Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution - Episode #160

Sa. Sam. All right. Good morning. Oh yeah, glad you could roll in.

Roll on in. Here we are at home in town for a few days. It's wonderful.

Good.

This lady. Lady down the hall that has been putting up with me for 21 years. It's nice to see her so. And that hound dog that loves you so.

Yes.

Cooper was happy when I got back in town. So yeah, it's. It's kind of show and event season. So we were, let's see, we were in Utah together last week for one conference and the week before last and then this past. This all this week I've been, let me see, last week and this week Denver with Affiliated Distributors and their industrial and safety groups and back to Denver on Sunday for Affiliated Distributors.

It's like Groundhog Day.

It is exactly right. I. I haven't logged their mobile app for this week's event. Wonder if I have the same booth because would have been nice to just leave everything set up, leave it there.

And you know, leave some stuff in a room and you're good to go.

Well the, you know, it's funny I thought of that. It's like, man, if the rooms were a little less costly, it would have been nice to just leave everything right there and come back to all the clothes and, and everything. But yeah, so you didn't have to.

Ship the boo for booth, right? It's all.

No, no, it's great. In. In AD is really good about that. You know, they're. I don't think I've been to one of their events. And you know, most events these days that we go to are. Are in, you know, large conference type hotels and AD does a lot with Gaylord properties and so all of Those have a FedEx location in them. So the booth ships to, you know, in our booth is pretty simple, right? It's just a small 10 by 10 with some pop ups. Fact, I found a. The other day a really cool big hard sided pelican case that can stop paying for the golf boxes from FedEx that are, you know, 50 or 60 bucks a whack and they last two trips. But yeah, it's pretty, it's straightforward. So yeah, the booth is there. But today ships the second booth we have for Lead Smart off to Chicago because the following week, last week of the month is the Affiliated Distributors electrical division. So this coming week is Pipe, valve and fitting, plumbing and H Vac in Denver and then the following week done downtown Chicago, which will be nice this time of year, nice and crisp. Will be at the electrical division the week after that, off to Memphis for the Industrial Supply association event, which should be great. And that gives me the opportunity to mention that our good friend of the show, Brendan Breen, the CEO of the Industrial Supply association, will be our featured guest next week on this show. So had a great opportunity to talk with Brendan a couple different times. He was at the AD event and so that was really nice. Him and his team was there. So it's good. They had a nice booth and a.

Lot of people there.

So then we slow down for. I think you and I are going to Vancouver, B.C. sometime before the end of the year and I've got a Las Vegas trip and then I think you're going to be going to Buffalo, so.

Okay. All right, well, let's talk about travel. Let's get on.

I don't know that anybody cares about that, do they? Probably not. Yeah. No, I want to talk about a show.

Yeah, we could talk about some news or something maybe they care about.

Let's do that. So before we start, I'll go fast. I'm Kevin Brown. Tom Burton here. We're four minutes into our show and all we've talked about is travel schedule. So enticing. It's why people log in, I'm sure is, you know, to enjoy that. But here we are again. It's episode number 163 of the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution podcast. So that means three plus years ago, Tom and I decided to get together every week and talk about the news in the economy and supply chain and mergers and acquisitions and IT and AI. And in fact, we got, I guess we got started before AI really just a little bit before generative AI was launched with ChatGPT. But we do that and we talk about manufacturing and distribution and people and leadership and all the different things that impact the world of wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We, we get together here and do that on Friday mornings and we do that by means of the newsletter that we publish. And the newsletter is called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. And that goes out to around 10,000 people each week, which we're excited to share with them. We review that and kind of try and apply what's going on in the news to what is happening around the world locally in the US and North America, and how that impacts wholesale distributors and manufacturers. If you don't get the newsletter and you're listening into the recorded version, because we're live this morning on YouTube Live, Facebook Live and LinkedIn Live. If you don't get that newsletter, we'd love to Send it to you three simple ways you can do that. You can just send us an email@helloadsmartech.com we will get that out to you right away. Secondly is you can, if you're active on LinkedIn, you can go straight to LinkedIn, look up either Lead Smart Technologies and you'll see the link to the newsletter there. You can search the around the Horn in wholesale Distribution manufacturing newsletter and that'll pop up and you can subscribe there. It'll come straight to your LinkedIn feed. Or third final way is we have a website for the show. It's www.aroundthehornpod.com aroundthehornpod.com and you can subscribe to the newsletter, you can subscribe to the show for Apple, Spotify, so forth there. So we would love it if you would subscribe to the newsletter. And then if you're enjoy the show, leave a review. If you're on YouTube, just hit the subscribe button. If you're listening on the recorded version, please subscribe and leave a review. And that's a big help to us as well. So lastly, we couldn't do this if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. We have developed what we describe as a platform that helps wholesale distributors and manufacturers both gain access and details that they've never seen before on their customers, their teams and their overall business. We do that with an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence tool where we bring silo data from across your business and we corral that together in one place and we use AI and other tools to gain insights that most people have never seen before. So if your company is digitally transforming and looking to accelerate growth and revenues and help your team be more successful, we would love to talk to you about that transformation and support you in that journey with technology that will make that faster, more cost efficient, drive revenues. So that's all I've got, I think. Tom, did I miss anything there? Should we dive into the news?

We should dive into the news. And if you're listening live, please, you know you want to hear more about our travel schedule in particular, jump in, say hello. Last time the comments were weird. We had like no comments and all of a sudden a whole bunch of them showed up at one time.

Yeah, yeah, it's like they were in a queue or something and the queue dropped.

Yeah, it was, it was kind of interesting. So anyway, if you're out there, let us know you're there. Hopefully our comment thing is working better today and yes. There's a black box here in the right corner of the, of the screen here, which I have seen it as well. Yeah. I have no, no idea why. But, you know, hey, that's the, the fun of modern technology. All right, let's do it.

So the economy's still shut down 17 days in.

You know, as you know, I'm not a news watcher, but do you feel like this is the most underreported event that we've had in a long time? I hear, you know, I don't watch the news, but I kind of keep up with the buzz and what are the things that are kind of, you know, and even the market, the market doesn't seem to really care a whole lot about this. It just seems like the most underreported event. And maybe this is the purpose of this article is where Scott Besson is basically coming out and going, hey, everybody, we need to do something about this.

Well, I, I think so. I, I do, you know, I listen to the news a lot. So we're kind of the opposite. I think you do hear about it a reasonable amount. I think the challenge that's really happening with all of this time right now is that. Well, let me first hit that. Your comment about the market. I think stock market. I think the stock market has very much proved to us over the last, I'll even say, just really since 2020, let's just say the last five years, through the ups and the downs of the economy as well as the pandemic. It doesn't care, really. And now it doesn't. Let me rephrase that. It cares with blips. Right? That's nice. You just had somebody said, love your CRM. That's awesome. Thank you. We'll send the check shortly. But the, by the way, that's Michelle, one of our great customers at Starrett Manufacturing, and saw some of their leadership team this week, and they love the work that Michelle is doing and we're doing in partnership with them. So that's good. So, Tom, in answer to that, right. I think what we've seen and you follow the stock market probably closer than I do. I probably follow the news closer than you do. I think what we see is little, I'm going to call them burps in the stock market related to some of these things. But in general, I mean, how many years have we been in kind of a bull, bull market in this setting? It's just the market is just going to do what the market does because there's so much money out there. Right. And so now, as we're seeing crypto becoming more mainstream.

Right.

And we've got, now we've talking about stable coins and some of the other things like that going into, going with the market in the marketplace. I think the market is just moving to drive dollars for, for people, whether it's electronic trading or, or normal trading. But we see, as we see things, you know, I mean, maybe for me, Tom, a good example I'd like your thoughts on this is with, this resonates with me is that when the market is baking in Federal Reserve cuts, you know, two months in advance or whatever it is, the market is just saying, okay, this is what we expect, but we're just going to drive ahead regardless of what they do. If they don't do what we think, then we'll have a little hiccup for a day or two or a burp for a day or two, and we'll be back to normal.

