B2B Buyer Signals and AI: The Implications For B2B Organizations

Foreign.

Welcome to around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by LeadSmart Technologies. Tom, Kevin and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents, and the global wholesale supply chain. Whether It's M&A SaaS and cloud computing, B2B, E commerce, or supply chain issues, we peel back the onion with our guests into the topics that impact your business the most.

How are you?

Good. Good to be back. Good to be back. Yeah.

Doing this six weeks in Florida and back to Santa Barbara, huh?

Yeah, I'm just glad to be back doing the show. We haven't done the show for two weeks, so I know it.

Yep. We've had travel schedules and your east coast and I was east coast for a few days and then Midwest and scrambling to get back and I took a little time away. We, we lost our. Tomorrow will be three weeks ago that we lost our biggest fan. So we.

Well, in his honor.

That's right. We played today's music in his honor. I gotta tell you a quick, quick story with that. We'll move on. But your dad was almost 89 and pretty sick, and so it was good for him to go to sleep and. But he'd been in the hospital for almost a month and three weeks into the hospital, struggling with his breathing and stuff. And my sister was visiting and we were on the phone because I was going to see him the next morning. He asked about the podcast link, wanted to hear it. And about a half hour later, my sister calls and this was on a Friday. And she goes, I cannot believe our father. And I said, what's. What are you talking about? She goes, once he had me get the podcast downloaded onto his iPhone and lay it on his chest, he basically dismissed me from our visit because he wanted to listen. So my sister was not. She actually thought it was pretty cool, but she was like, he just was making this, like, okay, I'm going to listen to this now. You can go. So poor Cindy got goodies.

Yeah.

What's that?

Good priorities. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyways, he was our biggest fan. We'll miss him. But, you know, life, life goes on and it's a struggle as we go. So on to today's stuff, huh? It's good to be back. As you said, we got a big list of guests coming up soon as well that I'm pretty excited about. So it's just us today. So we'll dive in. How about that?

All right, let's do it.

Good. So let's get a little bit of our housekeeping done before we dive into the news. So as again, Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, lifelong friends, co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart is a AI enabled customer intelligence and CRM solution that looks across customer bases, across sales teams, marketing teams, e commerce and across your entire business to help bring deep insights into understanding not just your customer, not just your, your sales teams, but your overall business. And gives actionable insights and accountability and visibility that companies have never had before. So that's what Tom and I do for a living. Lead Smart is the sponsor. We couldn't do this every week. There's quite a few costs that go with putting our podcast together. We're live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook Friday mornings at 9am Pacific Time. Happy if you're with us there. But if you're listening later in the day to the podcast on whatever your favorite podcast platform is, whether it's Spotify or Odyssey, Apple podcasts, whatever it might be, you won't be seeing the newsletter that we look at. And what we do every Friday is we get together and we look at our newsletter called around the Horn and wholesale distribution and manufacturing that goes out. I think it's close to 10,000 people now every Friday morning. If you don't get that and you would like to two simple ways to do that and just let us know. You can pop them actually three, I guess you could pop a note in the chat here if you've joined us live. Or you can send a simple email to helloadsmartech.com or we have a website for the podcast. It's www.aroundthehornpod.com. you can send us a note through there to sign up for the newsletter. We'll get that out to you each week. So we get together, we review through the news of the week and how it relates to wholesale distribution and manufacturing. If you are with us and you like what you hear, we're at where are we? 89 today, Tom?

89.

89. So we're coming up on 100, but we've done this 89 times basically. Now if you like what we're doing, follow Lead Smart Technologies on LinkedIn, subscribe on YouTube, follow and like on Facebook or if you're listening on any of the podcast formats. It would be phenomenal if you would subscribe as well as leave a review and that gets this information out to others. So I think I covered the, the housekeeping for the day, right, Tom?

Yeah. I'd also ask if you're on live now, please Jump in, let us know you're here and where you're from. LinkedIn has been really weird the last few weeks on. Or maybe the. The streaming platforms, I've noticed, have been really weird the last few weeks on comments. So would love to know you're here and, and jump in and say hi.

Yeah, it's odd sometimes, right? We'll see a few comments come through and then later in the day or the next day, I might look on LinkedIn or on YouTube and there's comments there that we never saw. So we'll do our best. Right.

You would think they could get this figured out, but it's. It's definitely fickle, I guess, to say the least.

Well, I tell you what, what did you. And a good chunk of our audience listens to the record, either the recorded podcast or live on LinkedIn. And what did Microsoft pay for LinkedIn? 26 billion, I think it was. You think they'd have this figured out, but there's some holes there still. Right. All right, well, as we dive into the news, we break things up into a bunch of different sections each week. And we start with economy and supply chain. So, Tom, you want to lead us off on that first article we have about weak US Productivity threatening, a soft landing.

Yeah, I mean, we have a few economic articles here today that we're going to touch on and. Hey, Tyler and Ron. Great. Okay. We actually have people that LinkedIn is providing their comments, so this is great.

Hey, you know what, Tom, before we jump, I just wanted to say I got a chance to see. See Ron at ISA recently and what a great guy. We had a super conversation and really encouraging guy to chat with. So thanks for being with us, Ron.

Yeah, thanks, Ron and Tyler for checking.

Tyler as well. Yep, absolutely.

So, as I said, we have a few economic articles today, and you combine that with the whole job report that came out this morning, which didn't quite. We didn't quite make our. Our news articles here, but the job market or the job number of new jobs were much less than expected and the market seems to like that a lot. But yeah, what this first article is saying is that productivity growth has been down in the first quarter. I think it's a stretch, you know, and they even say this in the article, right? It's a stretch to say that, oh, productivity is down and that's going to potentially lead to inflation. Productivity, I think, is. It's one, it's hard to measure and two, it kind of moves around a lot.

Yeah.

But I do think that, again, it's another indicator in the equation that, you know, things may be slowing down a bit and the question will be is, can inflation adjust enough? I'm still sticking with my one cut this year. In fact, I, I, I think you should just surrender and buy me my stake when you're, you're here.

No chance.

Because I think it's a foregone conclusion.

You know what, that totally sounds like somebody that's not confident in their bet, that's asking somebody else to pay off at the beginning.

I would just give you a break and maybe order a cheaper steak or something. Yeah, okay.

Anyway, we've got, we've got seven months left in the year.

