Gaining The Competitive Edge With Lee Richards

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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.

We are officially live. Welcome to episode number 24, around the Horn. Kevin, good morning.

Hey, good to see you guys.

You're in Charlotte, right? So I guess it's good afternoon for you now. Almost.

Yeah, well, Greensboro, not far from Charlotte.

All right, well, same and same now. So. So as you as, as you can probably tell, for those of you who come to our show regularly, we have an additional person here today. We're really excited to have Lee Richards here from the, from the Brooks Group. Lee, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do and then we'll jump into our. To our session.

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me today. So I am a group vice president of sales at the Brooks Group. And what I do today is I help sell sales organizations, trying to understand where their opportunities are and where their challenges are and improving their commercial success and helping them build a roadmap of improving their skills and their sales processes so that they can achieve greater revenue, move deals through the funnel faster, focusing on the right deals so that they can ultimately improve the performance of their sales organizations. I bring with it, I don't know, man, 25, 30 years of industrial sales experience. You know, we, we've worked with any of the same. Yeah, not dating any of us, but yeah, you know, I started my career as an engineer and it took about two years to figure out that engineering wasn't for me. So they moved me to sales. That's where all the bad engineers go. And So I spent 25 years in industrial sales selling capital equipment, gas turbines, compressors, all those services that come with it along the way. So I take that experience and now I bring it into the sales training, sales consulting world and help others improve their sales skills in those arenas.

Great. So maybe, Lee, we'll, we're going to talk a lot deeper later on about kind of some of the things you guys are working on. But you've just recently in the last six months or so, joined the Brooks Group. Large organization, small organization. Tell me a little bit about the Brooks Group so people can know that are with us today.

Yeah. So the Brooks Group is a sales enablement organization where we help companies with their skills and their processes around their commercial strategies. We do sales training, we do sales training, sales assessments, understanding the behaviors and motivators of top salespeople. We work with all types of industries, particularly in the industrial, the industrial and engineering space. And we use about 40 years of experience that we have of the impact selling process. It is our methodology of taking a sales opportunity from start to finish, from inquiry to close, in a very systematic manner. We layer on top of that the science of disc assessments and understanding people's motivators so that we have better communication. We're able to build trust and confidence with a customer as we go through the process.

That's great. Thank you, Lee. So, Tom, I'm going to kind of take a step backwards because we have quite a few new people I think, joining us today that might be here for their first time. And I looked at kind of the attendee list. So I'll do our quick little intro that we missed this morning and talk then a little bit more about Lee. But so welcome anybody that's new today and or if you watch this recording on YouTube live, Facebook live, LinkedIn live, this will all be recorded in this whole session there for review later on. But we do this session every week. Tom and I are the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. We make a CRM and customer intelligence solution that is specifically driven for manufacturing wholesale distribution, focusing on that vertical, not an off the shelf typical product. And what we do with our session each week here is we send out an email to a few thousand people every Friday morning where we try and gather all the data and interesting things that might have been going on throughout wholesale distribution and the economy and technology. We chat about that here for 30 to 45 minutes or so and we, we try and bring in some guests like Lee. So we've got, I think about 15 to 18 guests lined up for the this coming year. So far we'll probably get that up to about 25 or so. And then we'll be transitioning this to not only how we do this today, how you're viewing today, but starting beginning of February, this will turn into a full podcast as well. So that'll be available after the fact on all the podcast networks. So we're looking forward to that. But Lee, having you with us today brings another insight for people to see besides just hearing Tom and I each week. We've had a lot of people in the past that, you know. You know, Lee, you and I have had a lot of good chats, a couple of good meals together over the last year or so. So having your feedback as we go through the news today will be great. And everybody, what we really try and do with this session is solicit some of your feedback as well. So far that the, the great feedback we have so far is that it's Tom's birthday. So remember that. Thanks, Phil.

Thank you, Phil. It's great to finally reach my 30s.

Yeah.

You know, it's been a long haul but I feel like I've finally achieved it. But thank you, Phil.

Yeah, so my, my mother turned 85 earlier this week and I told her we're got about six months of us being flip flopped because I'm 58. So we've got that alternative universe going on there. But it's good. So we encourage some comments as we talk about this. It's great. We've got Will here as well from infor. Appreciate him joining us. Love people's feedback and thoughts in the chat here as we go through and chat about the news. So Lee, we're looking to forward to hear some of your feedback on the stuff we talked about today. So let's get started.

