Optimizing Your B2B Marketing Funnel With Guest Dan Vanacore

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.

Good morning everybody. That's here. It's good to see Will Quinn and that's awesome. Will, you're funny. Chair dance. Very good. So this is the those of you that are going to be listening on the podcast later. You don't know this, but I never have sat down before. And where are we, Tom? 62. 62 episodes. But I busted up my knee earlier this week and I thought that, you know, even after buckling my knee on Monday evening, that walking three or four miles a day at a at conferences was still a good thing to do. And I'm paying the price today, so I'm sitting.

So doing big wave surfing before you went out to the conferences, you see. That's right.

That's exactly. Let's go with it like that. I like that better. Tom, stick with that story.

Right?

Yeah.

That said, so we got Brian with us, probably a lot of other folks chiming in this morning. Feel free to let us know who you are, where you're at. I, I saw just on the LinkedIn portion of what we're doing quite a few new names that were, were joining us today. So that, that's great stuff. But before we kind of dive in again, this is around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution. Each week we put out a newsletter and that is entitled as well around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution, where we take data and information from globally as well as here in the US and we look at those in that, those articles and that, that news information, whether it's about wholesale distribution, it might be mergers and acquisitions, it can be technology AI we talk about regularly and we try and unpack that and put that right into some value for our listeners each week. So if you would like to get that email newsletter and you don't let us know, there's two ways to quickly and easily get there. The first one is email us@helloadsmartech.com and the other one is you can go right into the website that we have for the podcast here, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. all of our previous episodes without the beautiful video of these handsome gentlemen that are here, you'll get that. But just the audio portion of it is available on that podcast, all 62 of our episode. So that's what we do each week. Those of you that are listening later today on the podcast who do not see what we're doing, what we'll have on the screen momentarily is that email newsletter that goes out on a consistent basis. I was, I'll tell the story about a gentleman I talked to earlier this week in his show and, and how he gets his news each week that he likes.

So.

But before we move on, Dan Vanicore, thank you so much for being with us. Dan, tell us a little about yourself as our special guest for today.

Yes, thank you, Kevin, Appreciate that. Thank you, Tom. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Dan vanicore, I'm with Cloud 9 ERP Solutions. We're essentially a value added reseller for a software company called Acumatica. And essentially our business is to help digitize small and medium sized businesses to bring them into a cloud based environment for erp. We provide everything from financials, distribution, e commerce, warehouse management and much, much more. So I work with companies literally on a daily and weekly basis to understand their core requirements and what they're trying to do to transform their business to, to be based in a cloud ERP environment.

You know, it's interesting, I, Kevin and I were Both at the NET+ annual meeting and I know, Kevin, you were at another ad meeting as well. But I had a lot of, I had a lot of conversations this week with distributors in particular who were very, I guess, concerned about their ERP and not so much about just what their ERP is doing about the quality of the data. And are they going to be able to leverage that ERP data to drive AI, to drive integrations with other products. And I've never seen in, you know, the time that I've been going to shows and talking to people that sort of, I don't know, concern, if you will, that I saw this last week. I think there's a real awareness now of the importance of not just the ERP capabilities and functionality, but how do we leverage and utilize that data throughout the organization.

No, I couldn't agree more, Tom. I mean, you know, one of the key themes that we hear all the time from customers when we start to engage with them is the lack of information in the data or that the data is so spread out among different disparate systems that it makes it very hard to bring it together, consolidate it and be able to make, you know, real time business decisions. And you know, you think of the ramifications of that when you're competing in a global market. In many instances, you know, having that data readily available in one integrated ERP is, it's, it's mission critical today. And yeah, you're exactly right. We, that's a common theme we hear among customers on a daily basis. The lack of good solid data that can also be shared across every, you know, all the organizations and everybody in the company.

I think the plus side, and we can get into the news here, but I think one of the plus side is that, you know, Kevin, we've been talking for months about the importance of data in the organization and caring about your data. And I really do start here years. I just, I just started to hear that in these conversations it wasn't just about well, I have to have this functionality. It was all about, but I have to be able to use this data and have good data and you know, how is this going to work with AI and all of those types of things which were not conversations I was hearing even six months ago. So.

Well, and moving to the cloud was, you know, a big theme at both of the events we were at. This were as well and I thought that was really great. In fact, I had a discussion Sunday evening with a distributor that was at the net event that we were both at. It was a busy week. Dan. We left Saturday, met up in Denver for the Net alliance buying group meeting. Fantastic event, just great. Great human beings, they're running it all. They put on a great technology session where we had an opportunity to present as well on digital transformation on Sunday. And then I left on Monday midday to go to Affiliated distributors Pipe Valve and Fitting and plumbing event in Phoenix. And so great week of events. Next week is the 80s electrical event in Dallas and we just keep moving. But I was having a discussion after fact. Tom and I split off. Tom headed back to his room, but I ended up having a drink in the bar later in the evening with a distributor who is just getting ready to get their head around cloud solutions and most of the what we'll call point solutions that they have, maybe it's a data analysis tool or something like that, are cloud based and they have no CRM although they will soon and customer intelligence solution. But they spent, I believe they said they spent $60,000 last year on new servers and they're looking at just walking away from that because they're seeing the value and the need to get to the cloud.

