Is AI Helping Yet In Wholesale Distribution & Manufacturing?

[00:00:04] 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.

[00:00:24] 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.

[00:00:36] How's the morning for you so far other than my hiccups? Good?

[00:00:40] Okay. Let's get into it.

[00:00:42] I got a look at cover today.

[00:00:43] Yeah.

[00:00:44] Want to talk about some news maybe?

[00:00:46] Yeah, let's do that.

[00:00:47] Let's do that.

[00:00:47] Before we do that, why don't we do a little bit of housekeeping that we do every week.

[00:00:51] I'm Kevin Brown.

[00:00:53] This is my longtime friend and business partner, Tom Burton.

[00:00:56] We get together every week in less, what did I say a few weeks?

[00:01:00] Unless somebody's in the hospital or on an airplane.

[00:01:03] Last week I did it from, did our show from a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado.

[00:01:08] Next week we'll be from a hotel room in Chicago.

[00:01:11] And the following week I'll be back at my desk.

[00:01:13] But we get together each week and we oftentimes have guests.

[00:01:18] We were a newsletter that we published each week.

[00:01:22] The newsletter is called Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution, which is the same title as our show and live broadcast that we do each week.

[00:01:30] We published that newsletter.

[00:01:33] Again, it goes out to about 10,000, almost 11,000 people now.

[00:01:36] What we do is we try and bring the news of the week together where we can look at things that are impacting wholesale distribution and manufacturing related to the economy, supply chain, mergers and acquisitions, sales, marketing, AI, general technology, people and leadership.

[00:01:52] And we break all of these down into different sections within the newsletter.

[00:01:55] And we have a little chat about that each week.

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[00:03:18] In closing on that topic, we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies.

[00:03:27] Lead Smart is a leading company within the wholesale distribution and manufacturing space that offers technology solutions that bring greater insights into your business, your people, and your customers through AI-enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence solutions.

[00:03:44] So if you're looking to expand your digital transformation, grow your business, try and understand your customers better, and move your company in the place that it needs to be to adopt and adapt to the changing marketplace with technology and AI, we would love to have a chat with you.

[00:04:00] So I think I covered it all.

[00:04:02] Tom, did I miss anything?

[00:04:03] Yeah.

[00:04:04] We need like an AI bot summary of all that.

[00:04:07] Can't do it.

[00:04:08] You could never replace me doing this.

[00:04:11] It would just not work out in the right way.

[00:04:13] So the last thing I didn't mention is, and you oftentimes say this, if you're with us and listening live, join the conversation.

[00:04:21] We've got a comment section.

[00:04:23] If you're on Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn, join the conversation.

[00:04:27] Let us know, one, that you're with us and where you're from.

[00:04:29] And two, if you have thoughts on what we're going to discuss, please share those thoughts with us as well.

[00:04:34] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:36] You want to dive in?

[00:04:37] Let's do it.

[00:04:38] Got it.

[00:04:39] I got a lot to cover.

[00:04:40] Yeah, I got a text from you the other day.

[00:04:42] You're thinking no more rate cuts, huh?

[00:04:47] Let's see here.

[00:04:49] So what do we have?

[00:04:51] We have inflation yesterday reported to hit a whopping 2.4% up over expectations.

[00:04:59] Job report very over the top.

[00:05:02] What, a week ago, I guess, was the job report?

[00:05:04] Yep.

[00:05:05] So now all the people that were thinking, if not all, some of the people that were thinking about, you know, all these rate cuts and two more 50-point cuts or whatever are saying, hmm, I'm wondering if we're going to get any more cuts this year.

[00:05:20] Well, I think you're way ahead of yourself there.

[00:05:24] Yeah, I agree.

[00:05:25] You heard A-I.

[00:05:26] No, I actually agree.

[00:05:28] I think it would be, unless there is some craziness in, because there's still one more report that can come out before the November meeting.

[00:05:36] Yeah, before the November meeting.

[00:05:37] You're absolutely correct.

[00:05:38] Yes.

[00:05:39] So if there's some craziness in the job market or things like that, eh, who knows?

[00:05:44] But if it's even normal, I think they're going to go ahead and do the 25-point cut, but we'll see.

[00:05:50] I think, you know, as we look at this, right, there's a little bit of unique information in that discussion about the jobless claims, right?

[00:05:59] You have all the jobless claims that came from the hurricane, right, which was a big issue.

[00:06:05] And then you have Boeing on strike.

[00:06:07] So that was the caveat with this most recent job report that came out.

[00:06:13] So I think it's interesting, you know, there's two points, right?

[00:06:19] My response to your text message the other day was, wait 15 minutes.

[00:06:22] Because I think you coined that phrase related to this a few months ago, right?

[00:06:27] So we have three weeks before the next announcement of any rate cuts coming.

[00:06:32] And so I think from that standpoint, there could be a lot of change in the meantime.

[00:06:38] I'm, you know, we both listen to the news and whether we're reading Bloomberg or CNBC or whatever it might be or the journal, Wall Street Journal.

[00:06:48] You can find whatever opinion you want.

[00:06:50] Of course.

[00:06:51] Yeah, absolutely out there.

[00:06:52] I would suggest that right now we're definitely in a spot, though, where the vast majority are still leaning that we're going to probably see at least one quarter point cut.

[00:07:05] I think the idea, I would agree if you were to say or someone were to say, we're probably done with, you know, 500 basis point cuts.

[00:07:13] I don't think that'll happen this year.

[00:07:14] The rest of this year.

[00:07:15] I don't see that.

[00:07:16] But I do see absolutely.

[00:07:18] And it has nothing to do with the stake that's involved in this for us.

[00:07:22] I don't think there's nothing of significance here because most of what we're seeing right now has asterisks next to it.

[00:07:30] So the good news has some asterisks with it.

[00:07:33] So but we could see more, you know, in the next couple of weeks, we could see some some hits on some things.

[00:07:40] We've got a couple articles that kind of package what we're looking at both U.S. and globally, economically nicely.

[00:07:48] We'll talk further about that as we move on today.

[00:07:50] But I think that we're at a place where we completely have the next at least quarter point cut.

[00:08:01] It baked in.

[00:08:03] It's it's it's all but given unless there was some other very dramatic uptick.

[00:08:08] I actually agree.

[00:08:10] I actually agree.

[00:08:11] But, you know, stranger things have happened.

[00:08:15] So stranger things that happened this year in this discussion.

[00:08:18] Yeah.

[00:08:18] Right. I would say with that already.

[00:08:20] And the fact I would, though, take a step back.

[00:08:23] I was very confident that we were going to see, you know, maybe another half and then a quarter.

[00:08:31] Now it would not shock me if we see some more.

[00:08:34] If we see some more good news, it would not shock me if we didn't have a third cut this year.

[00:08:38] Yeah.

[00:08:38] I can't imagine a place where we don't have a because if the Fed with what they were saying, what they were seeing,

[00:08:45] if they pull back in November, the 7th, I think it is.

[00:08:49] If they didn't do something in this on the 7th, I think they look silly because they've been pacing for what they're going to do.

[00:08:56] And all that the data is showing is that we're on the right track.

[00:09:00] Yeah.

[00:09:01] So we'll see.

[00:09:02] I could absolutely see November and then I don't know when the first one is in the first Fed meeting is in the new year.

[00:09:11] But let's just say it's February.

[00:09:13] I could totally see something not again until February.

[00:09:16] So I'm going to get my stake.

[00:09:18] Yeah.

[00:09:19] You'll get your stake.

[00:09:20] But I'm not giving up yet.

[00:09:22] That's right.

[00:09:23] Right.

[00:09:23] You know what?

[00:09:25] There we are.

[00:09:26] No close to nowhere near the end of this discussion.

[00:09:29] That's right.

[00:09:29] So we have a lot of Fridays.

[00:09:31] Out of the wire.

[00:09:32] Yeah.

[00:09:32] We have a lot of Fridays between now and then.

[00:09:34] So the next article that we were posting here was about global trade could climb 3% in 2025.

[00:09:42] An article from Reuters.

[00:09:43] And I think the following article is also from Reuters that we posted about small U.S. trade deficit shows strong economic growth estimates for the third quarter.

[00:09:52] I think what I would throw out from these three articles is that if the world is able to manage the geopolitical issues in China, Taiwan, and I don't know if you follow very closely, but there's a lot of pressure going on right now in the South China Sea with China and some of the Southeast Asian nations about kind of supremacy in the waters there.

[00:10:21] That China believes they own.

[00:10:23] That's a big issue along with the issues with Taiwan.

[00:10:26] But if that stays managed and the Middle East crisis doesn't turn into a full regional conflict, which there's a lot of things pointing to that, this article talks about global trade could climb 3%, but it's got to have that Middle East issue contained a little bit.

[00:10:46] Yeah.

[00:10:46] And I think that's a very big if.

[00:10:48] Well, it is.

[00:10:49] I mean, there's, you know, when you, um, I was going to, I was going to say when you have a situation where you have, you know, emotions involved, but I guess there's never been a war that's not emotional, but this is.

[00:11:03] Emotional religious territory.

[00:11:05] There's so many factors that go with this conflict and so much unknowns with it.

[00:11:10] So anyways, three articles today pointing to the 25, 26, 2025, 2026, maybe looking a little better and, uh, some, some upticks in the economy.

