners
• Onboarding
  Shared launch-readiness framework against the old baseline
• Cadence
  Weekly channel insights review through Q1 2024

Product workflow, shown through the decisions and handoffs.

The decision

I wrote the go-to-market strategy across five levers, with a target to raise adoption from 12.8% to 17.3% of entitlement.

Lever	Change	Suggested measure (illustrative)
Sales	Vertical-specific integration goals	Integrated accounts by vertical
Professional services	A shared launch-readiness onboarding framework replacing the old path	Days to first order
Product	Self-serve tools	Self-service activations
Marketing	Awareness campaigns	Active buyers per account
Partners	Partner-generated leads, about a thousand in the period	Leads converted

Partner availability, sales interest and a completed configuration answer different questions from whether a customer has become a buyer. Put the first useful order at the center of the launch discussion.

From my original account

Enterprise buyers do not shop. They procure — through platforms with names like Coupa, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer and Oracle, with approval workflows and purchase orders and a rule that the price on the invoice must be the price that was approved. At an enterprise-commerce business I owned the products that connected a marketplace to a range of those platforms, across the US, Europe and Japan.

The core integration lets a buyer punch out from a procurement system into a marketplace, shop and return the cart for approval. Integrated accounts were strategically important to the business. The product problem extended beyond adding capabilities: customers faced a lengthy path to useful adoption.

I wrote the go-to-market strategy across five levers: vertical-specific sales goals, a shared launch-readiness onboarding framework for professional services, self-serve product tools, awareness campaigns, and partner-generated leads. I ran the weekly Punchout insights mechanism.

Then there was quoting. The product that let a buyer request a quote through a sourcing platform was not converting, and the team was working on the quote engine. I pulled funnel data and separated product matches from requests eligible for the existing response path. The analysis also exposed a unit-of-measure interpretation problem: a price expressed per pack could look wrong to a buyer comparing individual units. These were different causes requiring different changes.

For Integrated Quoting, a customer publishes a request on Amazon Business or a third-party platform. The seller quotes a price based on volume. Once a quote is won, price lock and inventory reservation give the customer time to order. Orders use the Ordering API or XML. Reconciliation and Invoice APIs support the post-order workflow.

Integrated search taught the same lesson from another angle. Low conversion could not be understood from relevance alone: visibility within the buyer’s experience mattered. I used the available evidence to distinguish whether customers rejected the result or rarely saw it. You cannot fix what you have not measured, and you cannot measure what you have not instrumented.

Tools in this chapter Punchout / cXML · CIF catalogs · UNSPSC · Coupa · SAP Ariba · Jaggaer · Oracle · SSO · funnel analytics · WBR / QBR mechanisms

From my original account

Across regions, one review

I authored and presented quarterly business reviews for the whole ESI portfolio across the US, Europe and Japan. The Q2 2023 review covered eight portfolio goals, including Hosted Catalog and Punch-in. I also worked on weekly reviews for search, Hosted Catalog and quoting, and a sourcing-partner monthly business review in February 2024.

For Hosted Catalog, I wrote eight versions of the catalog-management tool requirements, the planned-spend requirements, a vision, a workshop presentation, partner insights, a change-management operating procedure, and a one-pager for the internal procurement pilot. The internal procurement program was the proving ground for Hosted Catalog and related purchasing capabilities before external rollout.

Related purchasing capabilities had dependencies of their own. I worked on the relationship between who places an order and who receives it, and used an internal customer as a proving ground before wider introduction. The strategic choice was to learn with a customer who could tolerate iteration while still providing a meaningful test of the experience.

I ran weekly Punchout insights and authored quarterly reviews for the ESI portfolio. Punch-in provided a separate adoption lesson: partner readiness was green, but customer adoption was well below goal. I shifted to demand-side levers: European customer-advisor incentives, staged ERP-partner pilots, four procurement partners’ lead lists, and market-development funds tied to adoption targets. Partner readiness does not equal adoption.

Tools in this chapter versioned requirements · catalog listener design · SFTP / API publishing · quarterly and weekly business reviews · regional requirements

I ran the weekly Punchout insights mechanism in weeks six to twelve of 2024. I also authored and presented quarterly business reviews for the whole ESI portfolio across the US, Europe and Japan.

I was the senior product manager for Amazon Business’s external integrations: Punchout, Punch-in, Integrated Search, Hosted Catalog, Integrated Quoting and Order On Behalf Of, with payment and procurement integrations across platforms such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer and Oracle. Punchout was the largest, across more than 100 e-procurement systems. But growth had slowed and too few connected users were buying.

What I found

Punchout customers generated more sales and had more users per account. Growth had slowed and too few connected users were buying. The go-to-market strategy addressed onboarding through a launch-readiness framework and self-serve tools. The top five platforms carried a large share of customers and sales.