Yeah, again, another great Point. Right. We talk to companies all the time. Right. That you know, make different products or, you know, they distribute, let's say H vac plumbing supplies. I mean they're tech, they're in the business of, of plumbing and H vac.

Right.

They're not in the business of it. Right. And so to your point, Kevin, there's a big, a big thought process around, you know, is the investment in servers and hardware and software really timely anymore? And does it, does that make sense if that's not our core business? You know, let the experts do it, the cloud, ERP experts do it, manage, you know, in a SaaS environment and let us focus on our core business of, you know, whether it's, you know, a wholesale distribution or manufacturing, whatever the case is. So yeah, there's a big shift towards that. Absolutely.

And I think that's an interesting point.

Right.

I was actually on the phone with it and this is, you know, what I love so much about our business is every day we're on the phone with distributors and, and often on manufacturers as well. And, and in this case I was talking to a distributor yesterday. He was talking about the expense of moving to the cloud for a smaller company and we didn't have time on our call to get into it. But I think when you start looking at total cost of ownership and maintenance and I always joke thinking about Judy or Joe that has to walk down the hall a couple of times a day and open the closet up and make sure the little green lights are still flashing on the servers and you know, and then you've got to bring in that outside third party if there's a hiccup with things. And literally I was talking yesterday to distributor and he's going to accelerate over time to the cloud. But right now, you know, he's, he was looking at our cloud solution and still wanting to think about how he could make an off site backup. Okay.

Right.

Nothing wrong with that at all. Right. But when you think about the advantages that come from cloud based systems, you really, and you look at the total cost of ownership versus, you know, apples, I guess, apples to apples versus starting to look at apples and oranges, it becomes very attractive.

Absolutely. And one of the things we're trying to do a better job of up front is before we even show one screen or you know, of the software and get into a demo is to really kind of do the due diligence upfront and understand with the customer, you know, where, where are you feeling these, these, these, these pains in the business and how we Quantify them so that you have kind of an idea in mind of, let's say, over one or two years, the savings that you. You can incur so that when it comes time at the end of our sales cycle to actually move forward with the software, there's a cost justification versus, oh, my gosh, I'm looking at this outlay of cost versus what am I going to be saving? So I think there's a lot to be said for that today.

All right, well, let's, let's get into the news here. We could talk about technology all day.

Absolutely.

We usually do, which wouldn't be such.

A horrible thing, but.

Yeah.

Well, we'll start off with a little bit just, you know, we usually start off with a little bit of an economic impact. And again, if you're listening on the podcast, we're looking live on our screens today at the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution newsletter. And hey, Tom, I am going to tell you something really quick before we dive into that first article is I had this. I sent you this really cryptic picture the other day, right? And you're like, what on earth is this? And at the event I was at in Phenix, I had a great distributor. He's with us regular. I don't know if Duncan's here with us today, but he's up in Canada and he doesn't make it onto the broad live broadcast with us every week. But he reads the email first thing in, in the, in the morning on Fridays when it gets out. And he drew a little funnel. It was great. And I felt like I needed to tip him or something for how gracious he was. And he just drew squiggly lines at the top of the funnel. And he said, here's all the news and all the stuff and the newsletters that I get and all the things I, I just don't have time to read. And the nightly news, it's on at home. And then at the bottom of the funnel, it wrote, it said T and K. And he goes, on Friday mornings, Tom and Kevin are going to get me what I need to know. And he goes, I read the newsletter every single week and I try and make it to the show. So I don't know if Duncan's with us today, but thank you for that great compliment. And I was so appreciative of it. And Tom's looking at this, this picture. Then the text message I sent him was like, what on earth is that? But probably one of the best compliments we've had. So the news Funnel, all things.

We're going to be talking about funnels here in a little bit.

So first, first article today, right. Modern Distribution Management posted an article talking about August metal working orders. And we, you know, we kind of talk regularly. You know, Dan, if you think you've been with us a handful of times, listening in before, and we, you know, we look at this vacillating that's going on in the economy right now. What's the Fed going to do next? We've got, you know, what's happening with oil prices. It seems like last week the rest of the country plummeted and California state $6. But we look at a little bit of this and you know, we're kind of seeing the same thing. This talks about August output for metal working and these are barometers, right? We've got purchasing manager indexes, we've got this August metal working piece, four or five of these. We look at commercial construction, residential construction. But this comment about your net result is that for the third consecutive month, the gap between year to date orders in 2022 and 2023 is narrowed.

Right.

So while things have been pretty disparate so far this year and not a good year, that gap is narrowing right now. So that's a positive thing to see.

Yeah, I, you know, speaking of conversations, I did have a lot of conversations obviously at the Net plus show with distributors and certainly their mindset was, was bullish. You know, you've said this, Kevin, from your conversations and if anything they're a bit overwhelmed right now with the amount of work they've got and the amount of things and the, and it's been difficult to hire resources and keep resources. We heard that over and over and all of that. But so the issue was really keeping up more than not having enough to do. So that was a good, a good sign in general. Obviously there's other, creates other challenges. But it wasn't like, hey, I'm sitting around with not enough to do so that was not the issue at hand.

