Channel Conflicts: What you Need To Know To Support The B2B Buyer Journey

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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.

Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome. We've got a guest with us today, Brandon Lee, and we're going to chat with him momentarily. So we're excited to have him with us. But as always, let's kind of jump in and talk about the agenda for today. So welcome and thank you for joining us on around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. Today's kind of agenda, we're going to talk a little bit about channel conflict between distributors, dealers and manufacturers in the wholesale distribution ecosystem. We're going to talk a little bit about AI as we typically do, and a little bit more about marketing and some tips and tools. We have a great guest for that today. And then we're going to talk about digital first buyers as well. So we're looking forward to that. Tom, you kind of ready to go this morning?

Let's do it.

Yep. Let's do a little bit of a our housekeeping first. So again, around the Horn and wholesale distribution. Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, we're here every Friday Morning live on LinkedIn live, Facebook live and YouTube live. Oh, now you separated him, so he.

Dropped out, I guess, and then he came back like the shell game.

I didn't mean to.

Oh, you left for a moment and you're back now.

I did and I'm not sure exactly why.

Good. Well, while you're figuring that out, we'll button the rest of this up. So Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, our guest today, Brandon Lee, and we get together every Friday morning, 9 o' clock Pacific time to talk about wholesale distribution and the news around the world and the economy, technology, distribution, M and A sales, marketing, try to pull all that together and give you some feedback on what we thought was interesting going on in the week. Every few weeks we try and have a guest with us as well. So we do this each week. But as I started to mention YouTube Live, Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, and later today again on all of the popular podcast formats. The reason we want to mention the podcast format as well is that if you happen to be listening on the podcast, you will not see the newsletter that we're going to Be referencing in just a moment. So each week we curate a newsletter that goes out to thousands of people. If you don't get that and you're interested in it, simple way helloadsmartech.com will get you on that list. So we spend this time going through here and kind of chatting about things with our guests. So our event each week is sponsored by Lead Smart Technologies, which is the company Tom and I work for. LeadSmart is a CRM, what we call a smart CRM, customer intelligence and channel collaboration solution that helps wholesale distributors, manufacturers and the like get deeper insights into their customers and their business. So enough of that, Tom. Let's talk about the news.

Yeah. And good morning to Brian. Good morning to Ron. Ron. And please, if you're on and please jump in and say good morning. I think there's going to be a lot for everybody to jump in on to today. A lot of different topics.

Well, we've got people jumping in from different platforms as well. And you know what I didn't do, and I apologize is we didn't do a proper introduction to Brandon. So we've got with us today, Brandon Lee. Yeah, exactly. I apologize, buddy. Good, good. Not only good friend of Tom and myself, but a friend of our company. Our companies do some work together. We're going to spend some time talking deeper later on this morning, Brandon, about what you do. Well, why don't you give us the quick overview of Brandon Lee consulting and the digital transformation work that you do. And we know you've worked with some of our customers and helped them with digital transformation and technology. So why don't you fill us in a little bit before we dive into the news.

Yeah, thank you for that. And hey everybody, thanks for having me back. And yeah, you know, I'm, I'm this weird combination of digital technology, sales, revenue and ops. Like I love technology, but I love technology for a very strategic purpose. Where are the pain points? What do we need to do better? How do we equip the team with better data faster so that they could make better decisions? And what that looks like is it ends up being everything from CRMs to membership portals to digital selling sales playbooks that start incorporating digital and even sometimes tapping into the marketing side of things because sales people need high quality content that's going to help open doors. And so sometimes you got to work with marketing to say, hey, you know, a lot of the marketing stuff that we've done in the past, it was great, don't get this wrong. But we got to evolve it now for an Ever changing buyer. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. Nowhere. No. No simple box to put me in. And I don't know if that's.

I just think you're the digital renaissance man, you know, and, and you could even be like the Dos Equis guy, the most interesting man in the world as it relates to technology. So there you go. There you go.

Yep, yep. So that's, that's funny. My. As my dog Cooper's muzzle has started to gray a little bit while back, we. He was sitting on the couch looking all regal, and I put a Dos Equis bottle in front of him, called him the most interesting dog in the world. So he didn't know what was going on. He just wanted some beer. So it's good. Well, you know, it's.

It's great.

It's great, Brandon, to have you with us today. And as we get guests in. We've had a lot of them over the. Are we at 41 today, Tom? Is that what episode this is?

41? Yes.

Yeah. So we're coming up on a year before we know it, and astounding to me, as I think about it, but it's great to bring other insights in. And I think we're going to talk today about, you know, some digital transformation stuff, which we always do. So why don't we kind of dive into that and get started a little talking about the news, a little bit about the economy to kind of get started, huh?

Sure.

Yep. So this article here is from the Institute of Supply Management, and they talk about manufacturing expanding at a slower, slower pace. I don't think that surprises anybody right now with what we, you know, seeing in the ups and downs in the stock market and interest rates and the debt ceiling issues and so forth, that there's, you know, there's some caution and some, some, some pause out there. I thought it was interesting. Now they're saying the growth that we'll see is revenues expected to increase in the manufacturing sector by 1.7%. They started off in December of 20 saying 5.5%. And it just keeps. The number kind of keeps going down. But the good news is those are still positive numbers.

Right. Again, it goes back to, you know, stuff we've talked about week after week. No real, kind of a roller coaster up and down. No real clear direction, but again, not a real tank at the same time.

