Why Tech Strategy, Changing Buyers, and eCommerce Go Hand In Hand

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.

So. Hey, Tom, good to see you this morning. How's your morning so far?

So far so good. It's nice and sunny here. Rare sunny day here in Santa Barbara.

Well, and yesterday you had rain and snow just out the window, right? Yep, yep. Just up on the hill behind the office. That's, that's astounding. Well, I think we may be moving our way into springtime here in Southern California. So let's, let's hope for that I can envision shorts and flip flops on Friday mornings here soon. All right, so good. Well, hey, let's, before we get started, just wanted to welcome everybody. My name is Kevin Brown. This is Tom Burton. We are lifelong friends. We're also the co founders of Lead Smart Technology. Lead Smart is a leading CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform that is built specifically for manufacturers and wholesale distributors. And so we host this event every week both live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook Live. And then a few hours later, it's available on all the popular podcast formats. So we're happy to have you with us today. If you're listening on the recorded version or on the podcast, you don't get an opportunity to ask the questions, but you can always do that by reaching out to us directly. And you can do that at Lead Smart Technologies on any of those platforms I mentioned or at an email address of helload smart tech.com. we're always looking for ideas for feedback, for things to talk about, guests to have. So if you'd like to make some suggestions, that would be great. For those of you who are listening but not watching, what we do in this broadcast every week is we review through the highlights of the week in wholesale distribution, the economy, technology, and we relate that back to what's going on and how that impacts wholesale distributors and manufacturers in that arena. So what we're reviewing through is actually this email newsletter. It's called around the Horn. It goes out to a few thousand people every Friday morning early. If you're not getting that, just let us know@helloadsmartech.com or a direct message on any of the social platforms. We'll get you added to that, but wanted to give a little bit of background of what we're reviewing for those people that are listening and not watching.

Good point, good point.

Get my housekeeping done.

Good job. And good morning to Mike, good morning to Brian. Brian has a slick new picture, it looks like on his LinkedIn.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's, that's an executive look, look there. Yeah.

So good morning to everybody. All right, so let's jump in.

Yeah, let's talk about the news this week that goes out in that newsletter I just mentioned. So, you know, interesting to kind of get the conversation started is this article about small businesses weighing their banking options. You know, with the meltdown of some of the smaller banks, Signature bank, Silicon Valley bank. In the last few weeks, a lot of changes have been going on. People are taking a look at, you know, and businesses are taking a look at both day to day working capital and their treasury needs and so forth. So this was a pretty good article to get started on today.

Yeah, yeah. I mean that, you know, the whole Silicon Valley, that whole bank thing. Right. Is a great example of somebody not worrying about it because, or worrying about your bank because you didn't think it could happen. Nothing's broken until it happens.

Yeah, right.

And it happens. So it happened so suddenly. I think that was what was, you know, and we know people that were personally affected by that and you know, spent really a tumultuous weekend that first weekend wondering what the heck was going to happen with their, with their company and their firm. But yeah, I think it again, it's a wake up call to, and I know we've looked at it as a wake up call to look at, you know, just, and it's not just banking.

Right.

It's just looking at things that you may take for granted that just seem like they're not broken and that you just don't need to worry about it and everything's going to be fine. Yet one little hiccup like that can literally is one of our customer said was an extinction event. Right. Because of the, the bank.

The risk of it was.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's really important to look at those things in your business, whether it's, whether it's banking or anything that you're doing and you know, don't just take it for granted and, and look at things that, you know what could happen. At least be somewhat aware of it as far as what could happen going forward. And I think that was a good, in some ways A good wake up call for, for companies and people. And now people are spending a lot more time thinking about how to intelligently deal with any of their treasury and their capital and so forth.

Well, you know, it's interesting, right? It's to your point of, you know, you don't think about it until you have to think about it and something happens, right? And it's that mindset of well, nothing's broken, so I'll go about my day. And, and that makes good sense. However, right? If, when we look back in retrospect at all of this that's going on, is there a better place for some, some of your treasury money or just, you know, non, non working capital, so to speak? Locke, you don't even need to talk about fancy words, right? You got day to day operational dollars each week that you need in each month to operate your organization. And then many organizations are sitting on, you know, big chunks of cash anywhere, you know, from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions, at least in our audience. And, and what are we doing with that money now all of a sudden, you know, there's all of these, you know, opportunities to go earn 4 and 5% in short term notes out there. It's like, hello, ring, ring, ring, right? Where should that money be? And a lot of people are getting woken up to that right now.

Better yet, just take that money and spend it on technology, right? Then you don't have to worry about it sitting in the bank and then.

There'S your return on investment comes quick, right? It's a whole lot more than 4 or 5%.