Yeah, I, I don't, I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I do agree that obviously there's a lot of money in the system and there's certainly the momentum is still positive and the market is driven off of momentum, predominantly. But if you look at things, if you look at the last week or two of the market, we didn't have a show last week, but I would say, well, I would definitely it's been on the downside. And there's been two events that have been, quote, unquote, pushing it down. One is the Trump threat for more tariffs on China, which I believe was last Friday, if I'm not mistaken, but Thursday or Friday of last week. And then there's been this sort of spookiness that's out there related to private credit and some of the problems that have been.

There's a banking, banking issue of yesterday. Right, Right.

So those have moved the market, predominantly. Well, one, you know, the, the Trump thing moved it down significantly down in a day. And you've had some down days this week, but there's been very little that seems to be moving. The, the shutdown doesn't seem to be impacting the market. And yet I think what you said, we're on day 17 or 18, and, you know, per this article. Right. It's starting to affect the U.S. economy. And I think the United Airlines CEO came out today, which I, I know, I don't know if you noticed this last week, but the week before when I was traveling, it definitely seemed like there were fewer people traveling than I've seen recently. And the United CEO came out today.

And said, well, I fly private, so, you know.

Oh, yeah, you don't see all that. Yeah, but that'd be great. But the, you know, the. He came out and said, hey, this is starting, we're starting to see the effect of this because people are being a little nervous or hesitant about traveling because they don't, you know, the air traffic controllers and safety and things along those lines. I definitely saw, or at least it felt that it was a lot fewer people traveling. The lines were shorter, everything like that last week. And you know, Salt Lake's a big airport, right? There's, there's a lot of stuff there. So.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting you say that. I hadn't thought about that. I was just in Salt Lake, Salt Lake City Airport and Denver Airport in the last two weeks. See what Chicago is like next week. But the airports felt maybe a little lighter. But my planes were stuffed full.

Most of most. Well, that was only on a couple flights, but they were not, they were not full.

All my flights have been full.

Yeah, right.

So interesting. Well, I. Anyways, so best insane. We're starting to feel it. I think that the tariff component that we'll talk about a little bit more in a few minutes is, is definitely a factor. And, but the. I just noticed this morning cnbc, that Treasury Secretary Besant is supposed to be talking today with, on the phone with Chinese Vice Premier He Le Fang. And hopefully that says that hopefully the conversation signals progress as Beijing's new export controls by threatening an additional 100 tariff that Trump is on Chinese imports. You know, we have an article later that talks about the tit for tat thing going on in the ports as well. So China has slapped some, some fees just like the Trump administration did on American made ships, not just American made goods as they're coming into Chinese ports, like is going on. So that's just a tit for tat thing. But you know, it, it's going back. And I was just thinking about this. You know, we were talking about.

The.

Industrial Supply association event coming up soon. And it was literally. Is it called Liberation Day, April 2, I think it was. I was sitting in. Where were we? Nashville. Listening to Brendan and Brian Wilde from the national association of Wholesalers. And Brian is the legislative analyst. I don't know if that's the title. He's the chief Washington guy at national association of Wholesalers talk about this. And it was literally within about an hour of the Liberation Day speech that went on. But what's happened in the economy. We've just kind of plowed along through all of this tariff thing. And the last few weeks, we've posted articles about the fact that, you know, tariffs are an issue. But I give you a good example. And I, I didn't ask any question. I thought about that this morning as I was preparing for the show today. I didn't ask anybody any questions at the conference I was at this week. But I need to do that in the next couple weeks because I had lunch with, you know, groups of distributors and had meeting after meeting after meeting with distributors. I did not hear one person bring up tariffs. There wasn't, I don't think there was any keynotes. No, certainly no keynotes, but there wasn't. In fact, in Bill Weisberg's KeyNote for the AD event, we talked about leadership and growth and accelerate accelerating growth and winning attitudes and so forth. I did not hear one lunchtime discussion or one cocktail reception or dinner discussion or nobody that did booth appointments with us talk about them scrambling with tariffs. Everybody's full speed ahead and growing their business does not mean for one second they're not dealing with it. But it just, I think it would be great if we could get this all put to bed and get this, you know, figured out so we have some clarity to it. But it's not like the world is stopping or really slowing down because of it.

No, I mean, and I guess the. And I think we're kind of bouncing.

Around here, but what we do.

And I wanted to say good morning to Will. We haven't seen Will for a while. Good to see you again, Will.

And come visit me in Chicago the last week of the month if you're in. In the city. Let's connect.

Hey, Bob, there is a. We have one of your.

Publish one of Bob's articles today.

Yeah, so. So hold on. It's coming.

Yeah.

We promise not to skip it or not have time for it. But I want to go back to, you know, even what we're. What we were talking about here with the shutdown. But look at these first few articles here.

Yep.

Right. So. And here, let's.

Let's read them off because most of our people are listening versus watching.

First article, shut down starting to affect US Economy. Doesn't. Number two article, weak consumer sentiment persists. Easier for me to say amid job anxiety. Okay. Number three, Powell says Fed confronts growing risk of higher inflation unemployment. The. The fourth one is more positive. I'll just go down here. I'll come back to that. US Supply chain faces another tariff aheadwind of new port fees. And so let's just take those right there. Right. All of those are not necessarily, I guess, positive, if you want to call it that, for the economy. So let's say for a minute, if we were to strip out AI and strip out the AI economy that's going on right now, where do you think we would be if you remove the AI situation that's there? Right. You would be in a situation where, again, we have the government shutdown. Now, you could argue that the unemployment problem is a byproduct of AI or at least has an impact of it. So, but let's just assume for a minute that it's not that there was just, you know, lower employment, higher inflation, and we had the tariff situation. So I think to your point about the market, the market is often still being fueled by the AI play and the momentum that's created by the AI play. And I think that is overshadowing potentially some of these other issues that are out there from a market perspective. But it doesn't change the fact that these issues still exist and are not, you know, fully addressed, if you want to. And the tariff point, you're right, the tariff thing doesn't seem to be a big conversation right now. We didn't see here with Brendan, if you remember Brendan, when he was on last time, that was this. The biggest thing that he was hearing from his members was tariff, tariff, tariff. So it'd be very interesting to see next week what he's hearing now or if he's still hearing those types of things. You're on mute, but you sound good.

That was it with Brendan's point, though. I think when we had him on last, though, was literally the week before Liberation Day.

I think it was the week ever after.

Yeah, no, it was a week before because we always have him on before to promote the event. Yeah. So I'll double. I'll double check. But yeah, either way, right around the.

Time the tariffs were at the peak of, of, you know, the news.

So, and, and, you know, my comment earlier, I, I'm not suggesting people aren't dealing with. Of course they're dealing with it. It's just, it's becoming. And we see these, we've posted many articles about that, that it's just becoming more part of life now.

Right. It's.

It's just what. What is now. I think everybody would like to put this behind us and know that exactly where we're at and what the numbers are going to be and then live with those numbers accordingly. I think you know, that the. I'm gonna make a comment that makes it sound like I know something about political science, which is absolutely zero, but I just, I have to assume there is, you know, because we've got. This administration is wanting to also become a peacekeeper, which is great, I guess, you know, but there's probably some behind the scenes pressure. I hadn't really thought of this. It just hit me. Probably some significant behind the scenes pressure with the tariffs and everything that's going on that is beyond economic and some of it could be tied to the stuff that China is doing in the South China Sea as what kind of claiming some sovereignty in areas and, and then with the threat to Taiwan as well, with that. So I'm sure that there's some of that in the background as well.