All right, good.

Yep.

So first one we kind of brought up today was and I think those of you who have been with us in the past, we, and we try and talk about you're looking for positives. I was sharing with Lee this morning. Tom has a mantra that says don't watch the news. Don't watch the news. Don't watch the news. Right. But if you watch the news this morning you saw 12,000 layoffs. I think it was at Google. You know, the technology world is taking this opportunity to I think kind of cut back a little bit, probably get rid of some dead wood and so forth, but like to concentrate on, you know, what our friend Dirk Beveridge talks about, you know, about manufacturing, wholesale distribution kind of being the bedrock, you know, of the economy in this country as well. And there's some good news out there. So this, this article about cutting tool orders going up, you know, they were down from the prior month. They weren't as high as they'd been the prior month, but a big jump from the prior year. So there was a comment, you know, that I wanted to share that came out of this article and get maybe Tom, you and me, your feedback. But the comment said cutting tool consumption is on pace with durable goods production. A positive sign that supply chain issues and shortages of raw materials are easy. So if that's true, that's a really good sign for additional growth. So we see good things. No doom and gloom right here. Maybe growth isn't as high as it had been forecasted. I keep using the factor that, you know, people probably forecast in 2021 for, you know, or 2020, for 2021 to maybe have 22% growth. And in 2022 they forecasted a little bit less, but they're still growing.

Right.

There's positive news coming in, I think.

That, you know, and we're going to talk about the second article here about the, you know, optimism with the manufacturing executives. But I think if you look at this industry, right, there's been a lot of headwinds in the last, you know, two or three years past, right. Supply chain issues and other things that really have been big challenges. Whereas in the tech world, right, it was like party time when all of the, you know, Covid hit and, and the fact that everyone had to adopt technology much, much faster. So there was a lot of tailwinds in the technology industry that, you know, as you said, Kevin, I agree there's was a lot of probably excess, excess hiring and, and things that went on during that time that now is an opportunity. And, and actually these companies like Google and, you know, Salesforce and so forth are being rewarded from a, from a stock perspective and from whatever by making these cuts and cutting some of the fat. But in the world of, you know, industrial distribution, I think it's, it's switched a little bit. There was a lot of headwinds and if supply chain and everything is improving and going forward right now we're getting, you know, maybe it may not have tailwinds, but we're at least not running into the same headwinds that we were dealing with before. So it's a little bit of a flip flop from the tech world. Don't know if, Lee, if that resonates with you or not, but it seems like that's what I'm seeing here.

Yeah. And I can tell you with what we hear from our clients as we talk to sales executives and sales leaders that are looking to improve the skills of their sales team. We go through this discovery process of where is your sales team struggling? And if you go six months, a year ago, 18 months ago, we would consistently hear delivering bad news, delivering bad news of price increases, long lead times, missed deliveries, missed commitments. You know, I don't think I've had a sales executive tell me that that's one of their challenges. And probably three or four months now. I'm not saying it's out there. But what we're seeing is the voice in the field is that we've kind of moved beyond that, that objective, that objection of, you know, your deliveries are too long or your, your price increases are too high. There's some of that still out there. But we're not seeing that in the industrial space like we were a year ago.

That's a, that's a great point, Lee. I'm glad you brought that because, you know, it. What makes me think of right in, in the B2B world, right, if you have to come in and let's just back to cutting tools as an example, right? If you have to bring in a, you know, seven or a 12 or 14 or whatever, the percent increases into your customer and they're only feeling that at work, that can be a big thing to overcome. But when eggs are, you know, $8 a dozen, which they are here in Southern California right now, and you couldn't get the people worried about getting holiday presents and stuff like that. They felt that compression of supply chain issues in all facets of their life. So probably felt that coming, you know, in the B2B sales world or, you know, the guy that's running the plant was expecting some of that. So it made it easier. So I'm glad you brought that up because that's a key point.

Yeah.

Tom, are you going to say something before we move on? I want to.

Let's move on.

Well, I just wanted to add one more thing to this. You know, it's interesting, right? We're here in Southern California and just about 40 miles up the road from where Tom and I are both from. And I live just south of now in Long Beach, California. The port of Long beach in LA is I think it's the third largest or third busiest in the world. Third or fourth busiest in the world when you combine them. And there's just a little strip of land, man made land that separates the two. But, you know, I know I can tell supply chain issues when I drive over the hill heading that direction and watching how far down the ships are lined up. So right now it looks like pretty much normal. And I'm gonna be up that way later today. Pretty much normal amount of ships waiting to come into the harbor. You know, that's my barometer for what's going to happen from a supply chain standpoint because literally we had ships waiting to get into that queue down where I live, just offshore so early last summer. So things are improving, obviously.