Yep, yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a conflicting market. Right. As it shows, right. Metal working orders up 16% over July. So demand continues to remain strong in the economy. But yet the Fed, you know, is, you know, very focused on, you know, raising rates and, and looking at the market and so forth. I mean, I think even yesterday the September, October news was that inflation remained pretty much the same, you know, for, you know, that, that next month. So I think it's conflicting for a lot of business owners, you know, the economy continues to Remain strong, but yet interest rates continue going up. So there's trepidation, but yet they, you know, there's movement in the economy as well.

Well, I think, think you're spot, spot on with that, Dan. And you know, I, I said this many, many times. I just, and again, I, I think we need to get my buddy Sean Dubervack on, who's pretty well known economist. He's the previously the chief economist for the Consumer Electronics association, so one of the largest trade groups in the world. And John's a keynote speaker and consultant now and he listens in here and there with us. But you know, I look at this as our go to market is different, right? Our customers buy different, the economy is different. How people, whether it's commercial or consumers, the processes of how people acquire goods and services, excuse me, are different.

Right?

The world we live in is different. But we're using this, you know, I've got a hammer, right? And if the only hammer you have is, you know, the Fed, and I know I'm, I'm grossly, you know, understating all this, but if the only hammer you have or the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? So now it's like, okay, well if our, if our fix, because this is the way we've done it for the last 90 years or whatever it is, is that we adjust rates and we don't look at all of these other things in the economy. Okay? So now we, here we sit right with you look at wholesale distribution, which is what this broadcast is all about, right. And everyone is bullish, you know, maybe, and we comment on this, I think last week, right, with Lindsay, Tom that was with us, is that, you know, maybe some people aren't going to do as much hiring as, as maybe they would like to. Maybe they're going to hold off on a few things or, you know, maybe they're not going to build that new building this year. But their businesses are strong, right? And, and yet we've got this sentiment out there that is based on, you know, I don't even know when the whole concept of 2% inflation and what the Fed was going to even know when all that started. But the world we live in is just hugely different. And it seems like there might be some models that could be adjusted that really would reflect what's happening in the market. Because Wall street doesn't care, right. You know, people are just pushing, pushing, pushing ahead in the markets. And then we talk about the customer bases that we talk to on A day to day basis. It's like maybe, maybe there's a better way to evaluate this stuff.

I'm sure there's a better way, but I think the best way to evaluate is just keep observing. Yeah. And be, you know, cognizant and don't get caught up in any one little sound bite along the way.

Are you suggesting, Tom, are you suggesting that I might not be hearing from Jerome Powell with wanting to talk about my ideas?

Oh, well, he's going to be on in a couple weeks. Right. We're having a mon. Talk about rate hikes. So.

Yeah.

All right, let's move on. That's great.

Yep. So, hey, we, we talked a couple of times in the last few weeks about the leading up to, and then now we're, we're deep into this autoworker strike. You know, we'll, we'll can kind of move on this fairly quickly. But, you know, it looked like things were getting better with this earlier in the week. Right. Last weekend. And there looked like there were some opportunities there. But then Wednesday, 8,700 more workers, you know, off the job at Ford's most profitable plant. I think the article said, what was it, 25 billion per year in revenue comes out of that one plant.

Plant.

Right.

So they, they've hit them at their, at their core. They're saying we're hitting at your core. And boy, it would be great for us to see this get taken care of soon because we're in that place now where it's impacting lots and lots of other businesses.

Yeah.

And I, and I think the, the, the, the thing today too in the US and it's been this way for a long time is, you know, the, the short term view. Right. Quarter to quarter to quarter. Right. And it, the decisions you make based on quarter to quarter versus years out are vastly different, Kevin, to your point of, you know, having a bigger picture, a broader picture of, you know, where things are going. And you know, that takes visionary leaders too, and strong leaders to be able to, you know, weather the short term noise, if you will, like you said, Tom, and the media and everything today. And I think having, you know, and again, a lot of pressure when you're a publicly traded company to perform quarter to quarter. So it's hard so sometimes to, you know, buck that trend. But I think in many instances that short term view sometimes does more harm than good overall.

Well, that's an interesting point you make, Dan, because we talked about this a little bit in, I think it was last week, might have been the week before. But you know, the, I think it was the chairman of our CEO of Ford talked about, you know, the, the level that this is at now being grossly irresponsible. He said, you know, we've, we've kind of hit a place where we're kind of plateaued about what we can do. I mean, I, I don't, you know, I, the idea of getting a 40% increase in pay and then getting a four day work week but paid for five and, and you know, and this is skilled labor, but it's not anyways, it's a, there's a question about whether that's a reasonable way to look at things. But his point now was that, you know, that move that just happened with these lockouts and the discussion of the additional ones, you said it puts a dozen other Ford facilities at risk as well as parts supply plants that together employ 100,000 people. Now again, our reason for being here is to talk about wholesale distribution. Wholesale distribution is what's bringing the conveyors into those plants. It's what's bringing the safety equipment into those plants. It's what brings the hose and fittings and the pipe valves and fittings and everything else that are used in all those auto plants, but also in the vendors or the suppliers of the automakers.

Right.

