Around the Horn - Episode #10

Hey, Kevin, we're live once again. Episode number 10, can you believe it?

Yeah. Crazy. This kind of started as a little bit of a whim to go along with a weekly newsletter and hearing, you know, good, good comments from other people having. We're going to talk later today about trade shows and events and was just at a show this week and had a number of people comment on that. They've been joining us on Fridays or, or haven't been able to, but are planning to get here soon. So I'm glad we're doing this. Good idea you had. I wanted to do the newsletter, you wanted to do this. So here we go.

So. Well, speaking of the newsletter, it went out this morning. Let me bring it up and we can jump, right?

Yeah, before. Maybe before we jump into that, I'll kind of do. What I do every week related to this is, you know, if you, as you see the newsletter pop up here, you know, if you're not getting that, just put a note in the chat here or send us a direct Message on, on LinkedIn or our easy email at the company is helloeadsmart tech.com so we can make sure that you get that. In fact, I think last week we had like five to seven new people that had been engaged on, on this show and, and wanted to be involved with that. So let us know if you'd like to get it. If you're not getting it already, it goes out every Friday. If you are here and though you think you should be getting it and you're not, check your spam or your junk folder and it could easily be there.

Yeah, because it comes from Kevin. So it could very well be in your junk.

There you go. Okay, that's your shot for the day.

And we're going to share a bit about our travels this week as well, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's get through some of the news and let's do that because there's some pretty cool stuff here that I think it's worth kind of chatting about. You know, we talk almost every week about something related to SAS software. And it's not just banging the drum on SAS software, but so many of the people that we work with and talk with that are in the wholesale distribution arena, they're kind of migrating out of legacy software. They might still have that server closet in their building or their external team might be still remote vpning in to get access to their ERP and so forth. And SaaS is in the cloud is certainly the way we want to go. So this was a nice Little article about some key questions to ask when choosing a provider. And it really talks at length about some key points and a lot of it's stuff that we've talked about about building tech stacks and so forth that go with it. So I think if you're in that arena where you're, it's time to migrate, it's time to start doing some new things there, don't hesitate to take a look at this because there's some good points.

Yeah, I thought it was a very good high level overview. Right. As you start thinking about it and you know, again, going back and addressing a lot of the things about, you know, making from a security perspective and who you're doing business with and all that kind of stuff, you know, that continues to be more and more performance and security and even, you know, this is getting a little geeky, but it's. Even as a SaaS company, where are their servers? If you're a company in England and their servers are in Los Angeles, chances are you're going to have a lot of latency problems and other things like that. So anyway, there's just some things to think about as you move into that.

Well, it's a really good, really good point.

Right.

And then you talk about the security and all that goes along with that kind of, from that standpoint. So I think that this really brings out some good questions and we kind of forget. I was thinking about it. I was on the phone on Wednesday morning with a gentleman in England and we were talking through. He had had Zoom connection problems. He was remote in his car and he had Zoom problems. So we jumped on WhatsApp and it kind of made me kind of laugh thinking about this great technology that we have to be able to communicate. At the end of the day there's, you know, there's still a big bundle of cables running across the Atlantic Ocean back and forth, right. Just like the Pacific. So you know where your software is housed, who's housing it and hosting it and the security that goes with that and then how that blends in with the other tools you have in your company. Because, you know, you and I see this regularly within our organization and talking to companies who they went and bought these disparate softwares, right. Thinking that, well, they might be a supplier partner with one of our trade associations or buying groups or I ran across them online or they were mailing me, so we bought this. But now it doesn't integrate well to share data across their organizations. And that's back to that platform, that concept that we kind of beat the drum on all the time about having a tech stack that works together. So read that article. If you got further questions and you want to ever chat about this, reach out to Tom or I and we're happy to spend daily days, days talking about that. I threw this out and you know, just kind of. Tom and I look at a lot of newsletters and the general news throughout the week. Tom doesn't watch the news, but he reads it. I watch and read it. But we're trying to pull all this data together, as we've mentioned before. So stuff that would be insightful and helpful to a wholesale. Somebody in the wholesale distribution arena, whether you're a manufacturer, distributor, dealer, independent sales agents or IMRs, whoever it might be. But I just thought this was interesting about this. Industrial production decreases in August.

Right.