So, yeah, I think this whole debt ceiling thing needs to get figured out pretty quick. And I have, you know, we always be. Are very cautious to not get political in anything we're doing here. But it seems to me right now like we got some gamesmanship going on with the whole debt ceiling thing and if we could get that solved pretty quickly, things will settle in a little bit too.

That happens in politics.

Kevin.

Yeah, that seems really odd.

Yeah.

Not in Georgia, huh?

Gosh, you've seen what's happened to Georgia in the last few elections.

Yeah. It's funny. I love that it adds the value. Tom and I born and raised in California, you were as well, but you've been, you know, lived a few other places and I've been in Georgia for quite some time. So I love the, the different take that you have on some stuff as we talk as well regularly. So good stuff.

You think about where I've lived. I lived in California, I've lived in Idaho, I've lived in Texas and Georgia. So I've got far one way, far the other way and now one in the middle that can't figure out who they are.

So yeah, yeah, it knows where it wants to lean. It just can't quite get there. Right.

Yeah, the.

That's. That's interesting. So anyways, let's. Any other thoughts? Kind of an economic stuff, Tom, you usually have a take looking at, you know, market stock. I don't know what the stock market's doing today, but you know, it's yesterday looked pretty attractive a couple days before as well. So we'll see.

Again, I think everything is kind of meandering, right? It's sort of floating around, drifting. I'll just call it drifting with the wind a bit is what I see. I think that this article is the same story, just drifting with the wind and you know, nothing has really caused something to blow one way or the other. Obviously the debt ceiling thing, if that can't get sorted out, but I believe it will, that could, you know, cause a wind in one direction or another. But right now it just seems like we're kind of drifting around, everybody looking going, what's going to happen? Is something going to happen? Or, you know, and meanwhile, you know, business, business moves on.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I saw something on, I think CNBC yesterday related to real estate and interest rates tying to this whole fiasco with the debt ceiling stuff. And you know, we had seen some dips and now we saw a couple of increases and I'm looking for some bigger dips there as far as interest rates and so forth. So anyways, hopefully this stuff gets solved. We get some confidence back in the market. We see bigger, you know, bigger numbers for growth that we're looking for. So why don't we jump, jump ahead.

This next article seems way more fun.

Yeah, well, I thought you might think it was. So we're going to talk a little bit about this whole concept of AI evolving to reason like humans. And I'm, you know, Brandon, I won't speak for you, I follow this stuff pretty closely. I'm sure you do, but I don't know anybody that for the last year or more has been researching this stuff deeper and especially even in the last 60 days. Well, 60 days. But you know, since Chat GPT has come around and this year so far, the effort that Tom's put into that one to help our customers and with that through adding AI tools into our technology at Lead Smart, but also just in general knowledge of things. So, Tom, I'm gonna, I want you to dive in on this one first.

Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, what I find really interesting is, you know, it's a week ago, right, we talked about AI and the amount of change, or of evolution maybe is the better word that has occurred in this week. And I just look at that compared to the evolution of other technologies that I've been involved with over 35 years is unbelievable.

35 years.

Yeah, I know, I know.

Start when you're nine.

Yeah, I did actually. Wow. More like two. 37. Anyway, the amount of evolution that's occurred over the last week is a lot technologically and it evolves and it's so hard to keep up with and there's so many different companies that are trying to get involved with things. However, that all said, I tend to agree with some of the points. You know, the point of this article was is that is AI basically going to become have, you know, reasoning and sentience and you know, basically start acting like a human. And I don't think that that is going to happen at a mainstream level for a long, long time. And they said that. And you know, there's different opinions in this article. Right. And the reason, and the reason that I believe that is that as I continue to peel the onion and understand how the sausage is made, and I see all the things that go into making this really work at the right level, there's a lot of, there's a lot that has a lot more that still has to go into this. So as much as we have, as much as we see, you know, the radical. And remember, right, that chat GPT and OpenAI behind it and the model that was years in the making before it was released, they took a long time and then all of a sudden they said, here we are, and everybody jumped on it. They go, oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever. But it took a long time to get to the point of having those models in place. And then they're continuing to evolve from that perspective. So there's what people don't necessarily realize, and I'm learning more about this than maybe they want to. There's a lot going on behind the scenes that make all of this work. So the I think it's going to be longer than most people think to get to that point because there's just so many things still that have to be worked out technologically. And so I'm more of the person that this is probably as much as this will continue to speed and evolve, the whole reasoning aspect of it, I think is farther away than shorter away than some of the things in there.

So I want to get Brandon's take on this, but we kind of jumped ahead here. And I'm thinking right now, and this is the challenge that we sometimes have of recorded podcast and live session.

Right.

The article that we're talking about here was published this week. It's some of the research published by Microsoft. And it talks about AI has evolved to reason like humans. And the test piece that they reference in here is that they said they made a simple request. It says, here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail. Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner. So as I read this, and we could talk about how it described that in a moment. But as I read this, what came to my mind was this is massive, significant change because you could ask Google Chrome or Safari or whatever your tool is that same question, and it would just bring you all of these websites that talked about eggs and laptops in the same article, or you just this plethora of data that you couldn't do anything with. Well, now you could say, go write me a blog post about a book, nine eggs, a laptop, and do that. And we've got excited about that with ChatGPT. But what this is kind of saying is, no, no, no. This can reason like you can reason about how to stack things. I mean, that's my takeaway from that. That's pretty astounding. So I have that one. I want both of your thoughts on what I my takeaway was. And I've got a couple questions for you on this, Tom. So, Brandon, why don't we go to you first on this. What are your thoughts on the article?