Yep.

So. But, you know, we never know what's really going on and behind these things. But again, if we go back and we take all of these things, Tom, and we look what the, this administration told us that their intent was, right, was keep fentanyl out of the country, close the borders. You know, there, there's all this talk that says no one is coming across the Mexican border illegal anymore. I keep hearing it, you know, people saying those words on other podcasts and stuff and sometimes in the news. I can't imagine that no one is. But it's, you know, it's a minuscule fraction in comparison to open borders. So those two things, I assume fentanyl is slowing down.

Right.

The other one was fair trade, which is what tariffs are about. Right. Fair trade should get us more manufacturing and on shoring in the US which then we get some tax, we get interest rates down, some tax credits, money frees up, economy thrives. Right. That's the idea behind all this. So, and then, you know, if you get an ego that's tied to wanting to be. Get a Nobel Peace Prize or something, or, you know, get on the COVID of Time magazine as person of the year, then you're going to try and solve world. World peace as well.

Yeah, I heard that the Democrats were even suggesting that, that Trump should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Middle East.

Get out of here.

Oh, I have. It's true.

A Democrat or the Democrats.

Not all. So.

So that's, that's something. Well, when you look back to what's going on within, you know, the shutdown right now is. And we didn't really finish kind of talking about that, so let's kind of ping through these articles quickly and then we'll move into our other sections. But, you know, the reality I think with this is, with this shutdown thing is it is just there has to be a point in time where we get the partisanship out of things. Because, you know, the last thing I was hearing the other day is that just, there's just no interest in giving. They're just going to point fingers and you've got, you know, a couple of bullies on each side that are just making. I mean, sometimes I listen to and this is both sides of the aisle on this. It's just, it's like, yeah, come on. Just these, these people that you're, you're vilifying are, are still good human beings. Just think about what you're there for. You know, you're there for the people that pay taxes. You're not there for your agenda. So it gets a little frustrating.

Well, some of the things that they're supposedly holding on for as they believe are what their people want and their people are backing. But yeah, anyway.

Yep. So anyways.

Real quick on the, you know, the Fed meeting is what, next week, I believe.

Not positive about that, but I know it should be end of the month. Yep, yep.

So it says, you know, palace says Fred Fed confronts growing risk of higher inflation, unemployment. I checked the poly market this morning.

Oh, did you? Good.

94 for a 25% decrease next month or this month. Okay, October 29th. So I guess it's still the. Not next week, the week after.

Yeah, it's middle of the following week.

3% for a 50% or 50 point decrease, 2% for no change.

So here's the question. Let's hold that poly market up there. Right. So the people that are watching can see the stats. Poly market started as an online betting. The online betting platform, but it's really turned into as a prediction tool. And there's a few sites like this, this one's, this one is, you know, called the Presidential election, you know, like a week or so before. And it just tends to be super, super accurate. So. And you can't. Am I correct, Tom, you cannot use this as a betting tool in the.

US not yet, but very soon, very soon. Like probably before the end of the year for sure.

Okay, let's. Inquiring minds want to know, do you have their mobile app on your phone already?

I don't.

No, no, no, because you, you, you, you aren't afraid of putting a couple of bucks down here and there?

Oh, I would put. Definitely put some bucks down if I had the ability to do it. On some of these, you know. Yeah. But the, the point from a prediction perspective is, and there's been a bunch of studies on this is that crowd sourcing predict, you know, prediction markets are way more accurate than polls and traditional prediction pieces that are there, which is why this is so intriguing. And there's just, you know, I, I have to say I think the, the 2%, no change is a little, you know, that would be a good long shot bet. But I, I do believe there will be a cut. But 94 seems quite high to 97%. Basically saying there'll be a cut of some sort.

Well, I think we've got to look at, I like the fact you have this chart up here. I think we've got to think about what this article, there's a little bit behind this art, this, these comments that Powell is making as well. I think there's multiple components. One, and I'm going to throw this out there, see what your thoughts are, is the idea that Powell doesn't like Trump. Trump's been pressure, pressure, pressure. So we've seen over the last six months or so plenty of times where you can almost read between the lines with some of the things Powell saying that it's like, you know, kind of sticking, trying to stick it to the President a little bit. My, my take on this is right now is that no ifs, ands or buts, we get this cut in October. The question is what happens on the following one. That will be. I, I believe we're going to get the 2 this year.

It's 82 for a 25 decrease which.

Is very different than 94. Right. Or whatever.

The previous one still pretty out pretty high. It's pretty massive, I believe.

So I think what, I think what.

Look at these numbers for December. 82 for 25 basis points, 50 or 10 for 50 or more basis point.

Right.

No change or increase is 1%, but that's still pretty high. Which means there would have been three.

Cuts this year, which is what was projected anyways. Right, right, right. Yeah. So I, I think that if there was any. I think what he might be trying to say here is if anything gets any worse and the impact of the shutdown. Right. That's going to be interesting to see what happens with the job market if we have a lot of firings and so forth going with that. So anyways, and he said they have.

A weird situation because their job is to reduce inflation and keep employment high, but they have actually kind of a dichotomy occurring where inflation is rising. And employment is dropping. And it's kind of a weird combination.

Dichotomy a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So let me ask you this. What would the market be doing right now if we just used Kevin Brown's number, that inflation target should be 2.75 or 3% versus 2%.

I mean, what would the market be doing related to what if we had.

A higher inflation target?

Okay, so what would, what would be the quite. What's the question?

I think if we had, if the inflation target number was higher.

Huh.

Right. Than it is now, we'd have more. We wouldn't be trying to target getting somewhere. We would just be business as usual. I just think, I just going back to the comment I've been making for over a year that I just think are the numbers that we have might not relate to, and by the way Secretary Besant agrees with me is that I think we might be using the wrong numbers based upon what the, the economy is and the markets are at this in 2025 versus, you know, some, some politician in, in New Zealand that said in the random hallway press conference what the inflation number should be?

Well, I haven't looked at the inflation numbers this month or recently, but I still think it's, you know, if not over three, approaching to get over three. So even if you were to raise the amount, we're still ahead of kind of where they would, they would want to be and certainly well ahead of the 2%. So. Yeah. All right, let's, let's move ahead.

You don't think three is a better number than two?

I don't, I don't, I don't think you can arbitrarily just change numbers like that. They.

Arbitrarily, they arbitrarily just decided on two.

Sure. But, but they built a lot of economic infrastructure around that and economic frameworks around that. Right. So I, I agree with you that yes, it was a bit of an arbitrary, it is an arbitrary from the.

Beginning, but it's not, it couldn't be arbitrary anymore, is your point.

Right, right.

Right. And I agree with you fully on that. But I do think that, you know, and we, we talked about this a few months ago, I think was, I think it would be interesting to see, I think this would just be a great like thesis study for an economic student or PhD dissertation thing or whatever to do would be to look at it is what if, what, what are the implications? I mean I, you could do a deep research thing on ChatGPT and saying, you know, what would, what would the economic Implications be or what. What other things besides the rate would need to change in the economy? Right. And what other factors, whether it's the stock market or it's interest rates or whatever, what would be our target goals to have a more balanced number than just relying on that 2% rate? What, what should the inflation or the job numbers be? I think there's some research that could be done, specifically using AI, that might come up with a more balanced, better view of this, that might not have the ups and downs that we have of everybody waiting for the next Fed meeting with bated breath. Right. I mean, in theory, this could all be automated.

Right.

Using AI and the interest rates could change weekly.

Well, yeah, they could all be.

There's a lot of, you know.

Could make this way more efficient than what we're doing, that's for sure.