And I think the way that I sent it over to you, Tom, it said, however. And the important thing after this, the important thing that we're seeing so much right now is we've seen the last few months as the economy is declining. You know, industrial production, housing starts, construction supplies, industrial supply purchases, they've all been kind of still growing. Well now this is the one that shows us a decrease, but it's not a decrease. It's actually if you go in and read these and many of these articles that are showing up with these statistics out there now, it's not that it's a decrease, it's. They didn't, they decreased from the previous year's growth.

Right.

They're still growing, but not, yeah, there's.

A month over month decrease, but there's a year over year increase.

Exactly right. So, you know, it's not really doom and gloom. That's. I kind of had that however, thing in here because we got to pay attention to what those really mean. It's not, you know, the sky is falling.

Right.

It's the year looks solid, the month might not be the same. So as you pointed out, so good. Let's, let's chat about this national association of Wholesale Distributors and this ad campaign about, about Amazon and so forth. And it's interesting, Tom, we can talk to this a little bit. You've had a lot of experience selling through Amazon in the past. But you know Brian Beck, our friend that does a lot of consulting work and writing and is definitely a thought leader in the whole online sales world, he had posted some information yesterday about the state ofCal on LinkedIn about the state of California suing Amazon. We're going to try and get Brian with us I was messaging with him yesterday. We're going to try and get him on here with us in the next couple weeks on around the Horn on Fridays. But this is interesting. You know what, what are your thoughts after looking. Did you watch the little video clip that's in this article?

Yeah. I mean, you know, this has been a discussion with Amazon for, for years. Right. And there's you know, a whole lot of, you know, definitely e commerce sites and third party smaller and even small retailers. Right. That have been squashed by Amazon. So you know, I don't know, I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out or if it plays out. But I guess it's, it's getting, you know, probably and maybe the economics or the economy aspect of it is putting even more pressure on things. Right. And so, you know, maybe this is what's really pushed it along. But yeah, this has been an issue for. This isn't a new issue, let's put it that way.

Yeah. I think where this is though, really raising its head right now is you've got with the B2B side or Amazon business, you know, approaching and going out to, to manufacturers within, you know, the wholesale distribution and specifically in the industrial space now and Jansan and so forth is of, of wanting them to come in and we see a whole lot of organizations that are ready to help them. A lot of companies are now posting large amounts of their inventory online. Our, our friend Rohan Thombihali at Upstart Works and we mentioned Brian Rohan's company helps people do that. I think Rohan said he was going to be with us today. And you know there's these organizations that are helping manufacturers particularly do this and then there's a whole play for distributors to have inventory that we see so much of this but this, this whole concept of the games that Amazon plays with positioning is really a big factor. Right. And, and I think some of these things have happened to Amazon. In fact, Rohan and I were talking before they, they launched a new product about a year ago now that helps brands that are selling on Amazon go back and review all of their, their seller central data to see where Amazon might have, you know, snuck some extra fees in and so forth. I think some of this actually happens, it's not necessarily all of it by design. Some of it happens organically just within the organization that goofy things happen. But you know, I think the reality is if you look at this, this little video, you know, I think that this national association of Wholesale Distributors, you know, in their campaign called it the the United States of Amazon is that, you know, they're, they're wooing people in. Right. And, and I've got an Amazon package coming today. My wife probably has a handful of them. But the reality of this is, you know, you were wooing in these B2B companies now. And historically, you can see this, and this is what shows up in that video, right, Is that there's that risk that they take all of your data that's, you know, available. The next thing you know, your hard hat or your hammer or whatever it is that you're now you bought drink the Kool Aid and you're selling it online. And now they're selling a private label item of that, that they're making, you know, Amazon essentials or whatever it is. And you're way down in the listing. But you've spent thousands, if not hundreds, tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get to where you were.

And that's been their model all the way along. Right. Any success is success is actually a big warning sign on, on Amazon.

Yeah.

You have to be aware of success.

Yeah, yeah. So anyways, I think we're going to see more of that as, you know, as they push into that B2B side. So anyways, let's chat a little bit about some of the stuff happened in the industry. You know, people. We were talking earlier about the economy briefly. We talk about it just about every week. You know, DG McPherson, the CEO Granger, came out this week and they had some announcements of where they're looking to go. They're, you know, looking to get to $20 billion here over the next couple of years. And those are some pretty big feats. When I thought, I think I read something early this morning that said 80% of economists or something like that or pundits think that there's absolutely a recession coming. So there's something that we have within the wholesale distribution world that keeps the confidence level there because Granger's got huge confidence in where they're headed.

