How To Mine The Treasures In Your Data

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

Well, welcome everybody. Kristen, good to see you. Tom, how are you this morning?

I'm doing good. Do you realize that this is the officially halfway through the year? I'm sorry to start on a downer.

Yeah, really supposed to be positive. Yeah, I just was thinking about that, you know I write so few checks anymore if. But that was always my guide. I knew it was like March because I started writing the year correctly about three months in. Don't write checks anymore. So. Okay, well that ruined my day. Tom, halfway through the year. So off we go. So. Hey, welcome everybody. I'm Kevin Brown. This is my longtime lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. And we're joined today happily by our good friend Kristen Krakili. Kristen is a industry, I'll call it industrial, industrial safety and wholesale distribution expert, 20 plus years. Kristen, @ the right background. I hate to say that because you must have started when you were nine.

Exactly right.

But you've got phenomenal background both in working for a large manufacturing, the distribution side and then 20 plus years in a very unique field as a manufacturer's representative. But so differently than typical is you ran at an executive level, one of the very first, if not the first in the industrial world, national manufacturers rep agencies for years and years. And now you're doing some work with isa. You're facilitating the summer sessions. You did a great job of keeping Tom in line on the last session. You'll have to manage him again next week I think, and then me later in the month.

But I feel like you might be more of a challenge.

Kevin.

I'm just saying.

See, you know what's funny is Tom has the control over the meeting. So I can't mute you. I can't do anything. I. I will do my best to be well behaved. I try hard. Our friend Brendan Breen, the president of the ISA, has had to never had to mute me. How's that? So I'll do my best when we get together but we need to move ahead. We just wanted to introduce you. We're going to talk a little bit more about you, your background, things you're working on and these ISA summer sessions as we move in. But to kind of hit things for today. Tom, what are we going to talk about?

Well, we got a few different things, so we got a couple of pieces of economic data to start off with and then we're going to go into a topic we haven't really talked a lot about about AI. Sorry, what?

I almost spit my tea out.

Yeah, that was pretty. You have to go clean up your desk or what?

I saved it.

All right. For the people on the podcast. Well, I won't even talk about it.

Yeah, we'll get to that in just a second. But you caught me off guard with that. We rarely talk about AI.

Yeah.

So we're going to talk about this life.

Yes, that's right.

A little bit about AI. We're going to talk about, you know, integration tools and how that relates to AI integration of tools and, and data and security and. Yeah, we're gonna. We were gonna talk about a topic called dirty data that we were gonna talk about last week and didn't get to as well. So I think a lot of good stuff today as always. And it's going to be great, Kristen, to have your insights and feedback as we go along. And you're. You have a couple of fans already. Andy is calling you the rose between our two thorns and, and Destiny's, uh, big, big shout out from her. And good morning to Brian as well, so. And Butch. See reading from behind.

Do you know Andy?

Me too.

Yeah. Because he, he will never miss an opportunity to take a swipe at me ever. So. But a great, a great friend, Great friend of the show. So I thought he was gonna say.

Two roses and a thorn, but I don't know, it just didn't come out. I don't know, typo or something on his stuff.

Never once have you been. Been standing next to in a picture by somebody like Kristen and you be called the rose. So let's not get, let's. Let's get our housekeeping out of the way really quick and dive in as fast as we can here. So who are we mentioned? Tom Burton, Kevin Brown. Kristen is joining us today. Tom and I are the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. We have developed and produced a CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration solution completely focused on wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We don't sell our software to law firms and construction companies solely to this vertical that we serve. What we do is every week we consolidate the news throughout the worldwide economy, the stock market, M and A sales and marketing, and we try and package that up into a setting where we can apply that to how it impacts wholesale distribution. We bring that to you every Friday morning in a newsletter called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution, just like the show. If you don't get that, we have, I looked on LinkedIn, we have a lot of new people joining us today, plus the whole podcast environment which we'll speak to momentarily in that setting. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to feel free to, if you're live with us today in the comments, pop us a note, tell us where to send it or to be easier. And if you'd like to protect your data, just send us an email. It's helload smart tech.com helloadsmartech.com I'd like the newsletter. We'll get that sent right out to you on an ongoing basis and, and feel free to join us every week. And if you're new, we do this every Friday morning, 9 o'.

Clock.

So join us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn Live. And then later in the day on all the popular podcast forums will our platforms will be available. So I don't think I missed anything. Tom, let's go talk about cutting tool.

Orders and tell me, Andy wants to know where Kevin's mute button is. Man, tough day.

Tough today, Kevin.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're six minutes in and the two other hosts today and a guest have taken swipes of me, so. And, but my friend Amy Brown is here, I see her and she's gonna say nice things about me, I hope.

All right, well, let's get into the, into the news.

All right. Cutting tool orders up. Right. Things are, things are looking kind of positive out there. I was talking yesterday, last night I was at Bible study and I was talking to a gentleman there that's in the mortgage business, that's getting ready to leave the mortgage business. And we were talking about rates and his comment was Powell was on the news again. That's all he said.

Right.