So you've got, you know, Ford, Ford does not make, nor does GM or, or Stellantis. They don't make seats, they don't make steering wheels. They assemble them that come from another company. And we've got all this trickle effect now as this stuff happens and there can be a pretty big impact. And you know, we, we mentioned this and I have kind of some strong personal opinions on this. But when you look at the Honda, that Toyota, I think it is BMW, Tesla, Rivian, all non union plants, right, that are now competing against these wages that are expected to come out of the big three, so to speak. Can they still be competitive? Will there still be a Ford in five years? You know, those are the questions that you got to ask when you start looking at, you know, and Tesla prices are coming down right now and Ford's gonna have to raise car prices to meet this stuff. So it should be interesting.

Yeah, well, we'll have to see how this plays out. Right. There's a, I think there's a lot of things, a lot of you talk about the story behind the story. I think there's a lot of stories behind the story that it's, it's complicated, let's put it that way.

But the Story behind the story for why we're here is every one of those plants gets deliveries every day, Right. From a wholesale distributor that has a staff that needs to get paid.

Absolutely. Yep. Hey, before we go on, I want to say good morning. Do we have a few more people coming on? Andy from Portland. I heard it was snowing there yesterday, actually.

Really?

Yeah. I think I was talking to somebody in Portland and Mary Ellen from Colorado Springs. Welcome. Farouk from Canada. Welcome. And Gehendra from Chicago. So cool.

Some new names here. It's awesome.

Yeah, it's great to. I just wanted to welcome people and thanks for jumping in. All right, so let's move on to.

Let's talk about something more interesting.

Yeah, Something more interesting here. So this E Commerce article, E Commerce drives up U.S. port activity. @ first I was like, huh, why.

Did you put that in there?

Pardon?

Said, why'd you put. You thought, why did he put that in there?

No, but basically what he's saying, right, is that E Commerce is basically, you know, as the growth of E Commerce, right, is causing more and more shipping, more and more logistics, all of that. But the thing that I really liked about this article, it wasn't so much about the fact that there's more shipping or more, you know, shipments that are happening, but the expectations by people that are expecting an experience with their shipping. And the quote in there was, people are expecting to be able to track their shipments the way they track their Uber. And, you know, we've talked about this a lot on our. On the show, right? Is that consumer experience is driving business experience expectations. So it's really, really interesting to see, again, another example of something that we do as consumers with Uber or whatever the case may be. Now as business people, we're like, well, hey, we want that for tracking our deliveries and tracking our whatever all the way along there. And I thought that was an interesting take on the.

On the point, and that's why I dropped that article in, right? It is this. You know, we talk about this constantly with our customers and. And really philosophically, right, With. With. With our technology that we make it at Lead Smart with our channel cloud, CRM and customer intelligence solution, right? It is about improving the customer experience. It really is the reverse of how other companies use CRM. Typically, CRM is gonna be Big Brother, right? Let's get our guys to follow up on their leads and type in their sales calls. And our view is, right, the reverse. It's like, let's flood those people with great information that will enhance and change the experience of the customer. And that customer intelligence solution now enables us to enhance the customer experience. Customers with an enhanced experience buy more salesperson gets more dollars in their pocket, loves using technology leadership, gets more data than they had ever wanted about what's going on. Right? So it's this beautiful circle and we talk about this constantly about the experience and customers. Tom, what's. You kind of follow this stuff closer than I do. What's the most recent number? Has Gartner or Forrester come out with anything new recently? About the percentage of millennials as B2B buyers still between 50 and 60%?

Yeah, between 50 and 60%, yep.

So different buyer has different expectations. And, and now we're talking about logistics companies looking at this and saying, wait a minute, you know what? We need to integrate software and technology into our organizations that will allow us to really see real time. Not, you know, clicking on the FedEx tracking number that says, you know, out for delivery. No, no, no, but deep data, right.

And seeing the little thing move, right? See your ship move or your train move or, or wherever it's going to be on those things. And it's just an ex. It's just what we expect. And I think that's again, what we, what we learn or behaviors that we get as a consumer is going to be carrying over, not just in our experience, but just in our buying behaviors as we're going to talk about in just a minute. Couple. I wanted to hit a couple things here and then Dan wanted to get your take on this as well, but wanted to shout out to Dan, Dan Judge from the founder of NetPlus Alliance. It was great to see him. I think he's also like the godfather of ERP too, right?

Or, you know, so just, I gotta, you know, Dan is not just the godfather of erp, I think, but he's just a great human being. And I, I had such a nice time with Dan last Saturday to the Net alliance event. Rode on the bus together. We chatted a lot. And, and I think I've got him convinced to come on the show with us. And. But I think what we're going to do is we're going to do a separate event. And because Dan was around in the early days of ERP and we were talking about last Saturday, it was great. I was, I don't know how he feels about this. I felt really fortunate because not only did we ride together and chat on the bus for a half hour, we went to topgolf and we were in the same group now. I, I sat and Watched Dan just hit the ball straight all day long and he watched mine go every different direction. But, but we talked about even how the way that they were using ledgers and cards and things for inventory and how they did that migrated into what we now know as ERP and even cloud based erp. And then Dan was around in the very early day of trade associations and buying groups. So I think, Tom, what the hope is, if we can convince Dan to join us, is that probably towards the end of the year, we'll do a bonus episode.

Okay.

And we'll, we'll have Dan on it.

The evolution of erp. It'll be a history lesson. Yeah. And. And I wanted to also spotlight Andy's point here is that, which I didn't realize is that prices are really dropping on freight. And I assume that's probably related to one of the conversations we've had in the past is that inventories and everything are up, warehouses are full, all of that stuff. So there's less stuff needing to come across combined with some of the reshoring and some of the other things. So. But the experience is there. Dan, any take on this one before we move on?