[00:11:24] I was thinking about this though.

[00:11:25] I'll share this with you, Tom.

[00:11:26] I'm going to ask you your, before we move off the economy a little bit, I saw, I can't remember what I was reading the other day, but it was a question about, you know, when will we get back to 3% interest rates?

[00:11:38] And, um, and, you know, I was talking with an economist and they, they said, you know, probably not in our lifetime, but then I look at that with all the other things that we're seeing here.

[00:11:47] And it's like, we could have a full swing right in, into huge recessionary, you know, risks as well.

[00:11:55] So, no, I mean, there could be, look, it's, and it's not just any one thing, right?

[00:12:01] It's right.

[00:12:02] There's not any one thing.

[00:12:04] I think there's a lot of dynamics that are, I won't say that have are unique and never been experienced before, but a lot of them are.

[00:12:14] Yeah.

[00:12:14] Um, and we're going to talk more about this going forward, but even just some of the things happening with AI and with, um, and so forth about, you know, AI and hiring and all that.

[00:12:26] There's a lot of different dynamics that we haven't experienced certainly in a long, long time.

[00:12:32] And so, yes, I wouldn't bet on anything.

[00:12:36] No, no.

[00:12:36] I just, I think the, uh, the word to the wise right now is, um, hunker down plan for plan for the future and, uh, but be poised for the challenges that we've seen.

[00:12:52] And, uh, that could continue a little bit still.

[00:12:54] So, so, all right.

[00:12:56] Uh, we're in our economy and supply chain segment here.

[00:13:01] Improving supply chain performance starts with visibility, an article from supply and demand chain executive.

[00:13:07] Any takeaways on that or any thoughts from that?

[00:13:10] I had a few.

[00:13:11] Yeah, there were one that jumped one in particular.

[00:13:13] There was a few, but there were one in particular that jumped out, right?

[00:13:16] It was basically talking about using generative AI and supply chain.

[00:13:21] But one of the things they brought up is the ability for it to democratize the data.

[00:13:27] And what does that mean?

[00:13:28] It means how do you take what is generally very complex data in a lot of cases related to supply chain or even complex conclusions and make that data much more available and accessible to an organization.

[00:13:43] Yep.

[00:13:44] And I think that's an area of AI that I don't know that we've given a lot of credence to as far as its ability to take a lot of disparate data that, let's just face it, you're an average person isn't going to be able to sort through, figure out, and have an understanding of and make that very accessible to just the everyday rank and file individual on what they're doing.

[00:14:08] Yep.

[00:14:09] And whether that's supply chain, whether that's complex buying behaviors, whether that's any of those things, that democratization of data, I think, is something that we haven't talked a lot about, but is a very, very important byproduct.

[00:14:23] Yeah, it's interesting.

[00:14:25] This article talks about that supply chain leaders have been using some level of artificial intelligence since the early 2000s.

[00:14:34] They're talking about risk monitoring, sensor technology within their businesses, routing systems, and so forth.

[00:14:42] But then they talk about now moving forward over $7 billion has been spent on AI technology just this year in the manufacturing.

[00:14:53] It says now actual results are going to be needed to justify the expense.

[00:14:58] So it talked about a series of components.

[00:15:01] It talked about pattern recognition, supply chain entities, or data rich and insight poor.

[00:15:06] And what really triggered for me with that is the discussions we have with both manufacturers and wholesale distributors every day within the work that we do at Lead Smart Technologies with the channel cloud solutions.

[00:15:18] And that idea of data rich and insight poor, I wish I had coined that.

[00:15:26] Because when you think about manufacturers and wholesale distributors and silo data across their organizations, right?

[00:15:33] I've got my single source of truth is my ERP system.

[00:15:37] Unfortunately, sometimes single source of truth is still Judy that's been there for 35 years and then the ERP system.

[00:15:45] But we've got ERP, then we've got over here, we've got some e-commerce solutions, some PIM data, some whatever it might be, marketing automation, maybe CRM.

[00:15:55] And we've got these disparate sets of data.

[00:15:57] And this was a really good point that was talking about pattern recognition and what you can gain from insights when you're combining those data sets together.

[00:16:08] It becomes astounding in a business.

[00:16:10] And I know you work on that with our customers every day.

[00:16:12] Yep.

[00:16:13] No, what was the thing?

[00:16:16] Data rich and insight poor?

[00:16:17] I think that's exactly.

[00:16:20] And that's the actual advantage that this industry has is the data richness.

[00:16:26] Right.

[00:16:26] Yep.

[00:16:27] We don't have that as a software company.

[00:16:29] We don't have that richness of data and those hundreds of thousands of transactions and all of those things that really can tell a story,

[00:16:38] not only about supply chain, but buying behavior or anything else.

[00:16:42] Yeah.

[00:16:43] No, and it's really powerful.

[00:16:45] So the second thing they talked about was visible and actionable.

[00:16:47] So data incorporation.

[00:16:49] And that's kind of what I was talking about, right?

[00:16:51] They've got these expansive networks of data sources right across their business, but rarely are they combining those.

[00:16:58] Third was that they talked about data access.

[00:17:01] And they used the term earlier about democratizing data across an organization that accelerates insight.

[00:17:07] And it was interesting.

[00:17:09] They even talk about here, it says, as a result, data-driven insights are not just relegated to supply chain specialists.

[00:17:16] Marketing operations and finance teams can access them across organizations to gain insights relevant to their specific tasks and responsibilities.

[00:17:25] Right?

[00:17:26] And then you plug sales into there.

[00:17:27] And if you think about the relationship to sales and supply chain, you know, when you're democratizing this data, so to speak, or gaining insights across all of your data, then AI-related tools, some of which we have built into Elite Smart Channel Cloud, now we're able to give alerts.

[00:17:43] Right?

[00:17:44] Right?

[00:17:44] To, hey, you know what?

[00:17:45] You have these orders for these items, and these items just got delayed by the hurricane.

[00:17:50] Then here's our expected time.

[00:17:52] Now, somebody might argue and say, well, you know, we've been able to do some of those things for, you know, a while.

[00:17:56] Well, how you do those things now is, X manufacturer sends out an email that says, we're delayed because of our locations in North Carolina and Florida that were closed because of the hurricane.

[00:18:08] Or we had these parts coming into the port of such and such.

[00:18:13] That we're not able to get.

[00:18:15] And now we have an email that goes out to our people.

[00:18:19] Well, now, instead of worrying about all of those manual steps, we've got AI monitoring the supply chain.

[00:18:29] We've got AI tools built in that looks across the organization, across all of our data systems, and says, oh, here's the customers we need to update.

[00:18:37] Here's our sales team that we need to update.

[00:18:38] Here's the messaging that automatically is developed that we give our sales team to give to the customers when they talk to them.

[00:18:45] A lot of tools there.

[00:18:46] Yeah.

[00:18:47] And before we move on, I want to hit Kelly's comment because we're going to talk about this.

[00:18:51] She's saying data is not the issue.

[00:18:52] It's the people.

[00:18:54] AI will need a new skill set.

[00:18:56] We're going to be talking actually quite a bit about that as we go forward.

[00:18:59] So I will hold on commenting that.

[00:19:01] I think it's a great point, but we're going to talk more about it.

[00:19:04] Very good.

[00:19:05] So we're going to jump into our manufacturing and distribution segment.

[00:19:09] Why manufacturers are failing in their AI initiatives?

[00:19:14] Interesting, huh?

[00:19:16] Why are they failing?

[00:19:17] Yeah.

[00:19:17] Well, first of all, I think there's a couple of things.

[00:19:18] If you look here, it says, right, the market size is expected to go for AI and manufacturing alone.

[00:19:24] Yep.

[00:19:25] 3.2 billion to 64 billion by the 2030, which 2030 is not a long way away.

[00:19:34] No, it's six years.

[00:19:35] And that's a, what is that?

[00:19:36] A, oh my goodness.

[00:19:39] It's a 20 time jump.

[00:19:40] That's a 20 X jump.

[00:19:41] Right.

[00:19:42] In five years.

[00:19:43] Mm-hmm.

[00:19:44] That's just in manufacturing alone.

[00:19:47] Now, I'd like to peel that onion a bit and understand that a bit more, but let's assume that they're more or less correct.

[00:19:54] But then the point of the article here, right, is that AI projects right now are failing.

[00:19:59] That's not surprising as well.

[00:20:02] For the reason Kelly brought up, people.

[00:20:04] The other reason that they brought up here, which I'm seeing a lot in the work that we're doing, is trying to shoehorn in legacy, and not just legacy, but technology that wasn't really designed or built to support an AI initiative.

[00:20:24] Okay.

[00:20:25] And you try and shoehorn it in, and it doesn't really work well.

[00:20:30] Mm-hmm.

[00:20:30] Right.

[00:20:31] Even if you didn't get it, or you pay a lot of the company to do some fancy integration, but it doesn't really have the right data framework and all of that to be able to accomplish that.

[00:20:42] So they went through, there was a number of reasons in here.

[00:20:46] A lot of these projects are early adopter type projects.

[00:20:50] Yeah.

[00:20:50] But I think the opportunity is to learn from those things that are there, right?

[00:20:55] That are, why are, why are these early adopter projects, and a lot of reasons, failed?