Yeah, I think so. The whole concept of AGI, I think scares most people because we don't understand exactly what this general artificial intelligence will be, what it can do. And then simultaneously. And I think I saw Ronald's comment down here that, that he got a list sent to him with 75 new AI startups.

Right.

And that could have just been yesterday with, with the, you know. And so I'm looking at this in two ways. One is the AI, where the technology really is what we should really be concerned about. I appreciate having Tom that distills so much of this and helps me understand it. But on the other side, what the, the business side of me looks at is like other big pushes for new technology or new processes. There's going to be a lot of people that are making bad decisions on, oh, oh, we got it. We got to use that AI stuff and you know, go get us some of that AI without looking at the overall big picture. And when you have 75 new startups coming, a lot of startups are garbage. I mean, let's just be honest. There's, you know, there's all these online programs out there now that teach you how to market, they teach you how to sell, they teach you how to do this. But it doesn't mean that the engine behind it is real. And that's why I think buyers are so stunted in with startups because they've been sold, you know, a bunch of magic beans that never sprouted and have never done anything. So I think we're just creating a really big mess with some really cool technology that's got a lot of potential, but because of the Internet, because we're global, because anybody with a computer can and throw up the website and a startup that there's just a lot that we need to take a look at and be very selective about what do we really need to accomplish and how are we going to get there and not just start bolting on more technologies. Get a much, you know, this really big tech stack that's very weighted and expensive and 90% of it doesn't even get used. Good.

All good points. I think what's interesting to me too is unpacking a few of the things that you mentioned. There is, you know, one, and we could spend days on this because we, we live this constantly within our company is meeting other organizations who just bought software to buy software.

Right.

We, this sounded good. They popped up at a trade show or they called us or whatever and now they have all these pieces of software. That's a whole separate discussion with all of this. But it's intriguing. And then you start looking at it too is as we Talk about with RP's comment here about, you know, 75 startups is you think about the investment community, right? You get a lot of people wanting to jump on board in the AI world right now and they, they don't want to miss the bus, right? But then they're thinking back and saying, well wait a minute, Crypto, you know, I jumped in on that and then NFTs and now what's this one going to be? So there's all of this, you know, challenge that's going on with it. What's, what's interesting for me though as we talk about this particular article and you referenced with to it Brandon, about you know, AGI or artificial general intelligence or thinking deducing like a human would do, you know, and Tom, I wanted to throw this back to you. What came to my mind about this is two questions, Tom. One is that the potential with that concept for bad actors, right. Or people wanting to do harm. And the second that comes to my mind with that is related to that, that whole piece, is it referenced, I think the article referenced somebody's opinion was five years out before we would really get there. So is that five years in dog's life? Like things are moving so fast right now or is it, is it like truly a five year, I mean five years like we experienced 20 years in the Internet growth.

Well, again, I think, you know, the example they had in there was pretty rudimentary. When I look at it, I believe it's going to take longer and probably multiple person years, not DOG years to do it. To be a mainstream, something that has mainstream application and actually can be relevant in, in particular in the business world. Right. My homework that I've been doing for the last few months is how does this get utilized in the business world versus trying to keep up with all the latest startups and you know, cool tools and things like that. I look at those, but I look at those from the framework of how can those be applied into business, how can we use those especially in the B2B world.

Right.

So I think the opportunity for mainstream application of AGI or that reasoning aspect of it, AGI is a very broad field. So it's, it's. You don't want to, I don't want to put a pigeonhole into something, but the actual usage of that sort of reasoning, sentient sort of piece I think is Much farther down the road for a mainstream application. Are there certainly going to be examples of it and oh my gosh and all that? Yeah, of course there are. There are going to be a lot of those as we come along. The answer, of course, again answer to your first question, of course there are going to be people that are going to try and exploit this for bad and all. No, no doubt about that. And you know, I think it's, in some ways it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Right. I think it might actually help, you know, I think there might be more of a, a movement, I guess you'd call it from, you know, the rest of the world trying to stomp out some of that, those bad actors so that they don't ruin it and pollute everything for everything else that we're doing. You know, we've talked, I think we've talked a little bit about regulation in the past. We could do a whole conversation.

Very, very little.

I don't want to do today, which we don't want to do today.

No, but that's, I think that's an important point though, that goes with what you're saying is the potential for regulation.

Yeah, but no matter what, yes, there will certainly be bad actors. There already is. There already are. There always will be. There will always be that situation. But anyway, in answer to your question, I believe mainstream application of IT in the business world will be longer. There will certainly be certainly siloed applications or use cases that, where it's earlier than that. But mainstream is a ways away.

Yeah. So what is interesting to me out here, right, this, it made a comment about a Stanford study and it said they talked about early iterations of OpenAI's GPT has evolved. They called it the theory of mind, which is an ability to predict the actions of others. So we always here try and bring this back to our audience, right, which is typically manufacturers, wholesale distributors and dealers. Right. So now though, imagine this is what really triggered for me, right, Is and we talked last week a little bit about digital twins. And this kind of plays right into that digital twin idea. If we could sit down with a product manager, a marketing leadership team, a sales leadership team and maybe some executives and say, okay, let's now use these predictive tools, right, to get inside the head of that plant manager or that construction foreman that has to select which fall protection he's going to use or which conveyor system are they going to buy, which robotic system. Now you start bringing in all this data on product features, you start Thinking about all the siloed data you have of everything you've sold in your organization before, all your e commerce experiences, you bring all of that together, plus a new market, your new product features that product management brings in. And now you build this digital twin that's working off this ability to predict the purchasing habits of others. It's pretty astounding where we can go from a sales and marketing side of things, isn't it?