Yeah, I wanted to comment on the E Commerce piece too, because that always resonates. You know, I think of Mark Cuban's words when he says, you know, time is our biggest commodity nowadays. Right, right. And I figured. Yeah, right, exactly. So I always equate it both from a B2C and a B2B perspective. You know, as a personal consumer myself, if I can go on Amazon 95, 98% of the time and order my products and track their shipments, then that gives me more time to go play tennis or go take a walk or spend time with my wife. And it's, it's no different than in the B2B world as well. Right. If you're enabling technology the way it should be, you're freeing up more time. Right. You're reducing the redundancy and manual processes that we've all, you know, been encumbered with. If I could free up that time to spend more time, customer facing or doing better jobs of, you know, marketing my services or getting in front of a customer, then I've justified the cost of, of of the product or the technology because I'm able now to take, you know, that time or those hours in more productive ways. Right, Absolutely.

No, I think that's, it's interesting you mentioned it that way, Dan, as well. I was at, you know, last week, this is, I'm doing six out of eight weeks. I'm traveling right now and I was at an AI for Wholesale distribution conference in Chicago early last week and one of the early employees of Open AI and Chat GPT, you know, the company has produced that was there as one of the keynote speakers. And that was a big part of his discussion about AI was the ability to allow us to have more free time. Right. To pursue things we want to do. Not just to say now I've got free time because I did XYZ for me and now I can work more but get enough things done that we can take a step away and smell.

The roses so we can get to a four day workweek or a three day workweek and paid for.

Didn't they promise that like 20, 30 years ago that we were supposed to go to a four day. I remember hearing that all the time. Time.

Well, you know, you see so much of that.

Right.

But it's the, it's the four 12s, right, that you're doing as opposed to the, you know, the, the just a four day work week of a seven hour day. And yeah. So I'll let you know if we ever get to that point at Lead Smart Technologies. That'd be awesome.

And, and, and I'll come and meet you in my flying car when we're ready. Right. That, that was supposed to be another vision of the future. Right.

With the Uber.

Right.

The flying Uber is going to have, you know, basically these monster sized drones that are supposed to move people around. But you know, at Space Leaf Sprockets they're building George Jetson's hovering car. So you'll have it soon.

Okay.

All right, let's jump ahead.

Yeah. So this article, Complexities of B2B buyer journeys. Not anything I really have an opinion on.

That's, that's why it's here, Tom. I wanted to see what you could do.

Yeah. So you know, interesting point basically in here saying that the traditional marketing funnel is dead and relates to B2B. Yeah, I wrote a whole book on that topic. It's exactly. Has been the case for a while. And you know, I think there is. You are. We are. Dan, you were touching on this earlier a bit. Is more and more sales cycles. B2B sales cycles. And certainly in the world of software and technology is the. You have a lot of influencers. Right. In the past you always had, well, who's a champion? Who's the buyer and who's the. You know, and you kind of then try and work through that. But now there's so many people involved in a process that are maybe not even involved directly in the sales process, but they're influencing it and they're doing their own research, they're doing things, and then they're influencing the quote unquote champions or the people that are running that. You don't even know it. Right. You don't even know that those influencers are there. And so, but you have to take them into account. So therefore you have to know that when you're, you know, and this is what I say in the book, the funnel is dead. You're really just, you have two jobs as a seller or a marketer. You have a job of creating demand for your product or service and you have a job of building trust. And if you can do both of those things together, if you can build demand or create demand and build trust, you'll get opportunities. If you don't, then you won't. And so as you're building and creating demand and you're building trust, you have to look at it in a broader way than hey, I've just got my champion or the one person that's my buyer or whatever the case may be. And look at it way more holistically. I assume, Dan, in your world, you're seeing this very much as well.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Yeah, there, there's multiple decision makers, there's multiple influencer in companies nowadays. And, you know, it goes through, you know, a complete process when you're introducing software. But, you know, the thing I try to start out a lot of conversations with these influencers and buyers is that, you know, software is no different than making an investment in a delivery truck. If you're in wholesale distribution or a piece of equipment, that's going to help you process packages quicker and so forth. Right. But the funny part about software, that it's intangible, right? You know, you can't pick it up, you can't move it to a certain part in your business. It's an intangible object, if you will. So the point is, with any investment, there should be an ROI attached to it. If I buy a new piece of equipment, then I'm going to be able to process these many more pieces per hour. If I buy a delivery truck, I'm going to have that many more deliveries out there on the road, increasing my revenue and my income. The same thing should be true with software. You should be able to quantify and understand the ROI and the total cost of ownership so that it's a clear, it's clearly identified. So this is why I'm making the investment in this software and these are the benefits from a dollar value that I'm going to realize from it. And I think the buyer today is a lot more sophisticated when they come, when they're, when they're buying software that if you can present that up front even before you show them anything, any functionality with the software, they can begin to justify in their mind when it comes to the end of the process. Yeah, this makes sense. This is why I'm buying this or this is why I'm going to, you know, use this in my business. I think it, it, it's, if you can engage in that process early on, your success rate, I think, you know, increases drastically.