[00:21:02] And, again, make the adjustments so that as we move forward, because clearly it's not going away.

[00:21:08] So therefore, you can't just say, well, you know, screw it.

[00:21:11] AI is not.

[00:21:12] No, no.

[00:21:13] So then you just have to adjust to be able to make the thing, the process more successful.

[00:21:19] Well, absolutely.

[00:21:21] And then, you know, to the people part of it that we're going to talk more about later and continue that discussion is we've got to have a way that we can get people trained and understand what this is.

[00:21:31] And, you know, and I think the reality of it is, you know, when you take, when you move outside of a warehouse, right?

[00:21:42] I'll just, let's use distribution for a moment, right?

[00:21:44] When you take, if we remove the forklift driver, the truck delivery driver out of the equation, everybody from the warehouse office to the field salesperson is spending a good chunk of their day on a computer, no matter how you slice it, right?

[00:22:05] And so from that standpoint, this becomes really about training people.

[00:22:10] Now, it doesn't mean that we have to start from scratch because this is, I don't want to say it's not hard, but when we are using the right technology and the right technology that's purpose built for an industry, right?

[00:22:25] That helps people understand how to get from A to B in these settings.

[00:22:29] It really puts them in a good space because they already know how to log into their ERP system.

[00:22:34] They already know how to log into a warehouse management system if it's not part of ERP.

[00:22:39] They already know how to use these other systems.

[00:22:41] So it's not that they're afraid to go use a computer.

[00:22:44] Customer service is in a ERP system every day, all day, as well as a CRM if they have it.

[00:22:50] So now we just have to start working on how do we adjust when we get the right technology in place, manage our data correctly.

[00:22:57] And once we're doing that, how do we upskill these people, which I don't think is nearly as hard as, I don't want to say everywhere generalization.

[00:23:07] But I think we have a lot of, you know, we both spend our whole days talking to, I talk to prospects and existing customers and you're mostly talking to existing customers within our company is we need to upskill people, not necessarily have to full replacement.

[00:23:24] Yeah.

[00:23:25] Well, I, yeah, it's, it's not even, it's, it's even more than that.

[00:23:29] And it's, and there will be, I just saw a colleague called you a brainiac.

[00:23:33] I thought she was talking to you about the brainiac.

[00:23:35] She is, but I was going to let you take it for today.

[00:23:38] Okay.

[00:23:38] Um, is it's, it's, it's not just a matter of training people different.

[00:23:44] It's looking at a, a mindset about how you do your job.

[00:23:48] And again, we're going to talk more about this here in a, in a few minutes.

[00:23:52] Um, is, you know, and I, and even Bob's, I think jumping in on this saying, you know, that it's the delivery of information and the other half training, which is coaching.

[00:24:02] And coaching might be the right word because coaching in a lot of cases, if you think about good sports coaches, right, they're not just showing you what to do.

[00:24:11] They're instilling a mindset and how you're going to operate within that team.

[00:24:15] And I think that is also a very key part of this is, is getting the mindset of how you use these things as a, as a way then to then lead to the training so that the training actually has relevance.

[00:24:29] Well, I think that's good.

[00:24:30] You know, there's an interesting comment that was made.

[00:24:32] I appreciate Bob's comment earlier.

[00:24:34] And then Kelly just made a comment.

[00:24:35] Our generation is in the way.

[00:24:37] And, you know, that's a broad statement, but if you stop and think about that for a minute is so that people that the people that are making the decisions on moving these things ahead are not the generation of people that are going to be coming into the business to drive things to the next level.

[00:24:55] And I think that's where there has to be a mindset shift really is, you know, forget about me.

[00:25:02] And we talk about this just constantly.

[00:25:04] I was on the phone with a potential new customer yesterday and we were having this discussion.

[00:25:09] I said, you know, we shared with them in thinking about our technology with Leadsmore Channel Cloud was worry less about your people today that work there.

[00:25:18] Worry more about the people that you need to hire.

[00:25:21] And sometimes I'll even ask companies, you know, how many positions do you have open right now in sales or customer service or counter or inside sales or just customer facing?

[00:25:31] Well, what percentage of those people are likely millennials that are applying for those jobs?

[00:25:36] And to Kelly's point, right, you've got a whole lot of people that are in their 50s and 60s right now that are making the big decisions on budgets for these things that are struggling to get their heads around it because some of them are very technologically advanced.

[00:25:50] But many of them are.

[00:25:52] I have people doing most of this stuff for me and I read reports.

[00:25:55] So I think there is that was a very simple, quick statement that was made there about our generation is in the way.

[00:26:02] But I think if you really start to unpack that, there is I won't say that it's actually a fact.

[00:26:07] I'll say that it's a huge risk.

[00:26:10] Yeah.

[00:26:11] And I'm doing a workshop for one of our customers this week or next week, rather.

[00:26:16] And I think there's going to be more of that needed is, you know, and I'm doing a workshop, not for the sake of doing a workshop, but I'm doing a workshop as part of our implementation process.

[00:26:29] Right.

[00:26:30] Right.

[00:26:30] So we're going to do a workshop.

[00:26:32] We're going to do a workshop on how to use the future of AI and analytics in business.

[00:26:38] Mm hmm.

[00:26:39] And again, that's to help kind of reduce some of the friction associated with streamline.

[00:26:45] And they're very much all in.

[00:26:47] So it's not a matter that they've not all in, but then understanding how we're going to be able to apply it and put it together.

[00:26:53] So, yeah, it's there's a lot of leading that's going to be required in coaching.

[00:26:57] And I really think that's a great word is is thinking about this as a coaching exercise, not just a training exercise.

[00:27:04] Well, and I think it's a coaching exercise starting at the top of an organization versus the bottom.

[00:27:09] Right.

[00:27:09] It has to go top down.

[00:27:11] Yeah, it does.

[00:27:12] So I think this comment, we've got a plug for the Industrial Supply Association.

[00:27:17] I'm guessing that's my friend, Mr. Breen.

[00:27:20] I don't know why whenever Brendan's with us, Brendan doesn't pop up as it just pops up as LinkedIn user.

[00:27:27] But I'm going to guess that's my pal.

[00:27:29] I saw him a couple of weeks ago in Orlando and a great event that ISA had.

[00:27:34] And ISA is certainly trying to do some things to pump up the idea of technology within their members.

[00:27:40] So good.

[00:27:41] All right.

[00:27:42] Want to jump ahead here?

[00:27:43] Yeah, we have more similar stuff coming.

[00:27:47] We do.

[00:27:47] So we're jumping into our e-commerce and marketing segment.

[00:27:51] We can kind of move pretty quick on this.

[00:27:53] There was just an announcement yesterday.

[00:27:54] We've talked quite a bit in the past about it.

[00:27:57] And again, we're in our e-commerce and marketing segment.

[00:27:58] In fact, now is the time.

[00:28:00] Look at this, Tom.

[00:28:00] Boom.

[00:28:01] Exactly halfway through what we say this show is being an hour.

[00:28:07] Then I go an hour and 15 minutes.

[00:28:09] But this is our point for our reminder.

[00:28:12] I'm always late to this.

[00:28:14] If you are listening on the podcast to a recording, we do this show live on Friday mornings at 9 o'clock Pacific time.

[00:28:23] Tom and I are both in California.

[00:28:24] We're reviewing a newsletter that we send out.

[00:28:27] It's called Around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution.

[00:28:29] We talk about manufacturing in that as well on a consistent basis.

[00:28:33] That goes out to 10,000 plus people each week.

[00:28:35] We're looking at the newsletter and talking about the articles in each of the segments that are in that newsletter.

[00:28:41] If you don't get that newsletter and you'd like to, just send us a note at hello at leadsmarttech.com.

[00:28:48] Or you can go to the website for the podcast, www.aroundthehornpod.com, and sign up for it there and see past episodes.

[00:28:56] So we're live on YouTube live, LinkedIn live, Facebook live.

[00:28:59] And then later today, we'll be up on all the podcast formats.

[00:29:03] So if you want the newsletter and you're not seeing it, let us know.

[00:29:06] Let us know.

[00:29:07] So diving into this topic, Brandon Kelly just says, what about Amazon selling $25 billion in MRO?

[00:29:14] And this is a factor, right?

[00:29:17] This is part of the reason we have it here is that Amazon business is huge.

[00:29:23] But this is a big thing in not just distribution, but in U.S. business right now.

[00:29:29] So the current administration's FTC head, Lena Kahn, makes me think about that old Shaka Khan, Shaka Khan song from the 80s.

[00:29:41] Lena Kahn, Lena Kahn, Lena Kahn.

[00:29:43] She's going hard after folks right now.

[00:29:46] And it's not just Amazon.

[00:29:47] And what she's saying about Amazon is, hey, you've got an unfair monopoly in a lot of areas.

[00:29:52] You're basically price fixing and pushing competitors out.

[00:29:58] So, you know, you've sold on Amazon in previous life or helped people.

[00:30:01] I've sold on Amazon in a previous couple of different spots.

[00:30:06] And it is hard to compete with them.

[00:30:08] And there is no discussion about the rules.

[00:30:11] It's just this is how it is.

[00:30:13] So the government's coming after them.