Yes, so, so I'm sticking with it. I think, in fact, I think, I think there's a meeting in September. I don't know if there's one in November, but I know there's one in September, in December. I'm going to put my money on that. It actually takes place in December in the last meeting of the year and that will be the one for this year. But yeah, anyway, this, this article here is talking a bit about the inflation and you know, is in fact the fact that we're having lower productivity and then potentially connecting the dots to lower jobs, is that going to potentially reduce inflation and potentially go into a slowdown? Like I said, I think that's a little bit of a stretch. But some good data in there.

Well, I think, you know, that's a great recap. I think you did with that. You know what's interesting for me with this though is as I look at this is I'm going to go back to, and again, I think the caveat here is, you know, you studied computer science, I studied business. So none of that would suggest we're economists. Right? But I'm looking at this, right, and we've watched these wavering up and down signals that we have. And I'll just call these all the things we're looking at, pmi, consumer pricing information that we see as well, what's going on in the manufacturing side, all these signals that are there, they've been going up and down. But one of the things, and you've commented on this a lot that we've continued to see though, is the consumer spending is still through the roof and you comment regularly about the consumer debt and so forth. So we've got, that's kind of stayed constant and then we've had a number of other things that have been kind of bouncing up and down with jobs and then we've Watched the market and the market has kind of said, you know, maybe there's been a few times where it's cared, but in general the market has just kept pushing forward. You know, had some hiccups earlier in the week. Strong morning today so far, but it's just, I think this goes back to. Again, this just an opinion, but I still question, are we using all the right metrics in 2024 to look at these things? And I think when we come out of this and things get balanced back. Right. Because we don't want to go from, you know, Fed's rate five to five and a quarter or five and a quarter or five and and half, whatever the number is, we don't want to go from that down to zero to a half a point. But finding that balance in there when we get to that place that we hopefully do. I just wonder if there's, it's a time to kind of react, restructure what we're looking at for those numbers and.

Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. In fact, even in the last meeting he reiterated. Pal reiterated that 2%. 2%. 2%, sure. So that seems to be the, that's all he knows.

What would you expect him to say?

Well, yeah, but I mean, I don't think they're gonna, they're not going. I don't think they're going to change anything.

Yeah, right. You're probably right. I just, I, I'm not confident we're looking at things the right way anymore. And maybe we're trying to look for signals or expecting signals and this actually ties to something you were going to talk about later about technology and distribution. Right. Is the signals that are out there is maybe the signals need to be adjusted a little bit to things. Anyways, we'll see what happens.

I think, I don't disagree with you and I think you have to. Right. That's why I think it's responsible, you know, as a business owner or just, you know, person living in the, in the U. S is to kind of look at a lot of this different data and try and connect the dots a little bit for yourself because I do think it's, you know, 1, 1 benchmark metric of inflation of 2% that just tells one little piece of the story. And so I think you have to look at some of these things and, and try and connect some of the dots and, and not just listen to the sound bites that come along the way.

Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, that kind of ties into that the second article, right. We have here about confidence of US Consumers continues to decline as Americans worry about the future. That's an AP News story from earlier in the week. I think this is going to, you're going to might be getting your one compliment of the month here early in May is, you know, it's almost pointing to me right now that we're going to have to see this consumer confidence fall off and some spending falling off on the consumer side to maybe bring these things in line because that's, that's going to be a significant factor because every time we've looked at this over the last two years now is consumer spending, consumer confidence, it just seems to stay there. So, so this article talks about that falling off a little bit, people starting to pay attention to things and not running out and buying. And it almost feels like it's a Covid hangover. Right. The Amazon trucks that were delivering everything possible have still during COVID and the spending that went up, it seems to have kind of held. But now people, according to this article, are starting to take a look with a little bit less confidence there.

Yeah, it's funny. I was in Las Vegas last weekend with some college buddies or old college buddies, I guess now. And it was really interesting, I found, to observe and do a little mini survey. First of all, there was tons of people, tons of people in Las Vegas spending money like you wouldn't believe. I'm not just talking about gambling, I'm talking about food. And you know, we went to the Sphere for a, a show there and I think there was 10,000 people there for one showing, for one movie at 100 bucks a person. Right. It's like people were spending money left and right. And I did a little survey with some of my, my older college friends and older than you. Not quite. No. But in the same ballpark. And it was interesting to listen to them is that there is still a very strong wealth effect, especially I think with maybe older, relatively older people because of the stock market. Right. A lot of talking about their four how great their 401ks are, how great their, you know, portfolio is doing. And there's that wealth effect, I believe that comes from that stock market that gives confidence in people spending. I do think that especially with younger people that may not have that, you know, same portfolio. Right. A lot of the credit card and credit things that have been taking place have maybe getting to the point where they're being saturated. And there was a lot of, like I said, a lot of younger people in Las Vegas spending Money just left and right, left and right, left and right, and it's got to be going somewhere. And I think, though, the unfortunate. I think this article reflects that, right? Is that as kind of credit cards and, and, you know, home equity loans and all of that start to get saturated. Job worries, all of that. It's like, okay, what's happening here, right? And then maybe things aren't changing quite as. As fast. But anyway, that's my informal survey data from. From a week ago.

Well, no, I think that's, you know, that's an interesting data point too. I. You won't find me in Las Vegas unless I'm there for work or for conference, but just not a fan. But I know you math guys are out there doing your, your, your gambling with your, Your skill sets that you have with that, that I don't, I don't possess. But every time I'm there, I'm. I'm paying attention to how little I spend because of how expensive it is there. And I look at the people just flooding at me in and out of the stores and the shops and the big bags and the, you know, the big fancy, you know, boat drink cocktails, the daiquiris or whatever that are like $25 each. And I'm upset because a Diet Coke's four bucks and, and it's. Everybody gets to decide how they want to spend their money, but the consumption that goes on in that city, and sometimes people that are spending those dollars don't necessarily look like they have them. You know, can't judge a book by its cover, per se, but it astounds me every time I'm there. So I think, I think what a lot of this plays out to, right, is we're gonna have to see an easing on that consumer side. It's probably tied in.

So anyways, I do think that's coming. I think that the consumer. We're running out of places to where that money is actually coming from.

Well, you know, the good news, right, of that is as we loop this all back around to wholesale distribution manufacturing, which is why we're here, right? As we get these things balanced out, maybe some balancing in interest rates, and it's going to allow distributors and manufacturers to invest more in their business. Cost of money is a little bit easier on them and they've got eyesight to a more stabilized economy.

So.

Good. All right, next. One logistics supply chain shows steadiness amid rough waters, which I thought was kind of interesting. You know, this talked about, you know, the lessons learned during the pandemic period and so forth. What was going on. I thought it was kind of unique take on this because it was a mix of kind of manufacturers and some distribute more retail distribution on the side of this particular article. But it talked about and it will lead into what we're talking about and we talk about regularly about near shoring and reshoring as well. So any specific takeaways on this?