Good, I like that. So, you know, this article was, and got to remind ourselves all the time here, we need to talk about where this article came from because a big biggest percentage of our listeners are on the podcast now. And so this was from Marketing Week magazine. It was called it's not customer centric A B2B brands on why an alternative the funnel is needed. And you know, what triggered for me was. And so a little bit along the lines of what Tom was saying, but the article mentioned, you know, B2B buyers journeys are not linear. They're complex, they're changing. There's multiple people involved and they don't happen on the fly.

Right.

So we would like to think historically, well, here is our flow, right. And I mean we even do this at Lead Smart, right. We have, you know, our discovery calls and how we would like people to go through our process. And you know, they always say if, if the customer is in your process and it doesn't matter whether you're selling a hard hat or a piece of machinery or a piece of software. Right. If the customer isn't in your process, you're in their process. Well, that's what's always been said. I think there's somewhere in between where you both can end up being a little bit in each other's process because most of the time your customer actually doesn't have a true process. But I love this that it said these aren't linear. We'd like to see that we go from all of these stages in a nice, timely manner, but it's just not how things work. Especially, you know, with a modern buyer that is very different than what they've historically been.

It's not a linear process, it's an evolutionary process. Meaning that again, in the early stages, you probably don't know a lot about each other. There may or May not be demand, there may not be trust, but over time you want to evolve and move the buyer into more demand, into more trust. And no, it's not a linear A to B to C process. It's a whole series of things that come together on top of that. Right. As we all know, is that people are risk averse. And so you have to be able to also really help build that confidence that, hey, that, yeah, of course any purchase got risk associated with it, but the risk or the reward far out, raise the risk. And as a, as the seller or the person doing that is that you're there to support that. And I think that exists whether you're selling software or big equipment or any equipment, all of those things, you know, still apply.

And I think to your point too, Tom, those have to be reminded throughout the whole process. Right. Because the sales cycle can take three to six months, but it's easy to go from the beginning of that process to the end. But if you don't keep the goals and the objectives in mind throughout the process, it could kind of get lost in the shuffle along the way.

Yes. And I think, you know, early on I found that again, if you want to be looked at as the trusted advisor and the guide for what it's doing. Is your point. Yeah. You have to be able to not just talk about roi, but articulate why the ROI is there. But I think people more than ever are looking for a lot of the things that we just talked about earlier in the show is where is the market going? Where, where is the world going? How can I be a part of that? They don't know that that's not the world they're in. And having that, you know, guidance in that direction also helps that as well and build that trust. And if you can do that across more and more of the organization, therefore you, you know, can not only influence your main buyer, but also the other influencers that are, are part of that as well.

And those are hard conversations too because, you know, a lot of companies don't want to be forthcoming with, with, with gaps or, or weaknesses in their business where they're losing money. It's, it's a hard thing to address and, and come to the forefront with. So it's, it's, it's something you have to, you know, approach delicately and work with them, you know, as best you can and to, to build upon it and not expect, you know, them to have all the answers right away. Because it's, it's a learning curve for, for both parties. The Buyer and the seller.

I think that ties in, you know, nicely as well as, you know, there's so often. And again, this doesn't matter what you're selling, right. The three of us here happen to be involved in technology, but most of our, most of our guests that are with us today are on the distribution side of things. Right? And it makes, kind of makes me think about, you know, how important it is to know all of the people in the process too, because I think constantly about, you know, a question that I need to ask when we're talking to potential new users of our technology is, you know, is this a committee? Is this a process? Is, you know, how does, how does your process work? So we can adjust and encourage and, and coach and guide and it's, it's no different than, you know, if you're selling conveyor belts into a factory, right. There are different buying authorities within there. It's, it's really common that you'll see, you know, and I was in sales management and wholesale distribution and, and leadership for many, many, many years is, you know, you can ask the, the sales guy at that factory, you know, who are the buyers? And he says, oh, I got this great relationship, you know, with Judy Jones. Great. Well, how many other buyers are there that could pick out one of our other commodities that we sell, right? We just miss this because we don't understand and they, we don't understand how they're going about things. And that was the, no different in 1989. Right now we have these buyers that are going on four different websites, maybe even putting in how they're going to buy, you know, your solution into chat, GPT or another tool getting that data coming back to him. And this is that buyer that, you know, yesterday took his girlfriend on a date on in Uber and ordered doordash for lunch today and is looking at your product category on multiple websites. And he's going through his process and it's not linear to this point, right? He's going through his process and we don't even necessarily understand it unless we ask the right questions. And again, it doesn't matter what you're selling.

I call it the three Ds, right? The delay defer and detain, right? You start to engage in this process, Kevin, like you're talking about with the buyer and everything, you know, is going along as planned along the sales cycle. But then unforeseen, unforeseen things happen that maybe you're not aware of and maybe they're not communicating it and you're still kind of going down the same path. So a lot of times in the beginning of the sales cycle, I say, look, if at any given point in this process, something is going to take precedent or there's going to be a shift in direction, let us know sooner rather than later. Because we could pause the process and re. Engage with you, let's say three or six months later. Because if that's not communicated and there's not transparency, then me as the seller, I'm going to continue pursuing you not knowing that your priorities have changed. So, you know, I, I'm a big boy. If you tell me, hey, you got to hit the brakes, I'll hit the brakes. But I'd rather do that than constantly, you know, trying to call you and get on your calendar and so forth.