[00:30:14] But I think the bigger picture, Tom, and I won't harp on this too long.

[00:30:18] I want to get your thoughts and others.

[00:30:20] But I think the bigger, bigger factor here is the FTC right now is going after Amazon and Google and Meta at the same time.

[00:30:33] And pushing pretty hard about some of the factors that they're working on right now.

[00:30:40] And it's just interesting to see how broad of a reach and a stretch.

[00:30:45] I think that this I can't imagine if we have a Republican president in place that this is going to be the continued FTC head.

[00:30:57] But I'm guessing it will be if we have a Democratic leader there.

[00:31:00] And she's going pretty aggressive after some stuff that is quite unique.

[00:31:05] Any thoughts on all of that?

[00:31:06] Yeah, I don't know that much about exactly all of the quote-unquote evidence, if you want to call it that, in the Amazon case.

[00:31:16] I mean, clearly, Amazon is behemoth and they're a bully in a lot of cases.

[00:31:22] But a lot of big companies are bullies in their situation.

[00:31:27] You could also justify, to some degree, some of their bulliness because of just in order to maintain their efficiencies and so forth.

[00:31:35] In some ways, you could argue, is it really bullying or is it just trying to have good control?

[00:31:41] There's a fine line between them.

[00:31:43] But I don't know enough about even what they would do.

[00:31:47] If the Amazon lost, what would they do?

[00:31:50] Would they want to break up the company?

[00:31:53] I don't know what the outcome of this would be enough to really understand.

[00:32:00] And is this just a bunch of noise or what's actually going to occur?

[00:32:05] Yeah.

[00:32:06] Well, there's a lot of places that they're moving.

[00:32:10] And the conversation we have in our chat right now is about Amazon business.

[00:32:14] We're talking about Amazon as a whole.

[00:32:16] And you made a good point, I think, Tom.

[00:32:18] Just the fact that it makes me think about Meta and Meta or Facebook that they're coming after as well right now.

[00:32:26] And the bigger factor we'll talk about briefly for just a moment is they're coming after Google and truly wanting to break Google up.

[00:32:35] Yeah, but there's a clear what they're trying to accomplish with Google.

[00:32:39] It is.

[00:32:40] And it actually could be, in the end of the day, positive for Google.

[00:32:43] They could end up with more enterprise value in some cases by breaking that up.

[00:32:47] Yeah.

[00:32:49] You know, and that may end up happening.

[00:32:52] Well, but that's going to take a long time to get to that place with some damage happening along the way.

[00:32:58] But I think if we go back to this Amazon thing, what's interesting, and I think it's important to point out,

[00:33:03] the article is about a judge says that the antitrust lawsuit can proceed.

[00:33:07] What Amazon is saying in this setting, though, is that they have to...

[00:33:15] How did they describe it in the article?

[00:33:17] They said, look, of course the judge is going to let them move ahead because in this setting,

[00:33:21] they're presuming that the claims are true that the FTC is making.

[00:33:26] And Amazon is saying we're going to prove that they're not true.

[00:33:30] We shared this article here, and as I pulled it together, is I think right now we are facing something,

[00:33:38] and this will impact and can very much impact wholesale distribution, right?

[00:33:44] If you think about the Honeywells of the world and the 3Ms of the world,

[00:33:48] we have a very, very aggressive leader of the FTC that appears to have some very strong goals

[00:33:56] about breaking down some big companies out there and impacting how they do business.

[00:34:02] And that's something that needs to be watched and paid close attention to because it could...

[00:34:07] Now, the discussion in our chat, which is pretty cool to see how fast things are moving over there

[00:34:11] with some of the folks that are with us today, is truly about Amazon Business and its impact on wholesale distribution,

[00:34:18] which is great.

[00:34:19] But this is a broader thing that's going on here.

[00:34:22] Sure, sure.

[00:34:24] Yep.

[00:34:25] All right.

[00:34:26] You want to roll ahead five cases for AI and B2B marketing?

[00:34:30] You know, this was actually a really good article.

[00:34:33] We could spend a whole episode talking about some of the things in there.

[00:34:36] And what I liked about it is it was not just, oh, use it to write a blog post or use it to write an email,

[00:34:43] which is what you see here.

[00:34:47] But they really brought up some interesting concepts.

[00:34:53] We're going to talk more about buyer journey, right?

[00:34:56] It's interesting to see.

[00:34:57] I don't know, Kevin, if you've seen this, but it seems like in the last 90 days or so,

[00:35:03] the stuff that about buyer journey and stuff that I talked about for two years,

[00:35:09] for two years, really seems to be coming front and center.

[00:35:12] Yeah.

[00:35:13] And I'm not sure exactly why, but anyway, they were talking a lot about buyer journey in here.

[00:35:19] We're going to talk more about buyer journey in a minute.

[00:35:22] And, you know, obviously, and I'm probably jumping ahead here, but buyer journeys, I agree, are unpredictable

[00:35:32] in terms of what a company, the route that they take to do their research.

[00:35:37] Yeah.

[00:35:38] What is reasonably predictable is the learning process that a organization has to go through

[00:35:43] to make a decision on something.

[00:35:46] So the way that they get to that decision or the way that they go through that learning process

[00:35:50] may be very different from organization to organization, but you still have to go through

[00:35:55] the learning process to come out the other end.

[00:35:58] Right.

[00:35:58] And what they were talking about in this article is a, I think they call it a buying agent,

[00:36:04] which was an AI tool that would be, you know, we've been talking about yellow brick roads,

[00:36:10] right?

[00:36:10] That would basically have all of your content for your yellow brick road for your customer

[00:36:17] and how you want them to research, understand, or whatever, and make it easy for the customer

[00:36:22] or the prospect in this case to get the right data at the right time as they go through their

[00:36:28] journey.

[00:36:29] I thought that was a really interesting use case in there.

[00:36:32] Well, I thought you're right.

[00:36:34] And I think it was, I agree with everything you're saying.

[00:36:39] And what's interesting right now is to your point to start with here, Tom, was about the

[00:36:44] fact that, you know, we're hearing more and more and more about buyer journey and it's

[00:36:47] becoming an ongoing topic with folks across the board.

[00:36:51] I think what's interesting about that is that, you know, as we look at wholesale distribution,

[00:36:55] you don't have a choice but to pay attention to it now because of the migration, right?

[00:37:00] And there's, I think in one of our articles later, we talk about in e-commerce, we talk

[00:37:05] about the, you know, percentage of people that are not interested in talking with a salesperson,

[00:37:09] right?

[00:37:09] So now you have to decide if you're in wholesale distribution, okay?

[00:37:13] My customer is saying he wants an omni-channel experience and I think we're coming up on a

[00:37:18] very, I think we've been there for a long time, but people are finally coming around to

[00:37:22] it.

[00:37:22] The point in time where it says, okay, I agree, right?

[00:37:27] My customer is changing, right?

[00:37:30] Kevin and Tom have been quoting Gartner for two years now that, you know, 62% or whatever

[00:37:35] it might be of B2B buyers are millennials, right?

[00:37:43] I'm now seeing that.

[00:37:44] It is now finally impacting my business and they want to be online.

[00:37:49] They want to get access to their buying history.

[00:37:52] They want to see lots of data across the board and I need to go answer this.

[00:37:57] So that, I think people are finally starting to embrace that omni-channel piece.

[00:38:01] So.

[00:38:02] I like Bob's comment here.

[00:38:03] I got a chuckle out of that.

[00:38:06] He's now got follow the yellow brick road in his head.

[00:38:09] Yeah.

[00:38:09] Or is it goodbye yellow brick road?

[00:38:11] No, no.

[00:38:12] It's, there you go.

[00:38:13] No, it's the yellow brick road.

[00:38:15] I think you talk about it in a book you wrote.

[00:38:17] Uh, so we have to get your plugin, but now back to the important stuff is that I think

[00:38:22] people are actually finally seeing that this is happening and I need to address this.

[00:38:28] Um, that makes it very, very important to them, um, from the standpoint.

[00:38:33] And, you know, as we talk about with this is that we've got, you know, that there was

[00:38:39] a series of tips here, right?

[00:38:40] As it talks about five use cases, content tagging, right?

[00:38:45] And as we in wholesale distribution start embracing more and more of relevant content

[00:38:51] and content marketing, which.

[00:38:53] That was a good one as well.

[00:38:54] Yeah.

[00:38:54] Right.

[00:38:55] Right.

[00:38:55] Where you have good marketing people, you're developing tons and tons of content.

[00:38:59] We see that going on within our company, the amount of content that's being developed

[00:39:02] AI tools to use content tagging.

[00:39:05] So you have categories, subcategories, and even subcategories of your subcategories about

[00:39:11] your content is great.

[00:39:13] They talk about dynamic personalization.

[00:39:15] It says 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% of

[00:39:22] them are frustrated when this doesn't happen.

[00:39:24] What does that mean?

[00:39:26] Um, we talked constantly, and this is from a McKinsey report.

[00:39:30] We talked constantly, Tom, about the importance of recognizing the fact that there is a gray

[00:39:36] line that is actually going to be coming completely blurred soon of B2B experience and B2C experience.

[00:39:46] And it's tied to probably all started from Amazon, right?

[00:39:49] Is I want from my wholesale distributor, the same experience that I'm having from Uber, from

[00:39:55] Uber Eats or DoorDash and from Amazon.

