Digital Transformation Made Easy!

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on digital transformation. What does it mean, why it matters and how you can succeed. We have two great presenters, Kevin Brown and Tom Burton from LeadSmart Technologies. LeadSmart is one of our new business service providers. As they join In February of 2022 they offer a CRM business intelligence and channel collaboration platform. In today's presentation they'll discuss what it really means to digitally transform, what are some of the risks and pitfalls and what you can look to achieve with successful plan for digital transformation. Before I turn it over to Kevin and Tom, I'd like to give a brief introduction. So first is Kevin Brown, the CEO and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies. For over 30 years Kevin has worked in the industrial MRO and related products distribution world ranging from working for a national distributor, having established an exit and manufacturer sales agency and investing in and running a manufacturing company. So Kevin has seen all sides of distribution business from product development go to market, sales, marketing and technology. Our next presenter is Tom Byrne, the COO and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies. Tom has over 30 years of experience helping forward thinking businesses develop and implement innovative technology based strategies and solutions that drive sales and predictable revenue growth. Also, fun fact about Tom he is the author of the Revenue the Ultimate Playbook for the next generation of B2B sales and marketing. So after this webinar go on Amazon and purchase his book. But if you have any questions throughout the presentation, please type them into the question box and at the end of the presentation we'll have time to answer those. But now without further ado, I'll turn over to Kevin and Tom to get started.

Great, thanks.

Good morning everyone. We're happy to be here with you today. Before we kind of jump in and get started on this, we did that intro where Cynthia did a nice job of sharing a little bit about Tom and my background. We're looking forward to sharing some thoughts with you today. But before we get started, even on our first slide here, in fact we can Tom, jump to the next one with the agenda. But Cynthia, will you pop up the first poll for us? Wanted to get a feel from everybody about a little bit of your thoughts and ideas and understanding related to digital transformation in general. So you should see that poll popping up for you there.

I'm trying to vote too and it won't let me. It says I should be giving this session. I was going to select that but.

Oh well, I see some votes coming in right now. Sorry Tom, you're not allowed to vote.

That's Okay, I just, you know, good.

We'll take a little time, but our goal here today is to really kind of think through. We'll go through this agenda in just a moment. But you know, whether you're a distribution company that's on the smaller side or you're, you know, a large organization that works in multiple states with lots and lots of branches, we wanted to kind of unpack some things for you today that will be beneficial to you as what we kind of sometimes call as your digital journey. So Cynthia, how are we looking there with our quiz or our poll?

So it looks like about 43% of people said a completely foreign concept. Another 43% stated, I know a little bit about the concept but don't fully understand it. And lastly, 14% said working on transforming, but I really need to get my arms around it.

What was the percentage on that last one about working on things?

About 14%.