So where do you want to go next, Kevin?

You Know, let's just talk about that next one. Let's just stay in order I guess is what we can do here. Let's talk about that Forbes article. What were your guys thoughts on that?

Well, you know, I. A couple things that jump out is one kind of like what I was just saying. Right. A lot of the headwinds and some of the things that we just talked about have gone away. But I also really what you, you know, a majority plan to increase hiring and spend on technology and. No, I know, Lee, we were just chatting about this before the show and we should, we should jump into this more. But that when you're increasing hiring and spending on technology, that's not things you do in a recession. Right. Those are not, those are generally not recession actions that are going on. So, you know, Lee, what are you, what are you seeing and you know, from the feet on the ground and stuff related to this, especially in the world of the sales side of it.

Yeah, and the sales side of it. I almost kind of look at sales as being that leading indicator. You know, there's no need for manufacturing if we're not able to sell it. And so what we're seeing with a lot of our clients is a lot of hiring going on right now. You know, during the recession, we didn't see too much loss of sales roles like we did in many other roles within manufacturing organizations. But we're now seeing increases in the number of new salespeople coming into the job. We're seeing a lot of organizations bring salespeople in that might not come from a traditional sales background. We're seeing a lot of engineers moving into sales. We're seeing people with technical roles moving into sales. We're seeing a lot of folks taking that product knowledge that they have or that application knowledge and moving it into the sales arena, taking on a new career path. So what organizations are doing is they're taking that wealth of information that they have and providing them with some commercial skills now, communication skills, so that they can effectively help their customers, you know, not just bring products to them, but help them solve problems. So we're seeing a lot of growth, a lot of hiring going on into sales arena.

Well, that's what's interesting about that, is not just the growth, but and it's interesting we're seeing some of this in the tech world. But where you're seeing, right, you're bringing in, as you said, product people, engineers into the sales role. What that says is companies are recognizing that their sales team needs to be more consultative. They need to provide more guidance. Right. And expertise. And it's interesting, even in the tech world, there's starting to be a trend where you hire your salespeople from your customer service team and your customer support team. So they come in, they get exposed to customer service, client success, all of that, and then they graduate, if they will, into sales. I mean, that's so very different than the traditional sales, you know, hiring path.

That does really align, right, with what, what Lee was saying, with what you're bringing up happening in tech. We're seeing it more and more. I want, I don't know if Will Quinn with Infor is still here, but be interesting to see what Will's thoughts are if he's still with us this morning about bringing, you know, from a technology standpoint, because this, this really, really aligns, right, with, with vertical specific technology aligning with saying, hey, we've got product experts that are now selling to you versus similar to how you might have a sales guy that might have been a manufacturing engineer before he started or a process expert or something like that. So interesting thought that you guys both brought up there. I like that. Like that a lot.

Well, and you know, obviously it's an interesting thing, right, because sales skills or communication skills and things like that that you need when you're on the front line as a customer success or an engineer even, right. Those are not necessarily skills that are native in those types of people, you know, and yet if you can incorporate some of those skills, but combine that with their expertise and their knowledge and their, you know, that you really have an opportunity to provide that experience now for the, for the customer and the prospect of that trusted advisor versus somebody they perceive that's going to take an order or, you know, quote unquote, be the salesperson that's going to bring donuts on Friday, right. It's very different relationship that gets created in, in that situation.

Well, we're going to talk about that a little more as we start talking about E commerce and so forth here in a few minutes, but that is really true, right. It goes back to the changing, you know, customer base and the changing need for salespeople to have a different view than, you know, Lee. I'm, you know, we're about the same age that are similar ages and you know, we talked over dinner when we were at the Industrial Supply association event in December, right. About our early days. You know, I joke about all the time. You know, I, I could tell you in the early mid and mid-90s, I could tell you where every Pay phone was from the Mexican border on I5 to the Oregon border. Pretty much.

Right.

And a bag of quarters in the car. And then the cost of the early days of cell phones and so forth. And. But we did a lot of that, to Tom's point earlier, donut run type stuff. We saw Joe, you know, if you're selling commodities, it's a little different if you're selling capital equipment. But, you know, commodity sellers, we see Joe at this distributor location and we see, you know, Ralph at this end user on such and such a day. And those days are behind us, you know.