[00:39:57] So we have to be thinking about this.

[00:39:59] And I thought this was great.

[00:40:01] This article talks about using dynamic web pages that can adapt in real time to a visitor.

[00:40:06] And it ties it to account-based marketing campaigns.

[00:40:10] It says they use the example of a potential customer lands on your website and based on

[00:40:14] their industry, their role, and their previous interactions, their experience changes.

[00:40:20] The messages, the case studies, the product features displayed are aligned with what they're

[00:40:24] most likely to be interested in as they navigate through your site.

[00:40:28] Now, I thought that was just phenomenal to think about in a B2B setting because you could

[00:40:34] be Joe Smith at XYZ Factory.

[00:40:39] But you could be, if all we're doing is trying to target like an IP address of the facility

[00:40:44] and put content there, we're not talking to a safety guy per se or a parts purchaser.

[00:40:52] Understanding the persona of who's there, whether it's through login or whatever tool is used,

[00:40:59] and then modifying that website experience.

[00:41:02] Really, now we can drive...

[00:41:04] I mean, we typically think about account-based marketing tied to email campaigns and how

[00:41:10] we're spending our time and so forth.

[00:41:12] But if we could use our website tied to account-based marketing, that's pretty exciting.

[00:41:18] Yeah.

[00:41:19] And it's...

[00:41:20] As it says in there, right, it's beyond just, hey, who is this person and their name or even

[00:41:25] their demographic or gender?

[00:41:28] There's a whole lot of...

[00:41:29] There's a whole lot of intelligence, if you will, that can be adopted around that, that

[00:41:34] can be in the account-based profile that could be, in theory, incorporated into that experience.

[00:41:40] Yep.

[00:41:41] We don't see it a lot.

[00:41:42] And the technology, I think, is still a little bit early stage.

[00:41:46] But again, it's thinking...

[00:41:49] It's looking at things, you know, as what is it?

[00:41:52] The hockey analogy, skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is.

[00:41:56] Yep.

[00:41:57] And, you know, this just talks about where some of the things are actually headed.

[00:42:00] Yeah.

[00:42:00] So let's...

[00:42:01] Before we jump ahead, Tom, let's just hit these other topics.

[00:42:04] We talked about dynamic personalization.

[00:42:06] Number three was intense signal amplification.

[00:42:09] Interesting concept that says...

[00:42:11] And I've always...

[00:42:12] We've always talked about the number being 3%.

[00:42:14] But this says 5% to 10% of your total addressable market is in the market any one time for your

[00:42:21] products.

[00:42:22] So if you can understand when they're there and what they're doing by...

[00:42:26] As talked about intent signal, their intentions to buy amplification and using AI tools to do

[00:42:31] that is great.

[00:42:32] You talked about buying agents already.

[00:42:34] And then they talked about revenue intelligence and really understanding bringing all the data,

[00:42:40] the silo data that you have across your business together and analyzing the revenue intelligence

[00:42:47] or what is your buyer's journey?

[00:42:49] How are they spending and what are they doing?

[00:42:51] So good article.

[00:42:52] I thought it was really positive.

[00:42:53] And the revenue intelligence, this goes back to the democratization of data.

[00:42:57] And this is what I'm spending a lot of my time on with our customers is incorporating that revenue

[00:43:02] intelligence but then making it actually accessible and valuable not just for a manager or for an

[00:43:08] analyst but for the individual salesperson.

[00:43:12] Yep.

[00:43:12] Right?

[00:43:12] And a lot of times that's never happened.

[00:43:14] It's the manager or somebody like that that does the analysis.

[00:43:18] And the salespeople may or may not have any of the actual data related to that.

[00:43:23] Yeah.

[00:43:24] So there's an interesting discussion going on here.

[00:43:27] You've got a couple of people that are making some good comments about chatbots popping up

[00:43:32] and saying that we can help you with an immediate quote.

[00:43:36] And then human interaction.

[00:43:37] And I think as I look at those two comments, right, human interaction, chatbots, we think

[00:43:43] about those being completely separate.

[00:43:45] But the reality of it is, is I think down the road, you know, we've had some internal

[00:43:51] meetings this week with our product team about, you know, where lead smart channel cloud is

[00:43:56] headed from agents and co-pilots and so forth and the things that we're going to be able

[00:44:00] to work and assist with that.

[00:44:02] But we're still in a place today where we're so early in the days of AI is that giving the

[00:44:09] customer the choice of how they want to communicate.

[00:44:12] Sometimes I'm really, really happy to, and I'll give you a perfect example, getting ready

[00:44:17] to book a trip with little Mrs. Brown and I are going to go on a small vacation in December

[00:44:24] and I'm going to use mostly points to go do that.

[00:44:27] Well, me, the CEO of a technology company, when I do that, my comfort level rather than

[00:44:34] booking online is still talking to a person because I know that the person on the other

[00:44:41] end of the phone, their magic fingers are faster and better than mine to see what's the best

[00:44:47] option for us.

[00:44:48] Now, down the road, I know I'm going to have a confidence in talking to a bot that's the

[00:44:53] bot's going to be way ahead of my brain and that person that I just described, but I'm

[00:44:59] not there yet.

[00:44:59] I would rather talk to the person from Marriott to say, I'm looking at these two properties.

[00:45:04] Here's what I'm thinking.

[00:45:05] What's your suggestion?

[00:45:07] Or I'm looking at these flights.

[00:45:09] What are you suggesting?

[00:45:09] So I think we're at that place now.

[00:45:12] Bob's comment, Kelly's comment about chatbots and people is people want choice.

[00:45:19] Yes.

[00:45:20] Yes.

[00:45:20] But as the experience gets better, the AI, then it will become less and less of an issue,

[00:45:30] right?

[00:45:31] Or less and less of a requirement to have that decision.

[00:45:36] Is it live or?

[00:45:37] Well, and I think, you know, Kelly made the comment, oh dear, you're a Gen X.

[00:45:43] But I think the funny part of that is, as I use my example, I think I know enough about,

[00:45:49] because the work that I do, I know enough about the technology that some of these companies

[00:45:54] are using.

[00:45:55] And is their bot just a two-year-old bot from intercom.com or is it a true AI piece that's

[00:46:03] really analyzing things properly?

[00:46:05] So anyways, that's the, let's jump ahead.

[00:46:08] Let's pass by.

[00:46:08] We have an article here about PIM and DAM systems helping B2B organizations reach digital

[00:46:14] maturity about product information management.

[00:46:16] But let's hit that power forward five make or break truths about next gen e-commerce while

[00:46:23] we're still in this segment.

[00:46:24] And we'll jump through that pretty quick.

[00:46:26] Any thoughts on that, Tom, before I hit those five points?

[00:46:29] Well, I think this was the one I have a note here.

[00:46:32] This is the article that says, you don't know your customer if you don't know AI.

[00:46:36] I think that was one of the five points in the article.

[00:46:40] Am I right?

[00:46:42] Yes, it does.

[00:46:43] Let me just hit him.

[00:46:44] Invest like an attacker.

[00:46:46] Leaders act like attackers investing in particular in new technologies such as generative AI and

[00:46:55] new channels to better understand and serve their customer.

[00:46:57] Two, you can't outsource your way to victory.

[00:47:00] Leaders are not dependent on vendors for technology needs.

[00:47:03] Instead, they build up their own in-house talent to innovate at pace.

[00:47:07] Obviously, you're going to have outsourced partners and vendors with that.

[00:47:11] But great team internally to do that.

[00:47:13] Technology is strategy.

[00:47:15] Solid tech foundations give leaders the speed and flexibility to innovate.

[00:47:19] Four is you can't know your customers if you don't know AI.

[00:47:23] Leaders are turning to AI to get an edge with complex shopping journeys and evolving standards.

[00:47:28] And five is lead from the center but empower teams.

[00:47:31] A centralized operating model provides the necessary scale but is only effective if it enables e-commerce teams.

[00:47:38] So this is tied to e-commerce in general.

[00:47:40] But those are some good points, right?

[00:47:42] Yeah.

[00:47:43] I think we had a call this week earlier with some companies that were talking about e-commerce more.

[00:47:49] The e-commerce data and your ERP data are not always connected.

[00:47:54] In fact, a lot of companies they are, but a lot of companies are not.

[00:47:58] And some of the data that I gather from an e-commerce perspective is not really been under as much, I guess, there hasn't been as much emphasis put on it as, say, ERP data.

[00:48:12] And yet there's a lot of information, not just about the transactional data of the ERP, but again, going back to buying behavior.

[00:48:19] There's a lot of information that helps to understand the buying behavior from, I'm sorry, from the e-commerce data.

[00:48:25] So it's an area that I think is going to end up getting, what do they call it, next-gen e-commerce?

[00:48:33] Yep.

[00:48:34] I think it's an area that is going to have a lot of emphasis, but it's certainly the AI will be in the DNA of everything that's going through there.

[00:48:43] Well, and you know what we've talked about a few different times today on this is we've talked about, you know, omni-channel buying experiences, right?

[00:48:52] And meeting, as you talk about in your book, The Revenue Zone, right?

[00:48:57] Meeting the buyer where the buyer wants to buy.