Sort of story. Right. It's all very localized and everything is, every business is a bit different. Yeah.

Well, interesting too with Hardy, which is the big heating and air conditioning and refrigeration distributor group, really good folks there. They're seeing, you know, a little bit of a slowdown growth again, but it's the exact, if you dig into that, it's the exact same data we looked at before. Right. It's, we're growing, but this smaller period of time didn't have the same amount of growth. So we haven't seen anything yet. I think since the economy started to kind of to choke a little bit, you know, a number of months ago, probably close to a year now that we started to feel this. We haven't seen anybody who's retracting fully. It's. Is the growth not as strong as it had been previously?

So anyway, I think when there's, there's, I mean, let's face it, there's a lot of confusion. Right. And there's a lot of opinions and nobody really knows. And so I think what happens when you have that sort of volatile set of opinions, things can roller coaster and go up or down and, and I think we're going to see a lot more of that. You know, I think we're going to see a lot of short term roller coastering. But I do think and agree, I do agree that it's important to keep a lot an eye on the longer term trends. Right. It's because I think month to month you could see quite a bit of roller coastering. But year to year, longer term, I think that's where you really want to start to see what's really happening. And right now I think on the longer term we're not seeing that big massive drop, at least at this point, we're seeing more of that roller coaster month to month. Yep.

Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, historically these downturns turn into great upturns before too long. So I think we see a lot of people that are positioning themselves for that as well. So, so, you know, I want to talk about both of our travels this week and we even. I was gone Monday, Tuesday, you were gone till yesterday and I want to talk about that. But why don't I talk about these first two. Why don't you talk about our announcement this week? You know, we, we had some exciting news that went out earlier in the week.

Yeah. So yeah, this by far is the most exciting piece of news. On the thing is, so we have been working with a company for quite a few months called Mobilico. You may be familiar with them in the distribution space. And they have a platform, a mobile communications platform. And that platform allows you to do business texting, it allows you to do marketing and broadcast texting. Really, really interesting marketing engine that they have underneath a lot of really good data. And so we've been working on how we could integrate with what they're doing on the Moblico side and the SMS and the text world. How can we now integrate that into your CRM to Make it more actionable because they may have an operations team that's managing text messages and handling text messages. But sales teams weren't able to really have the benefit of what was going on in the communications and so forth. So by integrating the two products we now can take a lot of what is going on in the mobileco world, in the SMS world and the text world and make it actionable to a sales team or a sales organization with reports and dashboards and even some automations and other things as we go forward. So we have I guess two parts to the relationship, right. One is the technical integration and then the second is more of a co selling, co marketing effort that it sounds like you guys started on even this week. Kevin, about when somebody's looking at one product or the other. Let's take a look at the bigger picture on the whole thing.

Well, I think you're spot on there. Right? Because that combined solution, we sometimes say that one plus one equals three or four, not two. And when you pull this data together, it's great. What I'm really excited about with the MobileCo solution that they have, you stop and think about it and there's values all across an organization and their customer. So if you're a customer, you know, and you're used to text messaging, you know, you're doing some email, maybe some EDI transactions, maybe a little online, but your, your communication with your salesperson oftentimes ends up being by text message, right? Well that sales guy ends up stuck in a presentation or doing some training or he's off or you know, it'd be horrible but maybe he left the company. Well, where's that data? Where's that information? And so with this solution that oblique have has is now we can take that information that that customer needs, it goes across their platform. It can be seen now internally by both that salesperson, but it can be seen by somebody in management if they wanted to. But it pops up on a dashboard or a mobile or a desktop browser for an inside salesperson. So now all of a sudden if you have that field salesperson that just somebody just needs to check on an order, customer support or customer service can respond to that and the salesperson can keep doing what they do best, right? Everybody gets serviced well so customer gets their information quicker, never gets lost. Salesperson can be more efficient because they're not spending their time on minutia. Inside support and leadership now can see better a view of what's going on with the customer. And all that customer journey data now flows right into lead smart channel cloud. So we can see it in dashboards and reports right within our CRM and customer intelligence solution. So we're pretty excited. We've got some mutual customers already that we're working on, a handful of those. The Moblico team is involved in some trade associations of mine, groups that we aren't and we are. That they aren't. And we're kind of bringing those relationships together. So pretty excited about this. It's going to go well. And we'll get Pierre, the CEO of Moblico, on the show with us in the next couple of weeks as well and we'll talk about this further. That's good stuff.