Of course, absolutely. I mean the potential is massive of all of this. There's no doubt about that. And again, just before we leave here, I want to put RP's comment up here as well. We've talked about this before, but I personally have had even more reality on this this last week. And he's talking about that you always need to add the content and data aspect, especially for distribution. Pre, you know, is still the fuel that drives all of these even faster with AI, if the data is not good, and I know this is going to excite both of you, but this last week I have spent a lot of time really trying to understand how we would take data from a traditional structured data environment, databases, things like that, and put it into something at a. In an internal business that would actually have the right context to provide good AI results. It's not an easy, it's not an easy process and it's not even, it's not easy to understand. So data is the fuel, but it's not just the data is how the data is put together, organized. And it's not just like, oh, I got a spreadsheet over here and I've got an ERP database over here and I'm just going to somehow turn that into AI. It doesn't quite work that way.

You mean what I tell our customers we do that you haven't finished yet?

Yeah, exactly. If you want to know that, you can ask Kevin. So anyway, a lot to talk about more on here. I'm going to be working on something and maybe we'll do a special show on this that really does a deeper dive on the research that I've been doing and what I've been finding and how this is going to apply to the world. But the one thing, and we have a couple customers, Kevin, that have reached out that are saying, hey, can you help me with a little bit of an audit of what I've got? Let's get started by at least knowing what I have and what's here and all the pieces. And I think that's awesome idea. I think start to inventory, see what's there? Start thinking about it and then, you know, moving along from there. But anyway, well, I just cover there.

In kind of wrapping up on this and I'll throw it back to Brandon in a moment if you have any other thoughts on this topic. But what's interesting to me is I want to kind of take it back to one what RP was saying there about customer data, product data. You know, my background, sales and national account side of things for a large national distributor when I was young, then a manufacturer's rep and then being involved in a manufacturing company. I can't tell you the times I've sat in a room with a product management team, right. And a marketing team and then some feedback from sales or the BD group where we talked about what we think the customer might want and sales as well. I talked to some of the guys and they think this and then we, you know, marketing says well I read an article and then you know, we did a little survey by email of you know, 100 customers and well, how many response? Six responded, okay, great, thanks marketing. And then product is like no, no, no, we want to build this. Right. And you're dealing with these, I guess they're a little bit more than hypothetical, but they're not data driven truly. Right. And so I just, I'm super intrigued by this. From a product development and then a distribution side of things is real data out of a digital twin, so to speak, using these predictive tools that say we think we know what this type of person thinks, right. Here's who they are in the world. Here's all the things that they've already bought. This is what we should go build. Totally different world. All right. Off my soapbox.

Yeah. Well look, the only thing I would add to that is the caveat of humans aren't logical, right? As, as you're talking about these digital twins, there's a lot of these other variables that play into it. You know, the, the purchasing person is, had a, a 12 year history of golfing with so and so at, at your competitor. Like there's, there's illogical variables that we have to consider when we're trying to put some magical AI into place that's going to give us all these brilliant answers. We still need to be human beings and I know that's kind of the, the core of this article is where that, that line is drawn, but we still need to be human beings and take a look at some of those illogical, logical out potential outcomes.

And I love that, I love that statement. Because what it to me what triggered right off the, my head is right, is we talk about all the time, you know, or I shouldn't say we talk about, but we hear all the time, well, AI is going to replace all these jobs. Right. AI is only going to be as good as the people that are using it. Right. And the prompts that they're doing with it. So you just brought in the human element. Right. Brandon, to what I was describing is, hey, now we have all these tools that are real data. Now all of a sudden the opinions of people matter based upon that. But you can filter opinions a little bit when you have data.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the, the, and I think you're going to be moving on. But some of the other articles that, that you shared today, I keep coming in, I keep looking at it and going, but what about the human? Right. What about the human? Because it's that human nature that ultimately determines a lot of things. As we start talking about some of the other articles, I'm going to bring that back up because I saw that as a continual through there. And I think the more we get into data, the more we get into tech. And as much as I'm a data and a tech guy and I love to have real time data to help people make decisions, we still deal with human fear. We still deal with, you know, human pausing.

Right.

We, we get all that human emotion and the illogic of things that come into play that we need to stay on our toes and reconcile.

Yeah. Yep, good. I, I have all kinds of other thoughts and questions about what AI could do and looking at social media and, and other people's behaviors and figuring out what soccer team they like or, and, and bringing these things in. But that's a, that's a broader, deeper discussion that, so let's, let's kind of jump at Great thoughts, guys. Appreciate it.

And maybe what I just said just put me on the, on the list of the when the robots rise that I'm going to be at the top of the list of, of to, to take out list or something. But I think we can't, we can't discount the human nature.

Yep.

Well, but the last comment for me at least on this is I'm glad you brought that point up because it does tie into, you know, in even the big articles you're reading and stuff we've talked about in weeks gone by about this is that there is always the human element that needs to manage the AI. Right? There's whether it's prompt or Whether it's truly taking another view of the data and especially in the early stages, you know what I was describing about that, you know, product management team that's years down the road of this type of stuff happening. But there, I don't think you can ever take the human emotion or the human piece out of it.

Well, and boy, I really got. I. We need like a three hour episode, I think on this. But we are going to see, and I agree with both of you by the way, on the human aspect of it.

So don't hear that Brandon. You hear that? He agreed with us.