[00:48:59] And what this article is talking about, the core of this is the technology that goes with that.

[00:49:05] And, you know, we look at it as, you know, historically you've had these disparate systems.

[00:49:10] We've had e-commerce, we've got maybe some marketing tools, we've got CRM, we've got ERP, we've got maybe a data lake, we've got some other, maybe some BI tools.

[00:49:20] But at the end of the day, then you have all of these different systems of record.

[00:49:26] And those different systems of record are not combining, as we talked about earlier today, to help your customer.

[00:49:31] What we need to be is a place where we have, and, you know, we talk about this regularly with our customers.

[00:49:37] And we've got a big call next week with some potential very large partners where we talk about the fact that CRM,

[00:49:46] which has historically been looked at as a big brother tool to get some data out from our salespeople,

[00:49:53] where CRM, or what we call smart CRM, that's AI-enabled, which is what we do at LeadSmart,

[00:49:59] is really, truly becomes a foundational tool within your business of a place to bring all of this data into.

[00:50:08] So we have a single point of truth about what's happening with the customer and what's happening in our business

[00:50:13] versus in all these disparate systems across the organization.

[00:50:16] And when the company embraces that of using smart CRM, not traditional CRM, smart CRM,

[00:50:22] as a foundational tool within their business to visualize all the things that are happening in the company,

[00:50:29] that's when we can make this change where we can really, truly now serve the customer the way the customer says they want to be served

[00:50:36] because we're following their journey across all of the buying platforms, but that's visualized through the CRM platform.

[00:50:42] Well, if you look at the definition of CRM, it stands for Customer Relationship Management.

[00:50:48] What it's evolved into over the years is something other than that.

[00:50:52] It's become a sales management tool and sales tracking tool.

[00:50:56] I think we're just coming back to what it's originally.

[00:50:59] I think it was a presentation I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, I was talking about this.

[00:51:04] My first CRM project that I worked on was in 1997 at Ford Motor Company.

[00:51:12] And the vision of which we were implementing CRM, therefore, is much closer to what we're talking about today,

[00:51:18] which is understanding the customer.

[00:51:20] It wasn't about managing the salesperson or tracking what they're doing or so forth.

[00:51:26] I think we're coming full circle.

[00:51:28] For whatever reason, CRM became Salesforce automation and tracking sales activity and forecasting and all of that.

[00:51:37] Now we're coming back around going, wait a minute, isn't this about building relationships with the customer?

[00:51:42] So anyway, don't get me started on that.

[00:51:44] Yeah, we can kind of slide ahead here, but there was a comment that just came in is no CRM equals dumb e-com.

[00:51:51] I mean, somewhere in the end of the day, right, we don't do this show to necessarily promote the products of LeadSmart,

[00:52:00] but LeadSmart is our sponsor.

[00:52:03] But at the end of the day, somewhere you have to bring all of these pieces of data together.

[00:52:09] And e-com is a component of one sales function within an organization,

[00:52:14] but it is an important one from a standpoint of this is the hidden place that people are gathering information from your company.

[00:52:24] And it's probably not at, you know, three o'clock central time on a Tuesday.

[00:52:29] It's probably at nine o'clock central time or 5 a.m. when somebody is doing that from a smartphone or another device.

[00:52:38] And understanding that journey of what they're doing here versus what they're doing there is what's going to put companies ahead.

[00:52:45] And the people that aren't able to do that over the next few years are going to be sadly behind.

[00:52:50] And that's from an AI standpoint and e-commerce and all other facets of technology is if we're not digitally transforming,

[00:52:57] that's becoming kind of an old phrase of digital transformation.

[00:53:01] But if we're not digitally transforming, I've said this for a number of years now,

[00:53:05] is I'm not suggesting you're going to be out of business.

[00:53:07] I'm just suggesting your business is going to be extremely different in size and components.

[00:53:13] And you might be one branch versus seven branches because you can't keep up because the other guys are running circles around you,

[00:53:18] understanding their customer.

[00:53:20] Yep.

[00:53:21] So that's good.

[00:53:23] Let's kind of jump ahead into our cybersecurity, AI, and technology.

[00:53:31] We haven't posted an article from Automation World about edge technology and edge computing.

[00:53:35] We're going to, that's pretty deep for the timeframe that we have today.

[00:53:38] It's a pretty geeky article, but.

[00:53:41] Yeah.

[00:53:42] Let's jump ahead to knowledge workers lean on AI as workloads increase.

[00:53:48] Any thoughts on that one?

[00:53:51] Well, I think it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is mindset, right?

[00:53:55] And essentially what the article is saying, which we all know, I mean, we all live it, is we're all doing a lot of.

[00:54:03] But are we thinking about how.

[00:54:07] Tom, you're cutting in and out, Tom.

[00:54:10] Am I cutting in and out now?

[00:54:11] You're better now.

[00:54:12] Yep.

[00:54:12] Okay.

[00:54:13] As we think through that, you know, how we address that dredge work.

[00:54:18] And to me, even what you were just talking about, about booking, you know, finding out points and all that stuff.

[00:54:25] That's dredge work, right?

[00:54:26] That is not work that is.

[00:54:30] I don't know.

[00:54:31] Maybe you enjoy it, but it's certainly not something.

[00:54:34] That's why it's not done.

[00:54:36] Right.

[00:54:36] It's not complete because I hate it.

[00:54:38] Right.

[00:54:39] So, again, it's having that mindset, which is, you know, how do I think about incorporating AI into that, either at an individual level, but then as you move up at an organizational or department level, how do I incorporate that into the department?

[00:54:55] And I'll give you a specific example.

[00:54:57] We have a pretty big documentation project that we have to do in our engineering team, right?

[00:55:04] I could sit down with a blank sheet of paper and start documenting things, which is what I would have done pretty much my whole career.

[00:55:13] Or I can sit here and I can record on a video or whatever about some of the things that are going on, take screenshots of what we're doing and let the video and then tell AI to create the documentation based on the video.

[00:55:26] Right.

[00:55:27] What's going to be more efficient and more fast?

[00:55:29] Mm-hmm.

[00:55:30] Right.

[00:55:31] So, but if you're not thinking like that, you're going to sit down with that blank sheet of paper and start trying to document something like we've always done in the past.

[00:55:40] Yep.

[00:55:40] So, anyway, that's what a lot of this article is about is, you know, workloads are increasing.

[00:55:45] We have a lot of dredge work, a lot of our time staying on dredge work.

[00:55:49] Ooh.

[00:55:50] But yet there's still not a lot of part of that.

[00:55:53] Yep.

[00:55:54] So, and I think we should just reference here, right?

[00:55:56] It talks about knowledge workers.

[00:55:58] So what's a knowledge worker?

[00:55:59] I think as we think about wholesale distribution and manufacturing, right, it's all of those people inside who have deep access in your organization.

[00:56:08] It's customer service.

[00:56:08] It's inside sales.

[00:56:09] It's purchasing.

[00:56:11] It's supply chain folks.

[00:56:13] It's even, you know, accounting people and so forth.

[00:56:16] And that is where we think about that knowledge worker side of things.

[00:56:20] And so key kind of takeaways, they said knowledge workers grappling with expanding workloads.

[00:56:26] So they're starting to lean into AI.

[00:56:29] Just over half of knowledge workers say AI has somewhat or greatly improved their ability to do their job.

[00:56:34] And that despite supportive AI employees are grappling with the excess of dredge work is what it was called.

[00:56:41] Much to your point.

[00:56:42] But I think, you know, I didn't realize this, but I think my comment about, you know, trying to book a vacation is a great example.

[00:56:50] And I think that's what I think it translates well to what people specifically in wholesale distribution manufacturing are dealing with now.

[00:56:57] We're hearing Tom and Kevin and their guests come every Friday and we talk about this stuff.

[00:57:02] And, you know, I go to, you know, a Hardy event or an ASA or an ISA or an AD or a Net Plus or Blue Hawk or whatever it might be, buying group or trade association event.

[00:57:14] And I hear some speakers talking about AI.

[00:57:17] But it's not for me, right?

[00:57:20] If I'm a wholesale distributor, I've got to make the decision that says, am I ready to take a leap at this as one?

[00:57:26] Then do I have the right products and the right vendors available to help me?

[00:57:32] And am I ready to prepare my team correctly?

[00:57:35] And I think that's where people are struggling is getting the mindset and the willingness to go do that is one thing.

[00:57:41] But then when I think about it from a knowledge worker standpoint, as this article talks about,

[00:57:45] is if I'm a person and my company hasn't given me a new smart CRM or a new ERP that's cloud-based with AI tools in it or whatever it might be yet,

[00:57:57] and I'm trying to figure something out on my own, then I go back to the same place that I'm in right now of booking this trip that says, as an example,

[00:58:07] and I'll give you the perfect example is, when I look at airlines and hotels, all they're doing is giving me choices.

[00:58:16] They're not giving me any suggestions.

[00:58:19] So back to the comment earlier, right?

[00:58:22] Is if I could just go in and tell the travel source that says, I have this many points from these two groups of people.

[00:58:30] Tell me what is the, I want these parameters for my trip.

[00:58:34] Tell me what to do.

[00:58:36] Right.

[00:58:37] You're data rich and you're insight poor.

[00:58:40] You have a lot of options and you don't have a lot of insights.