No, nothing really. You know, a lot of stuff that we've kind of touched on already. Seems like you said the supply chain is being resilient despite all the different things that get tends to want to get thrown at it.

Yeah, there's two, two takeaways for me from this particular article. And again, this is from transporttopics.com Logistics supply chains show steadiness amid rough waters Two things that stuck out for me in this one was one, you know, sometimes we don't think about this and we're moving more and more to a technology or tech enabled products out there as well. A simple example, whether it's RFID or it's scanning systems or whatever, it might be in a, in a warehouse or a manufacturing plant or you know, it's. If you go to a lot of the industrial shows now or industrial safety related shows, we're starting to see both power tools and equipment as well as even safety equipment that now has monitoring chips inside of them, literally some of them monitoring worker health, heart rates, body temperatures, things like that, respiratory protection that's monitoring when the filtration media needs to be changed, tools when they need to be reworked. We don't think about this all the time in wholesale distribution and manufacturing, but the reality of it is we, we see all the stuff on the news about the semiconductor challenges, right? And the geopolitical impact of Taiwan and China's frustrations there. But those chips that we typically think about going into computers and technology and so forth outside of day to day wholesale distribution, those chips are dropping more and more and more into the products that wholesale distributors sell. And now we've got two issues. We've got not only the regular supply chain issues that go with all of that normally, but now we've got that chip factor and the technology mixing in. So kind of a single single takeaway for me on that. But there was a quote that I really appreciated and I think this is the big takeaway for our audience. The comment was that companies once envisioned supply chain networks as fixed, unchanged assets that only rarely changed configuration. Now companies have shifted from annual or biannual review of networks to reviews monthly or even weekly. And that ties into this being. We had this discussion month or two ago. Mike Mortensen from ARG was with us and we talked about that. And Mike was talking about as a large distributor, the conversations have changed with what they're having with their vendor. They care now on that hose or coupling supplier where they're making the product. They care about their supply chain and they're asking different and harder questions. So, you know, monthly and weekly reviews of supply chain when it used to be, they call it an unchanging asset that rarely change its configuration. Things are happening daily now that we need to stay on top of.

So good stuff. I think a week, a weekly review is not a start. It's a smart thing to do.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's still one of those things too.

Right.

Well, where does that fit in?

Right. We're.

We're already busy now. It's just, it's another thing that's got to be watched and managed there. It's good. So rolling into our manufacturing and distribution segment. CNN article on manufacturing in Mexico is having its moment. The US Is buying in, but so is China. Takeaways on that?

Well, I thought there was an interesting point in here. I didn't realize this. Is that it? I think it said in 2023, Mexico past China as the number one exporter into the US which I didn't realize.

And you should listen to the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution podcast.

I just need to read these articles a bit.

Really good. Yeah, they talked about this about three months ago.

We did. Okay. Well, you know, I'm old. I can't remember that far back, so I thought that was an interesting point.

It's astounding. It's huge.

And also just, you know, I think we did talk about this a week or two ago about just the amount of manufacturing from Mexico to support the auto industry and the automobile industry and the number of parts and things that are coming from there. But yeah, I think, you know, it's clear in there is Mexico is running with us. Right. They're really trying to really run with it and take advantage of it. I think it's going to continue to grow. There's no doubt about that.

Yeah, well, it's important. There's this, there's this China factor that plays into this as well, though. And it's gonna, it's interesting because it's a, it's a concern for both of the political candidates right now. You know, there's a comment in this article about, I guess Biden made a comment recently to the steel workers, I think, in Pennsylvania about the potential of tripling the tariffs on Chinese steel. And so now what this article is kind of describing is, all right, great, we're reshoring a lot of things to Mexico to get away from, you know, there's a, there's kind of two key factors, right? There's the supply chain issues of getting things from China to the U.S. north America or any other part of the world, right. When we have issues with Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, west coast port issues, whatever it might be. And then there's just the time, there's that factor. And then you have the geopolitical tension. China, Taiwan, China, US Pricing tariffs, US Is pressure on China not to invade Taiwan. You have all of these things going on. Well, what China is now doing is they're moving a lot of their own products and some of their manufacturing to Mexico. So I think the big factor that's going to have to be watched here is we can take care of. And again, this is not a geopolitical expert, I'm not an economist, but my view of all of this and takeaway is what we need to be watching out for in wholesale distribution and manufacturing on things is watching the US Government's response to what China is doing in Mexico and how Mexico may embrace China while trying to embrace the US through all of this. And there can be some rubs that go with all of this because a good chunk of this article and again, this is this one's from CNN was about China trying to get around tariffs by moving goods through Mexico. Coming here, I think this, Tom, I'm going to, you know, go out on a limb here. I think we're going to be talking about this more and more over the next 12 to 18 months because as more and more near this is near shoring, not reshoring near shoring as this is happening in this near shoring, there's a lot of factors that are going to come into play here.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. And I agree, agree completely. I think this is just starting, right? This conversation is just starting. You know, if, if China is manufacturing in Mexico, is it made in Mexico? Is it made in China? Right. Or it's like it's, it's like that's an, I think that's an interesting one. You talk about the tariffs. That's another point as well. Yeah, no, I, I think this is a really interesting area and an area that is definitely going to have a lot of relevance over the next, you know, not just 12 to 18 months. But over the next few years.

No, I think, I think that's right. And, and it's, it's very important because done correctly in this, managed properly in the proper partnership and we had Lynn Chase on that are going to call her our resident global AI expert that was with us and she had just been on a tour of a couple of manufacturing pockets within Mexico when she was with us last month and was talking about how astounded she was about what she saw from rail and air freight and so forth coming. The article talks quite a bit about Monterrey, Mexico. I've been there a couple of times on business and I mean that is just a hustling booming location for manufacturing big with the auto industry. I happen to have been down there doing some work with Grainger at the time and phenomenal to watch that hub going and that's just going to be growing. What I'm interested to see is as we looking at some other Latin American countries trying to jump into this bandwagon, it'll be, you know, Mexico and Central America probably be a little bit tougher for South America to have some involvement at the same level. But when you have a truck route that can come through and potentially a railroad or even short shipping routes, whole different news. That piece there. What I'm intrigued with with this and I don't want to spend too much time on this because what I'm describing now is a lot of what ifs. But there is that factor of smaller countries wanting to embrace China more for what China might be willing to do for them or other Southeast Asian countries that manufacturing is shifting out of where the US has some pretty good ties and some leverage more with Mexico than they might with Guatemala or you know, another country like that that could be looking to, to surge. Right. And then you even take that inside of it as you look at and now we're getting to South America. But you look at the struggles going on economically in Brazil could be some factors there. So something to watch. Right. Good for us to be paying attention to.