That's right, exactly.

You know, it's funny you say that, right? It just, it triggers for me, I was on the phone yesterday with one, one of our customers, right? And so it's astounding. They've been on our platform for, you know, I hate to plug this, but I will. But because it's, it's the investment part that you were just talking about and is, you know, they, his comment was they're 30% ahead of where they were this time last year and they're 20% ahead of their plan for this time for the end of the Q1, right? They just made a major investment in a huge technology change. Change that brings insights into their customers, their man. They're closing more of their quotes, they're driving more business out of their closed quotes because they invested in some technology, right? They paid for, in this discussion I had yesterday. They paid for that technology investment in less than 45 days, probably even less Than that.

Yeah.

And, and you know, they did it right. They had a plan, they worked with a good vendor, they, you know, went through all of these things. But it's interesting. Right. There is a good return to your point. So we'll talk more about technology as we go on today. But I thought that it was just interesting to kind of get a look at this. You maybe it's a little wake up call for all of us even personally, you know, thinking about, you know, where, where our cash is. So.

Yeah, no, and I agree with Mike's point here is to summarize. Well, right. Invest in your business and create your own roi.

Yep.

Not that that was where we were going with this article, but there you're right about a lot of people, you know, with money on the sidelines that, you know. Yeah. You can figure out where to put it. There's nothing wrong with that and having reserves. But also look on where you can do that to drive the business.

Yeah. Great comment by Mike Lauer. Thank you for that. That makes a lot of sense. But you know, it's, that's why we're here. Each week, right. These, these topics pop up, they generate further discussion. Audience pipes in. It. It's of value to everybody to, to kind of share these thoughts. So.

Good.

Well, back to technology investments. It kind of goes to the next article. Right. There's, there's a, a nice interesting piece of. I won't say nice. It's a, it's, there's disappointing news in it, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. This article that talks about, you know, this came from Modern Distribution Management. Tom Gale and Mike Hockett and all the team over there published this, but it was some research from PricewaterhouseCoopers. And the title of that article is executives say that Supply Chain Technology Investments haven't delivered yet. And I thought this one was a good one. So let's kind of unpack this a little bit. If you haven't read this yet. And again, if you're listening in, but don't get the newsletter from us, just let us know. Interesting study that they did. You want to kind of dive in on this and I'll follow you in.

Well, it's, you know, it's the same sort of story. I guess you hear a lot with inter. With more enterprise type technologies is, you know, a lot of money invested in not expectations not met. Right. So either it's not working the way they expected or thought or it's taking longer to do it's cost More money to put into place or, you know, it's just not working at all. Right. You know, typical things that you see, we've seen for many, many years, my whole career and enterprise technology, the what I, this goes back to the same thing I see over and over, which I, I have been preaching my whole career, is that, you know, and this is unfortunately what happens, right, when companies, you know, look at software and they see demos from vendors and, and all of that and they believe that what they see in the demo is to a large degree could just magically appear in their organization. Right, right. And what the demo is really is a potentially what, what it could be in the organization, not what it is. And what they tend to overlook is the project that's involved to get it from there to there. And it's not just technology. It's. It's change, right? It's the change that has to go on. It's the adoption, it's the training. It's all of those things that, that go along the way. But sometimes because the demo looks so sexy, it's easy to overlook the need to do the project. And in fact, some vendors will, some vendors will actually, you know, look at, you know, say, oh, no, it's just, you know, plug and play, right. And then it sets a false expectation of sort of this automagic implementation. So I think, you know, it comes back to a lot of the same challenges that have existed for a long time with enterprise. And then unfortunately, the bad side of it is it creates that bad taste that, oh, technology doesn't work or this isn't a good. It's just like, I wish we should put our money in the bank. Right. Rather than spending money here.

Well, that's, that's spot on. Right. And, and you know, you, you tell me when I talk to customers and partners of ours about, you know, oh yeah, we can do this or we can do that. You use that phrase with, with me and others in our organization all the time, is that this stuff just doesn't happen by auto magic, right? It's work has to be done in the background to get these things done. And I think that's one of the challenges. We were, I was on the phone a couple of months ago with a company that we had been introduced to that had just bought, you know, what we call off the shelf and blank, blank canvas type technology. And they went, and they had spent close to six figures on this project. Went in, I would call it, they went in eyes wide shut as what they did because they thought they were buying what they saw in a demo. To your point, I talk to customers all the time and I tell people this, we've said it before here, even on this broadcast is when you're buying technology and it doesn't matter what it is when you're buying technology. My point to people is the number one most important question you can ask the vendor is what does the software do versus what can it do? Show me what I would get day one and then how would I get to what you want to show me it can do? Because as we talk about all the time, right. And I think this is probably a little bit of background that probably would have come out of this study if some different questions were asked would be people went in, right, thinking they knew what it could do. They didn't have a goal or a plan, they didn't have an outcome that they wanted to achieve out of all of that, and they didn't know how they would get there to start off with.