Look, look, look at where we're going to be very, very soon is where you're going to be able to trade stocks on a live market 24 7, because there's no reason for the stock market to close. Right. There's no, there's no value in people sitting on the floor anymore, waving tickets and throwing paper.

Anymore anyway. But, yes.

But you know, that whole concept of that the market, the market should be 24 7, so why not, why not have those numbers anyways? You know where I'm headed with this, so imf, what's that you said you.

Think we're arbitrary and antiquated, which I tend to agree with. But I do think that she and I, I'm very much in favor of, of removing the antiquated process. I do think, though, that just arbitrarily deciding that you're going to change a target forecast inflation number, and I think there's way, way, way more into that. Yeah. And I think a lot of it would be driven off of GDP and expected true GDP growth, not based around, you know, cuts and imports and things like that. So I think, and this would be something that one of our economists that we've had on would be very helpful to really kind of unpack, I think would be an interesting discussion.

But. Yeah, no, I think that it's wise, but the other side, you know, I'm gonna, I was just, it was, I don't know if you heard. Listen to this one, Tom. You know, we, we talk about this often and we both enjoy listening to the, the all in podcast and a great, great podcast that's overall business and economy and technology and so forth. And they did their big summit that they had in la. I Think it was last month, wasn't it?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah. And so they had everybody from government officials and politicians to Elon Musk to everybody. But there was one of the companies that is doing. They're doing something related to stable coins and some other electronic currencies. And there was a whole discussion about moving towards having the financial markets and being able to trade 247 and so forth and kind of that the there not being any need for that not being the case. It just though hit me as I thought about that is the. You trade dramatically more than I do and have been successful doing that for many years. There's also another side of that that says, do I want to put that much. If you're an active trader, you know, having those markets that the times that the market's down, you can still put orders in, but you're not. You don't need to pay attention to them. The market opens. Right. I just wonder what that does to us from a human standpoint and an emotional standpoint. If, you know, now we could be trading and doing those things and, you know, we're flooded with News24.7 on our devices. Just one more thing to take up our time and emotions.

Well, the futures market, the crypto market, all of those for the Most part are 24 by 7. The futures market shut over the weekend and they shut for an hour every day, I believe is what it is. So we already have a fair amount of that occurring. Yeah. You know, I've listened to quite a bit of this. Even if we go to 24 hour or. Or around the clock trading, there still will be a quote unquote trading day that will be honored by a lot of the brokerages and things along those lines. So you'll still have some of that, but you can trade now 24 by 7 more or less, other than those. Those down times. So.

All right, where do you want to go next? We.

Let's. Let's get out of the economy. I think we've.

Well, I think it will be. Yeah, let's move ahead. But I think it will be good to see if that something does come out of a Treasury Secretary Besson's meeting with the Chinese vice premier later today.

That's something today did say that he's moving ahead with the meeting with. With G or whatever later that he had threatened to not do or whatever. So, yeah, I think the market like that. So who knows? I think there'll be a lot of banter, I think over the next few weeks.

Oh, no, no doubt. No doubt. And you know what? That's. Maybe his whole thing is to keep the media and the podcasts out there with plenty to talk about. Maybe that's. Maybe we should thank him for that.

That's right. That's right.

All right, let's dive into our manufacturing distribution segment. Quick article from Distribution Strategy Group about Fastenal's strategy shows how distributors can grow in a flat market. And you know, this is more of a broader, rather than just the news about. You know, sometimes in our scuttlebutt section, we'll publish some of the publicly traded wholesale distributors out there with their results. But the DSG did a nice article about, you know, kind of the broader strategy behind what they're doing with, with Fastenal and that. So good, good read there about how other distributors can kind of use some of the philosophies and things that they're doing. I did think, though, Tom, jumping ahead, though, to the article from the electrical.

District, but the one thing about Fastenal, the odd article is right, One of the reasons or the one of the ways they were growing is increasing wallet share with their, with their larger customers.

Tell me your thoughts on. Tell you. Tell me your thoughts on organic growth and increased wallet share.

Well, I mean, that's basically what this whole article is about, right? Organic growth. A lot of different, several different directions.

But yeah, I think you wrote an youth. I think you wrote a white paper about it.

I did.

And additional additionally to that, you and your team built the feature within Lead Smart called Revenue Expander, which looks across your entire ERP system and takes that data and analyzes it and comes back and reminds salespeople with push notifications that, hey, you know, you might be a 10% ahead at this customer this quarter, but you're selling them three of our 15 categories of products. You should go suggest these new categories. Right? I mean, that's, that's powerful stuff. When we look at just, you know, again, I, I'm in this show travel season and all I do at, you know, three to four days at a time is talk every day, all day, from breakfast through the booth time to lunch to the booth time to dinner and receptions with distributors. And we talk about that constantly about, you know, it's not uncommon to have a conversation with a salesperson that is excited because they have good growth going on right now. But at the same time, that growth could be exponentially larger if they were selling full line or, you know, all the product categories they have. And that tool that you and your team built is what does that.

Yeah, no, I would say that whether it's called white space or whatever you want to call it, probably one of the more common terms.

Sure. Yep.

And, and it's certainly. It's low hanging fruit. Right. For a lot of companies. So anyway, I thought it was interesting they mentioned that there's.

Yeah, that's good. This was kind of cool though. This next article about Schneider Electric, the big, one of the largest manufacturers of electrical equipment, collaborating with Nvidia. Nice kind of crossover between, you know, blue collar and products and into the, the AI race going on. Did you catch anything in that you liked?

Yeah, there's a lot, I think there's a lot of interesting, you know, you hear about all these big data centers, right. And you hear about, you know, Nvidia chips and whatever. But what you don't hear a lot about what is the infrastructure required to run these data centers, especially when you have so much more power having to go through the data centers. So what they were talking about here is, is Schneider a public company believe they are.

Yeah.

Okay. Might be worth looking into their, to their, their stock. But because it, what they're talking about is the infrastructure to power some of these larger data centers, there's a lot going on there. And so what Schneider Electric is looking at doing is putting in basically, you know, frameworks and architectures that can handle more of that power, handle that power more efficiently. All of the things that are underneath, you know, the kind of picks and shovels. Underneath the picks and shovels. Right. As what does it need to actually run these data centers and these chips at the scale that they, they need to. And even the more traditional rack systems and servers, farms and things like that that we've seen for over the years, those are, the infrastructure that supports those is not going to be able to support some of these much more high power data centers that are there. So I don't know if they have any proprietary technology who their competitors would be, but it's an area that I haven't really thought a lot about and could be an interesting play as we go forward.

Well, to your point there, right, we talk regularly here on the show about the, the data centers and these are big plays right now and it ties into what we've been talking about as well about on reshoring and on shoring, right. To get that getting manufacturing back here that to go along with as we see that happening and then the data, data centers that are needed to be built. It's a boon for all of our target customers that we mostly work with which while we have a lot of customers in office products and maybe some medical areas and so forth, you know, our core customers are elite smarter H vac and plumbing and building materials and so forth. You know, this data center building, I mean there's you know, major, the large electrical distributors, an example, are building whole teams about data centers.

Right.

Because they're selling everything from what's going in to build the building with electrical components, but then all the wiring and, and connectors and all of the things that go to power, all that stuff of what's actually happening. So traditionally you kind of think about, yeah, when you build a new building, right. There's, you know, whether it's, you're selling the, the rebar that's going in the concrete like you know, some of our customers do, or you're selling the drywall that's going on the wall like others are, or the, the studs that are going inside, or the roofing materials or H vac or whatever it is is great, but that's for the building. But now when we look at these type, other types as we start thinking about data centers now is they can't run without all the wiring and the things that goes with that. And so much of that is coming from wholesale distributors.