Absolutely. No, we'll definitely keep an eye on this over the period of time.

All right, my friend, why don't you take us into our next section which is our E Commerce and marketing section about buying signals.

Yeah, this was a good article from Forrester. Buying signals help B2B organizations reignite revenue interactions and kind of the the summary here from their consumer interactions. Digitally savvy B2B buyers are aware that they're signaling their interest through their behavior, content consumption and social Interactions. So, you know, the. Probably the first question is what the hell is a buying signal?

Right?

What do we mean by a buying signal? You know, a buying signal, right? You, if you've been in marketing and stuff, you've probably heard of the concept of lead scoring or, or even tracking who's on your website or opening your, you know, emails or reading your emails or attending your live show or whatever the case may be, right? In theory, all of those things are signals. Now what a lot of tech companies have been doing for years is using those signals to ideally, you know, basically build their forecast and try and build pipeline off of that. Right. And, and a lot of B2C have been doing this for years as well. But tech companies in the B2B space, what this article is saying that this is, this concept of signals is starting to expand into other industries more and more. Where I see it a little bit in the people we're talking to day in and day, I, I certainly, I'm not seeing this widespread. What I do find though interesting is, and, and this is good, right? Is that companies are finally starting to realize that the buyer is in control of their journey. And so you need to be able to use signals to at least understand where they sit in that buyer journey. Not using signals as a way to control the buyer journey, which is a futile effort. And I think that's, that's the key thing is using these buying signals not as a way to either false forecast or false control, but really have visibility on that buyer journey.

Great, great points. I think there's a book that talks quite a bit about this too. I don't know if you've read it. It's called the Revenue Zone.

I've heard of it and I've heard it's an amazing book. I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Okay, yeah, try that.

I'll listen to it.

All joking aside, Tom, my co host here is wrote the book called the Revenue Zone. If you've not had a chance to look at that, that's a great time. Is it audiobook now as well?

Yeah, it's audio and paperback.

I, I just assumed it wasn't because you hadn't asked me to be the narrator or the reader, but yeah, great. And we. You talk about a lot about this in, in the book, but I couple takeaways for me in this, right? I'm going to read a quote from the article. And again, this is from Forrester research. It said B2B buyers are aware that they're signaling their interest through their Behavior, content consumption and social interactions. In a past digital world, these buyers expect the providers will use that information to deliver relevant content and experiences. I love the first part of that. The second part of it is I don't think necessarily the traditional buyer in the B2B world has any idea about the signals that they're providing. But now what we know is, and the article even mentions this, right. That well over half of B2B buyers are millennials. And, and what's next Gen Z after that?

I think, I believe so. Yeah.

Yeah. And so those are coming more into play now. They get it. They. When they're having a digital journey, they, they know. And you talk about this in the revenue zone as well, is that people find their workarounds for that. Right. And, and so these signals become more and more important. My. Go ahead. If you want to add something.

No, I was going to say though I think it's important to note that. And again, they talk about consumer interactions. Right. I know I've done this is you go on a website or you go to Amazon or somewhere like that and you search for something and then you start getting ads for, you know, display ads. Right. For similar things. And a lot of times those display ads are, and this is from a consumer perspective, offering a better deal, an alternative you didn't. Weren't aware of. You do it purposely. That's right. What's a great way to do discovery is use some of that. Now you try and do that in the digital or in the business world. Right. I do think younger buyers are realizing that their signals, they're signaling things, but they expect then the B2B company to actually provide something valuable or relevant as the fact that they're, you know, waving this signal. Right. I'm waving my hand and going not just using this as a way to have 15 salespeople try and call me or email me or pressure me as a result of that. Right. And I think that's the key is using the signals to facilitate the buyer journey. Don't use the signals as a way to basically swarm somebody and put a high pressure sales pitch which will cause everybody to, you know, will not result in a successful. Yeah.

So the other big takeaway for me for this, Tom, is and we, we've talked about this a little bit, I have strong opinions on this. I don't want to say the MQL is dead, but it is a single factor. And this talks about. And when I say MQL's marketing qualified lead, very common term in the marketing world, not Necessarily on the sales side of things in, in our market of wholesale distribution manufacturing. But it said signals accelerate revenue Process Transformation title B2B Marketing and sales teams must transition away from the marketing, qualify lead as the only indicator for propensity to buy and leverage as many signals as possible to identify target accounts in the market and to engage with them. And you know, we just see day in and day out still that, you know, sponsor this and you're going to get a bunch of leads and you're going to do this and that. And the MQL is, I don't want to say dead, but it is now become a component of watching that journey as opposed to the only source. And I think the folks that are trying to stick with that being their really key only source are going the way of the dodo bird.

Well, the problem with the mql, it's if anything it's a super weak signal, right. And it's a misleading signal. You know, tying this back into wholesale distribution and this is an area that we're working on quite a bit is how do we use even, you know, there's all signals can be all over the place, right. It doesn't have to be somebody coming to your website or opening your email, but you can look at information about quotes, you can look at order history, you can look at, you know, a number of different things that are all signals. Right. And, and the question is, is how do you holistically use those signals to actually have again, provide a better customer experience, but understand the customer better, understand and then facilitate that buyer journey better even with existing customers. So this doesn't have to be only for prospects. This can be with your existing customers. And as you know in wholesale distribution, right. Majority of sales come from existing customers. So how do we get more out of that?

Yep, great point. Right. And, and I think that the reality of it is because somebody listened to a webinar and filled out a form that goes back to a sponsor or somebody went to your website and was willing to download a white paper does not mean that they're ready to become you, have you be their sole source vendor.

Right.

There's so many other signals and that's really what this is related to and getting, tracking and managing those signals. And it does tie back a lot to. We're getting ready to make an announcement soon here about a new partnership that we've developed at Lead Smart and tying back to gathering data from E Commerce. Right. And we have signals throughout our organization as wholesale distributors and manufacturers, especially the folks that are on the distribution side of things. Right. We've got signals from our marketing cadences. We've got signals from our events that we host, whether it's a barbecue, a lunch and learn or a webinar. We've got signals from our e commerce site and the journey that people are taking online. We've got signals from how they place their orders. We've got signals from our sales team's interaction with them that should be data should be coming back into a CRM related system. And so when we start putting all of these signals together, which I think a core of this article was about, now we've got these deep insights and to your point, about some of the things that your team are building within our company at Lead Smart is these tools that now can use our Genius feed GPS radar that looks at all of these things and provides actionable insights.