Yeah, no, the, again, this comes from many years of living through it. Right. The implementation project itself is the most important part of it. Assuming that you have a reasonably decent technology, the implementation process that you go through is going to determine the outcome that you achieve.

Yeah.

It's not the software that's going to achieve that for you, it's the implementation and the onboarding and the adoption and all of that. So I would, again, I didn't go into a lot of detail on, you know, why these haven't delivered, but just reading through the lines between the lines there, I believe that's a lot of what has happened and, you know, ends up happening as we learn from. And then we go back and go, hey, we got to do it better next time. And then there becomes sort of that iterative process on the whole thing.

Well, let's, let's look at some of the stats that they put into this though, because I think it is interesting and a lot of our listeners don't have access to this, this article per se, but what we know, right, from a series of different research articles you can find is somewhere between 60 and 75% of CRM implementations fail to achieve a desired outcome. Right. In this study they, I think there was 400 and some companies that they talked to the executives in and this was specifically about focused on supply chain technology. Write what they're using before it gets to the salespeople's hand. There's a finished good. It said 75% of these implementations didn't achieve their goal. 14% of them were actually cancelled before they even started without any results. 31% didn't meet their objectives, 43% of them exceeded their budget, and 49% exceeded the agreed upon time frame.

Okay.

And it says only 15% were delivered on time as planned. So you know that, that goes back to what we talk about all the time.

Right.

About people having an understanding of what a tech stack is. Right. What do I need in my organization if. And we're working with a very large distributor right now in the northeast that is working on this. They're working on what does their tech stack look over the next five to 10 years. Right. And they're looking at which products do we have that are going to integrate together to bring me all of the things that I need within my organization. So I think that becomes a big part of it because I think if you would peel this onion a little bit further on a lot of these just people didn't go in with an article, even talks about starting with an end in mind. What do we want to achieve? What are we expecting out of this? And how does this work with a broader tech stack?

Yeah. And again, the company you just mentioned, though, yes, they are doing all the things you just described, but they also appreciate that there is a project involved here.

Yeah.

To accomplish it. It's not just going to be, again, automagic. So I think that's important because I think when sometimes people realize there's a project. You talked about 14% not even starting.

Yeah.

A lot of that comes from, oh my gosh, there's a project here, there's work. We don't have the resources, we don't have that. We didn't think about that part of it. And then it ends up with shelfware as it goes. Yep.

Anyway, so the last thing I wanted to mention in this, that I thought that was very valuable in this article though, it talked about building of the workforce that can adapt to different types of technology. Right. And when we, we talk about this almost every week, we talk about the changing world. Buyer in B2B. Well, the ch. The, the seller in B2B is changing too. And we talk regularly about that. You know, companies need to digitally transform and be thinking about hiring people that are going to be able to digitally transform as well with your organization. And we, you know, are hearing all the time now about people saying, you know, we're, we're interviewing people and they're asking us what technology we have in the business as well. So, you know, building that workforce that this, that is technologically adept for where you're going to need to get, because the world's changing, you got to just decide if you're going to go along with it. Yep. So good stuff.

Yeah. And I'll just, I'll highlight Tom's point here. You know, he's absolutely right. The discovery stage of a tech needs to take into account the customer and whether the software can communicate it with it.

Right.

Again, all of that goes into the overall project that is here, you know, and so there's a, there's a little bit of a multidimensional piece. And you know, we've lost, we have lost deals in the past. Right. At Lead Smart because somebody came in and said, oh, it's just, you know, a competitor came in and just said, oh, it's just going to drop in there, don't worry about it. And we're talking about, hey, there's a project here and there's an implementation and we've seen those fail or not go there. Right. Because of that. And I really do, again, it's the, the companies that are going to succeed appreciate the journey that is required to get there. And it doesn't have to be absurdly expensive. It's just a journey to go through to actually do that. So.

Well, you know, it's interesting too, I, I would guess bet in this article, you know, spending a lot of time here, but it's valuable is that in these settings, I would be willing to bet you that every one of these implementations that you talk about with these struggles that they've had, are tying back to that number we use all the time. Right. About one and a half to four times the this kind of industry average of the cost of the software for implementation. So, you know, these people didn't just invest in software they invested in, especially if they're having discussions with PwC about how it all went. They probably brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers or EY or whoever it might be, and 15 people at $200, $300 an hour for nine months, you know, and you've got 4x the cost of the software and it didn't work. Yeah, big deal.