Yeah, I agree with Brandon. I'm not so sure about Kevin, but the human element of this. But what this is going to do is it will definitely squeeze out, in my opinion, a lot of the politics and emotion and opinions that oftentimes go into business decisions.

Perfect.

And maybe the politics first. Because a lot of times, to your point earlier, Kevin, we sit around the room and we throw out a bunch of opinions and then there's obviously the vested interest around the opinions that we have and what we're trying to do. Turf wars. And then a decision is made with, you know, three doses of opinion and two doses of vested interest. And maybe just somebody who doesn't want to rock the, rock the apple cart. Right. Whether that's a good decision or not, when you can put more logic into those decisions and have that data available, it's inherently going to squeeze out some of that. Doesn't mean it's going to go away. It's going to squeeze it out. And I think the decisions that are made are going to be much better, much more sound, less based on opinion, less based on politics. And I'm hoping that to be true, but I believe it will be true. It won't be 100%, but it won't be what it is. Right now I think a lot of business decisions are made 90% opinion and politics and vested interest versus looking at what's the right thing to do. And I think this based on data and this will help do that.

Anyway, last word, there's Brandon. Go ahead, Brandon.

I was gonna say there's still gonna be manipulation of data as well, even though it kicks out AI and everything you said is as we're talking as we move to the next one about, you know, videos and webinars and B2B marketing, which this the the best stuff. Marketing data has been manipulated for years to, you know, so the marketing team looks good even though the data itself at the core may not be good.

Look at all my MQLs.

Well, yeah.

Wow.

That's one of the articles. Right. Thank you. That was already.

Let's use that to transition. Let's use that to transition to these next couple articles.

Tom, the.

The. You've already had your compliment from me for the month of May last week, but thank you for distilling some of that, which, you know, you do a nice job of bringing that back around, so thank you for that.

Okay. Yeah. So I think this is a good way to kind of bridge into these next articles around the marketing front. And this first one here, the Power Quartet, using videos, webinars, white papers, and blogs to boost your B2B marketing strategy. I know I have a take, but, you know, Brandon, Kevin, why don't you start off with some of your thoughts on.

Well, yeah, let me throw a caveat out before we get too deep into this, because Brandon's frothing at the mouth right now.

I'm pretty good behavior.

I am. You know, you guys have the ability to veto this article as well. So, you know, for those. Again, as a quick reminder, if you're listening on the podcast and not seeing the three goofballs that are here right now laughing is. We're reviewing a email that we send out through Lead Smart Technologies every Friday morning, dark and early on here on the west coast called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. So we compile articles, economic topics, M and A things, artificial intelligence, whatever it is, try and bring that together for conversation about how that impacts wholesale distribution. So what we're looking at on the screen is a reminder. Again, if you're only listening and not watching, we're looking at some of these articles. So before we dive in on this. Right. We have a broad audience. There are, I'll say, three of us that are highly accomplished marketing and business executives here that are data and technology focused. Brandon, you happen to be a strong authority on digital marketing and Tom as well. This article is a little rudimentary, but we have people in our audience who are still trying to get their head around using multiple tools and multiple platforms. So we can dive in now. We just have a diverse audience.

Boy, Kevin, scold. Kevin scolded us, Brandon.

He wasn't meant to scold you.

It was meant scolding.

That was. No, that was. That was the hope of avoiding scolding. We have a broad audience.

Yeah.

All right. Fire away.

Well, after that, I don't have anything that. No, I'm kidding. Like I.

You.

You said it's rudimentary.

And.

And it is. But it doesn't mean it's also wrong. Right. I think this article, I mean, when we were chatting before we went live, like, this article could have been written 10 years ago.

Sure.

And it had the exact same information and been totally relevant all the way down to the, the HubSpot quote. Right. Like, everybody loves to give the HubSpot data. You know, HubSpot, great company, great tool, but a lot of the data they give is for a purpose. It promotes buying. HubSpot might be skewed. And so when I, when I look at this article, like, yeah, videos, webinars, white papers, blogs, nothing wrong with all of them. But we got to keep coming back to how are our buyers behaving? And if we're not considering the buyer behavior, then we're creating obstacles for our buyers to engage with us. And if we create obstacles, they're gone. So I'm going to share this quick story because it's very relevant to this good somebody that I've been engaging with for a couple of years now, who's a marketer, owns a company that builds websites and landing pages and, you know, white papers and puts them behind a gate and integrates HubSpot and all those wonderful things. And we've been having our cordial conversations about where I've said, look, we've got to blow up the silos between marketing and sales, and marketers need to think more relational like sales, and sales needs to think more marketing like marketers, because the way buyers behave. Well, he sent me a message. I can't remember yesterday, the day before, over the last few days. And he's. And he said that he posted something in a marketing community similar to what I just said about blowing that up. And he said, I got crucified in there. He's like, the marketers just came at me with venom that, no, you don't get it. What we do, da, da, da, in the basic conversation or the argument was our job is to create leads, and that was it. And it, it poses this question, well, how good are your leads and how good have your leads been? And this where it goes back to the manipulation of data. Those two departments stay siloed. We go, oh, look at all of our MQLs. Look at all the, all the traffic that we've driven. Look at all this, da, da, da, da, da. And then you go over to sales and you go, hey, what about the MQLs? And they go, the what? Yeah, because they learned years ago, working.

Qualified lead, those leads.