Yeah. And it's the customers that are driving this.

Absolutely.

Customer expectations have changed so much. And, you know, I often hear, well, you know, customers are changing. They're not like they used to be. Let's keep in mind that customers have always been changing. It's not like we've gone 100 years without a customer change.

Sure.

Right. It's an evolution.

Yeah.

And what we're seeing in the next stage of this evolution is customers have less time for us, for us as salespeople. We have customers that are better educated. We'll get to the E Commerce piece here in a moment.

Right.

But they're much more educated before they call in a salesperson to have that conversation. And so as a result, salespeople are getting pulled into these discussions where customers looking to make a purchase or make a decision later in the sales process. So the ability of a salesperson to have an impact on that decision becomes diminished.

Yep.

And so what? We work with sales organizations just to understand the sales process along with the buy process and ensuring that you're building yourself as that trusted advisor that gets involved early in that sales process. Working with your E Commerce Channel.

Right.

We're talking about Omni Channel being in concert with those other avenues of influencing your customer decisions.

That's super. Love that. That's good.

Lee, I want to. Want to touch on before we go, and Susan made a comment here about, you know, the fact that sales moving into a sales position for a better payout. Right. And I think a lot of even what's going on right now is. Is not even just, hey, I just want to make more money. But it is a career advancement. Right. So it allows me to not only potentially have an increase in income, but it also allows me to start building and having relationships directly with customers and, you know, things like that.

Right.

It's a logical, I guess, progression potentially in a career path, especially as you move towards leadership. Right. Or if you want to move to leadership. If you can understand selling and how sales work, that that would be great. But, Lee, I wanted to ask you. You brought up a point when we were talking before we started here about culture and the importance of when you're hiring and you're hiring salespeople, that the people that, you know that are looking for jobs or that are coming in are really, really, I guess, scrutinizing culture. But I would think that in addition to culture would also look at, you know, what is that career path? What is the way that I can move into leadership? Is that fairly accurate on what you're seeing?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I read a LinkedIn article, I think it goes back six or eight months that said that 50% of the salespeople they surveyed. It was Thousands of salespeople. 50% of the salespeople they surveyed said that they were actively looking for a new role, which meant that they've either sent out a resume to somebody or they've spoken to a recruiter. Doesn't mean they're moving yet, but it means that they're interested in moving. So it digs deeper and asks, why. Why are you looking to move? Well, you know, 15 years ago, you would have easily said, money, I can get paid more someplace else. But the leading driver of these moves today is culture.

Right.

I make enough money, but money is not everything. I spend eight to 10 hours a day with these people in this building, with this organization. I want to make sure that I enjoy that 10 hours a day. I want to be with people that are like me or have similar values to me. I want to be with an organization that values what I bring and rewards me for it. Not just monetarily, but, you know, demonstrates or communicates the value that I bring back to the company as who I am. A lot of people are looking for that flexibility.

Right.

I mean, work from home is such a big topic right now. As we come out of the pandemic, some of us just. We're just more efficient working from home. I'm one of those. There are other people that are more efficient working from the office. Where's that balance? And organizations are still struggling with that work from home strategy and balancing what everybody's looking for in working for an organization.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting as you talk about that. I love that discussion because there's so much more than a foosball table and a free lunch on Fridays.

Right.

You've got to develop that culture organizationally. I was talking with some executives, probably about this time last year, and There's a whole new technology, not new, but newer technology space in central Utah, you know, from part from Salt Lake down to about Provo. And I was talking to some technology executives up there about hiring and the types of people they're seeing because people don't have the same salary expectations there. And this great woman that I was talking to shared with me, she said, you know, Kevin, she goes, obviously, it's not about skill set. They're just as talented, right? It's not necessarily about cost of living in Utah. She said, those people that are willing to work for 15% less than they are in Orange county or Southern California are there about the culture, right? It's, hey, I've got flex time and it snowed last night. I want to ski tomorrow for three hours before I come in, right? It's those kind of, we might think, intangibles, but they're these things that do become fully tangible when you start packaging them together. That you have this workplace that people want to be. To your point, right. And that we used to do doesn't.

Work anymore because it's experience. Can I have a great experience at my job or my place of work in the same way I want to have a great experience and my buying inexperience, my personal, personal life, whatever the case may be. So.

Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Tom, go finish up there.

Go ahead.

No, I was just gonna. I did. Before we move on from here, just because of time, I have one last quick thing that came out of this article for me, but I wanted to recognize, you know, Will brought this back much as Susan had talked about, too, you know, to create conversation, right. He had on a plane. He. I was giving Will a hard time because he was out in Palm Desert for this nad meeting, and then he was down in San Diego. I watched from his LinkedIn profile. I said, you know, if he would have come up just, you know, an hour north and met with me for lunch, he would have had the perfect Southern California triangle. So we'll get that in next time, Will. But your great point, right, about speaking to a scientist who works with other scientists who sell their product, it's hard to find people with a science and sales background, which is really an interesting thing, right? Because Will with. With. With Infor and their, you know, fantastic ERP systems and so forth that they make, they probably end up in a similar spot that we are in with our company, right? And, Lee, I think you and I have talked about this. We're looking for expanding our sales and marketing team with people that understand how a hammer gets manufactured and goes through a distribution chain to the consumer or a roofing tile or whatever it might be through wholesale distribution, but also has the ability to sell SaaS software.

Right.

So it's this unique blend of people. When you start looking to try and find those people, they're one, harder to find. But two, back to our culture discussion is key. So thanks Will, for your comment on that. Susan, if your comment earlier and then you know, back to this, we kind of wind down about this section about optimism. You know, Phil commented earlier about a mild recession for B2C but steady as she goes for B2B. And I think we'll probably see that true from what we're seeing here. The last thing that came out of this for that Forbes article for me is they made a comment, they said that mixed outlook maybe is when they're talking about hiring because some companies doing a lot, some pulling back on it a little bit. So the mixed outlook may be a sign that 2023 will be a year of differentiation in which some firms show significant improvement while others fall further behind. And what made me think about that is, you know, this is, this is the time where the cream rises to the top, right. If you've already been doing work with companies like the Brooks Group and Lee and put technology solutions in, you know, that are going to drive your organization forward, things are going to go well. And it just really triggered for me that I don't know if you've heard this before, but Warren Buffett made a comment a long time ago. He said only when the tide goes out do you discover who's swimming naked. Right. So when things tighten up a little bit, right. That's when things go for those that have been doing the right things are going to go well. And if you've been doing some goofy stuff or or less than responsible things within your business, not going to go as well. So I just love that comment. Right.

Well we'll see a few, few naked swimmers out there I'm sure, especially in the tech space.

So good. Well, let's jump into that before we go onto that. Start talking about E Commerce. Cause that's kind of a little bit of a shift. We'll just talk about this comment briefly about Hardy within their H Vac and refrigeration world with their wonderful trade association for that group of distributors. And it's interesting cause they saw some nice movement up. They just had written a note that their November numbers were up 12.5 or 12.2%. But overall for the last 12 months, their members were up 21.5%. So that kind of ties to our whole discussion today. Right. Is don't look at B2C, look at what's going on in B2B to see where we're really headed in the world. That matters to the group of people that are joining us here on around the Horn. So any thoughts on that hardy info from either of you before we jump ahead?

No, I think it just aligns with what we've talked about. So. Yeah. Over and over. Yep.

Lee, do you see do work with folks in the H Vac and refrigeration world?

We do. We work with several people that are in the just call it utility space to commercial buildings and as well as residential. And what I find interesting is twofold. One is we talked about in the commercial space. Let's talk about commercial office space that organizations were going to go to this work from home and we were going to have less square footage office space. But yet the commercial numbers of, you know, air conditioning, H Vac going into the, into these types of buildings, it's increasing. It's like, you know, we're hearing two stories here. I think that there's still a lot of investment in there. I also wonder how much of their business may come from deferred expenses through Covid. You know, we think about during COVID a lot of facilities, if they have some issues with some of their condensers or some of their heavy equipment in their H Vac system, they may have put that spending off. And I wonder if they're seeing some of the benefits of that spending today. Either way, we'll take it. Right. We're not going to turn it down. It's still a good sign.

Positive stuff. Good. Thanks for that. Hey, before we, before we jump ahead, you know, Will just made another comment about wonderful associations says we have the president of the Industrial Supply Association, Brendan Breen, on with us, which is funny because I was just about. Lee, as you finished up at the December ISA sales works, eventually you led that track with I can't remember the woman's name. She was fantastic as well on manufacturers working with sales agents at the ISA event. Will, I'm glad you mentioned this though for us because it shows up on our end as just LinkedIn user. And I was about to comment about because this, this comment made here for us, it says LinkedIn user. It also pays to your industry trade association. I was just going to say I'll bet you five bucks that's Brandon. So Pretty confident that we. We nailed that one there, so. Good. So, my friend Brandon, if you're with. That's you, that's with us, but I'm sure it is. It's great to have you and I appreciate you being here.