Well, that's a different discussion we could have today is a bit about the model of vendors and service companies at the enterprise level. That's pretty broken itself. But aside from that, again, if you're not looking at again that there's a journey here, there's a project, there's other things you certainly are way, you know, you have no chance of succeeding if you're expecting that auto Magic that we talked about.

You know what Tom, I'm just a little off topic here but that you mentioned that a whole nother discussion. Let's maybe plan a day soon where we just do another, just to record another session and maybe we could get. I'm going to put them on the spot here, but we're getting together in three weeks in, in Phoenix. Will Quinn, that's with us here from Infor, maybe get Will, if he was open to it, to join us and we'll do maybe a 20 or 30 minute chat on the challenges of implementations and you know, and what he sees from his company. So Will, if you're up for that, let's, let's talk about that further when we're together and, and maybe we just do another recording of that because you know, Will's bouncing around the country, you know, in for his company is one of the largest and most well known and well liked ERP system within wholesale distribution. So maybe put our heads together on how people can improve at that. Yep.

All right, let's continue.

Yep, very good. Visual commerce.

Yeah, I thought this was pretty cool. You know, we talk about, you know, I think we've talked about the Metaverse a couple of times. We certainly have talked about blockchain and this whole idea of visual commerce, as it says, introduced by the gaming world. Visual commerce technology is making its mark in B2B digital commerce. Well again, that is now moving. I think they even talked about it in there as eventually the whole AR VR, augmented reality, virtual reality aspect of things, all of those types of things. But even the most simple things is just being able to look at a product or something. You're looking online, drill into it, move around with it, play with it virtually. I definitely believe that is going to be the future of, of E commerce is. And I will go one step further and say it's not just visual commerce, it's experience commerce. Right. How do I experience.

You heard it here, right?

Much like you would do if somebody came into your, to your shop or to your, you know, your manufacturer floor or whatever and showed you a product and you can pick it up and tear it apart and all that kind of stuff, right? Being able to replicate that in a virtual world. That's an experience that is in, in my opinion where the future is headed. And again, it starts on, you know, talking about some of the other technologies, whether it's AI blockchain, the underlying technologies that enable that. But this is the experience that will be, will be coming for sure and is here.

Well, look this is, we talk about this all the time, right. There's some days I feel like, you know, we're a CRM and customer intelligence company, but we spend half our time talking about E commerce on, on the broadcast here. But I think this simple example of this that they use in the article and I think, well, if you're not older like I am the and you don't wear glasses, then you wouldn't have seen this. But if you wear glasses, you have probably seen online the opportunity where you can try on frames, right? Right. On a picture of you. Right. They have this interactive experience where you can upload a picture of yourself and put a pair of glasses on. Now I don't think it works that well yet, but I can guarantee because I haven't tried it in a year. So I guarantee you it's getting better every day. Same thing about having a picture of your living room and dropping a couch in to your own living room that you're seeing online and considering buying. And that's that clarity. They use this term buyers look for clarity as they step through the online customer journey, right. It's in. The reason this caught my attention to, to share and discuss this today was so many wholesale distributors that we talked to and we're working with and manufacturers are working on their E commerce solution, right. And whether it's a manufacturer that's just really working hard to get detailed product information online even though they're selling through distribution or it's distributors that are transacting through E commerce the days. And we just unfortunately we see a lot of this. We see some people that are way ahead of the curve. We see some people that are trying to catch up to the curve and then we see this big center of that bell curve, right. Of people who have older static images of a screwdriver, right. But maybe a screwdriver is a bad. Maybe a gearbox might be better, right? But then that next level is when that gearbox is exploded and you see all the components and what the part numbers are for the components inside that gearbox, it could also be purchased, right? And when we start looking at this from a differential differentiated state view, right. Is just showing a picture of a gearbox is not going to be enough to thrive long term in e commerce.

And B2B well goes back to the same thing, right. Buyers are wanting to do their own research, right? Research. It depends, you know, you could define what is depth of research, right. And, and we want to keep doing more and more of our own research and our own analysis and our own. So we want as much information as possible to complete that research. It's just, it's another layer, I guess deeper in that process of doing that. But it's also again creates an experience. I think there's a plus side here that really creates a really, really compelling experience. Right. I have static picture only creates a certain level of experience. But this really allows you to create an experience and a deeper understanding. I think it'll be great for software as well. I think you're going to be able to have much more interactive. You know, the problem with software trials is if you give somebody a login in the software trial, there's, there's really very difficult to guide that experience.

Right.

And generally it doesn't work well. It generally doesn't end well.

Right.