Yeah, no, and I think that's a really good lead in, you know, we wanted to talk a little bit about our travels and I'll start with that. So I was at a conference called Dreamforce, which is Salesforce's huge annual conference. It hasn't happened for three years, but it happened this year. There were almost 50,000 people there, I believe. And the theme of the whole conference was data and how you utilize data that you know comes from different sources. How do you pull that data together and utilize it to become more actionable? Two things, you know, and we've been talking about this a lot over the last few months, but I think there's one thing that really hit me a lot of what they were talking about is how do you use make when you talk about data being actionable, what does that really mean? It really means kind of one of three things. One is the simple as you just have access to it, Right. So I have access to data that maybe it's about a customer, maybe it's about, you know, a customer engagement or whatever. I just have to want to have access that data so that when I'm doing what I'm doing, I have those different things that are there. Yeah. The second thing is, is I want to be able to do reporting and I want to do some analytics on that data. So I want to be able to use that and see if there's trends and things like that. But the third area, and this is an area that we're going to be doing a lot more of, is automations. How do you drive automations and workflow actions based around data. So for example, if you're receiving data from MobileCo like we just talked about, maybe there's in fact, we've talked about this. There's certain keywords, for example, in those text messages that are going back and forth or there's Certain events that have taken place with the SMS messages we can trigger automation actions inside lead smart based around that data. That could just be as simple as a notification to somebody. It could be raising a big flag on a salesperson's dashboard to go hey, you need to go check out this account. It could even be automated follow up. So using data to really have just visibility number one, two is to then have analytics from it and then three automations is really the big, the big conversation that was going on at the Dreamforce and it's really the, you know, if I didn't believe it was the future before I went there, it's no longer the future. It is now and more than ever this whole idea of first party data and all this kind of stuff is really, really front and center and is going to be the topic of the next 12 months without a doubt in my mind.

Yeah, I think you're spot on with that and I wish that I could have been there with you. There's two other. I was at one event and there was two other events or an additional event I needed to be at this week that I wasn't able to make. But it's interesting that and I think let's take us maybe a step back real quick and let's. Because we, we talk about data and triggers and stuff. Let's talk about that in real terms for a moment.

Right.

About mean what could we think about something like that might be if you were a wholesale distributor, an independent manufacturer's rep or manufacturer. Let's talk maybe about some use cases because you know a lot of like a lot of ERP systems will, you know when there's a, you know when there's a FedEx number or UPS tracking number triggered it can automate through the, either their ERP or an E commerce system. But there's so many other things along this way that could, could really trigger something that makes a difference.

Right.

For somebody. Do you have any thoughts on that? I've got some but I wanted to throw it out to you first.

Well, I think there's you know, in the, I mean obviously it's a little bit different from a manufacturer to a distributor to a distributor rep. There's some nuances between those things that are there but what we see most commonly right is how do I leverage. I'm just going to say leverage or utilize my ERP data more effectively. Right. Which is not just about hey, how do I take my whole ERP data and move it somewhere else. That's not what we're Talking about how do we use the, you know, smart intelligently use that subset of that data. We also hear it quite a bit from marketing related actions, just like we just talked about with Mobiliko. So whether that's email marketing or SMS marketing or SMS communications or whatever, I want to be able to have some visibility on those things that are going on. And maybe the third bucket that we see less frequently, but I think we will see it more often is E commerce. So what's going on with E commerce? And but if you really think about it, there's probably other data sources in an organization that have a customer centric element to that, right? A prospect. When I say customer, it could be a prospect or customer or a partner, but there's somebody in your, in your revenue ecosystem that is, you know, you would like to potentially be able to leverage and use that data. So that really the, and this is, I guess the danger of data, right, is it can get overwhelming very quickly. So the key is, is to really understand, okay, what do we want to accomplish? Which is a lot of what we do in the Lead smart front is okay, what are we trying to accomplish with that? Then let's get the right data to accomplish those outcomes versus starting with data and then figuring out what we do with it.