Yeah, they weren't qualified. So that sales Accepted lead chasm is still where all of that effort dies. It's wasted money. It's wasted effort, all of that, because we haven't solved that problem. So as we look at blogs and webinars and videos and everything out fine, they're all still potentially, the key is potentially good motions. But if we don't solve the chasm between marketing and sales, it's really just wasted dollars and wasted motions.

So Tom, there's blood coming out of the side of your mouth, biting your tongue, but I'm going to come back to you in just a second. There are some good points in this article and you know, so, so let me, I'm, let me start with what I agree with you wholly on, Brandon, on this. And you and I spoke on the phone about this yesterday. Tom and I are the co founders of Lead Smart Technology. We're scaling our company, building out our team. We have people that have responsibilities, right. You know that or coming into the organization for marketing. We have people that are starting off customer facing. We have a client success that falls underneath revenue. And everybody is responsible for revenue. And it's not marketing. Because to your point, right, I think in the, in, in this day and age in 2023, if you continue to your point, in my opinion, Brandon, if you continue as a business leader to allow a silo of marketing and a silo of sales, you are sadly mistaken because there are people that are going to come together that have lack of a better term of revenue department where sales and marketing are fully integrated with the same, Same Goals, where MQLs go out the window. Marketing qualified leads is what we refer to as an mql, something that maybe just as somebody fills out a form on your website and marketing dumps it over to sales and sales says this is stupid and sales says marketing sucks because the leads are bad. And marketing says sales sucks because they never do anything with our great leads. And we all have these hierarchies. You got to pull that stuff together, right? And I think that's kind of your point, Brandon, is get rid of that chasm. And Tom and I are developing this in our organization is that there's a revenue department and your compensation is tied to revenue growth. You happen to be an expert in digital marketing or customer support or whatever it is, client success, you play that role and your compensation is driven by the revenue of the organization. You just happen to have a role.

Well, and whether we call it revenue internally the focus, and this is your point, Brandon, the focus is the buyer, right? So maybe even Better it should be called the buyer department. And you know, I have strong opinions on the, on the changing buyer and the buyer journey.

No way.

But I think they're more than. See, those are actually facts now. It's not just an opinion anymore. But, but I think that, yes, I don't have any issue with that article about blogs or videos or anything. It's how you use them. And it didn't, wasn't really clear about, they weren't giving any recommendations on how to use them. But yes, if you're going to go build those, and the premise is you're going to go build those to get MQLs and I'm going to get a lead because somebody downloaded the white paper, throw those. I mean, that's just stupid, right? It's stupid for the buyer.

It doesn't, you know, it's 2018, right?

What's that?

It's very 2018.

Yeah, but it's just, it's not, it's not effective. It doesn't. And what I mean by stupid, it doesn't. Yes, it made. The buyer may have a piece of content, but you're not really, you know, looking at it from the buyer perspective. And it doesn't help the business because it's the model that doesn't work anymore or work very well anymore with the marketing sales, you know, dynamic that you just, guys just went through. So I don't have any issue with the, what they were talking about as far as creating content. It's just how you use that content and how do you use that effectively to provide value to the buyer that ultimately then ends up providing much more revenue and business and results for the business. So that's, that's the. And yeah, it was just, it was so Kevin, to your point, I understand that there are people that, you know, this may be new to them and rightly so, but even if it's new to them, what I wouldn't recommend is go back and fall into the 2010 motion.

And I think that was a big part of Brandon's point.

Right.

Is don't, don't go do that. My takeaway from this though, I thought there were some great reminders and this is rudimentary to some, but it really important to others. Right. Think about, you know, how many companies you look at that you got a newsletter from them four times or you'll look at a website and they have a blog in. The blog hasn't been updated in four years. Right. And this article talks about, you know, content marketing and creating consistent, high quality Content. And they talk about B2B companies struggling with that. Not thinking about using content calendars might be. If you're a marketer, Digital Marketer in 2023, these are really rudimentary things. But, you know, in wholesale distribution, it's not uncommon to find, you know, a young person that was in customer service that just got put into becoming the digital marketing person because they know how to use TikTok, the. These types of tools about the consistency, high quality content, you know, content calendars and so forth, I think are valuable to some folks with that as well. So.

So let's move on to the next one here. We're going to have to zip, I think, the rest of these.

Yep.

So, Kevin, I know you said you had some strong thoughts on this. By the way, I did listen to the podcast part of this too, with an audio podcast in this article from MDM as well.

Yeah.

Which I thought was quite interesting.

So Mike Hockett that was on with us here on the show recently, did an interview and I just, I just love this. So the article talks about marketing missteps that cause channel conflict. Right. And as we talk in this channel conflict, it's manufacturing their distribution base or distribution and dealer network. And this is something that is, is so, you know, I could, I could literally talk on this for 40 minutes. Historically. I won't, I may, I may just keep talking. Once we're done, I'll start talking again to the dogs gone today. And I'm working from home, so if.

You do that, you're going to turn the most interesting dog in the world to a really bored dog. But go right ahead.