And when we look at the stuff going on in the, in the economy right now, that we're looking for good news and this recession thing is maybe soft landing, you know, Powell's trying to do I think everything he can to keep that from happening. But it's good to see some good news in one of these market segments.

Yeah, I think, and I think we've seen it consist, I think we've talked about tool orders and specifically a couple times in the show. It seems to be coming up, but it's kind of ties into maybe to a degree on the second article about new home sales.

Exactly. Right. We're headed.

So Christian, any take on this?

You know, I think the only thing that I would add, you guys is I'm just looking at this note on the cutting tool piece and it being a leading indicator of upturns and downturns. And you know, in my, my past life manufacture rep business, we certainly use that as such. And so I think that part of it really rang true for me, you know, in regards to being a leading indicator of what might be happening in the industry.

Interesting. So you kind of use that the tool orders is sort of that canary coal mine type of concept of.

Absolutely, absolutely.

We did.

Yeah.

Well, if they're buying cutting tools, machines are running.

Right, Exactly.

That's, you know, that's really, I think what this boils down to in that arena is, you know, the factories have, whether it's a CNC machine or, you know, drilling system or whatever it is, if they're buying tools, they're ramping up. And I think it's really that, to your point, right, it's that bellwether almost piece to say what's coming.

Right.

Because those orders are ramping up, which means they have orders coming in. So good news with that, good news for that. Let's, for time's sake, let's jump ahead and talk. This, this housing new home sales piece kind of ties into this. And again, I just, I wanted to reference. We moved a little quickly this morning. So those of you who are listening in later, in fact, early Friday afternoons, this live broadcast will be on all the popular podcast forms platforms, I should say so if you are listening and not seeing it. What those are seeing live or seeing on their screen is a copy of the newsletter I mentioned earlier that we send out every, every Friday morning. So one of the articles we're looking at here is that new home sales climb. Right. Which is. I'm interested in both your takes on this. You know, I, again, I was talking this mortgage guy last night and my neighbor across the street just retired from the mortgage business. His rate started to go up. He said, I'm done. But it's astounding to me when we look at this, you know, 12 plus percent increase in April of new home sales with the rates the way they are. I mean, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, a lot more data probably to understand it could be seasonal, could start to be a seasonal type of thing. You know, I don't And I also think there's been a lot of homes on the docket, you know, planned. Right. It takes a long time to get this is new home sales. This isn't existing home sales. So there's a lot of Runway in a lot of cases to get to the point where you get to this point where sales are going up. So I don't know for me, I don't know that it means I think the tool actual, the tool indicator we just talked about may have more merit from what I'm telling what I can see. But anyway, and it's also just the sales price has gone up, which is interesting, giving the fact that, you know, the cost of capital is so much higher and the cost of your mortgage is so much higher. So that's interesting as well. But the cost of materials have gone up, so that isn't surprising either.

Yeah.

We'll talk a little bit about some of that material costs and stuff a little bit further later today. I know we have some regular folks that tune in with Us Weekly that come from the building materials market. I'd love, you know, if Jeff Gore or any of those types of folks might have some thoughts on this because it's interesting. Kristen's comment, I really appreciate that. And this is why we love having guests. Is that feedback in Tom, your point about canary and a coal mine is great with that as well. But the piece with that is that's bellwether. When we talk kind of about industrial and manufacturing, I'm interested in kind of learning. And if anybody that's with us today has thoughts on this, getting kind of what's the bellwether or what's the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, that we watch to see the trends and tips in the building materials market because that's something I'm not, frankly, that aware of. But I think new housing starts is one thing, but the sales piece just, it's interesting. And I know in Southern California, where I live, there's just not enough houses for people because I don't know why, but people still want to move here. Taxes just went up again this year in California. But that's my kind of interesting piece is learning about what that, what that, that turning point or tipping point of bellwether is in building materials. Any thoughts on that, you guys?

Yeah, you guys, I don't know that I have much to add on this one. You know, my, my experience, I would say, has been more anecdotal, and it's more around existing home sales versus new and Maybe it's just an indicator of my, my counterparts and where we're all at in our lives and kids are getting older and people are looking to get out of their houses. And I mean I was just with some friends last week in, in the Chicagoland area and they're all thinking about putting their house on the market in the next six to 12 months and talking about, you know, but inventory of even existing homes is still, at least in the area, you know, where I came from, pretty limited. And so it's just the dynamics just continue to be really interesting to watch I think in new and existing homes.

Good. Go ahead, Tom. I'm sorry.

Well, and I had seen the same thing. I'm not sure who the LinkedIn user is here. It doesn't show on our end. But saying that home prices have gone down for the first time in a while, and I saw that article earlier this week as well, is that prices were starting to drop and inventory was starting to come up a bit. So I think there's a lot of different dynamics and variables here that are, are going to play out. And I'm sure it's regional as well. I'm sure there's a lot of regional, you know, differences and even very local differences on how that actually plays out. So.

Well, I just, I kind of go back to.

Right.

We've been here we are where we. 47 today, Tom. Is that the number? I think. Yep.

Yes.