But if you could provide an experience for somebody technology wise to understand and move around and do the things that you're talking about here, it doesn't just have to be hard goods. It can be software or really anything that you're doing, even service, even training things. I mean the sky's the limit in my opinion in terms of that interactive experience that's going to be possible.

Well, it's what's interesting, right, this article, if you had a chance to read it, right. This article starts off from the discussion point. You know, a lot of this was introduced by gaming, right. And, and so now you know, it's. This is migrating into things and it just brings me back I think middle of the middle of the pandemic, the Industrial Supply Association's one of their virtual events. We were at and I remember in one of the breakout rooms one of the gentlemen from Fullerton Tool, it's a cutting tool company was talking about. They are, we're having virtual reality goggles at some of their customers that they were sharing data of what's happening at a tool, right. Because it couldn't go into the plant. Their, their product engineers couldn't get out there because of COVID to, to help and support. So you're seeing some of these things start to take. Taking effect. But you know, now you can in the article talked about this, right. If you start looking at, you know, MRO or maintenance, repair and operating supplies companies, right. If you can, could in theory even have an engineer or a plant manager that has, you know, AR headgear on, right? And they could see the solution that you're looking to provide in their own organization, right. And that doesn't mean you have to supply those AR headgear, right. You just, they might have their own and they can plug into your system, bring that data in, and now they can see that tool working in their shop floor. They can see that storage, you know, system that you have proposed for them in their own facility and they can walk around it. Even right now. The metaverse starts to become real, real life, real world in wholesale distribution, especially in the MRO arenas it's talking about here.

I would say it's great, great application.

So, yeah, very good.

All right.

Walmart coming to a business near you.

Yeah, I don't, I haven't seen their site. I wonder what kind of experience that is. You know, I haven't, I haven't seen it, but I, my guess is it's probably not the best experience at this point, but they're trying to get themselves in the game.

Well, I gotta, I, I don't know, I haven't looked either. Here's what I'm gonna throw out to you and I'm gonna. It starts with a question. Where's the closest Walmart to your home?

It's probably 45 minutes away. 45, 50 minutes away.

I'm 15 minutes away. Okay. Walmart doesn't have the presence in our life that it has in the rest of the country where we're at in Southern California.

True.

Right. Because we, you know, if we pulled, you know, we've got, as I just kind of look at some of the people who have commented this morning, right. We've got, you know, Illinois, we've got Massachusetts, we've got the Carolinas, we've got people from all over different pockets of the country. And, and I know our regular listeners are probably dispersed people that I just know that listen regularly 30 plus states. Walmart's a much bigger factor in their life. And what Walmart. I think my takeaway from this article is where were these people? Buy their eggs, right. And, and I've had to do this over a period of time because we had an opportunity with some consulting I did a number of years ago of working with Walmart.com Walmart.com has probably 4,000 square feet of engineering space in Carlsbad, just south of us, and they've got like three floors of a building in Silicon Valley that is just around the dot com side of Walmart for the B2C experience. Hundreds and hundreds of people on that side of it and having sold to that side of it before, wore in a previous life and put some projects together, very sophisticated people. I think they're probably looking at. This is a big percentage of B2B buyers also buy their Milk and their eggs or their you know, winter coat here. And they're used to that experience. So I'm going to be interested to.

Watch this one because that's, that, that's a great point. I, I think that what you're saying right in the right area is it's leveraging the mind share that they already have.

Exactly.

And rather than go and it says here small and mid sized businesses rather than even going to Staples or ordering on Amazon or something like that. If I've already got the mind share. And again I don't know a lot about Walmart. Maybe there's rewards programs and loyalty programs.

There's all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

All that kind of stuff that further. And I'm sure they didn't do this without a lot of research.

Oh no.

You know thought as well. So.

Yeah. Yep. Then I, I think it's a, you know they, they talk in here. Right. They're vying to start with with Staples and Costco but then later in the article they talk about Amazon. Right. And, and there's been all kinds of stuff in walls, you know throughout.

Yeah.

B2C analysts across the board, especially E commerce analysts on Wall street for a number of years now who have said if there is one organization out there that could truly ever challenge Amazon it's Walmart. Because of the footprint of stores. There is already a loyalty to those, those people from the. For so many of their shoppers already. So I think that the idea though of buying at Staples and Costco first for printer paper, printer cartridges, know things like that. But just as a side note when I worked with them and gentleman I called on there is now another company but he's with us here and there. You know Tom May saying Here, you know Walmart.com operates just like Amazon. Right. They in their marketplace does. To his point. Right. We you could go place products there as a third party seller. Just like you in drop ship. They can drop ship for you, you can drop ship to their customers. So a lot of tools there. But what I was selling to them and putting a whole package together for them on the dot com site was category cable. Right. It was ethernet cables, it was coax cables, it was splitters and connectors and all of those types of things and they had whole teams of people. They probably had eight to 10 people just doing low voltage electrical stuff. Right. So I think they're poised. I'm looking forward to seeing what know what comes of this.