Well, that's funny you say that because then that impacts your own pipeline. Right?

Exactly.

Better. Better to know, right, and move someone to a different, to the previous stage of the pipeline or leave them where they are, right, Than be thinking you're going to move folks ahead. And we do that, you know, we. Something similar to that as well. But I think the key, right, is this article, you know, is back to buyers are changing high expectations of experience. It's not a linear process, right? It's, it's going to take some hiccups and move and multiple people involved. But understanding that is, is key. And you know, I, I just look at it, you know, back to, to the idea, you know that. And it's so interesting, right? So many of our customers within, whether they're in pipe, valve and fitting or plumbing, electrical, H vac, you know, their salespeople get up in the morning and put on a pair of boots and get in a pickup truck and go to construction sites. Oftentimes, right. Doesn't matter whether you're selling SAS software or you're selling, you know, fire sprinkler pipes for a hospital, that buyer is changing, right? And that's what we have to get our head around. And we need to prepare to change how we do things as well.

Well, Dan, what were those three Ds again?

Delay, defer and detain.

And is that sort of like a ground rule that you try and establish with a customer, a prospect early on that, hey, if you have any of these 3Ds, please let me know so that we don't end up out of sync? And I think that's a great, a great little tool that anybody can use that kind of can help set some common ground?

Yeah, no, we do. We Try to deploy it, Tom, and bring it up, you know, very early on in the conversation so that if, you know, if something does happen or they have a change in direction, to let us know. And we'll be happy to hit the pause button and then regroup with you when it's a better time.

Right. And it makes it safe to do that rather than just ghost you and not say anything, so.

Exactly right. I mean, every salesperson, you know, that's been involved in sales for, you know, a number of years knows that, you know, ghosting is alive and well. Right. So to try to avert it and, and, you know, point out up front, I think it helps a lot.

All right, so a little bit. Well, let's do this tech talk piece briefly here. Thompson. This one's an article about customer data is king. We talk about data, we talk about dirty data. We talk about this stuff all the time. This was an article that talked a little bit about collecting customer data, doing it safely and legally as well.

I think it was pretty. Pretty basic ways, I think things that people are doing now. But I think it was a good article to kind of, if you're in, you know, marketing, to look at this and go, okay, am I following the right legal policies and so forth and getting that data? Am I, you know, properly using that data based on what I told the customer or the prospect that I would be using it for, you know, how to collect it, whether you're collecting it on web forms or emails or whatever the case may be. So, and I do think that, again, as we start to look at data as this fuel right for AI and what we're doing, really having more provenance on where your data is coming from, having more, you know, understanding of ui. Have I collected that data properly? Am I going to have a problem? Potentially, I think as the data becomes more and more valuable in different places, it is more important to possibly have more prudence on how you're going about that and being aware of it. I know a lot of companies don't have a lot of prudence on where they're getting that data or how they're going about it.

So isn't that for sure? You know, it brings a. Excuse me there. It brings up kind of a question for me. And it's. This is maybe a little bit off topic here, but Dan, if you have some background in this, dive in as well. But Tom kind of, you know, owned partners in a digital marketing agency for a while before we started Lead Smart. And, you know, I look at the, you know, GDPR that the EU has and, you know, that governs, you know, electronic communications in Europe or EU countries. And you know, we don't have anything like that in the U.S. right. We got, California's done their CCPA, Virginia has something, and Colorado has a privacy act. But I live in California. I don't know anything about California ccpa. I hear about GDPR constantly. I don't hear about this state thing. And we don't have anything global for the country. What do you think is behind that, Tom?

I just don't, I just don't think it's enforced and it's just spotlighted as much as it is in some of the other areas, that's all.

But I mean, you would think we would have something more, more restrictive, more structured as a, as a country, right. Like you're looking at with, you know, gdpr, because GDPR is pretty, pretty structured and rigid and the fines can be crazy for doing bad things. And you know, I mean, I don't know about you guys, I probably had at least three spam text messages this morning, right. With things. And things are just getting worse in that setting now with AI coming into things, it's going to be that much more so it's intriguing to me because you've got the US Government looking so closely at Meta, Apple, Google, wanting to engage closer with them, maybe even apply some regulations with them, but we have nothing nationally from a data standpoint. Yeah.

And that may or may not come as part of all of this. I, I think that we've talked about this before. If you look at data and you look at your, how you manage your data through three places. Privacy, meaning, you know, who should have access to see it at all. Security as to who should, if even if it's not private data, who should have access to it and who shouldn't. And then integrity, which is where did the data come from? And I think that's, you know, is that data actually true data? Is it factual data? Is it just somebody's opinion? Is it something that somebody made up? Right. We have to be able to have some awareness of that. And I think even going back to what we're talking about with ERP and transactional data and so forth, right. What data is, you know, private? What data do we need to secure and what's the integrity of that data if we're going to use it to fuel other things that are down the line? But yeah, who knows what's going to happen on all of this as we, as we go forward?

Good.