Okay, great. So we've got a nice mix of folks with kind of understanding things. And our goal today is to kind of take that term of digital transformation, kind of unpack it and make life a little bit simpler for everybody here. So it's a good help for us all. So the things that we want to go through today as we expand on all of this is that whole concept of digital transformation. And as I mentioned there, why does that matter? And you'll see throughout the course of our discussion session today why it matters. That'll be woven in in a lot of different places. We've identified six, there's probably quite a few more, but six challenges that distributors often face in this setting. And then we're going to talk about some keys to navigating those challenges, four of them in particular, and how to really get your head around this to, to do a progressive, or what we like to say, crawl, walk, run solution to transforming your company digitally. And then we'll talk just in our last couple minutes, we'll talk a little bit about our company and what we do with our particular solution. So Tom, let's jump ahead and really kind of dive in here on a follow up slide. So what is digital transformation? Well, you know, this term that's kind of right out of the dictionary, so to speak, is that it's the process really of taking digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes, even cultures within an organization, and then probably most importantly, that customer experience that meets the changes that are going on in our business and our market. And I think even before we move on from this, we've probably all seen over the course of our careers. Cynthia mentioned earlier on, I've been involved in industrial distribution for over 30 years. Things have transformed dramatically around us. But we've probably never been in a time where we're seeing more technology tools, whether it's cloud based SaaS, software tools, other technologies that you can bring into your business. But most importantly is, you know, thinking about it as well as we go through this, about the digital transformation that your customer is going through. And we're going to kind of unpack all this a little bit further. So Tom, let's jump ahead to our next slide. So you know those of you who talked about things being a foreign concept. Yep. That just makes a lot of sense when you think about that. If we looked at just the term digital transformation, but the reality of it is it's been happening to us for many, many decades. Right. We, we went from sending everything through the post to FedEx or UPS. All of a sudden, in what would have been the 80s, this thing popped up called a fax machine and that replaced a lot of things. All of a sudden we could get faxes immediately. In fact, I hate to admit this, but I remember the days of checking into a hotel and asking for my faxes that had been sent to me by my office. Then email came around in the 90s. Now we had this much better tool and that has just progressed that it's become part of our day to day life. Well, what about on the other side of the business? Whether it's in our warehousing solution or accounting system or whatever it might be internally, you know, we went from the old ledger onto something like QuickBooks. And then next thing we knew, the next slide there, Tom, all of a sudden we went to an ERP system. Whether it's a, you know, a NetSuite or one of the other products or an Epicore that a lot of people in the distribution world use, now we have this ERP system. Well, probably a few of you here are like both Tom and I, you carried a pager at one time. In fact, I remember one point in my life I had two of them, which was horrible. And now what do we have? We have these smart devices that go with us everywhere and have more computing power than could be imagined a number of years ago. And then even we went from the stage of having a Rolodex, still see them out there once in a while, or a handwritten phone book over to Salesforce Automation system and or a CRM system. So we've gone through a lot of changes over the Years. But the reason I share these with you is that, you know, you've been doing this concept of digital transformation already. But what we really want to do is get to this place where we have an organized and structured plan for how we're going to grow our businesses and help our customers better. And that's what we want to unpack today. So what's next? Well, we think about this, right? Our customer is changing, as we're going to talk about in depth here shortly. And as that customer is changing and the marketplace is evolving, we need to make sure we have the right tools within our business, whether it's erp, marketing automation, E commerce, CRM, whatever those tools are. But it's more than just having the tool, right? We want to be in a position where we can really be focused on having these tools, where we can focus on our customer and our prospects to serve them better, which is going to differentiate us from the competitors who haven't done this yet. And as I'm sure a number of you have thought about over time, and whether it's through NetPlus alliance or it's through maybe Industrial Supply association or another trade group, you're hearing a lot about this customer change and digital transformation. And there's risk that goes with not having the. The ability to really focus on the customer and using the right tools. And we'll unpack that a little bit further today as well. So, Tom, let's.

And to add to that, you know, this whole area of customer and prospect, we do this all the time. We work with companies all the time that are transforming digitally as it relates to helping focus on their customers and prospects. And the benefits that can be achieved by really what we're going to cover here are really astronomical, not only in terms of providing that better customer experience, but also really driving the growth of the business. So that kind of ties back to the why does it matter?

Thanks, Tom. That's a big help. So what we're going to talk about today is some of the challenges. Now, you may face a few of these. In fact, some of you face all of them. But different size businesses, different stages in digital transformation within your organization, you're probably at different spots, but we're going to talk about the speed of change and what that really means, buyer changes and expectations. We'll talk about that. Siloed data. Well, what does that really mean? The data that we have in different parts of our business, folks are oftentimes challenged and really struggle because they don't have a plan in place within their business and their organization to really develop their technology platforms to serve their company, their employees and their customers better then resources and timing. There's never a good time to try something new like this that might be a challenge to us. And we're going to talk about not only the challenges that go with that, but how to get around it and then culture and mindset and adoption. Right, because there's no point in buying a lot of technology if you're not going to get people using it. That's going to be then a value to your company as well as your customers. So we'll dive into these real quick here. So let's talk about the speed of change. What does that really mean? Well, you know what, smart devices right there. It's amazing what's out there right now between our watches, our phones, maybe cameras in the home, cameras in the workplace. 50 billion of them by the year 2030. All of those producing more data for us. Computing and processing speeds are growing consistently in astounding rates because there's so much more data to look at and evaluate. We see, and we regularly read and hear about the term big data. These are big sets of data that can, in your case, would probably be coming from your ERP or your accounting system. Right? We've got lots of data that could be analyzed. Well, 90% of that data has been developed over the past two years. I mean, that's just astounding. If we could spend a half hour just talking about that and the amount of data that's being developed and it says every 127, every second, 127 new devices are connected to the Internet. Well, that in itself is just really something crazy. And then obviously we've got well over half the world is using the Internet. So the cloud computing scenario and systems are just growing every day. And then if you think about it, right, start talking about where we want to be digitally, 2.5 trillion searches on just Google in 2020. So people are out looking for the products that you do, and they're looking for it online. Who those people are, how they behave is something we want to get focused on. So it's astounding the amount of data that's out there. So we'll talk a little bit about buyer changes and expectations, right? Well, every day there's a millennial entering into this buying process. In fact, research says that by 2025, just a few short years away, the majority of all B2B buyers will be millennials. Millennials act differently, don't they? Millennials have an expectation that they can get an online buying experience. Right. If you stop and think about, and we pause just for a moment here is that buyer. That's that B2B buyer. It might be at the local factory, the construction site, wherever your customer might be. As that buyer's age drops, his life experience or her life experience and how they buy things changes dramatically.