Well, the Genius feed is. Yeah, the Genius feed is a perfect example of, of looking for signals. But I as we wrap up because I know we need to move on. I would love to talk about this for another half hour by the way, but is, you know, maybe we'll record.

Our dinner on Monday night when I'm up at, at your office visiting.

All right. You mean eating the steak you're buying me. So the.

It's may.

Okay. Okay.

We have till the end of the year.

Okay. So you have data, right? We talk a lot about data. Data together different data points can be used to identify or create signals. Right. So that data then determines the signals. And then when you start thinking about AI and where we're talking about with AI, these signals can really be used as a way to fuel some AI capabilities as well. So I think there's. What we're seeing is multiple layers, right. Of, of data. Then how does that data translate to signals? How does those signals then use to translate to AI automation, analytics, insights, all of that kind of stuff, Those are really the layers that we're, we're seeing. And again, as long as that's being done to facilitate the buyer journey and not as a way to believe that you're going to control the buyer journey, which is generally a bad strategy. I think this will be very, very fruitful.

Good, good recap. Before we go comment was there it says LinkedIn user. Amen to that with a smiley face. Yeah, point out that came in when I was talking, not when you were talking. It's important to note that was actually, I'm looking at my phone. That was from our friend Lindsay Young at 3aspens Media. She will be with us as a guest soon and I'm really looking forward to her insights coming because she is a marketing and content with. So she was in alignment with our discussion. I think it was tied a lot to the MQL side of things which again, since we're plugging people here, Tom's book the revenue zone, Lindsay 3 aspens media all good sources for wholesale distribution and manufacturers in their marketing journeys. All right, there's my nobody's pays me for this stuff prompt promoting your book and all right, that's who's buying. You're going to sell a bunch of books this week.

That's right. Well, if I get a bunch of sales this weekend, I'll, I'll take care of that for you.

Okay, very good. All right. So a few months ago we restructured the newsletter. It's the time in the show where we need to talk about that. We now have the newsletter broken out into quite a few sections. We're getting ready to jump into our technology, cybersecurity and AI. It's pretty rare that we talk about AI on this show. Joking, joking there. But we publish this newsletter every Friday. So if you're listening on the recorded podcast later in the day or in the future, you're not seeing the newsletter that we have up on the screen that the friends that we have with us that are live are able to see. We publish this newsletter every Friday morning. It goes out to close to I think it's actually over 10,000 people now and it is called around the Horn in Wholesale distribution and manufacturing. And we try and take the news of the week. We break that down in the newsletter where we publish it on our podcast here where we discuss those topics. If you'd like to get the newsletter and you don't currently, couple simple ways. Helloadsmartech.com we will get you on that list. Or just stop by the website that we have for our podcast, www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get you on that list. So Tom, into this technology, cybersecurity and AI. U.S. homeland Security names AI safety, security security Advisory Board article from Reuters, of course Wall Street Journal and everybody else covered that article. Any initial thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it's quite a coup from those big, big players, right? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia. I mean basically they're going to be able to go in and to a large degree write their own ticket on how in this case U.S. homeland Security. But I assume that a lot of that will trickle into other areas of the Government on, you know, how they should be using AI. And I don't know that this is a good thing, actually. I, obviously, you know, they're going to have undue influence on that. But if you look at most of those, you know, Facebook isn't in there. So all of those companies are all building closed, closed source models. Not open source, but closed source models. They all have sort of a very specific business philosophy of how they're going about AI. And I think they're going to be big winners as it relates to the government and influencing how the government, not only how the government implements AI, but potentially the upcoming. Any regulations that are, that are. So it's a real.

I, I think, I think there's a lot behind this. I'm glad to see it. I expected your comments as they were about cautioning whether it's a good thing.

Excuse me.

And I'm with you on that, but I think it's important. And what you didn't mention is the other people on this are on this board are executives from Delta Air Lines, Occidental Petroleum, Northrop Grumman and some regional government people, the Governor of Maryland, some other folks like that. So I think this is the value that I see and I agree with you that, you know, it's kind of, maybe it's, maybe it's a little bit of letting the inmates run the asylum. But I do think that the risk here and what the government's looking at with this is trying to figure out, look, there's bad actors out there and we know that there's risks with bad actors related to AI. You know, just the simple, fastest example. And I just think about this all the time. It was just a great comment on our January. We called it the Legends show with Mike Marks and Dirk Beveridge and Ian Heller. Ian used that example of a real world example of an AI bot, right. And we've learned in the last month or so that within, what was it, 15 seconds, there are AI tools that can learn to mimic your voice. That is Joe Smith from Joe's Construction. A bot is calling a distributor and ordering $50,000 worth of wire. That's cable. Or is a copper wiring going to a fictitious job site. You just deliver it because you do that all the time. And it's now being sold for the value of the copper. Those things, that's the, that's the small issue now. We're talking about power grids that could be impacted, manufacturing plants shut down power to the White House, you know, whatever it might be that's I think a big part of what's behind this is what's the big threat to infrastructure and so forth. So I do think it's good to have this. I think there's going to be some, definitely some needs on some checks and balances with the, the intent and desire of some of the people on the panel here.

I don't, I'm not at all against the concept of it. I don't, I think the concept is good. I just think that based on, again, unless there's something we're not seeing, these are the mega companies and there's a lot of intelligent, sharp people out there that are not part of Microsoft or OpenAI or Google.

Sure.

That could add a lot of value to something like this. And like I said, I think they're going to have probably a lot of undue influence on how they move forward and the technology that they end up incorporating into, you know, the homeland security, the government and other things. But. Right, we'll see.

Yeah, no, I think, I think we're in alignment on that. Right. It's, it's, it's important to get a view of these things. And, and I think there's, you know, the Microsoft, the Googles, the Amazons, I think are, are there's a risk there of maybe being self serving. Probably a little less when you start thinking about the Nvidia, amd, Cisco, some of the other hardware providers. Maybe a little bit less risk of how this could be self serving to them. They're going to power this regardless. Right. So I think it's good. We'll watch it, we'll continue to talk about it. But it is good as we, and as we go back, right. All, all roads for this podcast go back to wholesale distribution and manufacturing, getting some controls around what's next for them so that they can see the roadmap will be beneficial. Very good. All right, off to what we have next there. AI lawsuits explained. Who's getting sued.