[00:58:43] I don't want to go from San Ana John Wayne Airport to San Francisco and wait for five hours before I fly to Hawaii.

[00:58:53] Don't even show me that option, right?

[00:58:56] But now what we're playing is we're playing with, even if there's AI tied to that, it's dumb AI because it's not telling me what I should do.

[00:59:04] It's just throwing options out.

[00:59:06] And I think that's where a lot of people in this, you know, dredge work scenario is if it's not going to tell me how to do it and I can trust it yet, I'll just keep doing it myself.

[00:59:15] And then they get stuck.

[00:59:16] Mm-hmm.

[00:59:17] So, all right.

[00:59:18] I'm off my travel soapbox now.

[00:59:20] All right.

[00:59:20] But I think, I did think that tied kind of well.

[00:59:22] No, I think it's a great example.

[00:59:23] I think it's, I mean, my instinct tells me you probably have now spent several hours on this, if not more.

[00:59:29] And still no movement because I haven't taken the time to make jump on.

[00:59:33] So, what I do is late at night on my phone or my iPad, I go back and look and I'm like, oh, is there anything better here?

[00:59:38] And if I could just say, you know, in this setting, right, here's my parameters and my prompts.

[00:59:44] We want to go from San Ana John Wayne to Lihue Airport in Kauai for these many days, then back to Honolulu for these many days and back.

[00:59:54] I don't, I want direct flights if at all possible.

[00:59:58] And if they're not direct flights, I don't want to wait for more than an hour.

[01:00:01] And it has to be these points being used and fit within these parameters.

[01:00:07] And then it comes back and just tells me, Kevin, do this.

[01:00:11] And here's how I got there.

[01:00:13] Whole different story, right?

[01:00:17] Good.

[01:00:18] All right.

[01:00:18] What's next?

[01:00:19] Sales and M&A as we kind of start to wind down today's show.

[01:00:23] A little quick thing about True Value, the co-op pursuing a sale of the company.

[01:00:29] We're not going to spend a lot of time with that.

[01:00:31] I just think it's interesting quoting their CEO, Chris Kempa.

[01:00:34] Chris was an executive at Grainger when some of our listeners were there, regular listeners were there.

[01:00:41] And I met Chris a few times when I was a vendor to Grainger years ago.

[01:00:46] So, he, not uncommon, moved down the street to another big Chicago company with True Value.

[01:00:52] So, but B2B buyer's journey is not linear.

[01:00:56] Here's how it changed.

[01:00:57] We've talked a lot about that today.

[01:00:59] An article from Fast Company on that.

[01:01:01] Tom, any thoughts about that particular piece about buying journeys not being linear?

[01:01:07] I might have hammered that home enough today already.

[01:01:09] Yeah, I'll just reiterate one point.

[01:01:10] We can move on.

[01:01:11] It's what I said earlier, right?

[01:01:12] The buyer journey is not linear, but their process of learning isn't linear, but it's consistent.

[01:01:20] And people have to learn one step at a time, right?

[01:01:23] So, I think if you understand, if you can understand what your buyer and prospect needs to understand,

[01:01:30] and you know what they need to believe in order for them to be able to do business with you,

[01:01:36] you can architect the right content strategy, even though the way they may go about it could be very, very different.

[01:01:42] That's really the...

[01:01:43] So, I don't think all is lost.

[01:01:45] Like, oh, it's chaos and there's nothing you can do.

[01:01:47] No.

[01:01:48] You can't control it, but you can influence by having the right content and the right information at the right time.

[01:01:53] Yep.

[01:01:53] Very good.

[01:01:54] Good.

[01:01:54] That's a good recap, and there's a lot of that stuff that we've talked about already today.

[01:01:58] We're going to dive into our...

[01:02:00] I call it the Dirk Beverage section, People in Leadership.

[01:02:03] We adopted this new section earlier this year because Dirk said we needed to talk more about that,

[01:02:08] and I think we really realize we don't talk enough about the people in an organization.

[01:02:13] Three articles we hit there today.

[01:02:15] One is from hrdive.com.

[01:02:17] Managers need training.

[01:02:19] We have five stories on why.

[01:02:20] I think we don't need to dive into all of these today, Tom, but I thought they were all kind of tying pretty well together about labor gaps,

[01:02:30] some diversity issues that go with that.

[01:02:33] But we have to put time into our people, and organizations certainly know that.

[01:02:38] I think AI is going to help us with that, as we've been talking about,

[01:02:41] and where I think that's going to play in is understanding more of what their needs are

[01:02:45] and being able to track and manage what people are doing and how we can help them.

[01:02:52] This article talks a little bit about, again, managers need training.

[01:02:57] One of the things that it makes me think about is, and you see this every single day,

[01:03:04] in my experience in manufacturing and wholesale distribution is,

[01:03:08] and the simplest of examples is, man, Joe is a great sales guy.

[01:03:13] Let's make him the sales manager.

[01:03:15] Sure.

[01:03:16] Joe has no skills as a manager.

[01:03:17] Michael Jordan was a great basketball player.

[01:03:19] Let's make him the coach.

[01:03:21] Yeah, exactly right.

[01:03:22] It's the individual contributor that becomes the manager.

[01:03:25] Very different skills.

[01:03:27] Very different set of objectives.

[01:03:30] Yep.

[01:03:30] Very different mindset.

[01:03:32] It's not about yourself.

[01:03:33] It's about your team.

[01:03:34] Yeah.

[01:03:35] Well, and you can do that with Joe, right, in that setting.

[01:03:39] If you analyze where Joe's skill sets and what Joe,

[01:03:43] and the place where it really starts is,

[01:03:45] and I've just seen this countless times in my career is,

[01:03:50] what does Joe want to do?

[01:03:52] Joe might get pushed into that saying with the idea of,

[01:03:59] yeah, you know what, Joe, this is your big new job and your promotion,

[01:04:02] but Joe would really like to just be out there taking good care of customers,

[01:04:06] right?

[01:04:06] And then he struggles with this,

[01:04:08] and then he's unhappy, and the company's unhappy,

[01:04:10] and they're not getting the results.

[01:04:14] So they, this is good.

[01:04:16] Bob made a comment.

[01:04:17] Richard Branson says,

[01:04:18] train your people well enough so they can leave and treat them well enough

[01:04:21] so they won't stay, so they want to stay, which is great.

[01:04:24] But this article in particular, before we jump ahead,

[01:04:28] it has links to a handful of additional articles about better training,

[01:04:33] about company leaders need training on conflict management and culture building,

[01:04:37] how to make managers more effective.

[01:04:40] So this key particular article has links to other very valuable articles as well

[01:04:45] on helping leaders get trained and understand things

[01:04:49] and move them in a direction that benefits the people as well.

[01:04:52] So another article from the same source, HR Dive,

[01:04:56] U.S. manufacturers say they struggle to fill critical labor gaps still.

[01:05:00] 76% of manufacturers reported year-over-year revenue increases,

[01:05:04] but 58% of them, only 58% of them reported headcount growth.

[01:05:10] So, and then 61% still struggling to fill gaps.

[01:05:15] This is something when I talk to our existing customers or industry people,

[01:05:19] I'm asking about a lot more.

[01:05:21] And we're seeing a shift in this now with the wholesale distributor side of things

[01:05:28] where there's a whole lot less problems and challenges with that.

[01:05:32] I think some of it tied to the job reports now,

[01:05:34] they're pretty much kind of saying is the people who want to work are working.

[01:05:39] So interesting article with that.

[01:05:41] We'll close this out.

[01:05:42] We won't talk about it, but the final article there is the trucking industry reverses gains in new women drivers.

[01:05:48] So we want to get, see more women out there driving delivery trucks and over the road and obviously highly skilled.

[01:05:55] So an article with there.

[01:05:56] So I included that article in here just so our customers could be thinking about,

[01:06:00] Hey, you know what?

[01:06:03] Why don't we have any women driving our trucks?

[01:06:06] And do we have customers that have things too?

[01:06:08] That's right.

[01:06:08] So industry scuttlebutt, we talk about each week.

[01:06:11] Turner Supply did an acquisition in Alabama, another core in Maine acquisition.

[01:06:17] But added in here was there was an announcement this week that Home Depot to have corporate staff work store shifts.

[01:06:26] And I just, you know, people are jumping up and down and a lot of the trade publications about what a great idea this is.

[01:06:33] And it just makes me think I was looking at the CEO of plumbing and HVAC distributor,

[01:06:41] First Supply in Wisconsin, visiting every one of their branches this month.

[01:06:46] And the amount of time that we see wholesale distributors that are truly out there where their management is,

[01:06:53] not only just going out and, you know, kissing babies and shaking hands,

[01:06:57] but getting out and seeing customers and helping.

[01:07:00] And so it's kind of interesting to see this big push by Home Depot to get this to be done.

[01:07:05] And the regional and even national independently owned distributors,

[01:07:09] it's just core to who they are and what they do.

[01:07:11] So congratulations.

[01:07:12] Are they doing like an undercover boss where they send the guy out or the person out and they don't even know that they're that they're an executive?

[01:07:20] Yeah, that's funny.

[01:07:21] You know, one of Darlene, my wife's clients that she did other design and marketing and print work for that's a large national franchise.