Right.

So we end up in this place where, you know, they took Uber when they went on their date the night before, they ordered their all of their clothes recently on Amazon and they get their food delivered by doordash. They, those are different experiences. These people are looking to have trusted advisors and guides, not just salespeople. So they're looking to your organization to have the technology, whether it's your e commerce system, maybe it's PDF libraries, whatever it might be. They're looking to have on demand access to information that will be of help and a value to them in making their decisions. This type of buyer might one day want to have your company deliver something. The next day they may want to buy something online because from you because of convenience. And the following day they might be out and about and they might pop in and want to buy something at your counter sales. But they want quick access their way, not necessarily just the way that we're used to transacting business. So the old days of where we just expected our delivery truck was going to stop by after our salesman had been there the day before, those things are changing. You're probably starting to feel that, but some not just my opinion is that research tells us right now that this is what's going to be happening for us.

So it's, we see it, we see it every day. And what you know, what I find interesting as we observe this right. Is millennials are not very tolerant of a poor customer experience. But on the other hand, when they get a very good customer experience, they're very loyal and they really will embrace it. So it's kind of that double edged sword that you have to, to have to deal with.

Thanks, Tom. So we talk a little bit about number three that we saw within our challenges and silo data. Well, what does that mean? Silo is just a term for lots of data in lots of different places. So if you looked within your business, you probably have related to financial data. You probably have tons of different spreadsheets with different reports. You've got your ERP data that came from the ERP system that you're using and that's all that transactional data that we have. Right. Then if you're working with E Commerce, you've got, whether it's Shopify or Woocommerce or whatever, the solution is NetPlus's partners in E Commerce, whatever solution you might be using there, you've got all of that data and then on the other side of it, you have that customer data, right? What has the salesman been saying? What is marketing been doing? You might be doing just simple email campaigns, but we've got these data silos, as we call them, where we have them in different places. And, and the challenge that comes from that is with that changing buyer that we talked about, the more that we can know about that buyer, the better off he's going to be served by our company.

Right?

And so when we can have this siloed data talking and bringing all these different pieces together, that's where you win and your customer wins. So, you know, we've all heard this before, right? He who fails to plan is planning to fail. We see that in lots of parts of not just our business, but our lives. But the idea of not having a plan, it's really a struggle with this. And when we talk about the decisions that need to be made with a digital transformation, it's not that difficult to get done as you'll see later on in our discussion. But we need to have a plan and most folks don't do that. So they don't talk about what did we want to accomplish with all this, what's the outcome that we're really looking to achieve and then how do we get that accomplished? What's that final thing that we're looking for when we go through the process of buying new software, expanding how we serve our customer through technology and then what's the financial and human resources that are needed within our company? Those are typically not really structured well. We're going to talk later in this presentation about how to do that better. Another big challenge is conflicting priorities. Right? Nobody has a digital transformation department, right? We have struggles and conflicting priorities with our people. The financial side of it, what impact is it going to have on our business? How many people do I need to a lot within our company to do this? And how is this going to disrupt the day to day of my company? And we're going to give you some solutions today about how to get around these conflicting priorities. Culture is a big thing too. And we can stop here. Oops, we got all of them at once. But you know, there's that old thing thinking, right? And we're in a very mature market and as Cynthia mentioned, Earlier I'm, you know, 30 plus years in this marketplace is we hear this all the time. Well, we've always done it this way, you know, and then next we oftentimes hear, you know, we're doing fine, we're growing. You know, we had 12% growth last year in our business. Why do I really need to do this? Well, that's going to be a big challenge if we keep thinking that. Let's go to the next one. Well, wait on this until it's easier. Right? Well, there's just no easy button as we see for this to happen out there. And then our final is, well, we'll deal with this next year. Right? We've got, we're gonna, we're gonna tackle this next year. Well, there's challenges that go with those thoughts of that culture. And if that becomes our long term thinking, we may just get left behind by companies that we compete with that have digitally transform and can serve that customer better. You know that that year over year growth that we might be experiencing that will change over a period of time if we can't serve the customer the way they want to be served. Let's jump ahead there, Tom. Well, the good news is that successfully navigating these challenges can be done. So I'm going to kind of let Tom take the lead on this and I'll take the backup position and we'll go through some ways to solve these problems.