The people that we just talked about. Those are the people. So yeah, I guess there's a double edged sword there.

That's right.

Yeah, a lot of lawsuits. This is a really, I think this will ultimately end up going to the Supreme Court and I don't know how this will even how they will decide some of this, but tremendous number of lawsuits coming from artists, media organizations, content providers that are, you know, they have their, their content on the web so these big models are grabbing their content. You know, even a YouTube video. Right. If you have a YouTube video on the web or whatever. That you've created or, or, you know, whatever the case may be, these big, these big, you know, models are grabbing that data and they're using that to drive the output of those models. And what's happening in some cases. Right, because. And this is what, you know, the people say, well, wait a minute. You're taking, let's say I wrote a blog article. It's not like somebody's taking that blog article and throwing it directly into their model. They're breaking apart that blog article and they're using it in the, in the big vector databases there. But what's actually happening sometimes is when somebody's running a chat GPT or running AI, the output of it is almost identical to what would be in some cases on the actual blog or the music or the.

Right.

Whatever. And then the authors are going, wait a minute, that looks exactly like what I have over here, even though it was a derivative work.

Right. So let's break that down for a second because this is important. And let's just use. We were talking about your book earlier today, right? So you've probably got snippets of your book in different places throughout the Internet that you've put out there for marketing purposes about your book, right?

I think there's a full PDF version out there on the Internet if somebody wanted to find it for sure.

But that's not even necessary per se, because as we talk about generative AI, that's predictive. It can go grab enough pieces of data that you've purposely put out there for marketing purposes and compare that to other things that are similar about to your book on the Internet and now basically put out a document or a new book that makes. Reduces the value of somebody paying full price for your book. And, and that's coming from the fact that you put some things out there, which my view of all of this is I'm struggling that we're going to be able to go backwards on things. And I think it's intriguing. I hadn't thought of this when I was reading the article initially, but it really does tie to you as an author. So I'm interested in your feedback. I have to look at this and say, hey, look, XYZ Author company, whoever it might be, and let's boil this down and take this back to our audience, is all of the content that maybe you developed as a distributor or you paid somebody to come in and help you develop content, and you've got great blog content and you've got all of these different things that now through these Tools that upstart new distributor down the street that has a new innovative model could use these tools to go replicate and do even more than what you've done. I think my gut tells me, and I'm looking for anybody's comments here and yours, if you disagree, is we're probably going to see something that says okay, from a date and point forward, this is what you have to pay for or this is how this works. But to go back, it's kind of a double edged sword. You know, if I look at a music, you know, a musician or an author and it's a. You took full advantage of the Internet and you knew that the Internet was evolving every day, right. And getting better. And now you don't like an outcome from something that was free for you to use, right?

No, I, I mean you have, you have to separate out gated content. I think that whole New York Times deal or whatever, that was done wild. That was gated content. So that was content that was behind a paywall and you were supposed to pay. That's a different story.

That's a good point.

We're talking about publicly available information that is out there on the Internet, right? And you know, there's a lot of it, right? And there's. And where the, the even music, right? If you take, you know, music and stuff that's out there and video and any of these things. So that's where the really difficult. And what's happening again is that all of this data or all this information on the Internet being put into these models and then they're creating what are called derivative works, which are derivatives of using that data that are there. Sometimes those derivative works look a lot alike. What's. Look a lot like what's out there. Sometimes they don't look a lot about what's out there, but they're still based on that derivative work. I, I don't see, I think that frankly, I'll just say it as an author, I think whether it's right or wrong, if I putting something out there on the Internet, in the public domain, then I have to be expecting that that is going to be used for derivative works. And I don't, I should not necessarily expect to be compensated for that. If I'm doing something where it is behind a paywall or it is a, you know, copyrighted something that is actually being charged for, that's a different story. I don't know even the right answer on how to do it right. But I think is if we're putting stuff out there, unfortunately or fortunately there's going to be derivative works. And I don't. We're. It's never going to go back the other way.

No, I, I think that's the key, you know, and I think the risk, right, It's a risk reward that, that it doesn't matter, right. We're talking today about here. This article talks about authors and musicians and things like that, but this is any business that's putting information out there in on the open Internet that we're gonna. And it's gonna impact, you know, our typical audience here as well. You know, I just, it made me think about, you know, a good example might be. And this is a risk, right? You, you're a musician and you've got. I know there's boatloads of, of websites about indie music and things like that where you can either post songs or, or, or snippets of songs. And now you're taking a risk in that that you could have somebody take your work and make it better and claim it as theirs. Right? Or take, you know, and that's, that's stuff that we've seen lawsuits about forever. Long before the Internet even that says somebody wrote a song and published it and now somebody's got a hit over here that has unique, you know, keys or notes or things similar to normal. Now this generative stuff can be doing that more every, every day.

So. Well, and we, I think we even two or three weeks ago there was an article we talked about, about the importance of wholesale distributors building content and high quality content. Right. So that's all content that is likely going to be on the public domain and available for all of that. And so again, I, I think the solution to all of this, right. If I'm a business or an author or anything else, I just have to maintain the quality of what I'm doing.

Right.

Quality is always going to trump quantity and so, you know, providing the quality, but know that and just not worry about it. It's just like it's, it's, it's just.

Go do what you do every day and do a good job.

Do what you do and do it well and don't worry about the other stuff. Well, well stated. And I think, you know. Hey, good comment here. Yeah, yeah. From Mike about. I think this is from the keynote from, from the nahead.

Yep.

Yeah. What? Last summer? Last October?

No, this was. No, this was this week in San Diego, Mike.

This week. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. That the comment that AI copyright or copyright is dead with AI. Yeah, I think that's probably pretty true.

It's one of those, Zach is one of those other smart guys in Santa Barbara like you. So he just lives down the street from you. So. Thanks Mike.

The dinner, let's invite him to dinner.