Well you heard it here first so there you go.

Yeah. If you haven't listened to Wall street talk about this in a while. You know, it's, but they, they talk about it and they're, you know, they're, I think Amazon is, you know, Amazon went after Grainger.com there's, they've said that. Right. Granger was in the MRO space in particular. Granger had that growing for years. They were doing quite well with it in that space and Amazon went after that. Right. And then now Amazon has continued to expand upon it and at The Fortune probably 50 level, even Walmart says here they're going to start off at small and mid sized businesses. And I'm intrigued to watch this because I think it would be healthy for specifically B2B that we talk about, but I think it would be healthy for our, for all of us if somebody took a good run at Amazon. Give them a run for their money.

Sure. All right, well let's wrap up here on the, on our E commerce experience thing with the digital self shelf strategy which I think really ties more to what we were just talking about with the interactive experience. But to me it all kind of comes together is, you know, it's not just once you find a product, how do you explore that product, but how do you shop?

Yep.

Right. How do you provide the ability to easily find or even discover maybe the better word, not just find, but discover something that you wouldn't have even known that existed. And again, that's a whole nother strategy versus just, you know, traditionally. Right. E commerce has been more search based. I look for something, I go to that page, I buy it. I mean if you look at Amazon, it's built predominantly from that search perspective. Right. Versus hey, I'm gonna go browse or I'm gonna go roam around a store and you know, see what's there.

Well, you know, it's interesting. I thought we might get through the whole day today and we were close without saying chatgpt. But if you think about search. Right. Is, and you talked about this, one of our first early discussions about AI search, right. Is you went out and what did you search? Respirators or hard hats or something.

Hard hats?

Yeah, hard hats on ChatGPT. And it gave you more than just what you would do from somebody's SEO dollars. They're spending search engine optimization dollars they're spending to be on Google. You got much more deeper information. And this is kind of all of this ties together to the other E commerce pieces we've talked about earlier today as well as everybody that is wanting to succeed in. I'm just gonna frankly say in business, if you're in wholesale distribution because your customer has a changing expectation, you're not going to be able to get away with just having a. Yep, we're online and we put up, we put 500 products online. Right? It's. Where does that experience pushing and moving over time, right? Where does this, where do I expect this to be? Right? Go listen to what some of the futurists like Sean Duberback and some of these guys out there that are talking about what's the future of commerce. Start thinking about those things in business today. And it ties right back into our tech stack discussion as well. Right. Do I have the other technology, not just my e commerce technology, but can my ERP system can support that? Can my e commerce data, as that gets more and more robust, can I easily pull that shopping cart data, abandoned cart data, search data into my CRM to inform a salesperson what am I doing with all of those things long term? Because you know, you used the term what extinction event earlier. We had heard a few weeks ago this could put, you know, people that have been very successful for very many years by driving factory to factory or job site to job site. If you're not going to be here, this could pass you by.

Yeah. And just to wrap up, you know, I, I've said this, I think it was on a show, another show earlier last week or whatever and someone may find it controversial, but I truly believe that the buying experience that you provide, no matter who you are, whether you're E commerce or what we're doing or whatever, the buying experience is more important than your brand, your product or your service. Now that's a really bold statement. But as you look at the younger buyer, as we've talked about and we look at what is expected, the companies that provide the buying experience are going to win in my opinion. In my opinion. And we're seeing that. Right? So it's not just an opinion, we're seeing that, but that's very different if you look at our history of companies that tend to focus from a marketing perspective on your product, features, functions, capabilities and your brand. Right. All those things like we just talked about with Walmart. Well, Walmart has a great brand. Right. The question will be do they have a good buying experience to be, to, to be determined.

Yeah.

So again, all of this stuff, the digital shelf strategy, the, the couple articles we have here, all ties back to improving the buying experience, even everything that we do with our product. I'm constantly working with our customers. How is this going to help you improve the buyer experience, the buying experience for your customers? How is it going to make your sales team and your, your revenue team able to provide a better experience for the buyer? However, that is right because buying experience is going to trump and is trumping, not just going to, is trumping all of these other things. And I just. We haven't lived in a world like that. We've lived in a world where brand, product and features have tended to be the, the stable thing. And that is what's changing.