Yeah, perfect, Perfect. So two things come to my mind related to what you're describing. It just takes me to a conversation. I actually met with a company earlier this week that in some, when I was at the show I was at, which we'll talk about in a few moments. But you know, large manufacturing organization, they sell through independent manufacturers reps to distribute wholesale distribution. And you know, in some early conversations that they've kind of come around to see the light a little bit. But in some early conversations when they've looked at some of the things we do within Lead Smart, we said, oh well we can do that because we have a data warehouse or we can get that from ERP or we have our marketing automation tool or we have a visualization tool. Well, we use the term oftentimes about either, you know, login or click fatigue where you have to go places. You know, my conversation with people when they kind of bring this up sometimes is well, we have that data. The question that I ask, and I just have to be very cautious to not sound to be just like a smart ass, lack of a better phrase, right. Is when was the last time you went and looked at that data? Right. And you may have these disparate locations that you have data at. But if you don't have an algorithm built or a process built where people know I need to go at this time and go look here and then compare that to this to then get an answer over here. That's where people stall. But yet they've spent a lot of money on these systems. And so I think what you're describing, right, is these triggers and actions that can happen is let's look at all of those, let's bring that data somewhere that's very clear and definitive. That now triggers me to do something versus me trying to remember is it in a spreadsheet in SharePoint or is it in our ERP system or is it in a data warehouse or an air table or something like that? Right. It's. It becomes very difficult to do.

Yeah. And again, this isn't about how do I replicate data that I have in an ERP system in another place. So it's taking data. And yes, accessibility is a problem like you're talking about. Right. They gave a statistic at Dreamforce which, and I think they were looking at this from a much larger Fortune 500 type company, but they stated that an average, the average large company has 900 systems in their organization that has customer or prospect or revenue related data that are siloed. Now, I don't believe it's true in most of the people we're working with, but even you might say it's 10. You might have 10. Right?

Yeah.

And so. And if you have different divisions or different areas, it could probably start to propagate. Right.

But you're exactly right. And I think that's the key.

Right.

Is marketing has this, accounting has that, operations has this, sales has that, and they're not communicating.

Yeah. And again, so there's an accessibility issue, but the bigger issue, and again, this is what we're talking about. I mean you can have different use cases for data, but our, the world we're living in is how if you're a revenue salesperson, revenue team, marketing person, your job is to generate revenue growth. Your job is to create more predictable revenue, longer lifetime value, full line wallet share. Right. That's your job. So how do we use this data intelligently from these multiple sources to accomplish that? And it's not just taking what I can see my data from here, it's how does it come together. So if I have data from here and data from here, but if it comes together in the right way, I get a whole insight that I didn't have before that I would never be able to get before. Unless like you Said I'd bounce around and then I somehow in my head kind of do my virtual. My own virtual whiteboard in my head about how all this data actually maps to an insight that I can use to actually.

And how many field sales people are going to pull over to the side of the road and their pickup truck and actually do that.

Right.

That becomes critical. I want to bring before we move on. I want to use a little use case with this. Right. Is within Lead Smart. We have what you and your team have built, right. Is a revenue expander tool where we can look at our customers, we can look at all the. What they're buying, right. We pull that data from an ERP system or another source. Right. So now that data is in there and let's say we maybe we're just general line, industrial distributor. Right. But now we can see what we're selling in, you know, industrial supplies, in safety, in tools, in whatever else it might be. Right. Now we can see these categories so the salesperson can see what his customer is doing there. But when we use that account planning tool, right. By bringing this data in from other places with that account planning tool, now we can say what should I be doing? We set an account plan against that. And now as this new sources of data comes in from erp, which is example number one, I get an updated dashboard and or a trigger that says XYZ Supply just bought and they bought these things but they didn't buy this. And your plan says you're supposed to sell this amount of these things that's actionable data. Where it becomes even a bigger trigger now is when we can say, oh by the way, an XYZ manufacturing or supplier, whatever that customer, they've opened these emails, they've watched these videos and they've taken these other marketing actions and all that data is coming into a single platform. I think that's a nice use case example of what you're talking about, about data. Right. We've got it everywhere. But what are we going to do to centralize it to take actions to drive revenues?