He had asked me when I met him to have you reach out to him when I told him you were there. So I don't know if you've done that or not. But yeah, we can do that. Zach is speaking as well at Distribution Strategy Group's AI event in June in Chicago. So Mike will see you there as well. Hopefully it's a little twist or a different presentation that Zach is doing. Zach Cass was, I believe he was one of the earliest employees at OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. And I think his title was like the head of Go to Market or head of Commercialization. So my sharp, sharp guy enjoyed, enjoyed listening to him. What sticks in my mind about Zach's presentation at DSG's event from last year was about the need and we've talked about this on the show and I'm sure we'll be talking about a lot more is the struggle to for us to get to AGI and all of the possibilities that we want to solving medical issues and things like that with AI is we need a source to power it because our current power grid won't support that. So anyways, good stuff. Thanks Mike. So let's jump ahead. Tom Training we're jumping into our sales and a M and A section here. I thought this was a really interesting article and it was from Sales and Marketing Management magazine. It's called where to Begin Sales Training. Ask those being trained and this is a little bit different take on things, you know, so often and we've had some folks on the show and talk regularly with folks, you know and there's just no shortage of sales training companies that have a model and they'll come in and train your people on this model. And the unique thing for me about this and this article, we don't need to spend a lot of time on it but it just talked about doing things from the bottom up and getting the impact and the feedback from those that are being trained. So I'm going to just because we're kind of running short on time and a few other things to discuss. Tom but they talked about doing, getting the content developed for your training by using the people that are going to be trained. So they talk about surveys and questionnaires asking what skills they want to learn and develop, interviews, managers digging deeper in one on one meetings to catch Nuances from conversations that surveys missed job task analysis. Right. What am I doing? Am I an inside salesperson? What does that look like? Can we make that better? Focus groups and performance metrics, you know, numbers don't lie, but sometimes the people can help us. Which what would a better metric be then? It might be bring in some training models from third parties that really work well. I really liked this article because they said, you know, you can't teach people everything that they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know, when they need to know it. There's a whole conversation about AI that goes with this as well. We'll do that another day. But good article.

Yeah, no, I completely agree and I think what this talks about is how do you enable the individual based on what the individual needs versus coming in and saying, okay, here's a new sales methodology or a sales process or whatever and, and not really, it's not that those are bad, but you have to take into account, especially in this day and age because sales is freaking hard. Right? It's harder. It's getting harder every day with all the things that we're dealing with. So yeah, let's, you know, talk to the people in the trenches, find out what they need help with and then build your curriculum. As you said, bottom up. So I think it's. Yeah, a very good article.

That's good, that's great. So jumping ahead, MDM analytics launches their new release of their market profiler app. MDM now part of national association of Wholesalers. I was back two weeks ago, three weeks ago at NAW and we talked quite a bit about this tool. Really cool. This market profiler app in a crux. This is a great article. Tom Gale wrote it about their updates to this tool. It's version 4.0, but it's really, really deep into market statistics that are very relevant, that are developed from the resources that MDM has versus a third party resource. That's just saying, hey, we think this is based upon Bureau of Labor Statistics or whatever it is. We think this is this. MDM's tool with this market profiler app goes really, really in a deep dive into what's really happening in specific verticals. Their focus right now is they've got 200 subcategories for US, Canada and Mexico. So if I'm a distributor, I think I'm wanting to look at this.

Pretty interesting. Yeah.

Yep. Well, and I think this is great. This is a good sign of the move of naw and MDM together, you know, providing more resources. NAW has a much broader membership that they can start getting some of this data from as well and, and providing it back to them. So good, good tool, good reach, good job. Tom Gale and the MDM team as well as, as the NAW folks. So people leadership moving ahead. Number of Americans applying for jobless claims remains historically low. We talked a little bit about job claims and stuff earlier in the day. We try and get something in here about people and leadership and hiring each week. Any thoughts on that one, Tom?

No, I think you have to go back. I'd like to reread that again, go look at some of the data that came out this morning. But yeah, bottom line, it's saying not a lot of people are, which I think is I think there's fewer people quitting. I think there's people right now. You know what it was a year or two ago, right? The great resignation as they called it. Y I think that there's people are realizing that hey, I better get back to work and maybe stay to work because I don't know exactly what's coming. Kind of comes in line with that consumer piece that's there. So I think again, this is just reading between the lines. I think there are people that are sticking with jobs, maybe not quitting as fast as they would have before. I don't know how this changed with or if any of this data was even announced today. But interesting overall.

Well, and I think that one of the comments that made here, which I think is interesting is, you know, we hear and read a lot about layoffs, but most of that is tied to technology. And it's technology companies trying to pacify their boards and Wall street, right? Put lay a bunch of people off, push some margins up, hire some people back. That's not what we see in manufacturing and wholesale distribution. Typically the stability is definitely there. But to your point earlier out of this article, I think what's great about that is the idea of people getting back to work because most of when I when I get out on the road or I'm on the phone with wholesale distributors and manufacturers daily is it's still tough to hire people. So anyways, that's. Let's jump into our industry scuttlebutt. Each week we talk about some very specific things that are happening in M and A or new activity. So Wesco International reports their first quarter results. Good read there. Wesco divested their integrated supply group to Valen last month. That deal's all closed. In fact, MDM Mike Hockett is our good friend of the show here. It's been with us. Mike did a good podcast earlier in the week with the president and CEO of Allen and talked a lot about their acquisition of that integrated supply group from Wesco. Jumping ahead, arg, we just had a comment here on the show from Mike Mortensen, the president and CEO there at arg. They have just added to their executive leadership team by promoting Mike Powers to Chief Digital and Technology Officer. A couple of things with that one is Mike's been on the show with us a few times and is a friend of our show and runs a great organization there. But Mike Powers, really sharp guy, had an opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Mike at the DSG event last October in Chicago. Looking forward to seeing him at some upcoming events as well. But it shows the shift and we're starting to see this. I think this is the third or fourth time now we're seeing this and it's and good on the guys at ARG for seeing this. They're not as big as some of the other companies that have done this, but seeing the value of technology and I know ARG is a, as a employee owned company sees technology as the core of their future. But you know, other companies, Dakota Supply Group hired Stefan Fulip a while back. Stefan's great guy as their Chief Digital officer. So we're starting to see in some of these organizations is we have our chief technology or chief Information officer but he's partnered with a Chief Digital officer and that is a great move I think moving forward because all roads and you made the comment earlier in the day in our discussion, right. Is it's going to be hard to survive in wholesale distribution and manufacturing if you're not thinking digital first moving forward.

So well, as I said, I think I said this before the show, right. I think we're at this money ball moment in business where if you remember the movie Moneyball, where you know, it went from in the baseball world, it went from the instinctive scout to using data and information to make player decisions and personnel decisions. I think we're that I think that the shift that we're going to see in wholesale distribution, manufacturing, especially in the quote unquote front office sales, marketing operations and so forth is going to be the largest shift that we've seen in a long time over or maybe ever. And technology obviously is going to drive that shift from, you know, to using data, using signals, using the things that we've talked about. So yeah, this is a Very, I think a very smart move as companies are doing this and very different than a cio. Very different role, very different set of responsibilities. But obviously then work ARM in arm.