Yeah, I let Kevin talk about all the problems and then I come in with a solution. So yeah, so we're going to pivot a little bit here and talk a bit about, okay, what can we do to address these challenges? And you know, per what we said in the beginning of the presentation, how do we make this digital transformation process a bit easier and more efficient? So as Kevin stated in the beginning, our goal, right. And really the, the primary, the next chapter, if you will, of digital transformation that we're seeing the most return on investment on is that focus on your customers and your prospects. And there's really four key technologies that we see playing together. Obviously there could be some other ones, but it's that erp, CRM, marketing automation and E Commerce. What we're going to talk about is how to get all of those to effectively work together and to become a lot easier to actually accomplish. Not just the transformation with these individual products, but how they come together to provide that focus on the customers and prospects. So in the way that there were four or six things, six challenges that Kevin just went through, what we have learned in doing this is there's really four things that really help navigate these challenge. And I'll cover each of these in just rather than going through them here, I'll cover each of them. Now we can kind of drill into them. So the first is, you know, Kevin was talking about the millennial and the millennial buyer. So if we embrace the fact that we need to facilitate a modern buyer journey and we look at things through that lens, right? If we just look at things through the lens that our prospects and customers want on demand access to our data and information. And even more so our prospect and customer want to do their own research, so they want to be able to find that information and then make their own decisions. So if we take the mindset that we're going to enable the prospect and the customer to do their research and we set things up for doing that, it inherently provides that better modern buyer experience. And then also I think Kevin, you mentioned this as well, is the ability for our customers to buy in a lot of different places how they want. So you hear a lot too, is that people don't. They may shop on E commerce in this world, but they don't necessarily buy on E commerce. They may shop for things, do their research, and then send in a purchase order, or they may go to a branch, or they may do whatever. And that can vary from time to time. So having that omnichannel buying experience and options and all of those things together really facilitate that more modern buyer journey. And then the second thing, and again, just before I leave, the first one, really, that first one is just about the mindset, right? So how do we make this easier? The first of all is just adopting the mindset and the strategy that that's what we're going to do is provide the more modern bio experience. So then if we adopt that mindset, then the next step is, okay, well, how do we then actually make that happen? And you know, Kevin was talking about silo data and data just a minute ago. But what we're going to talk a little bit about is what we call smart data management, and this came from Forbes, is that every company is a technology company, no matter what product or service it provides. The companies that embrace this fact are the ones that shape the world and companies that adapt quickly to new technologies gain a foothold on the market. Well, yes, every company is becoming a technology company, but the reason for that is the data that is really being needed and utilized to help facilitate that company grow. So it's how do they use that data and how do they use that technology to change the buyer experience and to change the prospect and customer situation. So what we consider to be smart data management is, and we do this a lot with our clients is we say how do we identify which data can have the maximum impact and that which of that data can facilitate and that buyer experience and provide insights to your sales and marketing teams? We're going to show you, I'll show you an example of that in a minute. About how we've done that with our product as an example is how do we take ERP data and transform that ERP data into something that makes the sales and marketing teams way, way more, have more insights and provide better, better experience of their customers. And the key is, you know, as Kevin did also say, is there's a ton of data out there. That is the problem. The good side is, is that not all of that data is irrelevant. So the secret is, is aggregating what we call data snippets or little pieces of data from your erp, from your marketing automation, from your E Commerce, and using those to provide those insights and intelligence. You see the picture on the right from the Moneyball, if you remember the movie Moneyball, where they were using data to actually drive how the baseball team was operating and the players that they used and how they used them and so forth. Well, we're trying to do the same thing. We're just trying to do it in our business. We're trying to use relevant data to then provide better insights into how we work with our customers and prospects and, and so forth. So we're trying to accomplish a lot of the same things. It's getting that right, relevant data. And then once we have aggregated that data, we can use tools to provide insights and tool and information that are going to help our prospects, customers, partners, as well as our internal sales team. And again, I'll show you an example of this in a minute. The punchline here is just real quick. The punchline is you don't have to have all of your data. You have to select the right data and you can get a tremendous, tremendous value out of just some of those data snippets. Go ahead, Kevin.