Next generation stuff. Right. This isn't the stuff that the traditional Amazon Google data centers have been built off of. Correct.

And you know, it's, it's kind of interesting with that Tom, is that, you know, Schneider being a manufacturer, that, that's an interesting collaboration with Nvidia, which is kind of a shift that we talked about, which kind of takes us to the next article which is modern distribution management. Did posted something about Sonopar, which is, you know, a French company and global electrical distributor. They're now in the software business.

Yeah, I, I, I couldn't believe that they have a software product that has generated over $2 billion in sales.

Yep. So, and it's kind of, it's great. They call it their digital job center for their customers.

So, so why do you think that is? I mean, why do you think they, did they get into the software business from necessity? Or do you think that you're going to see more distributors and, and companies having to provide technology, I guess, or, or offer technology as a strategic differentiator with their, with their customers? Because this software is all about collaboration. Right. So it's a collaboration software from, for project management.

Well, I mean, I think it's great, great comment, great question. In my, my view of this is we See this pretty regularly and from a standpoint, Tom of you've got just some major distributors regularly announce partnerships with Service titan where they're bringing it to their, their customers and there's a collaboration. I mean, I think we talk about this internally off and on. Is there will be a time very soon where contractors, distributors, manufacturers are going to be fully tied together and they're not going to share everything, but they are, there is going to be sets of data that are moving very quickly and that's, that's going to happen sooner rather than later. So I think what you're seeing is some of these very large organizations that are saying, you know, and come, I don't know that Sonopar is one that has this or even Schneider as we talked about before, two very large French companies. But many, many of the largest publicly traded companies as well as even privately held companies when you're in the, you know, tens of billions of dollars in revenue, they have venture arms. Right. So those venture arms are looking to things to invest in. So why wouldn't you want to in that setting, get into the software business if that's the future? Right. Because if you have a list of, you know, hundreds of thousands of in their setting and sona par setting here, hundreds of thousands, if not more, probably millions of electrical contractors that you already do business with. You have a built in customer base. You are, you're a trusted resource for them already. Right. And they already send you money, they already know your reliability level. Why would you not want to drop a great piece of technology in their lap? It's, it's really no different than, you know, Home Depot announcing a couple weeks ago their, you know, contractor app and Lowe's I believe, has one as well. So I think we're going to probably see more of that. Does that flow down to, you know, a regional player with that's a 200 million dollar a year company with 10 branches? Probably not. But the big players are going to try and continue to differentiate. And if you can get, you know, if you can get your customer using your mobile app or your technology to communicate with you, that's a big insulator against other customers. Yeah, or other, other competitors I should say.

But you have more visibility in what's going on.

Right.

Not chasing things around.

Yeah. You know, I mean you think about starting to even put like quoting tools built into a piece of software, then you have insight into what your customer is working on. Yep. So it's good. All right, where do you want to go next?

Let's go Ahead to maybe E commerce and marketing.

All right, cmos chief marketing officers share what brands get wrong when marketing to Gen Z. What does Gen Z care about, Tom?

What they don't care about is traditional advertising. They care about brand, they care about perception, they care about experience and so forth. So, you know, and I was thinking about this when I was reading the article. If you look at traditional advertising, does that go back to really like the 50s, right. When we first started having, having TV and TV commercials and maybe even the radio days before that.

Right, the 40s madman.

Right, 40s and 50s. And you know, it was great because there was no way to get exposure, right, to a product in those days. Now you can get exposure to anything. You can find anything, you can do it. So the advertising becomes a, as we know, a distraction. Right? Traditional advertising is a distraction. I think as people in our age, we put up with it because that's how we grew up, right? It was like that was the choice. But if you look at a Gen Z or a younger person, they haven't grown up with that requirement, if you will. And it's like, it's just, it's noise. And they, and they said here they hate advertising. So really talked about, you know, how to. The importance of building the brand, the perception, all of that stuff and kind of making those decisions.

It says Gen zers are not brand loyal and they hate advertising. So it talks about the. The real culprit of Gen Z's perceived aversion may be a failure by marketers to understand what types of content resonate with a group that is intensely picky and increasingly pulled toward insular online communities that require a different mindset to break into. So, you know, this ties in as we think about this with, you know, wholesale distribution is, you know, these are not. And think about it, right? You've even got many millennials and then certainly Gen Z's that they don't know life without the Internet or mobile phones. Yeah, the Gen Z's would probably, many of them, you know, would, wouldn't even know life without a mobile phone.

Right?

So from that standpoint, so the idea of solely relying on traditional email marketing and traditional brand views of how we want to build brands and so forth, they're not looking at things that way.

And you know, I don't know, I was watching, I think it was a golf tournament, the Ryder cup or one of those a few weeks ago. And they would have like Rolex would say, hey, I'm going to sponsor an hour of commercial free time. Right? That Actually had even more impact on me from a brand perspective than if they would have had commercials all throughout. In fact, I was like, appreciative of them doing that. It was like I wanted to. There was some loyalty. Right. Not that I'm not buying Rolexes, but my point is, I was gonna say.

Show me your wrist.

Yeah, no, my Apple watch isn't quite a Rolex. But the, But I could see the brand loyalty that starts to develop was like, hey, they're doing a favor for us. We're having. We're going to get an hour of uninterrupted time without all that, you know, interruptions every 10 minutes along the way. So I think there's a lot of ways to build that loyalty.

Yeah, it's a shift. And you know, I just. We've heard it before. I always think about this. It was the very first year. So this will, this year will be the third year where we talked about the. In January, we had a panel on. We had Dirk Beverage and Mike Marks and, and Ian Heller on and the. We were talking about, you know, buying habits and E commerce and so forth. And I just remember Ian, this was, you know, coming up on two years ago. You know, Ian just said, if you don't want to meet the buyer where they are somewhere else, we'll meet them there. Right. The buyers are doing things differently now. And so if we want to continue with practices that are just the same as we've always done thing and you know, it's that, that and I, and I'm even, even in these events that we're doing and you know, you talk to our customers with your team every day and you know, I talk to our existing customers and industry people and prospects for. What we do at Lead Smart and consistently is people are aware of the need to change, even with adopting new technologies like, you know, Lead Smart, channel cloud, things like that. But there is very much a thing that is there. You can feel the understanding out there for most people that there's more that they need to do. And, and the buyer, you know, we, we quote this stat, probably quoted it a hundred times, right. And the number keeps going up 80 plus percent. I think it's 82% now. B2B buyers are millennials.

Sure.

Just have different habits. They just do different things. So to treat them like we treated their predecessor, who might have been in their 50s and 60s, who we had been calling on for 20 years, the relationships do, in fact matter. There's no questions that they matter. But how that relationship develops and what it's based on is just different.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and again, they said in here, right, they want value, they don't want just promotion. So even if you're doing, you know, taking it back to our market. Right. Even if you're doing, you know, email marketing, which a lot of our customers do.

Sure.

Think through maybe the email strategy, which is maybe not just hey, buy my stuff or what's on special, but is there other things that can be added value? Right. Again, to build that, that affinity for the brand, which is what you're, what you're trying to do.