And we've been trying to keep the theme throughout this, right. Because we were still, you know, coming out of the pandemic when we got this started of the positive nature of things going on. And you know, I heard a quote last week and I trying to remember exactly who was from. But it, you know, it was related to one of the buying, buying groups in the industrial and construction trades and but I've heard this from many folks throughout wholesale distribution is, you know, if we turn the news on, right. Tom, you're the one that's always saying don't watch the news, don't watch the news, don't watch the news. But if we turn the news on, we see all the stuff from CNBC and, and Bloomberg and the general new CNN and whatever it is, it's the doom and gloom, right. When we look to wholesale distribution, the manufacturing segment, we can find good news just about every week. Right. Because we're going to talk a little bit later. Net alliance published their, some data from some of their memberships about their growth. Maybe it's not as high as they'd like, but I think it's 88% of them we'll talk about in a little bit are growing this year. So there's optimism and we like to bring that optimism out as we discuss this stuff each week.

Well, and I think all that good news is driven because of AI. So let's, let's get into that.

Yeah, I saw that coming and I didn't spill my tea on.

Yeah. But the next few articles, Kristen, you know, I've been involved in a couple of years isa summer sessions so far, and I know you have a lot more coming up and a lot of some of these things we're going to talk about are right in the wheelhouse of some of the topics that are in the, in the summer sessions as well. Which is, which is great. And I, I've been very impressed with it. We'll talk more about these in a bit. But just the quality of the, the depth of some of the conversations we've had in some of the, you know, a couple that I've been involved with so far is, is amazing. So I'm looking forward to the rest of them during the, the rest of the year.

So, Tom, we just saw in the comments that this, that last comment you couldn't see is, was from Brendan the. Yeah, the president of isa. So, Brendan, great choice on getting Kristen to come in and, and facilitate these sessions. I knew you were a smart guy, but, you know, now we're really seeing the fruits of all of this. So.

With this first article is how AI helps manufacturers upgrade their E commerce operations. That was a title of the article, but that really doesn't tell the story of the article.

Not fully, does it?

No. So the article was an interview from somebody who's in the field that's really involved with AI and talking about, you know, the different areas that AI can benefit. In this case, more of a manufacturer. But what I really liked about his, it was at the very end. The comment at the end was go into this with a big vision and think big. Right? Yep. And I'm starting to see, I haven't seen in the manufacturing industry yet personally, but I have seen this in other industries where companies are creating what they're calling like a center of excellence inside of their organization for AI and looking at AI holistically rather than running around and trying to do shadow AI projects that are for very different things in the organization. Obviously that makes a lot of sense for some of the reasons we're going to talk about in a minute related to data. But I like the concept of what he was saying, which is think big, look big, look broad. Right? And you can potentially touch a lot of different areas with stuff.

Tom, before we go further on this, Tom and Chris on this, one of my big takeaways, and I'm really going to copy and paste and save. This is the gentleman that is focused on in this article. And that article is in Digital Commerce360, how AI helps manufacturers upgrade their e commerce systems and so forth. But the. There's such a succinct definition provided here of AI that I wanted to actually just read that because we have such a diverse audience that's with us each week between the three live platforms and the podcast. I'm just going to read this if you guys don't mind, because I think it really succinctly pulled things together. And it says AI utilizes computing power, the Internet and the cloud, and is able to collect and analyze huge amounts of data in seconds if you feed AI the right kind. And we're going to talk about this more today, right? Kind of information and requests and connect it to the right places in your business, it can quickly generate, evaluate and benchmark ideas and convert all that data, whether it be structured or unstructured, into insights and recommendations to make informed decisions. Now, that's a lot. But that in my mind, if you're new to AI and there are people with us today that are new to just, I mean, they're hearing about it, people are trying to sell them AI tools left and right and they're hearing us talk about it each week. But computing power, the Internet and the cloud to collect and analyze huge amounts of data in seconds and provide business feedback. What a great. For me, that was really succinct. I thought I'd share that.

Yeah, I agree with you, Kevin. That really resonated with me as well, because I think there is a lot of confusion about what it is and what it isn't and that, you know, you guys talked a little bit about the role that I'm playing right now with the ISA summer sessions. And really, you know, that was Brendan's brainchild. And the ISA team, you know, they were getting a lot of feedback from their membership about really needing more education from the association. And what we did is we looked at all the feedback from the surveys from ISA 23 that just happened in April and looked at what people were asking for. And it was amazing. The questions around AI in particular, but, you know, technology in general and how do we use it in smart and good ways in our business? And so that's A lot of what prompted the the topics of the sessions that are happening over the course of the summer is because it does seem like there is a lot of confusion around how to use AI and use it effectively.

You know Kristen, the simpler answer would just be go listen to around the Horn on Fridays. But you know what? Again let's Brendan's with us today. I think Destiny was there's a handful of people Joby I think was coming today from isa and here's my little plug that I do regularly. If you're anywhere related, remotely related to the industrial world, peripheral even get involved with isa. It's just the Industrial Supply association is is as a trade association versus the buying groups. Stick with your buying group. But as a trade association they're just working to do on doing the really, really good stuff. And in my opinion, you know, better now than ever. So great time. And Brendan, I know you commented so you're there. Pick a Friday sometimes in late August or September that you can join us again because we'd love to have you back. So the ISA is where you can go to get guidance on what's AI about, right?