[01:07:30] They were their CEO and I've had dinner with him a bunch of times.

[01:07:34] Their CEO was on undercover boss going out and meeting with their franchisees.

[01:07:38] It was pretty cool to watch the process and then listen to him tell that story.

[01:07:42] So very good.

[01:07:43] Well, as we wind down, we have a good read section every week.

[01:07:46] Why so many companies are firing Gen Zs.

[01:07:50] You catch anything in that of any interest?

[01:07:53] There's a lot in there and a lot of interest.

[01:07:56] I totally understand.

[01:07:57] Again, you know, I think Gen Z is I'll just speak personally is Gen Z has been the hardest generation of people that I've ever had to work with.

[01:08:08] I'll take that on myself.

[01:08:10] Right.

[01:08:10] Is more than anything else.

[01:08:12] But I'm realizing and there's a lot of conversation about this is it's a very different generation than, you know, certainly our generation or even potentially millennials.

[01:08:22] Yeah.

[01:08:23] Well, I think that the time that is, you know, our generation and our father's generation was, you know, I mean, I look at it as faith, family work.

[01:08:35] And but they're all tied very closely because they all get so much of my attention in my life.

[01:08:40] But, you know, I think most people are thinking that standpoint if you're, you know, anything but that that Gen Z mindset is the my work is such a big part of my life and it defines me.

[01:08:54] And I think that it defining me is a big piece.

[01:08:57] And in the Gen Z world right now is so much of that is this is just something I do.

[01:09:03] It's a piece of what I do.

[01:09:04] But that other stuff that the sports or the entertainment or the things are just as important.

[01:09:10] And my work life balance is I'm not going to let work get in the way.

[01:09:14] And, you know, people of our generation and we were, you know, comments made by our audience today about the generation you and I fit into is no, no, I'm going to work till I get things done.

[01:09:25] And if I have to work this weekend, I'm going to work this weekend.

[01:09:28] And it's just a different mindset.

[01:09:30] I think there's one more piece of that, though, too.

[01:09:32] You know, it's not that when as, you know, older people like we are, we didn't have other interests outside of work.

[01:09:40] Right.

[01:09:40] I was a huge sports fan, you know, when I was in my 20s and 30s.

[01:09:45] And, you know, I had a lot of other interests.

[01:09:48] Right.

[01:09:48] That outside of work.

[01:09:50] The thing is, is I went to work and I focused on what I was doing when I was there.

[01:09:55] And then I went home and then I watched sports or did what I was going to do on sports.

[01:10:00] The problem is if you intermingle all of that together in a day, it's super distracting and you can't stay focused on any one thing.

[01:10:07] And then all of a sudden your day gets away from you.

[01:10:10] Right.

[01:10:10] Now multiply that by 500 by all the different channels of things you can go look at and do and then add sports.

[01:10:17] I mean, I thought about that as like, you know, look, I've been a gambler in my life.

[01:10:22] If if I had sports betting at that time when I was younger or whatever, what would I have done, you know, along the same way?

[01:10:31] So it's it's I can empathize with the situation, but it still is a very, very real situation for businesses and companies that have to get productivity and have to get things done with the money they're paying.

[01:10:43] Yeah, good. Well, there's a there's a point here from this article and I thought it was interesting.

[01:10:50] Right. Gen Z is essentially coping with its introduction to corporate work culture.

[01:10:54] What's different in this generation is they were raised to be change maker, influencing the way businesses think about corporate responsibility, diversity, climate change.

[01:11:03] And they want to change work culture in some settings as well.

[01:11:07] And so they've kind of lived a life of having what they want.

[01:11:12] I won't say all of them, obviously, but but getting what they want and wanting to see change.

[01:11:17] But the closing of this article, I think, was the key thing.

[01:11:21] The quote was made inside.

[01:11:22] I think Gen Z wants to come in and play the game exactly the way they want to play it.

[01:11:27] And sometimes if you're coming into a game where a bunch of other people are playing, you've got to play the way they play first.

[01:11:35] Yeah. And I think that for me was the big takeaway is you can't come in and decide.

[01:11:40] And, you know, we look at this the.

[01:11:45] From a standpoint, I think about wholesale distribution, especially independently owned.

[01:11:50] Right. You could have an organization that's, you know, third or fourth generation and they do things a certain way.

[01:11:57] And if you start hiring some people, forget about what gen they are, you know, gen X, gen Z, whatever it is.

[01:12:04] But if their mindset is that I'm going to come in and I want to work for you, but I want to play by my rules.

[01:12:09] It's going to be a challenge.

[01:12:11] Right. And that's what this article leads to.

[01:12:13] So anyways, good stuff here.

[01:12:15] Final article we'll talk about briefly is each week.

[01:12:19] We don't cover it every week, but most weeks we have what we call a second look.

[01:12:23] It's an article about something that we've talked about in previous articles.

[01:12:28] We've talked a lot about the port strike.

[01:12:30] There was another article that I thought was really good about the pending issue with the East Coast and Gulf Coast Gulfport.

[01:12:38] Port strike that's on pause now till January is about automation.

[01:12:43] And I am going to jump out on a limb and say that whole port strike thing can get really ugly again in January based upon this issue of automation.

[01:12:54] So we're going to continue to talk about that as we go.

[01:12:56] It's kind of an interesting way to end up after everything we've been talking about all day.

[01:13:01] Port strike?

[01:13:02] Yeah. And the automation and all that stuff.

[01:13:04] Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is.

[01:13:06] So anyways, that's that's the key.

[01:13:09] Anything exciting as we wrap up for the weekend for you, my friend?

[01:13:14] Not really. No.

[01:13:16] No. All right.

[01:13:16] No. I've got some desk time, some volunteer time, some family time, and then back in the bags.

[01:13:25] I'm out. I'm out of here, man.

[01:13:26] All right.

[01:13:27] I leave Monday morning for a 10 day trip.

[01:13:30] All right.

[01:13:30] And so next week's show will be from somewhere at the Hyatt Hotel on Wacker Drive in Chicago.

[01:13:38] I'm going to have to find the little quiet spot.

[01:13:41] It might be in the room, but we'll get that.

[01:13:43] We'll look forward to being together again next week.

[01:13:45] And it is conference time, right?

[01:13:49] We did Industrial Supply Association a couple of weeks ago in Orlando at Technology Executive Summit.

[01:13:55] Last week, affiliated distributors, Net Plus Alliance, all kinds of stuff going on over the next month.

[01:14:02] So I'm going to road warrior like I was a young man.

[01:14:05] That's right.

[01:14:06] Well, bring your AI with you.

[01:14:08] All right.

[01:14:08] We'll bring my AI tools with me.

[01:14:10] So we'll wind down.

[01:14:12] Thanks, Bob, for the comment about safe travels.

[01:14:15] It's a lot of it going on right now through the end of the year.

[01:14:17] I'll be gone a lot.

[01:14:20] We thank everybody for coming again.

[01:14:22] I'm Kevin Brown.

[01:14:23] This is my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton.

[01:14:26] We're grateful that you spend some time with us each week, whether it's a couple of minutes on a recording or shoveling a sandwich down while you're listening live.

[01:14:37] We love it that you come.

[01:14:38] If you like what we do each week, share the idea with your friends.

[01:14:41] If you're listening on the recorded podcast, leave us a review.

[01:14:45] Forward the link to a show that you might have liked to some peers, and that'll get us out there that much more.

[01:14:51] I think I mentioned recently we're downloaded in about 20 plus.

[01:14:55] I think it was 26 countries we've been downloaded before.

[01:14:58] Astounding to me.

[01:14:59] We have listeners each week from, I know, consistently from many different countries.

[01:15:03] We're just trying to get better at this.

[01:15:04] If you have suggestions about things to talk about, suggestions about guests, we would love to hear that.

[01:15:10] But we're grateful for you being with us.

[01:15:12] We couldn't do it, as we mentioned, each week without the sponsorship of the company Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies.

[01:15:17] If you're on a digital transformation journey and looking to get your company to the next level on how you can include AI and deep learnings about customers, your teams, and your overall business, we'd love to have a conversation with you.

[01:15:31] So we'll leave it at that.

[01:15:32] Anything to add, Tom?

[01:15:33] No, I just want to thank everybody for all the comments.

[01:15:35] That was some great comments.

[01:15:36] I might as well go back and read them myself.

[01:15:38] Yeah, in fact, there were some things in there I want to go back and comment on.

[01:15:43] So it would be very good.

[01:15:45] So based upon that, again, LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, a lot of the comments that we have, if you wanted to read those and you would listen to the podcast, the Lead Smart Technologies LinkedIn page is where this recording is at.

[01:15:59] And you could go see some of the great comments that were made today as well.

[01:16:02] So we'll go from there.

[01:16:04] Tom, I'm sure we'll be talking to you later today.

[01:16:07] And we'll wish everybody a fantastic rest of your Friday and a great weekend.

[01:16:11] Be safe, be kind, do good things.

[01:16:18] We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests.

[01:16:22] Each week, we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business.

[01:16:26] 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.

[01:16:37] 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.

[01:16:44] 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.

[01:16:53] And finally, please check out our sponsor, LeadSmart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM, customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform.

[01:17:05] That's LeadSmart Technologies at LeadSmartTech.com.