Right. Which I think ties well. And let's scroll down a couple articles there to the one about shoppers are asking AI, what to wear is your brand in the chat. Right. So now we're going to shift into the conversation of we've talked about forever about, you know, we were just talking earlier about brand and so forth, but now we've been talking about forever about SEO, search engine optimization and how we're getting in front of people. And now we need to be talking about, you know, AEO or aieo. Right. About where are we getting people and where is that transaction starting to happen. And we got a few articles coming up about that. So do you want to jump in on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think they're pretty, the two here are pretty related. Right. The first one is talking about from a consumer perspective, a lot of shoppers are consulting with AI on a fashion, what they should be wearing and doing in certain, you know, situations like hey, I'm going to a business meeting or a party or whatever it is, and they're asking for that AI to provide direction and, and insights into what they're doing, which is interesting. Right. Because that's easily influenced. Right. As far as of what's easily done. The second article, which kind of relates to that is if AI can't find you, neither can your customers. Talks about the fact that, you know, as we've talked about this several times now, is the traditional search, traditional Google search is rapidly being replaced by, or if not replaced, augmented by AI search. And so going back to the piece there, remember I think we did this a couple of weeks ago where we said, hey, show me what are the best safety goggles or whatever that are out there. And it came back with some certain recommendations that are there and certain brands. So it's, it's. Yeah, it's very, it's, it's a pretty big shift in terms of, and I think it ties back even to the brand situation because I Think the AI response that you get can certainly influence your brand more than the Google response you get where you just get a link back to your website.

So it's interesting and I haven't looked at this closely just kind of got me thinking right because you know now when you do a Google search you get Gemini's response right off the bat. But I haven't haven't looked at that from a shopping standpoint. You know when I shop online it's probably 90 plus percent Amazon and I go into the app to do what I want to do. But I'm just trying to think about how that will play. It's going to be interesting to watch how that plays out because ChatGPT is going to do their thing. Perplexity has their marketplace that they're working on. But Gemini kind of does get you the best of both worlds, wouldn't it?

Yeah but think about where people are going for AI right now. They're going to chat GPT right. So it's you know, you have to go to where they are and Google is not. I don't go to Google. I personally don't go to Google thinking I'm looking for an AI result. I go to chat GPT thinking I'm looking for an AI result.

See I'm and I'm starting to do so in you do everything chat GPT. It's so interesting right. I want to start almost do a little survey on this. So Bob says It's funny old McDonald had a farm Eieio not a E I O and SEO and leave it to Bob. Thank you Bob for that to keep.

Us moving after that he's throwing rocks at our aisle.

We we will need to they'll move along here promptly so we do get to Bob's article that we posted this week but it is interesting to start. I mean this might be a great I'm going to a wine tasting tonight with a about five couples that are wine wine nuts and the I'm looking looking forward to that. So that might be an interesting conversation with a handful of people that would be there would be actually pretty relevant is like where are you searching now And I know what you wine. Sure yeah I mean even even that right. And a good example is I wanted to check I I actually bought a bottle of wine versus taking some that I have to the to this wine tasting there was something in particular I wanted to do but I wanted to look at the ratings of that between three different rating people and or companies and I actually did that this this morning because I needed to send a guy a text message about what I was bringing tonight. And I actually did use Google and I wanted what Gemini said. So I think I am actually might be doing a little bit of a shifting on that but I typically don't do the same type of search for those types of things in ChatGPT because if I get rid of my, if I get rid of my search history, I get rid of all the business stuff I'm doing. So I'm kind of doing business in chat GPT. Quick AI searches in perplexity and then the combined searches I'm going back to Google with because I get Gemini and in Gemini's who answered that wine question for me super quickly. I didn't have to click on any links but the links were there if I wanted them which I think that's probably something they should be marketing more to with this. But you know, point being with this is with these articles is and, and I think something we need to work on at Lead Smart to get ourselves organized a little bit better with that is the reality of it is the younger generation is starting to use AI. This article talks about the first article there talks about 73, 73% of shoppers trust AI chats bots for style and purchase advice. So it's pretty big number, right. They talk about a conversational commerce that's driving engagement. Right. So if you can do that I, I love that conversational commerce. So they the these are some pretty good things that I think are important specifically for distributors to be thinking about right now which if you don't have anything to add to that, let's jump into our technology, cybersecurity and AI segment because in there we have this article from CNBC about Walmart teams up with OpenAI to allow purchase direct directly in ChatGPT. So thoughts on that on your end, Tom?

Well, I mean I think we talked about this right a week or so ago is that OpenAI is and chat GPT was opening up so that you could make purchases directly on their site. Walmart went into a kind of a. It's unclear about how much they paid, but it was significant. Right. So what I'm, what I believe is going to occur is not only is OpenAI going to allow people to make purchases of Walmart products through there, but they're probably going to spotlight Walmart products right ahead of other products. Right, right. So if I'm looking for something and I had an exist at Walmart and Target, I would expect that Walmart's going to get a higher position on that and a higher piece on there. Which actually kind of is irritating to me because. Right. Pay for. Pay to play. And now we're going to get a whole bunch of bias and a lot of different things that are there.

Absolutely.

Which again may go back to some of the different, you know, cloud comment here about all these different, you know, perplexity co pilot. All these different things for personal and business. Yeah, it might work. I don't know. I don't know how it's going to play out, but I think it's a bit of a slippery slope. And I mean think about this now from a business perspective. Right. If I wanted to get ahead of is are they going to open up a sort of Google Ad Marketplace type of scenario where I can go. Because remember, Google Ads are all based on bidding. Right. So whoever outbids each other gets the highest ranking. Could you do the same? Is OpenAI going to do something similar where you could bid to get yourself positioned in the right thing and then be able to purchase right through there? I don't know but Walmart certainly seems to be the first example of that.

Yeah, agreed on all of that. By the way. Appreciate that. A comment from Klaus there about and thanks for being with us. Klaus. The. He talks about the, the shift of how he's doing his, his searches. Right. He said everybody does things a little bit differently basically. But he talks about using Gemini Perplexing co pilot personal life. It's Gemini Perplexity he likes better co pilot he uses because he's at work and you know, we haven't pushed it out across our entire organization but I have co pilot and I just, I just use it so rarely. But what I do. What's that?

It's crappy.

What. What I like it for though and I really like it for is doing. I was working on a. What was I working on? I was working on a bonus plan for the new science client success person that's coming on your team the other day and I. I don't have the wizardry that you have with Excel is not one of my strengths and I was trying to pull something together and I, my formula was off and I asked it and it redid the formula for me really quickly. Great tool, right? I didn't have to go. I did it right in line while I was working. So there is some nice things about that but it's certainly not the idea of going to copilot for general work is not something that would. I would, I would be thinking about with that. Here's the shift though, back to this article. Right so we're thinking about retail there maybe a little bit of B2B from the Walmart side. I my caution of this and I would this is just not something I would have thought about a lot but we had a couple of really good conversations a while back with a gentleman I met at the Distribution Strategy Group's Applied AI event. Was it June? I guess it was. In Chicago was Lutz Finger that's you know, Karen L. University professor in AI and very early on the Snapchat team with the technology behind there and Google Health and their AI component and really, really bright guy, fun guy to be around and you know what he was talking about. This is when you stop and think about what Chat GPT really wants to be and is probably on their way. There is all things to everyone where you know, you're looking at this kind of time I think and I'm glad you're shaking, you're nodding your head on this is that the where we're headed here is or their goal is something we should all be thinking about because awareness is so important in this setting is the idea of I want to be everywhere you go to search. I want to be your Google, I want to be your Amazon and I want to be your health place and I want to be everything that you need to do right in that setting. And that then must get us all thinking about what do I want to share with them. Right? And that was Lutz's big comment. When you think about things from a wholesale distributor is do you want them to control your customers journey with you? Do you want them to have everything that you know, do you want them to have all of the data that you would need to share with there to be on their platform? It's a very different thing than when somebody decided to use the the Amazon platform and start an Amazon store years ago. Yeah, they have all your customer data which is that you sell there, but they don't have your Joe smith that said XYZ Construction that spends $3.5 million a year with you because that's not who that customer is. Right. But now what ChatGPT is going to want to be successful in this and I can almost guarantee you there is a lot I'm sure there was a huge negotiation in this Walmart deal about what data really gets loaded into them and what comes back and forth. I just think we're going to learn a lot more about this. But people should be thinking about I want your Take on this. Before we finish on this, Tom, I think people should very, very quickly be thinking about what do I share. They're not, not from a security standpoint, but is what do I want to control versus in the marketplaces versus what is somebody else I want to allow someone else to control based upon what I'm sharing.