Yeah, I'll have him call you. But the, you know, so there's this, there's this conflict, right. That they talk about that historically, distributors have been. I'm not sharing anything with you, Mr. Manufacturer, because I can't let you know who I'm selling your product to because you might go sell it to them or you might share it with my competitor down the street. And there's just been this conflict that's gone. I mean, I've been on the distribution side of things. I started my career in 1989 watching this happen. Right. And here we are today. And I've talked about this with people for literally 20 plus years. Is there is no way you can tell me that you're selling to that plant that I know that that plant or that construction site is here that I can't with a few minutes on the Internet find out who the right people are there so why wouldn't we want to put our data together? And that's the core of kind of what's going on here and is everybody has an ability. In the quote here that came from Mr. Hale that they were talking to is folks don't recognize the other party's ability to influence the equation. And a manufacturer wants to be in a place where he can understand the customer. We talked about this a little bit earlier about AI and product development. Right. Because the manufacturer wants to touch the customer, know them well. Distributors know other pieces of data. And when you bring them together, instead of having a lack of understanding, you can bring them together. Tom, back to your common point is we get to serve the customer better. We get to understand their desires, their wants, their needs, but it remains this day and age. Now, you have this with. You know, we had some conversations recently, Tom, with some. Some gentlemen from a global manufacturing company that are challenged with sharing data with their distribution network. So happens our technology helps with that. But, you know, the idea of the only way that a manufacturer, whether you're a stanley tool or a 3M or whoever it might be, that you can get data from your distributor is that they're sharing point of sale reports with you so that others can be compensated so that they'll still support the channel. That's this amount of dollars and this zip code. Typically it's not this customer. And we should collaborate together. So I, I thought this was a short article. Mike. I think Mike was going to be with us today. I don't know if he was from mdm. It's phenomenal. There's. There's two quotes take away from this article so we can move on for this, because we'll talk with Brandon a little bit more today. But one is if you don't understand customer insights, you're just guessing. Right. And the best way to do that is to bring all the parties together. The last piece that they comment, and this came from Harvard Business Review that was quoted here. It's talking about understanding the motivations of the buyer. And we talk about that all the time. Right. It says people don't buy drills, they buy holes. Do you read that in that article? That is so.

I heard that in the podcast too. Yeah, yeah.

It's like they're solving a problem and you're trying to sell features.

Right.

They buy holes, not drills.

I just.

Anyways, maybe I'm easily overwhelmed, but that was. I loved that comment. So collaboration, manufacturers, distributors, pull your head out of the sand, Be willing to talk, share data, find out what's best for that mutual customer.

Well, and again, just to kind of maybe wrap up everything we've talked about here today, again, if you put the buyer of the at the center of the universe and even AI right to me, we should be using. That's why I'm doing the homework, I'm doing. How do we use AI so that we can either provide a better experience for the buyer themselves in a self serve manner or how as a sales team or a business team can we provide a better experience for the buyer? How can we make better decisions on behalf of the buyer? All of those types of things, all the stuff here about marketing, collaboration and all of that, all at the end of the day provides a better experience for the buyer. If we do that and you optimize that with some of the things that we've talked about with AI over time there'll be plenty, you know what they say, rising waters raise all ships. There'll be plenty for everybody to go around. And you know, Brandon, you and I talk a lot about mindset. Right. There's a mindset shift that inherently is going to, I don't know, it will be interesting to see if it can happen. I'm not sure it can happen. But by changing a mindset shift a bit, it opens the door. And rather than why do I get mine and I got to protect this and I can't share that and this is in my world and all of that, which is not generally good for the buyer or the customer, but it's not good for the business either. And it doesn't have to be that way anymore with some of the tools and optimizations that are there. But I think that kind of wraps everything together that we've talked about with AI and marketing today.

Yep, it does. So go ahead, Brandon.

I was gonna say and maybe that's where things like the digital twins and creating some models that are AI driven, we can start to help the teams understand that yes, we want to believe in theory that rising tides raise all ships, but the illogic of human nature is I need to protect mine and I'm not going to share. So maybe using this AI technology and developing out some models can get people more comfortable with man, if I collaborate, it's actually better for all of us.

Right.

And again, I think we, we know it, we believe it here, but it doesn't get down here because we're, you know, fear.

Well, we haven't experienced it yet either.

Right.

Maybe after we experience it a few times it'll, it'll start to change.

But Brandon, you really triggered something great, great there that came to my mind. It's like I think people will probably find themselves in a room collaborating on a project that used AI and somebody's going to realize, huh, there's those other 12 spreadsheets that I didn't add into the model because that's kind of my f. Oh wow, look at what the outcome for the organization. Had I maybe been honest and forthright in all of this. Right. And shared fully, it could have been better. So listen, we're running out of time. I want to talk to Brandon for a minute. Tom, can you pop up. Let's just scroll down about the scuttlebutt stuff. There's a couple shout outs we wanted to make today. Again in our newsletter that goes out each week, the folks at Sphere One, the buying group, they're based here not far from us celebrating their 24 year anniversary. They just had their big event last week, I think it was. So congratulations to them on their anniversary. They did all their award winners mentioned to them this morning in a note we would kind of do a shout out for that streamlights name their rep of the year. Tom, you know some of the guys over at Holton McArdle you've met in years gone by, great rep agency on the the actually the whole eastern seaboard pretty much now and then. Some good results for DXP on the quarterly sales jump. So good to see those growth pieces there. The last couple articles there. There's a good article about warehouse management systems but the, the Goodreads is we have a section each week in the newsletter is talks about how an industrial product distributors appeal to Digital first customers and that's a whole nother podcast we can do. In fact we should maybe get. Why don't we do this gents, the three of us and maybe either next week or the following let's get together and do another live session outside of Friday and let's talk about Digital first buyers and some of those types of things. You guys up for that?

Sure.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, let's plan that. Let's plan that and we'll let everybody know that we're gonna go live because the Digital first buyers is just, it's pretty phenomenal because they buy differently, right? They, they're, they're using SEO type things and search engine research tools as opposed to somebody that says I want to know how many watts that this generator puts out. They're doing things differently. So we should talk about that more.