Well, thanks for that, Tom. And you know, as we kind of wind this down now, we've got a segment that we have each week and again if you're listening on the podcast, we're on our screen here. For those that are live with us, we're looking at a newsletter we send out every week. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to comes out early every Friday, it's early for us here in California. Email us. It's hello lead Smart tech dot com. We'll get you signed up for that or go straight to www.aroundthehornpod.com. you can see all the previous episodes there. Beautiful picture of Tom and Kevin and you can sign up for the newsletter there and you would get that. So each week we have a feature called Industry Scuttlebutt. A couple things going on out there, some interesting partnerships with the DPA which is Distributor Partners Association, I guess it is Buying group partnered up their Industrial and safety partnered up with an auto parts distributor. That's kind of interesting stuff. We usually post something here about Fastenal and Grainger and the other msc and the other publicly traded wholesale distributors. Fastenal having a solid quarter. But the last one here kind of talked about smart equip and building an E commerce venue or their own marketplace. We are talking more and more on a consistent basis about marketplaces and and not just Amazon but vertical specific marketplaces and you know, marketplaces for chemicals. There's marketplaces for, you know, many, many different products. We're going to continue to see more of that and if we're in wholesale distribution we need to be prepared to participate with those marketplaces. So any thoughts on those articles at all from you guys?

No, I think just kind of again align with a lot of stuff that we've seen and obviously to be E commerce isn't going away. Yeah. Get less so good.

So two last things we've had a special feature this week. Industrial Distribution does their big 50 top industrial distributors in the country there. Andy Mitchell from Mallory is here with us and Mallory certainly plays into that. They're moving up higher on that list every year. That's if you're in the wholesale distribution world and anything related to industrial industrial safety keeping an eye on that list is good. Some of the usual suspects there but sometimes some people move up on that list that might not be recognized as well. So we do a feature each week as well in the newsletter. Again it's called this one's called A good Read. And this week it's the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says what separates successful people from everyone else comes down to two words. And at the core of it all is emotional quotient versus intelligence quotient. Right. How am I as a leader? How am I emotionally? The one quote Mike took away from this was, in the long run, EQ trumps iq. Without being a source of energy for others, very little can be accomplished. So usually in this segment in the Goodreads, we're talking about something related to leadership or personal development. I thought this one was a good one. Good. A good read across the board. They hit on three things. Give people a voice, lead with authenticity, and acknowledge that you don't know everything.

Okay. We can acknowledge I don't know everything. Really?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

You heard it. You heard it here.

All right, Dan, any takeaways on that last article there?

I. I think, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, for me personally, always in learning mode. Right. Either from my colleagues or customers or, you know, people in general, there's always something new to learn.

Yep. You know, this is, again, this was from an Inc. Magazine article, but it was quoting Satya Nadella from Microsoft CEO. And I had an opportunity to. I ran into him at, at the Consumer Electronics association event about, probably within about a year after him starting. So it's probably six, seven years ago. And we were literally in the Samsung Pavilion. Now, he had his entourage and bodyguards, but you had to look for them. But he was literally just chatting away and about. You know, I think it was one of the first times that Samsung was showing a. A connected refrigerator and, and I was standing right next to him and he was pointing things out and chatting and, and everybody was engaging with him and, well, you know, and again, his entourage was over here. But he's a. He's an engaging person. I'd love to have an opportunity to kind of do that again or be around somebody like that. I didn't recognize who he was at first, and then I kind of clicked in on it and then it became a buzz because he was there, but he was just out with the rest of us looking at new tech.

That's. That's. You're making me think when you mentioned that about. There was used to be comments about Bill Clinton, the former president, that if you, if you met him, he would make you the sole. The sole focus. You'd be the most important person in the room. And that's how you felt, you know, walking away after having a conversation. And I. It's kind of like what you were saying it's a unique skill when, when you could, you know, have conversations like that and make feel, you know, make someone feel like they're the most important person.

Well, people are people, right? So that's. So as we wind up today, we've got some upcoming events. I think the, the key ones here that benefit mostly our audience is that we've got the ISA Industrial Supply Association Fall Summit is next week in Orlando. Unfortunately, it conflicted this time around for Affiliated Distributors North American Electrical meeting, which is going on in Dallas. And so that's where I'll be. I'm not sure if I'll be on crutches or not, but that's where I'll be. And we've got Power Transmission Distributors association meeting coming up in Florida next week as well. And then the week after that is National Safety Congress, where a lot of people that join us each week here are going to be at. So a lot of good events coming up. If you're wanting to stay on top of what's going on in wholesale distribution and relevant events, make sure you're getting the newsletter each week because we try and update that on a consistent basis.

All right, Dan, thank you for being here today. Great insights. Look forward to hearing more from you. And, and as we move forward in this journey and what's happening with erp, I think it's going to be a, a very much a focal point over the, in the next coming year for sure.

Thanks, Tom. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Of course, I appreciate your contributions. You know, I think that, Tom, you made that point earlier today that it's a big conversation that we have consistently, you know, there we, we meet, you know, quarter billion dollar a year companies on a consistent basis that are operating on an ERP system that's 15 years old and the platform that's on there, you know, that that's built on is extremely antiquated and times are changing, technology's changing. We're going to need to make those adjustments.

So absolutely good to have you and.

Your organization out there. And so that's it. Yep, that. That's it for today. Anything else, Tom?

No, thanks everybody who jumped in on the commenting. Yeah, Brian. Thanks everybody for sticking around and have a good weekend. And Kevin, stay off those big waves.

Yeah, there you go.

All right, see you.

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