Yeah, I think, I think you're spot on with, you know, with that and it just makes me think, right, who if you think. Let's talk B2C for a minute, right? What are some of the most common names out there, right? Nike Adidas. Right. These, you know, just the two things came to mind quickly. But look at right, Nike is leading in social media. Nike is leading in brand awareness. Nike is leading the industry in their E commerce presence. There was just a whole thing, I didn't catch it all but there was a whole thing about, I think it was Footlocker's online presence and their partnership with Nike earlier in the week and about how they're partnering on stuff. I didn't read the whole article but you know, major brands are frankly embracing what you're describing in B2C. Of course, you know, look, we're going to maintain our position by meeting the buyer where the buyer wants to be. And that mindset to your point needs to translate right over and B2B. Right.

I mean Nike is a great example. When you think of Nike nowadays, you don't think of high top tennis shoes which is where they started or, or whatever you think of some experience, right? That is what you, that they have done a amazing job of maybe the best, one of the best jobs of creating an experiential brand versus a product centric brand.

Right.

And that is very much what's going on in B2C. And yes, it's going to, is transferring over to B2B for all the reasons we've talked about before. So I know we're kind of short on time here and we're good.

We've got, we've got a couple. I wanted to make another point on this. We got here handful of minutes left here today. But the. I want to tie this back to something very specifically about B2B right. And, and I'm not, I'm going to use a couple of companies names but please don't as you listen this. They're not a My view of how these companies are, are their online presence, because, I don't know, I haven't paid close attention. But let's just, you know, let's just use a tradesman, right. Who's coming through the trades. Maybe he's going through the union apprenticeship process. And. And his dad was always a Milwaukee tool guy. Right. He saw Milwaukee tools his whole life around the house. Dad was a Milwaukee guy. Dad gave him a lot. His, you know, first tape measure said Milwaukee on it or whatever it might be. Right. Probably doesn't care anymore. Right. If that guy's a millennial or, or, you know, right behind the millennials. If all of a sudden DeWalt or Stanley or Makita or, you know, Metabo or whatever comes in with the buying experience that he's looking for, that loyalty to that brand is probably going to start falling off, because at the end of the day, you know, the cutoff wheels or the, or the, the concrete drills or whatever from Metabo versus Milwaukee are both going to get the whole drill right. Brand loyalty in this arena can probably shift. Could be even easier than in some levels of B2C.

Oh, completely agree. Right. And that's what I mean is experience is going to trump brand and product features. Yeah. And price. Honestly. Right. Again, not always. Right. But that is generally going to be the winners. The winners are going to be any of us. Right. And I'm not just talking about wholesale distributors or manufacturers, any of us, ourselves included. If we can provide a better buying experience over time and be perceived as the company that has the better buying experience, we have a big competitive advantage over anything else that may. May exist. And I think that's what's cool, is that a lot of companies that are smaller companies that may not have the brand recognition and the, you know, the Milwaukee tool thing that you just said there Right. Still have an opportunity to really, really make a huge impact. Right. Because of the experience that is that they're able to create. So. Completely agree.

All right, let's jump in a little bit of news and then we'll kind of get our tech talk and a few other things done. So just some good news here, if you're. If you're listening versus watching up on our screen now is the three things we talk about each week, which are just kind of industry scuttlebutt stuff. The first one this week is Sonopar, the big international electrical distributor. Huge jump in sales that they're showing 28%. They have a whole US operation. That's SONAPAR US that the article talks about about some of their growth as well. So I don't remember reading anything about E commerce in that particular.

No, but they did 20 acquisitions, so that's pretty impressive.

Yeah, exactly. I forgot about that. You're exactly right. So the other piece is Netplus alliance, the, the buying group for industrial industrial safety and construction supplies. They put out a new report this week that is a survey of their members that talk about 70, 77% of their distributor members expect growth in, in 2023, which is good. You know, most of them, I think it said 64% of their members saw significant growth in 2022 over 2021. So that's good. But what I triggered on here and I want to talk to, I was actually on the phone with Zach from Netplus yesterday about their upcoming event this fall. But I want to talk to Jennifer sometime soon. And I know at their upcoming event this fall they're going to be talking quite a bit about E Commerce because the drivers that are mentioned in this study that they did were new customer growth, expanded product line offering, improved product availability, increased end user confidence in project pipelines. It doesn't talk anything about E commerce that we've been talking about so much today. So I think that'd be a great conversation to have with Jennifer sometime soon as well.

So, and look at this last one here. The Genuine Parts.

Yep.

It'll use cloud services to modernize digital source supply chains and advanced data platforms to enhance customer experience.

That's it. Right.

And, and before we leave that, I think I, I, I, I really, I think Tom made the comment of the day. Tom May is customers need to be segmented by buying process for selling process.

Great points.

So right. So right. It is. And it is. Everything that we preach and talk about is how do we provide that look at the buying process first versus our selling process.