Yeah. And the other thing, you know that I'd like to call out and this is something that we're talking about a lot as part of those summer sessions is just the buyer's journey and what's changed and how people are going through their decision making process so differently. And there's a point in this article that talks about how AI tools are really great at recognizing patterns and how it can inform around buyer Personas and segments and how buyers are behaving and really help to make that buyer journey, customer experience seamless and really personalized. And that piece of it really resonated with me because that's a lot of what we're talking about on these sessions and how quickly that's changed, you know, during and since the pandemic and you know, for our industry and for all industries how important it is to keep up with those kinds of changes and how buyers are behaving because if you don't, you're just going to get left behind. And so that that piece of it really resonated with me, you know.

You know what's interesting about that is and I've seen this just firsthand on some of the work we've been doing with our customers, the amount of insights that you can learn even from your ERP data about the customer, find the customer experience, the customer buying journey, where they're going, all of that is quite Remarkable. And a lot of people don't look at their ERP data from the viewpoint of understanding the customer journey, right. They look at it to look at from the viewpoint of well, how many sales am I making and how many quotes do I have and how many orders and all of that. But if you start to take all of this data and that. I've said this before, right. I love it in this field because we're so data rich but we have to be able to use that data in a way to look at things that maybe we didn't use that data to look at before. And there is a lot of power there with that. And yeah, there's a lot of. Even in just ERP data alone or in our CRM data and ERP data together, there's a lot of insights that can be gleaned on the customer journey when you're using AI and using that, that you're just not going to be able to see yourself, right? There's no mere mortal that's going to look at this and run a report and go, oh, look at all of that. It's taking all of those data points and then bringing to the surface things that we're not able to see on our own.

That's great, great analysis of that piece, Tom. You know, you used the phrase as we got started today, the story behind the story and I think that's what we're seeing consistently. I was talking to one of our customers the other day and one of the things they want to work with us on is to be able to look and say, hey, I've got XYZ customer, right? And my salespeople call on them regularly. My inside sales team works with them on an ongoing basis and customer support handles things. And you know, that's pretty straightforward CRM stuff in our world. We put some pretty cool tools to go with that. But they said, you know, but then we have this issue and I've talked a couple of times the last 10 days or so about this topic with either potential customers or customers. But then we have all this E commerce data, right? And they say, well you know what, my customer logs into my E commerce system. So I know that they're there. E commerce is telling me what are they looking at. But then I've got this whole other group of people because maybe marketing or a different team is looking at E commerce and I've got a whole other team that's doing the day to day customer facing stuff. How do we pull that together? And some of the things that You've built, Tom, with your team for our company is that ability to say, hey, you know what? They were here, you should know about it. And not only do you know about it, Mr. Salesperson or customer Service, but they looked at these items or even put them in a shopping cart or started to build a quote. They never fulfilled it here, but they bought it a month later at the counter. Right. And there's these prescriptive things that can come out of this. And I think it's the story behind the story that says ERP tells us that they bought that item. Right. But we don't know the story behind it of how did they get there. And now we're starting to get these deep views into an organization across the organization that we've never had before. And maybe there's a bigger, better and more important story behind just a sales report. And we've always had those. Right?

Absolutely. And the. Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's absolutely this. And you look at that not just at an individual, but you start to see the trends. And the trends are what then help you understand how the buyer is in general. The buyer is operating and. And then help facilitate that better. So if you're seeing a trend that they're hitting these touch points and ending up buying over here, then help facilitate that more. Right, right. Or if you're, you know, versus and again, as sellers. Right. Are on the company side, we tend to look at through the lens of what either we think it should be or the way that, you know, we think it ought to be. And that's obviously a lot of times very different than the buyer. Right. I mean, look at ourselves as buyers. As buyers, we do things very differently than we do things as sellers in the organization. So anyway, before we jump off of.

That though, there was another piece of this. It was really intriguing to me because it kind of triggered that crossover between the technology sales world and wholesale distribution. You know, in technology world, right. Everybody's looking at subscription business and ongoing business and auto renewals and so forth. And there's quite a bit of that in wholesale distribution where people have contracts and they get shipped a certain amount of stuff. But this article really talked about the avail, the ability of the right AI tools to identify a customer that could be ripe for subscriptions or auto shipments. Right. Which it really intrigued me because I'd be happy to hear this from anybody that is any of the distributors that are on today. But traditionally, in my experience, Kristen, you may have some great feedback on this too, is you typically see that when it's something that's tied to a bid that says we're going to buy X number of hard hats a month or X number of wrenches or cutting tools or whatever a month for this duration. But this is suggesting other things that says there are patterns. To Tom's point earlier, right. There are patterns in your business that are developing that are probably not going to show up unless you do a very deep dive on your ERP data that AI can bring to the surface. We do that, Tom, with our Genius feed and Lead Smart, right. That says, hey, this is happening in your business. Right. And it's a very different factor than where we've historically been where we might be able to go back to somebody and look at things and go, hey, you know what, Mr. Customer, we see you're buying this on a consistent pattern. Why don't we just ship you this each month on an auto order? And now we've reduced labor and all kinds of other stuff that goes with that.

Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, we've been talking a lot about AI from like a sales and a market marketing and a customer service perspective. But when you get into like the inventory and replenishment, you know, the insights that can be provided on that part of the business and managing that piece more effectively, you know, it can be amazing the impact that it can have. You know, one more thing, you guys, before we jump to the next article that I just is so important. You know, as we talk about all these different channels, you know, your website, your social media, you know, your shopping cart, whatever that is, the brand reputation and how your brand is viewed by the customer on each of these channels on each of these platforms and the consistency between those is so important. And I think as you know, organizations are exploring how to use AI and build it into their day to day business. You know, some of the foundational work that has to be done is as you're exploring the different channels that make sense for your business, is making sure that you are showing up in a consistent way on each of those challenge on each of those channels. Excuse me. So that your customer has that consistent, seamless experience, no matter where they're touching your organization.

You know, Tom, she needs to come back again because that was a great takeaway from the article as well. And I remember reading that part of it. Because the impact that these things can have on brand is significant. So thank you for that.

I've said this before, right. I truly believe every day the buying experience that you provide to your customer is what defines your brand and is more important than your brand or your product because it creates the brand or the product. To me, this just further reinforces that. But rather than talking about it and not giving away of how do you handle that, it's this gives you a lot of opportunity to get ahead of that and get on top of that and provide that level of experience because you have the deeper understanding of what they're doing. If you ignore it, right. You're not going to know. You're going to have a big blind spot. But if you look into it, you have the opportunity to have that, to take that experience to another level. So let's, let's move on. I think timing will. Your timing is good because we're about ready to talk about erp.

Yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting, right? You'll see our theme building throughout the day here as we are getting ready to talk about more and more with data. I did want to before we move too much ahead, one address those of you that are listening on the podcast that's recorded later. I try and do this a couple times each broadcast or show that we do that. Those that are on the live, YouTube live, Facebook live or LinkedIn live are seeing a newsletter we send out each week. If you're interested in receiving that, simply send us an email to helloeadsmartech.com and we'll get you added to that list. Compliment Christian, you may have heard this before. I try and only compliment Tom once a month. You know, we've been friends for a lifetime and so once, once every six.

Months and we're running out of time here really quick so.

Well, the you have yet to say today, Tom, you heard it here first.

Oh, so we saw. We have a little bit to go though.

We're well through. We're well more than halfway through the today's show and you haven't said that yet and it's a compliment. So very good.

So now you can't say it.

Oh he will. He'll find a spot because we're going to talk about dirty data in a minute. And he's remember we held this over from last week because he has look at the big smile on his face. He's excited. So let's quickly talk about this ERP article. National association of Wholesalers published it. It's from a technology company, one of the founders of a company that works in the ERP world and just some really good information about the importance of combining data across an organization. Tom, you talk about this constantly. I agree. And say amen to that consistently. Kristen's on the same page as we look at organizations and wholesale distribution where they're manufacturing, manufacturer sales agencies and wholesale distributors is we've got data across our organization, the thousands of spreadsheets, E commerce, marketing automation, data warehouses, BI tools, erp, CRM. And we, when we start pulling those things together and they use, you know, our phrase that we use consistently right here, siloed data. And they really talked a lot in this article about the importance of having accurate data and getting them out of the silos to work together.

Yeah, and let's, let's, we'll just touch on this quickly because Kristen, this is actually a topic we're going to be covering on the 11th, right on the. In this, in the next shameless plug. Yeah, but I just want to touch on one thing here and then I think it'll, it'll filter into what we're going to talk about later. Integration between technology has historically in what I consider peer to peer, right. So I have an ERP system. I integrate that to my CRM, I integrate my E commerce into my erp. So if you were to draw a picture on the page with all of your technologies and then you connect them together one to one, those are all peer to peer, what I call peer to peer integrations or one to one integrations. And that's historically how integration has been done. The problem with that is as you get more tools, it becomes very difficult to manage all those integrations, which is what they're doing talking about here. But now again, based on what we've been talking about with AI, having more of a holistic data view is becoming more and more important. So as we look at integration, and this is an area I'm spending a lot of time on, not just within our own company, but some with our buying group partners and even the topics we're talking about, Kristen, is how do we build like a centralized data platform, if you will, that we can take data from kind of a hub and spoke approach, Right. We can take data from a lot of places, use that data, refine that data, clean it, make it AI ready, all of the things that we need to do and then use it and push it into those other places that we need to, whether it's erp, CRM, all of that stuff. Sort of a hub and spoke model versus a peer to peer model like the airlines, you know, transition. Right. You have Southwest, that's peer to peer and a lot of the other ones have the hub and spoke approach. And I think that that's really, really going to be a bigger and bigger theme. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying. But there is things that can be done now to start preparing for that and that's what's really going to open up the opportunity for this integration problem and eliminating a lot of the silo data that we have out there.

That's great, Tom. I love that. Kristen, anything else on this topic? One thing to add before we jump off, but I want to get to you first.

