Vicki Cantrell and Dave Finnegan on what retailers and retail tech vendors get wrong about each other.

Nobody has "champion" in their title. So how do retail tech vendors find the person who will push a project through?

Recorded live at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden talk with Vicki Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Vendors in Partnership, and Dave Finnegan, Operating Partner and Chief Connection Officer at BlackFinn Partners. The two hosted VIP Connect, a three-hour session held right before RetailClub kicked off, where retailers and solution providers sat at the same table to learn how the other side makes decisions.

Retailers think they know how retail tech vendors operate. Vendors think they know what selling to retailers takes. This conversation shows how much both sides have been guessing.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why "we do AI" stopped working as an opener for retail tech vendors, and what great marketers lead with.
• What's happening behind a vendor rep's pitch, and why the budget question keeps coming up.
• The ROI question that retailers say makes selling to retailers a real conversation.
• How to find the champion inside a retail organization when nobody's title says it.
• The one question a former CIO says changes the whole discovery meeting.
• Why retailers want vendors to challenge their roadmap.

If this episode changes how you think about how retail tech vendors sell to retailers, leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods.

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Featured guests

Vicki Cantrell, https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickicantrell/

CEO & Co-founder, Vendors in Partnership - https://vendorsinpartnership.com

Vicki is a retail strategist and community builder, recognized for relationship building and accelerated growth. She founded Vendors in Partnership and the Vendors in Partnership (VIP) Awards, celebrating partnerships between retailers and solution providers and creating a joint community of these industry experts to advance retail innovation and partnerships.

Her career includes Retail Transformation Officer for Aptos, NRF’s SVP Communities and Shop.org, COO of Tory Burch, CIO of Giorgio Armani and Gucci Group. Cantrell is a Vice President for the Retail Orphan Initiative (RetailROI), a non-executive director of Tandy Leather Company, and on the Executive Leadership Committee of the Retail AI Council.

Dave Finnegan. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davefinnegan/

Operating Partner - Chief Connection Officer, BlackFinn Partners. https://www.linkedin.com/company/blackfinn-partners/

Dave Finnegan is an award winning retail innovator, brand anthropologist, and storyteller with over 25 years of experience leading customer experience, tech and digital transformation. He helped launch Build-A-Bear Workshop (CIO) and later served as Chief Experience Officer at Orvis, driving the brand’s most successful era. Dave now advises brands and investors through roles at BlackFinn, the NRF, and NewRoad Capital Partners.

As a brand anthropologist and a member of the Explorers Club, in 2022 Dave dedicated a year to studying human experience. He traveled to every continent—interviewing indigenous leaders from the Amazon to Africa, scientists from Antarctica to the Galápagos, and some of the most interesting people in the world, including the librarian of the world’s oldest library at the Monastery of St. Catherine. He is currently pursuing a master’s in Anthropology at Harvard which is helping him to continue his journey to better understand human experience.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

00:52 Show Intro

03:46 VIP Connect Recap: Inside the Room Where Retail Deals Get Made

04:18 What Is VIP Connect? The Event Bringing Retailers and Vendors Together

05:37 Everyone Says They Do AI — Here's Why That's a Problem

06:48 How AI Has Completely Changed the Sales Conversation

08:38 What's Really Happening Behind the Vendor's Pitch

11:40 The Decades-Old Disconnect Between Business and Tech

13:03 Forget Titles — Find the Real Champion

15:36 People Buy From People: The Power of Just Asking Questions

18:16 Stop Asking "What's Your Problem" — Ask This Instead

21:56 Show Close

Meet your hosts

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026 and a Top AI Leader for 2027. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader inCareers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024, 2025 and 2026. He is an advisory council member at the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Episode Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.