So.

And thanks, Will, for pointing that out. And, you know, we're great supporters of isa.

We're looking.

Oh, and Brendan, we'll get our registration for the spring event in probably today.

Closing business on the show here.

Yeah, let's talk about the changing sales dynamics and here's the trade association guy that's using around the horn to get things done. Anyways, wonderful if you're here and I know a lot of you that are here today are members or support the Industrial Supply Chain association. But Brandon's doing a fantastic job as president. Now. It's been coming up on a year, so keep it up, my buddy. Keep doing good things. And obviously we're a supporter and member as well, so good stuff. All right, let's. Let's jump ahead. Tom, I know you've got some deep thoughts on this B2B digital sales piece, so let's get it rolling in. We'll talk a little bit about E commerce and stuff in the time we have left today.

No, I think this article, right. I thought, you know, the purpose and the punchline of the article is certainly on track to win over customers and keep them coming back. B2B sellers must engage them through their buyer journey. Certainly no argument there. We've talked a lot about that. What I think there was an opportunity in that article, though. If you were reading through the article, it was then kind of then discussing, well, what you do as a seller and what your seller processes should be. And almost like it, you know, here's an order taker. And I think there was a real opportunity in this article and maybe it's just an opportunity to really start thinking about the switch of viewpoint of, hey, let's not make everything about me and my sales process, but how do we make this around the buyer journey, Understanding the buyer journey, and then what do we need to do to support that buyer journey? Right. So this, you know, traditional sales funnel of awareness, interest, consideration, intent, all that kind of stuff, that's fine. And it's not that you're not going to look at that through a lens of your, of your sales organization, but even as importantly, I think, Kevin, we built a training course on this just this week or for one of our partners is you also, at the same time, and maybe even more importantly, need to look at it through the buyer's lens and how that all aligns. So Lee, I don't know if you agree with me or not, but I thought there was a real opportunity on that article to kind of go to another level.

Yeah.

Anytime we talk about the sales process, you first have to understand your customers buy process.

Right.

We have to align to the way customers want to buy. And you know what, E commerce is a great thing. It's a great tool. Because as we talk about this evolution of buyers today, one of the things that's happening is our commercialism is driving our expectations in the B2B arena. Our experiences with Amazon and Walmart.com and Target.com we buy for our families. We take that to work with us. And what's happened is customers today in the B2B world, they want to buy when they buy. I mean, how many of us work from home into the evenings, right? Your customers are doing the same seven, eight o' clock at night. They're trying to solve a problem in their organization. They're jumping on websites, they're trying to get resources because you know what, as sales guys, we clock out at five o'.

Clock.

Right.

And so customers want information at their fingertips when they want it. And so as we look through this article and we look through these first couple of stages of, you know, awareness, we look at interests and we look at consideration. You know, those are important pieces in the buy process and can be in concert with the direct sales effort, your marketing effort as well as the E commerce effort. We call that omnichannel.

Right.

We want to be able to reach our customers in different modes, different modalities, the way that they want to be reached.

Yeah. And, and you have to understand, you have to look at it through the buyer's lens. Right. To be able to understand then how you put your processes and strategies in place place to facilitate that. And I see that quite a bit more and more in our customers that we're working for is that they don't, when you really start peeling the onion, they don't really understand the buyer that well. And but on the plus side, they're realizing they need to understand the buyer a lot more. And so there's a lot more energy and emphasis going into that and even using data and even what we do with CRM and all of that to help facilitate that understanding of the buyer versus just tracking what I do as a salesperson. And if to me, I think that is the trend of the next several years and I think it aligns with everything else We've talked about, you know, hiring people with experience in the area and all of that kind of stuff. All of that aligns towards that, I guess, transition to, you know, what is the next generation of sales a salesperson look like? Yep.