I was just going to add a little bit to that.

Right.

You know, it's real easy to just for us to throw in a PowerPoint presentation, a picture of, you know, Brad Pitt, everybody likes him, and think about, oh, remember that movie? But you know, what I'd really like to do is unpack that movie for a moment because we mentioned at the beginning of our presentation today that it doesn't matter whether you're a large national or multinational distributor or you're a single location distributor in a small market, you have the ability to manage the data that you have to maximize its use within your business. And the reason that I think they use this, we use this example today, if you think about it, right? This was the Oakland A's a smaller team. They weren't the marquee team in their market. They were certainly under resourced, undercapitalized compared to the big players that, you know, the Yankees and the Dodgers and some of the big teams that they were competing against out there for the same players, but yet they found a way to take relevant data that was available to everybody. Everybody could get the same data that they did, but they took this data and they use it in a very specific way to maximize outcomes within their so called business. Right. And so that's really a great analogy between that example of Billy Bean and the Oakland A's in that setting and where we're sitting today is you don't have to be this big player in the market to make this happen and achieve great things with the data you have.

No, absolutely. And there's a lot that can be done with a little actually that's nice. Which then kind of goes to the next step in our making this easy is okay, how do you come up with that plan and roadmap then to leverage that data and to create that transformation? So a couple questions that you can answer and do right away is which of the four technologies do you already have in place already of CRM, marketing automation, ERP and so forth and E commerce? And then which of those technologies are you missing or out of date or inadequate? You know, a lot of companies have technologies that are old, that are out of date, they're inadequate, they're certainly not adequate for today. So you can take a look at what you have and what you don't have and then prioritize the implementation of those remaining technologies based on achieving that maximum impact in value. And we're going to give you some suggestions on how to do that here in just a minute. But again, where people or companies often get overwhelmed is, oh, we're going to try and do everything all at once and it's going to become this big mega project. And that's not necessary and certainly not really practical at the same time. So identify the technologies you have, what you need, and then work out the plan to take them to the next step. And then the key thing here we see this A lot is that when you end up getting these different technologies, they end up kind of getting duct taped together. We call it digital duct tape. And the problem with that is that when you digital duct tape these technologies together, you lose the value of the data and that smart data management that we just went through because the data tends to remain siloed back to the original challenge. And you're not looking at how these technologies are being used holistically to actually create that insight in that experience. So that the digital duct tape is something that we want to avoid and we want to look at this definitely more holistically and comprehensively.

Tom, before you go fully past that, I wanted to make one little additional comment related to that digital duct tape. And let's use a real life example of that. We have a new customer we're working with right now. They're nearly 20 location distributor in the southeast part of the United States. And they have bought lots of software, right? ERP system. That's the core of their business. They've got E Commerce running by a whole different group of people in their organization that are running their, their ERP data. They've got software that they've purchased to help them define their compensation plan for their people, and their people have access to that. They bought three or four different disparate systems, but they never did it with a plan. And now what they finally realized is they need a modern CRM that's cloud based, that's focused to help them in their business. And now they have that digital duct tape and it's something we're working with them on and they'll certainly be overcome. But if they had had that plan in place and a roadmap for how they were doing all of their data management together, as Tom's been discussing, they wouldn't have needed digital duct tape. Right? So digital duct tape can be used. We can solve those problems. But when we have these transformation plans and roadmaps, it makes it so much easier.