Yeah. We want our system. Right. And there was a term they were using at Dreamforce which I actually kind of like they were calling it real time CRM rather than being a CRM that I'm just recording, recording information into and all of that. It's really how do I use the data in real time to help me move the ball down the field rather than do record what I've already done. Yep. And, and again the. The risk. Right. And this is an Area that we spend a lot of time on with our customers is to go overboard and to try and do too much too quickly. But you can do things in bite size and get little, much, much smaller, I guess mini projects with this but very substantial order of magnitude improvement in your sales by some little things. So how do you do some of these things with data intelligently and maybe over time you start to build more and more into that. But you're not trying to create this super complex, you know, data setup over here. You're trying to do things that are going to really help somebody, increase wallet share, close more deals, open up opportunities that they wouldn't have normally seen, that kind of stuff.

So three things come out of that, right, customer gets served better and he's happier and he's more loyal to you. Second is salesperson is more efficient at what they're doing. So they're helping the customer and their leadership team or their owner and they're putting more dollars in their pockets and commissions. And third is when number one and number two happen, the executive team gets more data about the customer and what's going on with the revenue side of their business than they've ever had. So I want to wrap up on that topic because we've got a couple of things to cover and I don't want to go too long today. You mentioned you're at Dreamforce. Dreamforce is the large worldwide event for salesforce.com why we're talking about that is Salesforce is a development partner of us from our product Leadsmart. So just to clarify for the folks out there is our software is built on a couple of different platforms, AWS and some other tools that Tom and his team is leading. The technology side of our company is. And we have built part of our system off of the same development platform that Salesforce builds their software off of. So not Salesforce. We have a great partnership with them, very engaged with them. You were out to dinner the other night with some senior leaders from. From Salesforce. Wonderful partnership. We're what's called an OEM partner of theirs. There's about 500 of them around the world. They have this ability to develop software on that same platform. And like I mentioned earlier, we use other platforms as well to develop our product. So wanted to reiterate that. So I think the theme of this week for the two of us has been super spreaders. I was, I don't know, 12, 15,000 person event in San Diego. I'm going to shift gears because of time I was at the National Safety Congress this year was, I think it was the 30th out of the last 33 years that I've been to that event. Really hard to get a lot done because there's some people here today I've noticed joined us that I got to spend some time with this week. You know, it was old home day for me and it was funny for me is a little side personal note is Tom, as you know and, and I just noticed Andy Mitchell with Mallory Safety's with us today. I got to spend some time with Andy. But you know, my wife Darlene has a marketing, design and printing company. She does a lot of brochure and design work with some major manufacturers that were at this show. So for a period of time on, on Tuesday, I had both my worlds. I had my personal life and my business together in the same trade show, which I've been, you know, for so many years. It was kind of fun to. I bumped into my wife multiple times at the trade show while she was seeing some of her clients. So it was good, good event, well attended. We got to see some existing customers. I got to have some really good meetings with some potential new customers for our software and listening to that ongoing theme of the things that we've been talking about today is data serving customers better, needing to understand customers needs more. And we're just seeing that in customers. You know, we've talked about it so much in the last few months with this on this Friday event is buyers are changing.

Right.

The buyer that we used to go drop off bagels to on Thursdays at 8. Right. He's now being he's retiring. Right. Or he's been promoted and in behind him is that person that, you know, took Uber to the movies last night and had Door Dash deliver their lunch. It's a different world, as is the salesperson that these organizations need to hire. So it's really neat to talk to some of these really kind of call it mature, mature companies and mature markets, watching them starting to hear and see the need and the value of change. So it's really good to see.

Yeah. And I'll just add one more thing before we talk about the customer. One really stat that really hit me from one of the sessions I was in. And I think this might have came from Gartner, But I'm not 100% sure. But basically it was 73% of the customers that they surveyed said that they expect a vendor or a company that they work with to understand when they their needs, their requirements and their business yes. So they can't be a number. That was the big thing. As I said, we're done being a number or a commodity. We expect you, if I'm your customer, to know my business, know my requirements, know what I'm doing, and actually act as a guide or a consultant to my business.