Yeah. A couple of things just really jumped out at me in addition to what Tom already talked about. Just once you achieve integration at this level, the efficiencies that it creates internally for your team and then how that shows up as part of your customer experience. And I know integrations like this can be super painful, but I think just the efficiencies, it's like the speed of which you can use your data and give that to your team and how positively that can affect your customer experience I think is worth the investment to see how this can be improved.

That's great. So before we jump off here, there was a great quote in this and I think it's really important and there's, I think people here that have joined us today that this is extremely valuable to them. The comment says failure to integrate software can hamper a distributor's ability to scale by limiting visibility in the inventory, customer orders and fulfillment status. And there's about seven other things in my mind you could add to that. It says time consuming, error prone, manual tasks that aren't automated and aren't getting data from other areas are like ropes holding down a hot air balloon. You simply can't go airborne with inefficient processes tying you down. And that lack of integration limits your agility, ability to adapt to change and market conditions and customer demands. So it just, we can't reiterate enough that the amount of data and Tom, you know, or Chris and I should say Tom's background, you know, 30 plus years in technology, software development and bringing those products to market, you know, and he's commented a number of times as some folks that are on our board of directors and or board of Advisors at LeadSmart is the astounding amount of data. Most people that we talk to and share more about what we do at Lead Smart and how we connect to these systems have never seen an industry or a market where there is that much available data that goes oftentimes goes untapped. So we see this when we talk to outsiders that it's really astounding to them.

Yeah, it's very. Transactions, right. There's thousands of transactions and millions of transactions across millions of SKUs and millions of customers. It's very, very high volume, which in the tech world, right. Even, you know, you were not selling thousands of SKUs and thousands of customs. It's just a very different. Different situation.

Well, yeah, and it's, you know, it's interesting and this would be a discussion for another time or a glass of wine, but you know, Christian's background, running a, you know, helping as an executive run a national manufacturers rep organization. Think about the data that they have, right. They have all of that thing that's happened amongst all the manufacturers that they've worked with and POS reports and all of those things. And when you start, you know, getting that into a interconnected ecosystem, so to speak, right. You get this source of truth that tells the story behind the story.

So I think there's a huge opportunity for that. Manufacturers right in that middle there. But we'll save that for another day. I want to move. Kevin, I think we should move through this quick. Yeah.

Let's just acknowledge this other article though, because it's something we should start talking about more regularly. We've talked about it a couple times recently about cyber security. There is one piece I do want to mention about the cyber security article that it would be valuable for folks to read it. If you're having the newsletter again, if you don't have the newsletter, let us know. There's a quote in this talking about cyber security from IBM's research and it says the number of cyber attacks targeting manufacturing now exceeds the number targeting any other industry, including financial services and insurance. So reading between the lines on that says if you build something in a factory, you're more likely to get hacked or have issues than bank of America that has to transfer across, if it's not already very soon into wholesale distributors. We've just been talking about all the data that these people have. So anyways, we're going to talk more ongoing down the road about cybersecurity. But it's not like it doesn't impact us the way it.

Well, most, most cybersecurity attacks in the past have been to either freeze up your office environment so you don't get at your office data or financial. Right. And more of a financial. But now if you start to, if you start to think about if I'm a secure, you know, a hacker or one of these people, right. If I can bring down a manufacturing plant or I can bring down my assembly line, then that obviously impacts that business as well.

Happy to write a check.

Right, right. And so the other thing too is that unfortunately. Right. They tend to look for where they, you know, you know, banks and a lot of these companies have invested a ton of money now in their cybersecurity strategy. Probably way different in terms of investment compared to manufacturers. So they look for the, they look for the hole on the dam, basically, and try and go through there as well. And, and so, yeah, there's a whole lot. I think it's an area we haven't talked a lot about. It's an area I think that we should talk about a bit more as we go forward, but it's certainly an area to be keeping an eye on.

Good. Well, let's get to your dirty data article that we held over from last week. And this just speaks to everything we've been working on with all of this. So, Tom, I'm going to let you dive in.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, we just talked about. Right. How do you build sort of a holistic data strategy? How do you put. Get your data all into one, or at least start thinking about getting your data in one place? I'm going to just say a couple things here as you're thinking about. AI data is not just what you have in your software applications or your databases or your spreadsheets. Data can be PDF documents, product catalogs that are in PDF format, all kinds of, you know, it's called in the world, in the AI world, unstructured data. Right. You have structured data. When you think of a spreadsheet, you have columns and rows and all of that type of thing like you'd have in a database table in a PDF. It's not structured that way. It's just data. It's documented, it has contacts or your website or whatever is all considered unstructured data. So, so first of all, you know, what they're talking about here is first of all, know what you have. Right. Do an inventory on what you have. But then, and I won't go through all of this, but it's more. Okay, now what are the steps to go through to start getting, I call getting your data act together. Right. How do you start looking at your data hygiene? How do you look at duplicates? How do you look at the typical things that you find problematic between those different things and then working out that process to actually get them there? I feel like at Lead Smart, we have our. Every day we're shifting from being a CRM company and into a data company. And the more and more that we're having to do to make to facilitate this process, I wouldn't, if you would have asked me this a year ago, I would have been like, no, we wouldn't be spending this much time and effort into this. But if you're going to have that holistic data strategy, you know, it's like you say garbage in, garbage out. This takes that to a whole nother extreme. So, Kristen, love to get your take on this because I know this is an area we've been talking about on some of the shows.