I think they made it, they made an interesting kind of couple interesting comments in here, right. They said a major difference between B2C sales funnel and the B2B sales funnel is buyer's motivation. Right? And that goes back to a little bit about what Lee's talking about is how they want to do things. And said unlike consumers, businesses aren't interested in buying things for entertainment or enjoyment. Sometimes I think in my household when I watch how many times the Amazon truck is here, it's just fun for somebody push the button, right? But the comment that I really, I really liked out of this was that they said every purchase a business makes is a calculated decision. And you know, we talk about this pretty consistently, you know, Tom and I do, Lee. And you might have heard me talk about this before.

Lee.

But is the, you know that, that newer buyer, right? More than half of B2B buyers are millennials now, right? They, they took Uber to the movies the other night and they ordered, you know, doordash for dinner the night before. They're used to that experience, as you talked about, you know, a few moments ago, Lee, with how I want to gather information. And they could be looking at ratings and videos and things like that about a swap to a new cutting tool or wanting to know the latest OSHA regulation or what's going on related to PPE or something like that. They could be doing that from a Jacuzzi with a mobile phone.

Right. These days.

And it's understanding how they're capturing that data and giving them other options like that that becomes critical for us.

So, yeah, but I will say I do not believe that the E Commerce or this digital, digital buying, digital selling will ever take the place of a sales rep. The role of human sales reps is going to be here for a long, long time. You see, E commerce is great. It's wonderful in places where we're replenishing orders, we're buying consumables, we're buying low risk products, we're buying volume. Where the salesperson becomes much more valuable is when the customer is looking at making a change and that change is risky. She's cutting tools, for example. Maybe they're gonna move to a new material or a new design. They've never worked with this vendor before. They've never worked with this technology. Before for that buyer, that, that whether it's the engineer or that machinist, whoever's making that recommendation for a new technology or a new vendor, that's risky on their own reputation for making that recommendation. So they want the confidence that they're going to move forward with that. They're making the right decision with that. The other place we see the value in having sales reps or those, those purchases that are high value, and I'm just saying high price tag, but high value, where you really need to calculate an ROI on that purchase. And that ROI needs to be thought through. It's not just the purchase price, the consumables that come with it, maybe the fuel, the transportation and so forth, but there's also the emotional risk that comes along with it.

Right.

And so having somebody that's got that expertise and that insights is really valuable. When you think about what a salesperson does every day. They're focused on a product, focused on a service, and they see how customer A addresses problems and opportunities with their product. They see how customer B addresses problems and opportunities and customers C and so on. And so they've got this inventory of experiences so that when Kevin calls me and asks Lee, I got this problem. What have you seen out there? I can say, well, you know, last week I was over at Tom's shop and I saw this. And two weeks ago we were over at Barry's shop and Barry did this. And I can give experiences and insights into what we've seen in the industry that are tailored to what it is that you're looking for. Versus you go online, you're going to find white papers, aren't you? Great stuff, but it's not always going to be tailored to what Kevin needs. This is the value that I think a sales rep brings into the equation.

I think that's extremely insightful. That really goes along right where the buyer right now, he wants to decide when he invites the salesperson in.

Right.

And what's interesting that is we could be sending out emails, we could be sending out marketing emails, we could be sending out individual emails, sales from a salesperson, we could be leaving voicemails. And historically we felt like, oh, they're ignoring me. But the reality of what's going on today is if you're sending some pretty good content into that person, they may not return your emails or return your calls, but that doesn't mean they don't have this device out and looking at who you are and what you do. Right? And that kind of goes back to as we Talked about that, you know, whole omnichannel idea. It's the, you know, omnichannel buying and I'm omnichannel selling.

Right.

It really ties all of these things together that says, how am I getting in front of that customer to solve their issues and understand their business better? And they are going to consume data and information about me in a lot of ways that I don't even realize. You know, we've got, you know, it's part. Part of, you know, in the business that we're in. Right. Sports. Part of the value, big value of some of the trade associations and buying groups that we partner with.

Right.

Is all of those buyers of our product are talking internally about their experience. You know, are the guys at XYZ Co. Good folks? Have they helped us solve problems? Are they jerks? Are they helpful? How's the pricing? All that's happening and we have no idea.

Right.

What's going on with that. So that's. I think there's that omnichannel selling piece that we got to talk about, too, so.

Good. All right, well, Kevin, what do you want to do to wrap up here? Do you want to touch on some of these?