I think in, in my opinion, and we're gonna, we're talking about. There's another article, I hope we get to it, about context. Right. I think that if OpenAI or chat GPT opens up a sort of Google Ad Marketplace situation, in other words, where you buy keywords on Google for Google or there's something where I can potentially put my product in front of people and buy my way in, I think that's fine depending upon the product and the situation. But what the problem is is it's still going to miss context. Right? You're the context of what you're doing and the, and so forth is going to be very limited to whatever you have around your product spec.

Right.

And I think the key then to really working with really much other than like, you know, maybe simple MRO products or, or things like that where it's really much more complex products like consumables.

Type things, commodity type products.

Right. Then context is so important in depth of what you're providing is so important. And so I don't, I don't, I think, I don't know that there's a either or I think there's a potentially a both going forward. And you know, one of the things, maybe we need to do a around the horn 2.0 show on this because I've really been thinking about what does the world look like in five years as it relates to how we incorporate AI and these AI things into our life. And you look five years ahead and you look at some of the capabilities and you look at the things that are there, you really have to look that way to be thinking about your strategies of what you're going to be doing today and putting those things into play. And so as I look ahead five years, I see, I don't believe that how we operate today will look anything in five years will look anything like how we operate today.

Well, agreed. Yeah.

And, and so you've got to be thinking to where the puck is going, right? And, and going backwards on that. So, but to me this is just a, the perfect example of them. I believe there will be some form of a Google Ad Marketplace that starts to develop an open AI which will allow them to spotlight your Products based around. It's not just keywords. Right. In the Google world, it's all. You buy your keywords here. It'll be based around the questions and answers. It'll be much more comprehensive.

Yeah.

Which.

Well, let's.

And guess who's going to. In that's going to impact Google and Facebook, right?

Well, that's Right.

Right.

And the idea behind that is. And that's, that's the, the fight. Right. We don't hear a lot about it. Consumers don't hear a lot about it. But it's the Llama model from Meta.

Right.

And it's Gemini from Google. Right. You don't think about Llama.

Right.

You think about what do they think. When you're in Facebook you can say ask Meta or something like that. Right. But that's that, that is the. I mean there's just a whole lot more people in the fight for eyeballs now. Yeah. Right. Why don't we jump down to that article. But before we do, there's a couple other good articles in that section from on. On cyber attacks and AI agents from Distribution Strategy Group, a couple other good articles. But just because of a. Of time and wanting to get some other sections today, let's talk about this article from Gartner. When I sent it off to our team to get the newsletter put together, I said geeking out a little bit on AI prompts because it's a little bit deep for the, you know, as some of sometimes we publish. But let's talk about context with AI and it ties right into what we're just talking about here.

Yeah. What this article is talking about is. Right. We kind of all started out in the AI world. Well, you have to ask the right prompt. But what context is, is how much information are you giving. Right. Your AI, whether it's at a prompt level or at a model level or whatever, how much depth of contents and context and breadth of context. Because that's what's really going to make the difference. Right. So think about in our world of distribution and the specialty products or manufacturing and distribution. Right. The specialty products and the, you know, all of the different. And how products work together and the engineered solutions and all of those types of things, that context does not exist in the OpenAI model as it exists today. Correct. So any of the models, Right. The Gemini model, the cloud models, any of those don't have that context. So we've got to be thinking about how do we define context into the AI versus and even into the prompt, which is what they were talking about is not prompt engineering, but context engineering is how do you build that context and construct context and what you want the AI to do and how it operates.

I love the, I love the examples, right.

And giving it, it's not just a prompt, but it's giving up more data and examples and other, you know, documents, structured and unstructured data. Both.

Yeah, well, I love, I love what. And I want to go into that a little bit further. Maybe you could take us down that path in a moment related to that. But the article here, and this is a Gartner article, it just seems like the content I get both, you know, as I get all these emails of how we curate our newsletter. But when we get gartner and or McKinsey content that relates to our wholesale distribution audience, like in this segment, they're just, they're some of the best stuff that we get. Right. McKinsey is I think maybe a little bit better. But I love this. It says contact adds depth. Transforming AI from that of a black and white comic strip into a 3D virtual world. And, and what it really makes me think about. And this is just a, this is a small component that I'm going to mention here. But you know, there's a product in the marketplace that does SKU level product recommendations, right. For wholesale distributors, teams and mostly inside sales in that setting. And the struggle, you know, and this, this is talking a little bit different type of context. But you know, if you think about what we could get in that setting if we were had a live agent with us in a phone call, right. Or even if I had an agent working with me right now that was using true context to query whether it's chat, GPT or whatever tool it is while we're doing the show, that could be feeding me relevant information right now, live based upon the context of what we're talking about right now.

Right.

That'd be so powerful. This is what you need to know next. Now in that setting of that software company I was talking about, right. It doesn't know when you're a customer service person the context of the phone call that you're on.

Sure.

Right. It just can see some data that says somebody like this bought this type of paper on our last call. Now you should sell them toner. Well, they don't want to buy toner. They called about a problem actually with an office chair. But if our context is poor in that setting, we can't get good results, right?

No, I think. And even going back to white space and wallet share and all of that context. That's what's really going to rather than just you know, randomly saying hey you didn't buy, you bought tools but you didn't buy fasteners. Right. But if you have more context than that then you have actually the tools to actually go and be effective in that situation that's there.

Well and you know, they just, they what is context engineering? Right. They talk about designing and structuring relevant data, workflows and environments so AI systems can understand intent, make better decisions and deliver contextual enterprise aligned outcomes without relying on manual prompts. And you know, I, one of the things that pops into my mind that's pretty broad statement but Tom, would you, you know, you one year computer scientist by education and I studied business in school so I'm going to give you that heads up to start with. But then secondly is I know you've done just, you've taken courses in AI and so forth. But just to scratch the surface on this is from my standpoint is the idea of even asking whatever tool you're using, whether it's Gemini or, or ChatGPT or whatever the model is you're using, asking it to help you define your context and prompt of your desired outcome. I mean that's kind of even almost the first layer of this isn't.

Is I mean they'll definitely help you.

Yep.

Prompt. But where this really starts to spotlight is this whole concept of agentic workflows.

Right.

Right. So let the. When you really want to start thinking about context and kind of going in different directions based around whatever the context may be, that's where the agentic workflows can start to come into play because you're not, it's not a one size fits all right. And so I can make adjustments and I can start off and, and start letting the, the process take me through and drill down into in the. And essentially dynamically start adjusting based on the context and the signals that I'm giving it that are there. So you know, agentic workflows is not a lot that very few companies have done a whole lot with. It's still kind of clumsy to work with. It's got flaws but aside from that, you know, it's just getting better every day. AI OpenAI just released a workflow builder a week or so ago and so I think and we're getting more and more. I'm having more conversations with our customers about workflows than I've had in the five years that we've been doing this.

Well, people are more aware of what could be. Right. Right.

Well, I just, yeah, I think they're, they're realizing that understanding their process and their workflows, that is their context. Right. Of. And then combining that of course with their products and their, and the different things. So yeah, I think it's. Look, we're in the very, very early innings of this, but I think, yeah, we are moving from, hey, this interesting little prompt into how do we really provide much, much more meaningful outputs on this AI because that's how it's going to build trust and it's going to go forward. Anyway, let's move ahead. I want to make sure we do hit Bob's article today.