Yep, absolutely. So as you work out, as we work out the plan and the roadmap, right. There's we, you know, and this is kind of a balance, as we were talking earlier about culture and priorities and conflicting priorities and so forth. So of course you want to have alignment within your organization behind what you're doing. However, one of the problems we see commonly is that that alignment turns in sometimes into analysis paralysis and nothing really gets done because there's too many opinions and there's too many people that are, you know, have opinions and ideas on what should occur. And as a result, a lot of things don't occur. So what we recommend is here's. There's kind of a few steps here to really help create that alignment. First of all, going back to the plan, what is your outcome and expected ROI that we want to do? So we look at that because that kind of gives that true north of where we're headed and we can align the organization around that outcome in that roi. Then from there we can decide, okay, who are the stakeholders that need to be involved, whether that's different departments or even finance or whatever, and how we can best communicate and align them to that outcome and roi, and then define and agree on the dates and timelines for accomplishing some of these things. And always with a mindset that we're going to keep moving and to keep the process going. The culture issue that Kevin brought up earlier, which we hear all the time, and Kevin, we've heard this now from some of our companies that we've been working with for years. We're going to do it next year and next year and next year. Right. It's like the tomorrow thing. We'll always do it tomorrow, never again. Yeah, there's never a good time. And, and you know, well, we won't have those same, you know, competing priorities in a year. Well, the fact is you are going to have different competing priorities in a year. So the most important thing is to keep things moving and keep them going and then obviously work out, you know, what is the budget and the investment and the dollars you have to invest in these and again, work that out as it ways to go forward. So just again, to summarize, obviously need to keep the organization aligned, but you want to make sure that the organization and what is doing is keeping things moving versus things stopping and coming to a halt. Because really a year of delay, the ramifications and the way the speed at which the market is moving and the competitors are moving, it could literally be. This may sound extreme, but catastrophic by continuing to wait large, long, long periods of time. Go ahead, Kevin. I know you have some things to add here.

No, I think we can jump ahead in the view of time. We can move on to the next one here.

Okay, so anyway, the things we want to look at as we move forward then is how do we do things in the right sequence. So what can be done now? Quickly and efficiently? Kind of what we just talked about, spade on the plan, a more roadmap. Then we want to then say, okay, what can we implement? What can we put in place right now then, how do we continue to improve on that over time? And we'll begin building out what I'm going to show you in a minute called mission control, which has allowed me to start to have those insights and that smart data that we were talking about and then continue to optimize and work towards the ideal. Right, so let's not try and hit the ideal day one, but let's look at how we want to get to that idea through that crawl walk run. And then as we get more sophisticated, we can look at more advanced technologies and artificial intelligence and automation, because you have a platform and a framework for actually accomplishing that.

You know, Tom, if I can. Before that, we jump ahead and we're going to do another poll here before we move into the next slide in just a moment, Cynthia, we'll call for that. But, you know, this is really kind of the crux of what we wanted to bring across to the viewers today and the folks who have joined us is that, you know, this is a big topic, digital transformation, but it really kind of boils down to some key points within your business regarding what Tom was describing. We've been sharing today is about focusing on that customer, how we can serve them better, and that will then in turn help your business. But so many people look at this as just being completely daunting to them. We don't have the time. We talked about all the challenges that people have within their organization. But this particular slide, this thinking and mindset of crawl walk run, there's things that can be done quickly and easily up front to refine the systems that you already have, make sure that they're talking, set these roadmaps and so forth. But that's the big takeaway that we really want people to have today, is that it's never going to be an easy time. It doesn't have to be as difficult as you might think it is. And there's a crawl walk run solution that you can do with this so that it becomes part of your organization, is that you're digitally transforming. I always like to say this is a process. It's not an event. There's not a button that says, over the next six months, we're going to digitally transform. Your organization is going to be digitally transforming because of the world that we live in for the rest of your lifespan of your business. And so we need to get these pieces in place and we can do it from this easy method of crawl walk run.

Okay, did you want to do the poll?

Yeah. Let's jump ahead. Cynthia. If you're ready with that poll, let's, let's throw that up there.

Alrighty. So I just launched the poll right now.

Yep. So my company has the following. Let's get a little feel for what people have regarding technology within their business. Now, which tools are you currently using.

While they're doing that? I'm going to go ahead and keep going, Kevin, in the interest of time. So, you know, kind of the opposite of digital duct tape is looking at what we call a tech stack and working out how you have your technology working together. And you may have heard this term before, tech stack. And what it means is it's an integrated collection of technology based tools that work together to help operate more effectively, market more efficiently, and enable your sales and market and service teams to provide an optimal customer experience. The key word here is integrated collection versus again, the digital duct tape. So when we look at the technologies that we've been talking about, erp, E commerce, marketing tools, marketing automation, email tools, the way that these really need to fit together and we found to be the most successful is you take what we consider a modern CRM and that's the business we're in is building more modern, a modern CRM that can incorporate data, the right data from erp, from E Commerce, from marketing tools. Aggregate that with day to day sales activities and then provide a layer on top of this to provide that visualization, insights, guidance, that moneyball view into the business that allows you to make really, really, really good decisions in the organization going forward. So this is how we architect and work with companies to architect that tech stack.

And Tom, before we jump ahead, let's get those poll results.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

All righty. So it looks like it's pretty. It looks like 50% chose ERP and CRM and then the next two, ERP System and ERP E Comm Marketing Automation, but no CRM yet, both tied at 25%.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah, pretty common. Pretty common.

That seems about right.

So speaking of CRM and mission control, just real quick, and I'm sharing what we do more as an example rather than necessarily trying to spotlight that we're the perfect solution on these things. But we've spent a lot of time, Kevin and I and our company really figuring out how do we provide that right CRM. And we built a product called Channel Cloud and it's a CRM and mission control platform. So it's really those top two layers that then allow us to tie into your existing ERP and E commerce and marketing automation tools. And what we've done and how we built this is what we use is kind of an app based architecture. So much like you have your phone, right? You have your phone and you install apps on your phone based around things you need to do. We've done that with our CRM platform and our so forth. So we have a platform that we can tie in to these other external data sources, take that data, use the right data, and then provide apps that can be installed incrementally over time based around the needs of the organization. So it goes back to that crawl, walk, run. We have most clients start off with a few apps and then they keep adding more and more apps over time. And then we added a layer on top of that to provide that mission control, moneyball visualization into what's going on in the business. So we put a lot of time and effort into making sure that all of this kind of comes together to tie into that tech stack. And so an example of one of these apps, we have an app called the Revenue Expander app. And this is used a lot by our clients to facilitate full line selling. So they want to understand, okay, which product categories are within a given customer, who's buying what, what are they spending this year and this month compared to the prior year, and where are opportunities for us to sell additional product lines into our accounts that we wouldn't necessarily have that visibility into this by itself. We see like significant increase in sales when companies start looking at this and using this data just because they don't have that data readily available right within their sales team. Then we have another app called the Account Planner app which builds right on top of that, which says, okay, well it's great to know that here are the places that you can sell more full line. What should be the goals? What are the account plans for the organization and for the reps that are responsible for those accounts? And how are we achieving those goals over time and how do we track all of those and again, visually see that and make it a bit more of a game, if you will. In the process we have a tool called Geo Tracker and Trip Planner which allows the sales team to graphically look at things geographically, look at accounts based around certain statuses, and then build out smart plans, smart trips, right? You know, people are, there's less obviously face to face meetings, there's less in person meetings, there's things like that. So how do you make the most out of those trips and out of those plans? Again, using smart data. If you really look at the common denominator here, we're using data to intelligently provide more insights and directions and that's digital transformation. And then this mission control piece, everything we do and up here on the right, you'll see kind of different parts of, you know, whether it's dealing with sales or existing customers or partners or your marketing or even deals or activity, we do everything to make it as visual as possible so that it's in providing insights again, kind of that moneyball insights into what's actually occurring, what's happening and make it real, real easy to see what's happening and going on through that mission control aspect of things. So again, examples of how we're doing this and using this as it relates to the CRM, we're pulling data in.

From lots of places, aggregating it to clear and definitive views that can be used to drive the business.

Yep. And again, just to put it in perspective, as far as time, you know, a lot of times we work with customers and they're up and going with something like this literally in, you know, less than a month. So it's not again, using that crawl rock run the app approach and tying those things together, it can happen much faster. So to really summarize, I think we're close on time here, but we've talked about digital transformation, we've talked about the challenges. We then pivoted into some of the things to help navigate those. We talk a little bit about what we do and how we do that. And we wanted to offer for anybody who's interested, a 45 minute basically consultation with myself and, or Kevin, not a sales call. We're not looking to sell anything. We really like working with companies and understanding what they're trying to do. And if there's a fit for something we do, we'll tell you. And if there's not, we won't. But we can help you really with that roadmap and recommendations and, and all of that and maybe kind of help kickstart what you're doing, especially if this is an area that you don't have a lot of background with. So if that's something you're interested in, you can just go to leadsmartech.com schedule and there's a calendar. You can pop up and schedule something with us. We would love to learn more about what you're doing. And with that I think we go to questions.

Yes. So thank you, Kevin and Tom. That was a lot of great information. So thank you so much for putting that together. But yes, let's jump into Q and A. So the first question we got was how is this different than other CRMs?

Maybe I can jump on that one to start with, Tom. So a good question. I think Tom really that one of the last slides that he showed there was, you know, that dashboard arena. So what we've done is we've looked at what are the challenges that people typically have in using CRM. And as you mentioned at the beginning of our presentation today, Cynthia, is I've spent 30 years in this arena being a distributor, salesperson, manufacturers rep and a manufacturer. I struggled with the idea of accounts, contacts, tasks. What is that doing to drive my business forward? I was always constantly struggling and this is what I've heard from people throughout my whole career is how do I remember where that certain report that somebody made for me is? How do I get a look at really what's going on with my customers? How can I use a technology tool to expand and sell more to my customers? So Tom had mentioned this app based system that we use, that's the real differentiator for us. Our product is actually built in partnership with Salesforce. So we use the same development platform that they built Salesforce on. But we've built our standalone product called Lead Smart Channel Cloud to solve these problems that distributors and manufacturers in the industrial space have. Right. We need to know how to grow our business, not just how to throw a bunch of data into a system that just is another silo. And that's what typically CRMs are, is just another silo.

Great, thank you. The next question is how disruptive, how disruptive will this be?

Yeah, so that's, it's, that's a common question, right? Because, and it goes back to what we were talking about on our crawl walk run. The key is, is to do things in those bite sized chunks. And what we found is it's really not very disruptive at all. Where it becomes disruptive is two things we've seen where companies really face disruption. One is trying to do too much at once, kind of a big bang, we're going to change the world overnight. The other is, believe it or not, is that digital duct tape scenario that we talked about. Because everything starts to become so disparate, people don't know where to go, they don't know when they should log into this system versus that system. What data is here, what data is there? And that by itself, that dispersal or that becomes disruptive in and of itself. So it's really trying to do too much at once and having everything too spread out we found to be the most disruptive. If we eliminate those things, the disruption really, really drops and we get adoption of results much, much faster.

Thanks, Tom. And then it looks like we only have time for one more question. So that is picking between a few. Which one do we want to ask? How about is there a risk if we don't do any of these?

I'd start on that real quick. I know we're short on time. Thank you, Cynthia. Is Tom alluded to this a little bit earlier in the discussion, and I think I mentioned something as well as it's easy to become complacent when our business is still growing. But if we embrace, which I think we all have to, that the world is changing, our buyers changing, the marketplace is changing, and there's data and information available to us to serve that customer better, to help him serve his customer better, whoever that might be. Right. When we aggregate all of this information, we can take the lead in this. And frankly, if we're not going to be the leader of the pack on this, we risk getting left behind. And Tom used the term catastrophic. It has been catastrophic to some businesses. It may not be impacting people who are watching this today yet, but the likelihood is that it will. So the idea of getting started with something that we've tried to share the approach with today is the key, is be thinking about this digital transformation within my business and adopting technology that integrates and syncs to help you grow and expand before someone else down the street from you does in your market.

That's well said, Kevin. Thank you. And thank you to both of you for answering those questions. Looks like we wrapped up our Q and A based on our time. But as a reminder to everyone on this, this webinar recording will be available on the NetPlus Academy powered by Blueville by the end of the day. So I encourage you to share with others in your organizations that weren't able to be here today. But other than that, Kevin, Tom, is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

Just thank you for having us. We're really appreciative of our partnership with the Net plus Alliance. And it's a new. But we're looking to grow and the more of the members that we get to meet, the happier we are. We'll see you in October.

Yes. Thank you so much. And everyone, have a great rest of your day. Take care.

Thank you.