Right. And I wanted to pinpoint something related to this Genuine Parts piece. Right. Because they big in automotive but they also own Motion Industries and Cayman Industrial which are Motion Bot, Cayman Motion Zone by Genuine. So two big groups in both power transmission and industrial supply there. So they're seeing the light of what we've been talking about earlier in the day about modernizing digital. Right. Cloud services. They're seeing it. Right. They're moving into that in their business.

Good.

All right, well let's jump ahead in tech spotlight this week. Do I need to digitally transform and why does it matter?

It's a beautifully written article. Beautiful.

This is. Occasionally we'll drop an article in from from the lead smart tech.com website, our company and this is a short article that Tom wrote about the critical nature of digitally transforming. We've done multiple webinars related to this. We've done them for two different buying groups that have gone really well. And so you know, if you're thinking about digitally transforming, one, if you're not, get started and two, if you are, this is some good pillars to talk about. I I the the key things that my takeaway in this article are the four things we talk about regularly is that in a tech stack, right? Do do the you get the four pillars before you go buy a a commission tracking software or you know, something unique, right? Have your robust ERP system, right? Have a robust and smart and customer intelligence focused CRM system. Not off the shelf systems but stuff that are made for your industry. Have good marketing automation systems, whether that's something super sophisticated like an activecampaign or a HubSpot for big campaigns, or it's something more like a mailchimp or a constant contact. But have those pieces where you can pull data from them into your other systems, your organization. And then the fourth piece of the pillar is E commerce and a robust E commerce system that can share data and information across those four platforms. If a digital transformation project can get those four pieces in place over a series of years, they are prepared to thrive in the future.

What's the foundation for that customer experience right there.

So good. So each week we do what we call Goodreads. Modern Distribution magazine published a piece that Dirk Beverage and Dirk's fantastic researcher, writer, keynote speaker. Boy, if you've, if you've not heard Dirk give a keynote, I always suggest sitting the third row because he's moving so fast you might get hit with sweat. What a great speaker. And he wrote a great piece about modernizing employee value propositions. Talking about people over profit. Historically, most organizations have put profit over people. Dirk's doing a whole series of events and writings on HR and in wholesale distribution. So if you're not following Dirk, catch him on on LinkedIn. He's it's a rare day, even on the weekends it goes by that Dirk isn't publishing something insightful.

Good. And yeah, our webinar replay. It's only going to be up a little bit longer, so if you haven't seen it, go check it out.

Tom, for those that can't see our screen or aren't getting this newsletter, what's the best way for them to get access to it?

Well, the, the webinar replay is Smart CR Smart-CRM-On Demand. So that's the URL. So lead smart tech.com smart-CRM-on/demand. Right.

We have it on YouTube yet?

I don't believe so. No, it will. No, it's not on YouTube. So you have to go to the website to get it there.

Yep, yep. Good.

So, and then, yeah, lastly, our events that are here that not much change, but still quite a bit happening. I know you're going to be attending a bunch of these as we go forward. So lots of stuff happening.

Yeah. So we had great event last week with AD in San Diego for their Bearing Power Transmission Group. Unfortunately, the people that came in for that didn't get good weather, but it was a great event in San Diego. Then our next event that we're at is just a few weeks away at isa, the Industrial Supply Association's Spring meeting in Phoenix. Not sure either Brendan or Joby from ISA is going to jump on with us in the next couple weeks and give us a little bit more of a rundown of that event. So we'll have them joining us as well.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I want to thank everybody, Tom, Will, Mike, everybody jumping in for all the good comments today and good conversation as always. And we have a guest next week, Kevin.

We believe it to be the case. I. I didn't hear back in my confirmation, but we're scheduled with Marty McLaughlin, the chief marketing Officer at Affiliated Distributor. So.

Okay, just.

Just heard my email beep. So maybe that's Marty confirming, but Marty's scheduled and that is the plan. If for some reason something happens, he'll be with us in the next couple weeks. We've got a handful of good, good guests coming on in the near future and looking forward to those. We'll announce more of those. I know, like just as an example, Mike Hockett with Modern Distribution Management is with us oftentimes. Comments here and there. I heard from him again this morning. We're going to meet up at ISA's event in a few weeks and chat a little bit more. Fact, I'm contemplating maybe even going live on LinkedIn a few times from that event with some of these folks. But we'll have Mike Hockett on with us shortly as well. I'm looking forward to some of his insights. Tom Gale's supposed to be joining us. The founder of MDM got quite a few others scheduled as well.

Great. All right, well, thanks everybody. Have a good weekend. We'll see you next week.

Yeah, thanks everybody for being with us until next time.

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 Contract Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution Industry CRM Customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead Smart Technologies atLead smart tech.com.