Yep. Let's roll into our sales and M A segment and we'll go straight down to that. Another good article. They'll hear as well. We're gonna catch Bob's article about knowledge and then after that there's a good article there about pricing concerns from Mike Kunkel as well. That's a, a LinkedIn posted article. Let's, let's talk about Bob's article there. You want to lead us off?

Well, hey Bob, I thought it was a really great article.

You sound like ChatGPT.

Yeah. Hey, well done, Bob. Great question.

This is insightful.

That's insightful article. Yeah. Do sound. I spend too much time on Chat GPT. I guess it's like anybody was to ask you a question. It's like great question.

Well, remember, remember when we were sitting in the conference room a few months back and we were working on, I think we were working on just some modifications to the core values of the company because we'd be kind of just needed as a lot of hiring is going on at Lead Smart right now. Needed to do some work on that and I had my laptop shooting up to the screen in front of us and after about the 10th question, you were like, this thinks you're smarter than you are.

Yeah. You were like, you know, I'll pound.

I'm a wizard, man. It's a. Yeah, my head was, it.

Was going, your ego was getting really big about how brilliant we are and the questions you were asking. But what I thought was actually good about this article, it actually just aligns with what we were just talking about. His point being, right, is a lot of companies throw sales people. You hire a salesperson, you think they're going to be some sort of all star salesperson. What do you do? You toss them in. All right. Start selling. Right. You might train them for a day on your products or whatever and you just Say start selling and guess what, you're not giving them context. Correct. And in context of the market, context of the conversations, all of those things that we just talked about. Right. And the point of his article here is, you know, how do you actually go about. I think I don't know, Bob, it was the SEAL thing you were talking about is go slow to move fast but basically go deliberate through the process. And really. And I agree and I think this is something, whether it's in sales or marketing or and whatever is you as we're becoming more selective on what and what roles we're hiring for and who we're hiring for, the onboarding and the ramp up and the context that we have to give is very different than hey, I'm just going to throw somebody in and you know, hopefully they're gonna, you know, they'll swim and if they're either sink or swim and if they'll sink, we'll go get somebody else. And I thought it was some really good insightful pieces there.

Well, there's a couple things here. The first thing I want to say is, is it and Bob has been a regular loyal listener and contributor to our show for years now and greatly appreciate that. And if you're not following or connected with Bob Britton B R I T T O N on LinkedIn you should do so because he publishes some really good content on a consistent basis. But Tom, just as a side note, isn't it Bob that regularly comments on the live show on LinkedIn that we should go move on from AI and doesn't we do too much on AI is that same guy?

I think it's same guy. Yeah, yeah.

Here I reference. I think it says first, what is sales knowledge? Here's a working definition. Sales knowledge is the comprehensive understanding of products, buyers, markets, competitors and sales process that enables a seller to create, communicate and capture value effectively throughout the customer journey. Chat GPT just, just reference point here real quick. So.

Oh, that came from ChatGPT.

It says it right here in his article. Yeah, so but I digest there. There's a great. In fact Tom, do you, can you highlight any of this?

Do you.

I don't know if you have it open if you don't no problems. We're running short on time. But what I liked about this and it really, it's interesting what triggers for me out of this and what I liked about reading this is he talks about a description and example applications for product knowledge, customer knowledge, market knowledge, competitor knowledge, process knowledge, playbook knowledge, interpersonal emotional knowledge, nine or seven things there and he gives a description and example applications of it. What I found, I, you know my mind always shifts is how can we apply some of this to technology? You know, when you think about product, customer, market, competitor, process and playbook knowledge really, let's just say up until the process knowledge that all can be tracked and managed really well in a AI enabled smart CRM. Right. You can have that data in there that is easily queried and can be used with tools like lead smarts, Genius feed and so forth. Oh Bob, by the way, he just comment. I wasn't insinuating for one second ChatGPT wrote this article. I just thought it was funny because you referenced Chat GPT and you're always telling us to move on from AI. That's the, that's the.

He's just a I fan is all it is.

Yeah, that's it. That. That's right. No, no, I and I did think for one second. This is. Bob is a. A veteran of the sales field and guide coach and consultant. I just. I like this. Right. Because we think about most field salespeople. You'll just say whether you're on the manufacturing side or the distributor side are good at a couple of these but they're not good at the. The whole mix of them. Right. They might not have, they might have product knowledge and market knowledge but don't pay attention to their competitors. And we live in a world in a day and age when you can have all of those things and you can have them all at your fingertips. And I this, this just this one single again this is title of this article is retention of sales knowledge and ramp up speed. Bob is this comes with this grow your top line revenue tool. But this, we're using it here from LinkedIn today. I just think this chart is really, really good. It's really, really solid. So anyways, there's your plug Bob. Follow Bob. I liked it. I'm gonna actually read more of this and maybe even save that chart and use it in one of my agents if he doesn't mind. So Tom, let's get ready to roll. We've got. We kind of are gonna miss today our people in leadership segment but really.

Over about I don't know, 812 articles here.

Well part of that is what we. We don't typically talk about our channel leaders on the move segment. There is a pretty exciting announcement though in the industry scuttlebutt section. You want to tell us about that one?

Yeah. So we did a. Not just an integration but a product with Core technologies for companies that are on Eclipse erp and we've used it now and tested it with a few customers and it's, it's pretty amazing. We can kind of get real time Eclipse data, quotes, bids, orders, invoices, all that kind of stuff. Customer information, what have you. All of that can be synced in real time between Eclipse and Lead Smart. We even have some BI directional things so contacts can sync bidirectionally. There's other things that can be syncing BI directionally and when you really have that sort of real time, I guess environment there, it really does make a big difference in terms of the, the.

Analytics and I think the, the core at the core of this, no pun intended, Kore, our friends at Cortech Jamil and his team there. I think not all ERP systems are.

Created equal and some are more complicated than others in terms of extracting data and things like that.

That was my point. Right. And Eclipse has historically been a little bit of a struggle. APIs are a little bit of a struggle. Core has built a set of their own APIs and so forth to work with this and it's working flawlessly with the customers that we have it that have struggled to get good data out of Epicor Eclipse in that setting. And so we're pretty excited and happy to be partnered with the team at CORE on working with this and we've got some great distributors using it already, but now that it's available it's a full. You know, a lot of what Core has historically done has been project work versus product work and in partnership with you and your team and, and the team there with Mark and those guys there have built a great product out in this space. We were happy to announce that. So we're looking forward to that closing kind of out on that is. And it's kind of cool to see Infor having launched some Infor being another major ERP system for manufacturers distributors, in fact having dinner with previous guest on the show Steve Levy from, from Infor having dinner with him in Memphis three weeks. We just scheduled that yesterday. So we have, we have a standing date now on the final night of ISA events that Steve and I get together for dinner and collaborate over maybe a, a beverage or two on, on what we're seeing in the technology and distribution world. So that'll be fun. But they're building some agents into their portfolio of agents into their ERP system. That's good. So Tom, we got a big day ahead of us. I got to get on a plane again. Sunday. So lots to do. Great show. Thanks for your insights. Love the agency talk that we were having and we're going to continue to have these. Anything else before we roll?

Nope. Thanks everybody. Great comments. Great to see everybody here.

Great audience. Yep. We appreciate you.

I got an interview.

That's right, you do. Momentarily. So before we go, we thank everybody for coming again. I'm Kevin Brown. This is Tom Burton. We couldn't do this without the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. If your company is looking to move forward using AI and other smart CRM related tools to kind of understand your customers better, your team better and your overall business better by gaining insights across your organization. Back to the points that Bob made here about product and customer and market knowledge and competitor knowledge, bringing all those siloed pieces of data from across your business into a single platform. We're moving into a world of platforms now, not just software. And bring that together in a way that can help your business accelerate growth. We would love to talk with you about that. We'll be here again next week. Until then, we will wish you all a wonderful weekend. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend.