Doubling Down On Data!

Welcome to around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by Lead Smart 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 and 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.

Everybody should start their day with a little Vince Guaraldi. So that's the way, the way I look at it makes us think about Snoopy and Charlie Brown to get the day going. So how's your morning so far on this Friday morning?

So far so good. Cold Southern California or Central California?

So what, you're at the southernmost tip of Central California, I think, right?

Central coast, northern tip of central whatever. I don't know, northwestern part of Southern California. How's that?

You're in Santa Barbara. I've always just thought of that as the lower part of the Central coast and the northern part of northern most of Southern California. But I don't know what the geographers say. I'm down here in south Orange county in Southern California. But you know what, it was again, almost broke into the 30s last night here. So I'm sure we're gonna have some of our friends in other parts of the country here. Chime in and wine for us and, and as well. But it's not what we're used to.

Right, Exactly. Well, let's, let's say good morning to a few people. I really want to acknowledge Tom May for coming so early today. I mean he is, he is definitely getting extra brownie points.

Yeah, well, there was that one week that he was late and you, you put him in the penalty box. So.

Yeah, but I mean, man, he is like, you know, overachieving now. And good morning to Brian as well, our good friend Brian Conway and Will, who it's probably, I would assume, a little colder in Naperville.

So I think he's laughing at us right now complaining about the temperature here. So I, I probably well deserved. It's just not stuff that we're used to. So, you know, let's, let's wait as some other folks join in and, but why don't we get started and kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing today, do a little introduction. So good morning again to everybody. It's Kevin Brown and Tom Burton with Lead Smart Technologies. Tom and I are both the co founders of a company that makes a CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform that is focused on the wholesale distribution world. So we get together every Friday Morning, both on LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and a couple hours after we finish this live session, this data goes right. Our information goes right into our podcast that's available on all of the top podcast platforms. So you can find us kind of wherever you might want to consume information. But again, on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook Live, you would just go to the Lead Smart Technologies page. What I'll ask you to do with that, if you wouldn't mind, because it's a big help to us and we hope that you can share kind of what we're doing, if you like what we're doing with friends and colleagues, as you'll kind of click that like button and, and, and even the share button as well. So before we close out on that housekeeping stuff that we do each week, we also send out an email newsletter every Friday morning. If you're not getting that, you can direct message us. You could put it in the chat here with your email where you'd like to get it, or you could just use helloadsmart tech.com email address. We'll get you added to that. But what we try and do is. So I'm going to get together oftentimes with guests and collaborate and talk about what's going on in the world of wholesale distribution this past week related to technology, sales, marketing, M and A artificial intelligence, you name it, we've kind of got the discussion going on it. So let's get started. Tom?

Yep. Let's do it. Is it. Are you seeing the, seeing the, the newsletter?

We are, yeah.

Okay.

Yep. So why don't we talk about that first one there a little bit. You want to kind of dive in on that.

Yeah. So, you know, we've talked a lot in, in the last few weeks around, you know, B2B sales, B2B marketplaces, online sales, digital sales. I found this article pretty interesting where they were talking about the digital sales now accounting for the most of B2B transactions, in fact, 82%. And that includes EDI and other things, which is massive. But I think the real interesting part of that article was a lot of times when you hear the word digital sales, people think E commerce or they make an order on E commerce. And you know what they were talking about in there is that digital sales is a bit more of an experience than it is a transaction. So you're starting to use. How do you use, how does a buyer use digital to go through their whole buyer journey, whether it's research or pricing or requesting a quote or whatever. And they may or may not actually make a transaction on E commerce. They may make a transaction through a PO or through other, other means, but they've used digital on their journey significantly. And what did it say, like 12 or 15 different, you know, digital touch points in some cases.

I laughed at that. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on that because I started scratching my head trying to think. I can think of like 5 or 6. I couldn't think of, you know, 10 or 12 of different methodologies. But there, you know, there are exactly what you described. And you know, what comes to my mind is with, that is, you know, early kind of in the E commerce days, you know, people talked about E commerce being, you know, the 24 hour salesman for your, for your company or salesperson for your company. And it's just graduated to be so much beyond that. And, and it has to become that. We use the term here as we talk, you know, both within the company and, and on the, on our, around the horn each week here we talk about very specifically, you know, the whole concept of omnichannel. And omnichannel is where we're, where we're headed. And you know, you've written in your book and we talk a lot all the time about, you know, the differing buyer and the buyer's journey is different than what we're used to traditionally in wholesale distribution.

Yeah, I think again, I like the word even better. Omni experience.

Right.

So because it's, it's not, I think again people get caught up in the transaction and they lose sight of everything that goes on prior to the transaction. Yep. And it's the stuff that goes on prior to the transaction that causes the transaction to occur. So it's how you're using, you know, digital. And I think, you know, there's probably they're taking into account content, digital content, whether that's website, whether that's, you know, one of the things I talk to people all about all the time as an example of a digital touch point is your, your branded search. When someone goes to Google and Google's your name, your company, what do they see? Right. What do they see on that Google? And soon what are they going to hear? What are they going to hear and see in ChatGPT or, or AI type thing. But what do you see there and how does that represent? Are you seeing good, are you seeing reviews, are you seeing competitors there? All of that matters in that Buyer experience, so that all of those are touch points in that digital omni experience that we're talking about.

Yeah, I'd love to sometimes. I know we have folks that are joining us that might be multitasking, getting other things done while they're listening. But Will Quinn is with us this morning for the large and impressive ERP company, and he's working day in and day out with trade associations and buying groups. I'd love it if, if Will's still with us, if he could chime in a little bit about his thoughts about, you know, what he might be seeing with, at the distributor level with the whole omnichannel side of things and how people are working that he's dealing with. But, you know, Tom makes a, a good point about, you know, getting this stuff right. Really raises the bar for SEO, you know, across the board. Right. It's getting this whole omni experience or omnichannel piece right is, is critical. And it, we're going to talk a little bit more shortly about data that really plays into that. But it's interesting.

I want to, I want to have a whole episode and possibly even a separate conversation about. And Tom, this relates to SEO is going to be replaced by digital brand. So how does your, you know, SEO tends to be like, well, how do you rank? Right. How do your pages rank and are all of that. But what's happening now is that what is your digital brand optimization? It's going to be DBO as we go forward, which is okay when somebody's looking for you on whatever, search, chat or AI chat, GPT, whatever, however that's embedded in the things there. How is your brand represented digitally across the board? And that, I think is going to be a very, very big area that is just starting obviously, to be in its infancy. And yes, that ties into data, which we can, we can get into next year.

Yeah, well, we, we've had a number of these discussions internally in our organization about that with, you know, the whole concept of really making sure that it's a, it's a broad view versus a single piece. Right. And we've talked to, even talked to marketing consultants, you know, together recently that, you know, SEO becomes a big part of things. And I think that, I don't want to say it's not important.

Right.

But there's just so much more. And for, for a long time, for many years, right. In the late 2000s, 2010s, you know, SEO was everything, right. It had to be the core of everything you did. And now what we're seeing no, no different than what we're talking about here with Omnichannel or Omni Experience is there's so many places you have to really look to be and, and you know, it becomes critical. So I think Will just jumped in here. Can you highlight that for us, Tom?

Yeah, yeah. So what in response, I believe Kevin, to your question, he's saying B2B buyers are more and more demanding. A B2B. B2C experience, your E commerce platform is your shopping space for your customers, even if they are not buying directly from your website. Totally agree. It is definitely a great place for them to again shop and do their research and understand, you know, what's possible, I guess, before they're actually making that transaction.

Yeah, I think that's great. And you know, thank you for that. Your comment on that Will. I'm appreciative of that because you know, you're out talking to wholesale distributors and manufacturers every day just like we are. So it's, it's helpful to get that, you know, it even becomes that, you know, you commented, you know, the digital brand. So for an organization and if you stop and think about it really, you know, sometimes there's even more to your digital presence. Right. And I shouldn't say sometimes, always there's more to your digital presence than just what are my, what are my sales from my website right now you mentioned earlier the importance of realizing, and we've talked to a number of people about this recently who have said, you know, they're their customers go on their website and build orders. They don't order it online.

Right.

But they build out basically a purchase order for and then they shoot that over from that standpoint. So it's, it helps them. Right. But that would never show up in their system as having been an E Commerce related sale. And there's a lot of different things that happen out of that. But the other side of it is, you know what everybody is fighting a battle every day in the streets over customer share. Right. We all want to get more customers and sell more to the existing customers. And that whole digital presence that you're talking about or digital brand that you know, we're relating to today is this is your, you know, your first handshake oftentimes with a potential new customer is through your digital brand. Whether it's they find you through social or they find you through, you know, your, your direct mail campaigns or obviously your website. And that feel and warmth that happens right off the bat is critical in differentiating from your competitors.

No, well, Again, your digital brand becomes more exposed with the AI piece. Yeah. I think I mentioned a couple of episodes ago where I had gone in and to chat GPT and I said, what's the best place to get a hard hat? And it came back and I believe if it mentioned Grainger and I think. Was it Northern Supply?

I think is what I think is what you mentioned.

Yeah. Right. Okay. I don't know how that they decided to pick Granger and Northern Supply, but for some reason or another. Right. That those brands were represented in that, in that piece. So the. Yeah. So the digital, you, you heard it here first. Digital brand optimization is, is going to be the next generation of what traditionally has been SEO. And it will matter because it will matter not only for what your, you know, customers are doing directly, but how they're finding you or how you're being represented on, you know, again, AI and other locations that are there. So.

Yep. I think, I think that's powerful stuff. And, you know, it, it truly does become that face of everything that you're doing within your organization. You know, to kind of wrap up on this particular topic, there was a piece that said within this, they said digital typically drives such omnichannel sales these days of everything we talked about. But it says more than 90% of B2B sales organizations that were surveyed viewed today's B2B omnichannel reality as equally or more effective in reaching and serving customers than it was before. COVID 19. So this kind of ties back to even. I think I shared this example a while back. I was at an ISA event, Industrial Supply association event last spring and was talking to a large distributor of cutting tools. And they, through Covid, when they had a large percentage of their customers they just could not get into. They were working with virtual reality goggles and video with technicians on site that were then sending them data back about issues that they were having or solutions and things that they were problems they were trying to solve for. So all of these tools together come to where we're going to be going moving forward to drive business. So good stuff there. All right, Mr. Data, let's get you talking about this. Doubling down on data and digital kind of moves ahead on the same topic.

So another good article From Digital Commerce 360 about data and you know, data, let's face it, right? Data. When you start talking about data in your organization and kind of quote unquote, hygiene and cleaning your data, it's not the most exciting topic that people tend to want to talk about. I was at the ad event when we were there last, before Christmas, I was talking to a lot of people about their data and it was like, I would rather have a root canal than. Yeah, but the fact is, is that data is the fuel, right? That's driving. Well, everything we just talked about. So data is driving your digital brand. It's driving, driving. If you're going to use AI in your organization, it's going to drive all of those things. And it is, you know, and you're starting to see even valuation metrics for companies being influenced by the quality of their data and your, you know, as an asset in your organization. So it talks about, you know, all the things that leverage data. What. And again, this is an area I want to dig into more separately. But what we've learned and what we found out is that, yeah, if you look data, I'm just going to call it getting my data act together. I'll thing here because it's more than just hygiene. It's how are you using that data? What are your data sources? How does it come together holistically? Doing that project doesn't have to be as overwhelming as I think it looks on the surface. And we've put together some tools for sort of quickly organizing that so that we can say, all right, how do we get customer data? How do we get transactional data? How do we get, you know, different data from different sources, Right? Then how do we then quickly organize that and make it into a sort of a holistic data framework. So if anybody is interested in that, you know, direct message me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to share more about that and how you do that. But the point is, is that getting your data act together is probably the most critical project right now that a wholesale distributor manufacturer, anybody in this industry should be thinking about and doing, because it's the fuel that's going to drive all of these other things that you keep hearing about and makes them all possible within. And the good news is this is what I love about this industry. You know, I'm relatively new to this industry, is the amount of data that's available is massive compared to, you know, say, in the tech world or other places where I've been. So we have this huge asset pool here, potential asset pool. How do we actually use it? And so I think we're in a really great place to be able to take advantage of it if we kind of.

Again, yeah, I think it's interesting as you describe that, you know, you just talked about the tech world as an example, right? So most software technology companies, maybe they have 10, maybe 20 SKUs, right. They don't have hundreds or thousands of SKUs. Right. We, we have people in wholesale distribution who have, you know, 50,000 vendors and millions of SKUs.

Right.

So when you start thinking about that, you know, in a, in a technology company, maybe in a technology company you have, you know, if you're a hardware company in tech, you have 200 SKUs or something like that.

Right.

But this becomes very, very different when we've got, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of SKUs.

Right.

And especially when people are thinking they're buying not only the items that they carry that they're selling, but they're also buying through a redistribution company or a wholesaler that now gives them access to tens of thousands of other SKUs they can put on their website that they can get fulfilled through a wholesale distributor on their behalf. This data becomes so much more powerful. And we're going to talk more in a couple of minutes about AI as we've been doing a lot recently. Now that AI piece starts to really come in here because we've got so much more we can analyze of internal data. But the challenge, we haven't used this term, I don't think yet this morning, but what we see with our customer base so often is we use the term siloed data. We have E commerce data, we have marketing automation data, we have ERP data, we have trade show lists, we have hundreds of spreadsheets in our organization, but they stay over here. And people have to remember to go look at that data as opposed to that data all being aggregated for them into a central location where they can see that and maximize the use of it.

Yeah, no. And that centralized or holistic data strategy becomes the catalyst and the fuel to not only drive AI, but drive digital brand, to drive a lot of the things that we've talked about in the previous articles. And you know, I'll just say if you're, if you're thinking about like trying to at least get a handle on your, your data, look at things, just put it into three buckets, right? You have product data like you just said, all the SKUs and all the information there, which again, in this industry, as you're, as you pointed out, orders of magnitude more product data than we would have in say, a typical tech company.

Yeah.

The second is customer and I'll prospect and customer information. Right. So whether it's lists from your trade shows, like you just said, or my customer, semi ERP or whatever, but the Third area that people, that may be the most valuable of that data is what I call transactional data. It's not just transaction of orders. I mean orders and purchases and all that are part of transactional data. But even your meetings, your conversations, your things that you're doing when you're talking to your end users and you know, people say, oh, I don't want to have to track all that kind of stuff. But if you can find a way to track that and be able to get more and more transactional data, that data can be super invaluable and insightful data to drive AI and some of these other things.

So how do you put your data.

Into those three different areas and then how do you use those things holistically to drive the piece there? But like I said, it doesn't have to be as difficult as it sometimes thinks about. And there's definitely a crawl, walk, run approach that can be taken so that at least you're starting to build that asset, organize that asset, put it together and get it to a point where it's, it becomes that fuel as I talked about, to drive some of these other things.

Yeah, couple of, I like that. So, you know, in my mind I think about, you know, we've got numbers driven data and then we have behavioral data, right? You have transaction data, there's three that you were describing. Then that behavioral side of things ties into that too. What are they doing, what's going on, what is our team doing, what is our team not doing and so forth. Couple of quotes that I really liked out of this article. It said before migrating or Investing in more AI driven search experiences, B2B organizations should do the best they can to optimize and enrich the data they have and leverage as much of the native search capabilities as possible before taking the next step. So, you know, to your point, right, and we could spend an hour talking about, you know, the quality of data, but you know, everybody is, you know, we're, we're going to talk again in a moment. We've talked about the last few weeks about AI and chat, GPT and things like that. There's a lot of companies, the buzzword is, you know, putting footing, know AI in your company name. But the question is, are you, you, are you ready for that in your organization? And this article talks about, you know, a journey as opposed to just saying I'm going to go from, you know, 0 to 100. Right. Your first car should never be a Ferrari.

Right.

You need to kind of ease into this and get prepared for it. And I think a lot of companies will, you know, kind of potentially buy some, you know, bells and whistles and flashy, you know, shiny objects because they think it's the future, but they've really not taken a journey to prepare themselves for that along the way.

And having that again. Yeah. You can buy products that will leverage certain pieces of data like we just talked about, but in some ways those can be taking that sort of patchwork approach.

Right.

While it may feel like an instant gratification, it can actually set you backwards long term. Sure. Because we might as well use this to kind of dovetail into this next article here by Chat GPT, AI is blowing everybody's mind. But the, the way that AI is going to continue to blow everybody's mind as we go forward is the depth of the intelligence that it's providing as well as the breadth.

Right?

Yeah. And the depth of the intelligence that starts to come from your AI is a, as a result of, you know, I forget who I was talking to yesterday about this. Right. Is to an average user, this looks like magic. You know, it's like Chat GPT literally looks like magic. That's, that's occurring, but underneath the scenes there's no magic. Right. It's all just technology.

Yeah.

And the way that Chat GBT and open AI works is it takes data, but then it uses that data and kind of mashes it together and then go reach, it reaches out to different types of AI models to then come back and provide your answer. So there's a lot of things going on under the hood there that make it, you know, come back with that really good experience. So the, the way that you're going to be that more mind blowing experience is how that composite data can be used together to then as the AI capabilities grow, you have a way to kind of fuel all of those AI capabilities so that you can create that mind blowing AI versus trying to create what I call patchwork AI right now because somebody's oh my God, I could do a shiny object here and a shiny object here. That may look cool right now, but it's actually going to set you back because you're going to not be thinking about things to really be able to capitalize on what's going to be possible. Not even just like in five years, but in five months.

Well, I think, I think you're right on track with that. And there's a couple of closing pieces out of this article that they talked about and they said, you know, it's, it's really getting to an experience driven commerce setup.

Right.

And you talk about experience regularly here, but they're talking about what are the table sticks. Right. Things are moving quickly with all of this. But I wanted to close out with what they said here. They said headless commerce and AI cloud applications are all great topics and should be things that manufacturers and distributors are thinking about, but based upon where they are in their journey. Right. And so we talked about, you know, a little of that journey before. It says all of these topics require an understanding on the full impact on their organization across people, process and technology. And, and that's closing on this. The last piece that I wanted to mention with that is that most, I don't say most, but many companies don't have a process and a journey that they're taking on developing their tech stack.

Right.

They've got an ERP system that, you know, organizationally was decided on. Maybe CRM was decided on by a large group. But then they have these. You, you and your team use the, the term point solutions.

Right.

We bought this for that and we bought this for that and we bought this for that and we bought.

We.

They've got all these things and sometimes those other systems don't let data out.

Well.

Right. They're siloed in a way that's not as easy to get data out of them. And I think this really becomes critical to talking about as the article talked about, full impact on the organization across people, process of technology and before even buying any one off pieces of software, there should be a process in place again. We could do a whole session just on that topic.

Yeah. In the, and I, I can't emphasize this enough. Right. The magic that we see now with chat gbt. I put magic in air quotes. Right. Is nothing compared to the magic we're going to be seeing in, in three to six months. And if you look at how people are blowing away about what they're doing today.

Right.

I remember when the iPhone came out, I was working for Intuit at the time actually. And when the iPhone came out, everybody thought in that organization was like this is magic.

Right.

Because they'd been using blackberries and some of the things like that. And literally overnight there was this big initiative on how we changed the whole company from Blackberries to iPhones for business use because there was this magic that was perceived by using the. Right. I, I see what. We're happy. What's going to happen here is that it gets added like orders of magnitude different.

Sure.

We're seeing chat GPT is kind of a I won't call it a novelty because it's more than that, but it's not really. You're not really seeing the value yet from a business perspective of what's possible, right. What's going to happen in the next few months? You will see the magic. This from the business and then what's going to happen, right. Executives and everybody else are going to go, I want that. How do we have that in our business? How do we, how do we turn our blackberries into iPhones @ that point? And the way that you're going to get ahead of that is what we just talked about, right. And to be ready for that. And we're building some stuff to help companies get ready for that, which I can't wait to talk about at some point. But the. Too early, too early, too early, too early. But it's just, it's. It's just. I mean, just trust me, when we have seen nothing yet, especially in the AI world, about blowing minds in the business world, and it is coming super, super quick. Yep, there's going to be that, that killer app. So.

Well, you, you really nailed something. We need to kind of move on here. But the. You really nailed something that we don't talk about a whole lot, right. This happens whether it doesn't matter what kind of company you're in. But, you know, senior executive or CEO comes in and he was, you know, or she was out to lunch with somebody and, and they raved about. And I think your iPhone example is perfect, right? Or, but could be Chat GPT. They heard this, you know, this. Somebody got in their ear about what could be done with it, and they come back and say, we want this in our organization, you know, what are we doing about this? And we have to have it. And sometimes that process just in itself bypasses what we were talking about earlier about that, you know, people process in technology and so that, you know, of building out technology. So I think we're going to see some of that and you know, where everybody's, you know, jumping on the AI bandwagon. So let's, let's jump in and talk about this article a little bit more though, I think will be helpful to us.

Which one? The.

Yeah, the Chat GPT, the chat bot piece. And we've kind of talked a lot about what's in there already. But I put this in as I was, you know, reading some of the news over the week just because, you know, we talk about this a lot with, with AI and Chat GPT. We've had a number of discussions about it. But yeah, and you gave a nice example of it kind of explaining it last week. But I think this is a, a good overview of the pros and cons that come out of this article. Right, right. I was on, wanted to share this quickly. I was on the phone yesterday with an old friend in the Chicagoland area that's a retired senior executive from a large distribution company and his daughter's getting married in the next couple months, I think. So he's got to write the father of the bride speech. So he went into Chat GPT and he said it was just astounded, right. When he know, kind of put, you know, his daughter's name in and maybe some key points about some things and then, you know, told it to use, you know, a caring or loving tone or whatever it was. And he was astounded with what came out of it. And he said, you know, he showed it to his wife. And I was like, why did you show it to your wife? And I said it just. And. But his comment was right. He was astounded by how great it came out. And I, we had a little bit of a discussion related to. I think you called, what did you call, a blank page syndrome when we spoke last week. Right. But what it did is it gave him a baseline which I've used this for a number of times. And I'm hearing a lot of people, you know, are looking at this from a standpoint of it gives me the baseline. The reason I share that with is not just to tell, you know, my friend's experience, but to go into what this article also talks about. The downside, right, is it needs that personal. And I think this will become less and less important. But when we're using Chat GPT and AI tools like this, it really needs that still human interaction right now.

Right? Well, the, the prompts, as you see on this thing here, it says natural language prompts. The prompts actually are which come from the person, right. Drive a lot more of the AI output than most people understand. Right. So there's a real industry that's going to be developed about how to create prompts.

Right.

And not just simple prompts like, you know, do it in my own voice or do it in first person or, or you know, do it that's, that's suitable for a wedding speech or whatever the the case may be. But the ability to provide the right prompts is going to like pushing the buttons right on the, on the switchboard are what are going to cause the quality of the results to go through in there. So yeah, it's, it's the prompts and the ability to know that and how you're going to use it. And as the AI be underneath the covers becomes more powerful, the importance of the prompts become even more important because you can end up, you can end up in, you know, really going in a weird direction if you, with the, with the wrong, with the wrong, you know, pushing the wrong buttons, basically.

Yeah, now that makes, that makes good sense. So it, it made a, it made a comment in this article that I really was interested. I want your thoughts on because I've not asked you about this before and it talked about all the great things that it can do. You know, answer questions, write essays, summarize documents, program computers, blah, blah, blah. Right. And it said, but deep down it currently doesn't know what's true. So you know, there is, what do they say? You know, don't believe everything you read on the Internet. So there's an interesting component of that. Now my assumption is, you know, every day this is going to get smarter and smarter to be able to filter out what's, what's the junk. But that is an interesting point right now.

Yeah, well, look at, you know, look at like Wikipedia, right? And you notice, you know, Wikipedia, there's, you know, there's, it's a group effort to try and keep it as truthful or as factual as possible. There's going to be a lot of ongoing optimization of optimization to ensure that the integrity of what's coming out and the truth and all of that. And it will be influenced by the prompts, but it's also going to be influenced by the piece underneath. But yes, I agree is that as the data and the capabilities get broader, the opportunity for a lot of untruths, if you want to call it that, to surface and maybe not even so much that, but things that are based more on opinion versus facts. Right. And I think that's also an area, you know, where it's a very broad area to see how that all kind of comes together.

You know, I think that's, those are good points. So we talked a lot about technology today. Let's kind of jump. I just, I'm going to mention this about manufacturing technology orders coming in that we've seen and you know, so interesting. They talked about third best year ever. Even though sales within that arena were down, things are still good. And they talked about, you know, that term. We've heard a little bit about rolling recession versus full on recession. I think we're gonna hopefully continue to see some good news within that. But you know it kind of tells that same tale that we've been talking about for months now is that while some months may be off there's you know, from the previous year, 5%, 7% whatever it might be, they're still way ahead on the year from the previous year and or still having record type years which this talks about, you know, third best year since they've been tracking this in manufacturing technology. So. Good, good info there. The other thing I wanted to hit on real quick before we talk about some stuff in industry scuttle about a little bit is I. There's some interesting things going on. You know we have between where you and I both live is the port of LA and Long Beach. And you know, historically in that port, you know there's that man made spit out there that really divides that piece of water into Los Angeles and Long beach harbors. But if you combine them, I think they're the third busiest historically the third busiest port in the world because of all of the challenges with supply chain of coming direct from, from China to those ports. People started using other ports and so things are way down in Long Beach LA and they're getting ready to have some challenges it looks like with their union contracts and so forth. So it's kind of going to be something to be watching again as we go into the middle part of this year and the latter part of this year. Supply chains have been freeing up some but not fully. We've got things that have moved out of the west coast and are even coming in in Texas and the east coast now that would normally come in to west coast port. So something we're going to kind of keep our eye on and what we're seeing with supply chain because it's so important to our wholesale distribution friends.

Yeah, there's certainly going to be storms and and you know, events that are going to come in all the time that are constantly going to influence. Right. It's never going to be perfectly smooth sailing but overall it appears to be still in the right direction.

Yeah. A union issue in either of those two harbors though could we've seen it work. So a couple of things happen. Another to talk about. Ben Brumfeld with Fighter Tech has is a global manufacturer of spill containment spill cleanup products. He is moving over to ad so he's going to run the member supply business which is kind of cool. So congratulations Ben. I know he's been with us a number of times before on around the Horn. Great Move to join the folks at, at at ad. Although I was messaging yesterday with somebody at Fighter Tech and they were sad to see him go. So that's always, you know, bittersweet good news, bad news. But if you're with us today, Ben, congratulations. If you know Ben, maybe share a little note with him, the second quick piece. Brendan, who was our guest last week from the Industrial Supply association, he did a short little webinar about not just ISA23 that's coming up in April, but, but kind of what's going on the rest of the year. That's worth a watch. And then PF Markey, who's very actively been involved in ISA and a number of other associations and events just got acquired. So some exciting things happening out there. You know we here cause you and I are, you know, while we work within wholesale distribution. I've been in wholesale distribution for 30 plus years and you in technology for a similar amount of time. This show is about wholesale distribution but you and I follow the PE markets as well and venture capital markets as well for based upon being the co founders of Lead Smart. But the interesting thing is, right, we talk a lot about that dry powder that they reference that's out there on the sidelines and there is no shortage of M and A activity. We only typically put one or two lists here and around the horn each week, but I read about five or six this week, just like every week.

Yeah. And another, another prediction. I'm going to make another prediction. I'm not sure that this prediction will happen in 2023, but I think it'll happen in 2024. Is, you know, if you think about private equity a lot of times, what do they look at your profits and your growth and your financials. But I believe that PEs will start to also look at that whole data concept we just talked about. Because if you think about it, if I'm a PE group, if I can pull together a series of companies and leverage collectively right now the data between those companies, now I have a major, major competitive advantage in my portfolio, not just within the company there. So I believe that's going to become a criteria. As you know, like I said, I don't know if 2023 might be too aggressive, but I think you're going to start to see that in 2024.

Yep. Data, data, data, data, data. Right.

We're gonna keep. It's the new currency.

It is, yeah. So we always put a, try and put a good, what we call a good read up there. Those come from outside sources that we've seen throughout the week. So some things on leadership here. And then we added a couple of events. MDM has their M and A update next week, so a lot happening there. And then we're at most of these events I think we're, we're going to be involved with from lead sports standpoint. So we're looking for the AD event next month in San Diego and then Phoenix for isa. And I'm very appreciative that those early events that we have are.

Going to.

Be more west coast based, so a little easier travel in the early part of the spring. So I think that's kind of it for, for our newsletter from the day. Any other thoughts you wanted to share before we jump off, Tom?

No, no. It's interesting times, that's for sure.

100%. Yeah. There's no question about that. And you know, it's the only constant is change. Right. Is that we, we know that's happening. It's kind of like I refer to my, my golf game. The only thing consistent about my golf game is it's inconsistency, but changes happening.

Right.

And if we're not, we're in this position of the wholesale distribution with a lot of mature companies in a very mature market and the way that their buyers, as we talk about all the time, is changing. The sales people that they're hiring are expecting more and this is a deep time of change for wholesale distribution and it's fun to be involved with.

Yep. And hopefully we're helping a bit. So thanks to Tom and Will and Brian and everybody else who jumped in today and have a good weekend and we'll see you next week.

We'll look forward to next week. You have a great weekend, Tom.

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