Yeah, we'll do that real quick. I want to talk to. We've got a few more minutes, but I want to thank Susan for her comment. She talked about, you know, talking to her clients, you know, salespeople. We forget that it's not about us. Right. We're supposed to be out there solving problems for people. And if we do a good job of that and we build that trust, you know, lots of good stuff will come our way. So Susan's right on track with that. That's a good thing. So anyways, back to. We talked already about, you know, e commerce already. WD40 does a lot. They partner a lot with what they do with our buddy Rohan from Upstart works in Chicago who helps them with their E Comm strategy and. But just, you know, ongoing more acquisition stuff. And, you know, it's funny, we talk, Lee, pretty regularly on the. On the broadcast here about, you know, the M and A things that are going on out there. And that's been another, you know, strong indicator, I think what's going on in wholesale distribution in the B2B world here, right. Is, you know, we typically put one or two, you know, on here this week. There was five to seven significant M&A transactions in the last 10 days. We only put a couple of them up here. This Emerson one is kind of interesting because it's an intent and intent on kind of a hostile takeover. So it's a little bit of a, you know, when you start seeing $7.6 billion bids. Right. That's, that's kind of an interesting article, which is why I posted that one. So it's good stuff. So before we kind of wrap up today, there's that last article that we've talked a number of times in the last couple of weeks about, you know, the shift out of, you know, just in time inventory to well managed inventory. And Lee, I wanted to talk about this for a couple of minutes based upon your background, right. You spent a lot of time in Asia running big operations. I know, you know, that was probably during the true just in time era for a lot of people. But you know, this whole shift of, you know, we've got nothing but data available and analytics available to us and you know, as we use the term big data of all that's out there. Do you have any thoughts that you might want to share about kind of that shift from, you know, just this as just intelligent? Right. So I've got all these, you know, demand accuracy they talk about and optimizing supply chain. Any thoughts from your experience on that?

You know, I've been removed from that space for a while, but I can tell you just by, by what I hear from my clients. There's, there's just a whole shift in the strategy of moving product, whether it's raw materials to the manufacturing facilities. I've heard of strategies that are moving sub assemblies into regional, regional spaces. Look, it just blows my mind that Amazon can deliver not within 24 hours, but same day. How does that Amazon warehouse know that I'm going to need a pack of paper this afternoon is, is beyond my imagination or make, or make money at it and make money at it. That's right. That's right. So yeah, it's going to be incredible to see that space change over the next couple of years. We're seeing artificial intelligence just leapfrog day after day this past year, haven't we? And that's really going to drive, I think, some of the changes in that skill set.

So I grabbed an article that I didn't add for today, but next week we're probably going to talk about the metaverse in manufacturing and wholesale distribution because there's going to be more and more of that coming together. But you know, the reality, right, is this makes me think back to that. I think it was attributed to Jeff Bezos at Amazon saying that every company is a data company, right? And you may think that you manufacture widgets or distribute widgets. The end of the day, you have, you know, amazing amounts of data within your business, and you need to really execute against that data to drive growth right. In revenue. So this is a little more up Tom's alley as a, you know, as a computer scientist by training. But I just kind of love that comment is like, what are you doing? It doesn't matter what you do, whether you could be the gardener.

Right.

But if you have data about your routes and what people are doing and how much you're using, if you're the gardener, a fertilizer and XYZ house versus the other house. And that's the future for all of us, right? Is it's executing the growth of our business against the data we've been able to accumulate. And how do we get even more good stuff? Well, before we bounce off today, Lee, thanks so much for being with us. We'll have you maybe on again later in the year and hope you can join us on Fridays because your insight has been great and add some comments in. Tom or Lee, any closing thoughts before we jump off today?

No. I wanted to thank Lee. Also really appreciated you being here and some of the insights that we brought. I thought it was a really good discussion today. So.

Yeah, that was good then. Lee, I'll see you in, I think, beginning of March.

Yeah.

Together when you're in town. I'm looking forward to that. And Susan and Will and Phil and Brendan and everybody made comments today, plus everybody else that was with us or that watch this on the recording. Thank you for being with us. Reminder again in, in February, you're going to be able to go to, whether it's Spotify or Apple or whatever it might be that you listen to podcasts on, and this will all be together there on an ongoing and consistent basis. So that's all being developed for us right now. So we're looking forward to it. And our good friend Lars jumped in at the end like always or often, I shouldn't say. Thanks, Lars, for being with us. I don't know if you're back in the US When I heard from you earlier in the week, you were in France, but if you're not back yet, travel safe back, my friend. So wish everybody a great weekend.

Yeah. Thanks, everybody.

All right, thanks, guys.

Good to see you.

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