Absolutely. And I'm going to sound like a broken record because how good your data is totally affects your customer experience. Right. So if you've got duplicates, you know, and your customers are receiving multiple, maybe different marketing or sales messages because they're duplicated in your system, it's going to turn them off. Right. Because they know that they're just kind of like a cog in a wheel and it feels less personalized. And so, you know, that's just one small example of how having your house in order from a data perspective can result in a really positive brand recognition, consistent personalized experience for your buyer versus if you don't have your data house in order to how you probably can alienate and lose customers as a result of that. And so it's just, it sounds, it's like basic blocking and tackling, like have good data. But oh, my gosh, the challenge is real, right. When you've got, depending upon your sales organization and marketing organization and who has access to all those data points and who's inputting the data. I mean, the struggle is real to have good data.

Well, and it's an area, Right. That I don't. And I'm. And you know, Kristen, you've seen this maybe at a much broader level than us, but it's an area that people haven't paid a lot of attention to. It was almost like data was like almost. Right. It was just sort of a mess to clean up, you know? Yeah.

I think, I think people maybe, I shouldn't say scared, but they're, they avoid it because, you know, they look at, I mean, just, just think about, think about your Outlook contact, you know, list. Right. You know, how many duplicates do you have in that. Right. Or, you know, on your phone or. And when you start taking these things and multiplying that across an organization, it gets daunting. And what we experience regularly. Right, Tom, in our company is you're talking to our customers and potential customers is. It's like, oh, there's that thing over there that I know, right. I know I've got seven customer numbers for one plant right. In my ERP system. And I. The idea of going to try and solve that is hard. Great news now is there's phenomenal tools out there, right, that can, can work on these.

There's AI tools that help facilitate. We were working with one this week. Yeah, right. I mean, again, think about the value of AI as looking at a lot of data points. Well, look at the data points in your data points and surface some of these issues. So you're not like, you know, getting an Excel spreadsheet and running, you know, pivot tables or something like that. That's not what this is. Right?

Well, that's funny. Yes, you're right. But, but I think the takeaway today, and there's more that we can talk about here, but the takeaway today for me on this is, you know, for manufacturers, distributors, dealers, the folks that we deal with on an ongoing basis, you know, within Lead Smart and here on the, on the around the horn podcast is, look, everybody has the same opportunity right now to go level a playing field, right. If you're a regional distributor and you want to go compete against the big behemoths, the national guys, there has never been a time where the playing field is more level than it is right now. You have the ability potentially in a small mid sized regional or national independently owned distributor or wholesaler or dealer network to go use these tools to completely differentiate yourself from your competitors and potentially even run some circles around the big national guys that you struggle with in so many ways. So this isn't just an interesting conversation, right? This is, this can be game changing one from a survival standpoint for some people. And I don't ever want to be the doomsday guy that says if you don't do all this stuff, you're going to go out of business. But I will say, I'll be the guy to say, you heard it here first. In the next 6, 12, 18, 24 and 36 months, if you don't make some significant changes in your organization, your business isn't going to be the same. And there are other people who will be way ahead of you.

Yeah, sorry, Kevin, I thought you were. I would totally agree with you. I think, you know, this is one of the things we talked about in one of the first summer sessions was about the brand loyalty is not what it used to be. And it's about who is providing the customer with their desired experience and access to data and information and ability to buy what they need, how they want to, and when they want to. And to me, what's underneath this conversation about data is, and this is also something we've talked about is, is there can't just be the sales department and the marketing department and customer service and data or technology, all of those departments, you know, functional areas, whatever you want to call them, if they're not already working together on this, then I think that, again, is just a basic, you know, blocking and tackling maneuver that has to start to happen. Because if those functional areas aren't talking together and working, working together towards some of these goals, I don't think you'll ever get there.

I think that's extremely well said. You know, I think about it, right, as you talked about across departments and, you know, elite Smart, we kind of have three areas within our companies, right? We have a product side, we have a smaller operational group, and everything else is all things revenue, sales, marketing, client success, support. And when those. Because if you say, and I've said this for quite some time, Tom's talked about it forever, too. Sales and marketing are becoming one department. And if you're not having sales and marketing coming one department, you're probably missing the boat as well, because it is about the customer and the customer experience, and that is what's going to drive your salesforce. So I want to recap this because we're running short on time. I want to talk to Kristen for.

A moment before I wanted to add one more thing and then we can.

Let me, let me do mine first. Danner Nanner.

All right, go ahead.

So, principles of data hygiene. I want to act like I'm smart for a minute, Tom. Great stuff came from this.

I'm going to go get a drink of water. Go ahead.