Dark social into that conversation as well.

Okay, great. Let's get that agenda together because I.

Think that, I think we'll do like a telethon. It'll be like a four hour sort of session that we can do between.

The three of us. Is four hours enough?

Yeah, probably not, right?

Can we do it, can we do it late in the day and have cocktails with it?

Early in the day and have cocktails? Yeah.

You know, we're missing Tom May today, that was with us on Cinco de Mayo for that. So Brandon, though, before we jump off today, let's talk a little bit more about some of what you do. You've got two technology companies that you're co founder of that relate to digital marketing. I'm going to say the word and then you can add to it correctly, social selling, which we sometimes like to say that that's a bad word. But why don't you kind of unpack a little bit about that. You've done some. We have a lot of our listeners and folks that read the newsletter are part of. They're either members of buying groups or trade associations or the people that run those. You've done quite a bit of work with both members of buying groups and trade associations as well as them themselves. Would you kind of share that? Let's plug you in what you do because we're really appreciative of the things you've added to our broadcast today.

Yeah, I appreciate having having you guys here. You know, it's. I'm going to start with this because I wanted to share this earlier and I think it's really important. Important and I'll use it as a stepping on point is I saw this post that said KPIs and it crossed out key performance indicators and it said the new leadership thinks this way. It was keep people interested, keep people informed, keep people involved and keep people inspired. Those are awesome KPIs for internal and external. And the way that we have it, the way that we can accomplish this is through technology and training. Right. It really comes down to that. It's. It's that simple in a way. And then it's completely difficult because you got change. And I keep talking about the human emotion and the human logic and illogic and that's probably why I focus on it so much is whenever we start talking about change, we get the emotion and illogic and logic and all this other stuff that gets in and muddies the water. But here's, here's where we're at. Our, our buyers require us to behave differently. Our Competition is changing, which requires that we need to operate differently. And that means we need new technologies that help us learn things quicker, help us have confidence to implement new systems quicker. And for me, a lot of that comes down then to the technology and the training. And you referenced the two technology companies. I'm a co founder in those. Both came about in helping teams, whether it's a manufacturer with distributors going, hey, we need help with content to share socially. Right. I mean, I started my career doing that. Hey, we need help with content. And we created brochures and flyers and all those things and, you know, printed it when I own Digital Lizard and got it out the door to hundreds and thousands of people and locations all over the world and all that. Great. Then it evolved to digital. It's like, hey, we need emails done for us, especially when you have small distributors out there. We need social posts created. Like all these things are ways that, whether it's the buying group, it's the manufacturer, it's a wholesale distributor with, with any micro wholesalers that they work with or their sales reps that are involved. We need content because digital content is what helps us create conversations. And if we're not opening our mouth, we're not producing content. It's like going to that network and standing in the corner and looking at everybody having a good time and all the great conversations that are going on and us sitting there going, I don't do social media. That's like saying, I don't talk at events. I, I, I'm just here to observe and we're missing out. So a lot of, a lot of what I do is help teams assess and then create a system to take it on and go in baby steps. I mean, we need a process. We need leadership to be bought in. We need some key stakeholders that are going to champion it, that have influence in the organization. I mean, there's a lot of prep work on the front end, but once we can get that aligned, then this can work really, really well. And it's like the mindset we talk about with modern selling. We need to go slow to move fast and change. Any sort of change is that same mindset. We've got to move slow and make sure that we got the foundation done right or else we're going to have all kinds of obstacles, people, processes along the way. And I'm sensitive to the time, so I'm going to.

No, that's good. So we'll wrap up with that. So you work with organizations at a leadership level to help digital transformation. You offer Services for content development, content syndication. And you have two technology companies tied to that fist bump, which is a phenomenal tool to get access within LinkedIn. It's a LinkedIn plugin, which is a great tool. And then Funnel Amplified as well. So as we wrap up and I.

Can I say something on that real quick? Like take 30 seconds because funnel Amplified. And this isn't a pitch, but it's look, Funnel Amplified came about because I had customers with either sales reps or distributors who were like, we need help with content. We have a small team. Da, da, da, da. Funnel Amplified was designed because of that need. Hey, we can create social posts that are ready to publish. One person can do it or my team does it and we push a button and then you got a whole network of people that get a notification on their phone and they look at it and it's like, green button publish, red button reject. Right. It's a great baby step to start getting people being digitally available, having that digital voice and showing up. And those are some of the, like, the steps that we just. We've got to take and get started and then we can talk about future steps. Like how do we get executives and salespeople to actually write their own post?

Yeah.

Their own mouth. But that's some of those things. We just. We're running out of time to go. We'll do it later. We'll do it later. We'll get to it. Awesome.

So closing. How do people find you?

LinkedIn is best forward slash. Brandon Lee, Digital. Of course. I'm connected to these two guys. If you go find them. And then my website is BrandonLee Me. If you want to learn a little bit more. But LinkedIn's always the best comes. Comes with.

You've done a great job with that website. So. But yeah, you, you are consistently on LinkedIn like Tom and I both are. So good stuff. Tom. We're wrapping up. We went long today, but it was. I wanted Brandon to talk about what he does because he shared so much today with some really good feedback and we'll get that other, that other live event scheduled next week, which will be fun again.

Thanks everybody for their contributions. Have a good weekend and we'll see what another week brings us.

In the world of AI, go do good things.

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, Lead Smart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industries, CRM Customer Intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead Smart Technologies atLead smart tech.com.