Yep, very good. So, and then the last piece of that before we jump ahead is the good folks at dsg Dakota Supply Group. They rebranded last month their organization, a lot of hard work and they just opened another location. So they just are, are continuing on the growth spurt. I don't remember if the article says, I think this puts them at like, I want to say 56 or 57 branch locations, which is phenomenal as they continue their growth. So good, good for our friend Paul Kennedy and his executive team over there. So Tom, kind of in closing on the day, let's break down this, this article briefly. Each week we have a section called A Good Read. It's a little different each week. Sometimes it's on leadership, sometimes it's on sales, sometimes it's on, you know, executive health. And it's just, it varies. But this week we've got an article here that we, we put in. It's from Mark Dancer and Mark refers to himself. If you don't know Mark, he's phenomenal writer describes his, his work as a distribution supply chain futurist. He's an author. He's a fellow with naw, done. So just some phenomenal work over the years. But his writing is pretty solid stuff. And he wrote an article here about tech that drives true change. And I, what I liked about this, Tom, is we can dive into a little bit of the topics there, but it's like sometimes we get, and I'd say we're guilty of it here too is we talk kind of about and I'll say globally, AI and technology and distribution is talked about. We kind of talk about some of the same stuff over and over again. And Mark hit some really interesting points in this article. Before I dive into some of his key points, did you have any thoughts?

No. Why don't you just hit a couple of those key points? We can touch on those here. But I do agree, in fact I want to read it again. It's a pretty meaty article and so definitely one of those that you could read a couple of times.

Yeah. And he has a substack that he does this in that he does all of his posts in, which is great. And I think it's just, I think if I remember correctly it's markdancer substack, so that would be good. But he talks about three key topics. He said, see your customers he said today distributors apply AI to better see and use the data inside their systems. And I love it how he breaks this down. I need to send Mark a note about this because he does a bunch of what ifs. He says, what if AI could help them better see customers needs, aspiration, purpose, values and perhaps by connecting their systems or by listening to spoken words as well. I love this, right? I mean let's, let's start using these tools to deeper understand the needs. And then his next point is let the customer see you. He said, trust workflows and overall flows from transparency. Again, a what if, what if AI could help customers see into your business from their viewpoint. A vision that goes beyond seeing solution prices and delivery dates. That's what we talk about, right. In wholesale distribution. And we think everybody just wants to know what he's talking. He says, what I'm talking about is a human line of sight that sees your business the way it is, powered by people with passions who succeed and fail every day. Could I help with that? And you know, we think about it, right? The counter guy in your company as a distribution company has a relationship with Joe that is getting equipment to a job site. They might even go to a ball game, they might grab a burger, they might go to the same church, whatever it is, we don't have line of sight to that. Especially in larger organizations. Our sales guy is talking to three layers above the guy that comes into the counter to have our business relationship. So I love this about letting a customer have deeper insight into our company. And the last thing he says is together see the future. He said, what if AI could paint holistic future states that include your services and he even says, and profits and the customer's initiatives and profits. Perhaps in a collaborative multi layer game environment, could such an AI help your people and customers slay day to day problems as gamified villains while aiming to build a previously unimagined world that of shared purpose and mutual benefit in the long term. Wow.

Yeah. That last one I think in particular, and all of them actually reflect this is moving from transactional information into consultative and relationship driven information, shared growth opportunities. Right, right. And we've talked about this. This is the big advantage even the smaller distributor has or the more localized regional distributor is being able to provide that level of, you know, going beyond the transactional information, but going into that and using technology and AI, right, to actually provide that experience that is, you know, even use the word gamified. But I do think gamified experiences are going to take hold More and more and more. To some degree. To some degree. And I think it, it's, it's not because, hey, I want a game. I think a gamified experience can be adopted easier, understood easier, and then used to accomplish, like what you said there sort of a collaborative business plan, strategy and so forth on how we partner and work together. So I want, I see more of that in our own business as we, as we move ahead.

No, I, I think you're spot on. And I, you know, I kind of wish there was a different term for gamified, you know, because I think sometimes people, if you're not thinking about the technology side of that, it's, and where that, you know, maybe even more comes from. It's, it may be something that gets poo pooed pretty quick, but I think the idea with this is engaging.

Right.

Engaging more with our people and our customers in a way by using tools that make them want to engage. Right. And maybe. Would you agree that's a reasonable explanation of gamification?

No, I mean, it's, it's. Gamification is not because, hey, I want to have a poker game or an online chess game or whatever. It's. How do we attract attention and retain attention and then use that as a way to actually get the outcome right. If the gamification aspect provides that outcome and we can keep the attention and attract the attention that. It's, that's a, it's a strategy. It's not a, it's not to just be a game.

Good.

Great example of that. Thanks for doing that. Good. Okay, well, you know what? We covered it. We got through it.

Yeah.

First week back, a little rusty. We'll have to stay on track and keep, keep, keep going with things. So we'll, we'll get there.

All right, well, let's wrap up. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate everybody listening. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next Friday.

Yeah, well, again, if you, if you're listening in on the podcast, you missed out on the, the email newsletter that we send out. If you'd like it, get a copy of that, just reach out to us. But if you're listening on the podcast, do us a big favor. If you like what we do, please click that subscribe button as well as leave a review about what we do, whether it's Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, wherever you might listen to those. That's very helpful to us to get that word out to other people. And if you don't do so now, we'd love it if you'd Click the Follow button on on LinkedIn of lead smart Technologies. All of our recorded podcasts are there. Lead Smart Technologies company that Tom and I work for is the sponsor of this event. We couldn't do it without them. So YouTube Alive hit the subscribe button. We've got other content there and that our YouTube site is growing dramatically. Facebook LinkedIn hit the follow, hit the subscribe, hit the like whatever it is, help get that word out to other people and keep coming back if you like what we're doing. If you've got suggestions on topics of guests, whatever it might be, let us know as well. We'd like that. So Tom, thank you my friend. I will see you Monday in Santa Barbara. I'm looking forward to that. It's been a couple months since we've been face to face, so we'll wish everybody a fantastic weekend. Be kind, be safe, and do great things.

Yep. Thanks everyone.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests. Each week we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business, so please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about more often, and even guests you'd like to see join us. We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then you stay safe, stay focused and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review to help others in wholesale distribution get access to the conversation. And finally, please check out our sponsor, Leadsmart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM Customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead smart technologies@lead smart tech.com.