This won't take long for me to stay. I'm smart, right. Accuracy of your data, completeness of your data, consistency of your data, timeliness, is it relevant? Is it up to date? Uniqueness, Right. Where does it appear within your organization? And valid validity or validating it. Those were the key principles of data hygiene. Time. You could probably add more from your experience. Boom, back to you to close this out.

No, I think that's great. I just wanted to add to what Kristen said. I think that this whole data process and this holistic data process is going to drive what I'm going to call the great reorg. I think organizationally we will see organizations Completely different in the next two to five years, if not sooner.

Was that you heard it here first?

No, I don't say those things. You said that. I said I don't say that. But I think it has to. Right. Inherent. It's going to drive the great.

We lost you, Tom. Tom, we lost you.

Okay, how about now?

Here we go. You're back.

Yeah, sorry. It's going to drive the great. The great reorg because it has to. Right. It organically changes how we look at things and how we work and how we put things together. So I think that's going to be an interesting side effect that we'll see over the next period of time as well. And again, all in the. All in the interest of that customer. So, Kevin, let me continue. That was some smart insight you had there.

It just, I mean, that's right from the article, right? I like that, how you packaged that up at the end. That's good stuff. So we're running down on time. We have industry scuttlebutt. We talked earlier about in the segment of our newsletter here, we have each week industry scuttlebutt. We talked a little bit about NetPlus alliance members research. They just said Dan Judge, the kind of founder of Netplus alliance, continues to do that as he's kind of emeritus at. @ netplus. What a wonderful man that is there. There's some information about 3M lawsuits. We have some great friends from 3M that regularly join us here. Some challenges going on on other sides of the organization there, but we hope they get through all of that and then some M&A stuff that's here as well. So in wrapping up today, lots of work heading into the, you know, summertime, but we're gonna get late summer and into fall become big event times. So the trade associations and buying groups having their events. So if you don't get our newsletter, we are looking right now at the rest of the year of some key, key events that are coming up. And obviously we'll wrap up today talking a little bit more about the ISA summer session. Kristen, you want to take just a minute and kind of recap what's going on and what's coming in the next few weeks with that and how people can get involved.

Yeah, absolutely. So. And thank you for that. So we're the July 11th will be our fourth session and how we started. It was big picture, you know, around. What does omnichannel mean? Why is it important? What are the business ramifications of doing nothing? We talked about the Importance of brand, the buyer, the customer journey, you know, the whole focus being on that end, customer centricity and, you know, looking at everything through their lens. And then we shifted to two very specific marketing sessions. What is on a channel marketing? Why is it important? The session on the 11th that Tom is participating in is going to be all around, how do you execute to an omnichannel marketing strategy? And then we'll do the same thing from a sales perspective. What does omnichannel sales mean? Defining at why is it important? And then how do you execute to an omnichannel sales strategy? And then the last two sessions, I think are going to be so great. And I'm, I'm concerned that people are going to look at recruitment and retention and think, ah, this is an HR thing. But all of these strategies that we're talking about around customer centricity and that consistent experience, that brand experience can be equally applied from a recruitment perspective and a retention perspective. And how do we apply those same concepts to our future employees and to our existing employees to make sure that we're getting the best talent and keeping that talent? So I'm super excited about the upcoming sessions and, you know, really appreciate you guys having me here today.

So how, how can people, Kristen, get involved if they're not familiar with this? What, what do they go do to get registered? How can they access this?

So they go to the ISA website, isapartners.org hopefully Brendan and Destiny. I'm saying that right. Okay. There's a button at the right hand corner that just says summer sessions. They can click on that. The all of the sessions are free for ISA member companies and any employee can sign up. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at in the organization. And then for anybody that's from a non ISA member company, they are able to pay for these sessions. So they're available to everyone.

Good.

Well, thank you for that. We're also appreciative and thank you for including both Tom and I in the sessions. I heard the other day I saw on social media there were people that were asking for Tom's autograph for his last session. So that's pretty good. I'll try and live up to that one on my session later this month, but we're later in July. I appreciate you including us in that and thank you so much for being with us today. It was great to have you.

Thank you. It was fun.

You added a lot of value. I really appreciate it. And I'll just say one more shout out. We did the dress rehearsal Yesterday for the one coming up on the 11th and I will tell you that even though it's what, 45 minutes, we're going to get pretty deep on some stuff. So if this is an area especially related to some of the things we've been talking about, I highly recommend it because I was. There was some really, really great conversations.

So that's good. We'll look for. We'll look forward to that one. Christian, will you come back and join us again sometime? I would love to.

Thank you. I just want to give a shout out to Will for his suggestion to call sales and marketing. And I'm going to my terrible Boston accent. Smacketing. I love it.

That's great. Yeah, yeah.

And he says, who doesn't want Tom's autograph? And it's selfie. See, I I think we'll end right there, everybody. Have a great weekend. Yes, a great holiday.

Enjoy your weekend, everybody. We hope to see you back with us next Friday again. If you don't get the newsletter and you want to hello@lead smarttech.com thank you to everybody that was with us today. Thank you for most of the comments and not all of them, but most of them. And Kristen, thank you again and have a wonderful weekend. And Lake Michigan, enjoying some sunshine, hopefully.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much.

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