S4E6: Ian Heller

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the taste makers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Alright, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to Commerce Famous episode six on season four. Today, I've got an exciting guest named Ian Heller who's joining me today. Ian is the founder of distribution strategy group, and he's got a heck of a fun background in in all things b two b ecommerce. Ian, welcome to the pod. Hey.

Hey. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to it. Well, what's fun about it for me personally is I've actually been a guest on a couple of webinars with you as the host, and I think it's fun to flip the script.

You you gotta ask all the hard questions and watch me squirm. I'm gonna do the same to you. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I didn't prepare at all. So, you know, it it it should be it should be, quite squirmy.

Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Let's start off by by introducing yourself a little bit about your role as it relates to kind of the some of the complexities that you've dealt with in your career in ecommerce. You've had a few really impactful companies you've worked at in the b to b space.

I'll steal a little of your thunder, but it's companies like Grainger and Staples. When people think about b to b and ecommerce, they think about companies like that, and you certainly have those as part of your stops. Yeah. My last stop was actually the one where I where I managed a large b to b website, and that was at Whitecap, which is a construction supplies distributor. So I was there for seven years as VP of marketing.

I had ecommerce, among my responsibilities. So I was at I I was at Granger, like, in the nineties when they launched granger.com, but I was in marketing, and ecommerce was a totally different department. So I wasn't as involved there. I did run an e business for GE Capital, after that. But, yeah.

When I was at Staples, it was so long ago. It was called Corporate Express, and I was in marketing. That was another ecommerce department. So I've I've been ecommerce adjacent and involved and involved on the demand generation, but it wasn't really until my last corporate job that I managed the function directly. Got it.

Well, what got you to ecommerce? Let's start there. Yeah. Well, I mean, look. You you marketing and ecommerce have converged.

Right? You really can't do one without the other anymore because part of what you part of the way that you generate demand is through e commerce. Right? Whether it's, you know, geofencing or SEO ads or whatever, you're always involved with e commerce, at least on the demand generation side, even when you're in marketing. But then when I got to Whitecap, ecommerce actually fell within the marketing set of responsibilities.

So that's when I that's when I had direct responsibility for it. Take us through the timeline. What year was it where these roads started to converge for you? Yeah. So I joined white cap in 2010 and I was there for seven years.

Right. And, I think like a lot of people who are in B2B e commerce, I made the mistake, first of all, of measuring the return on our e commerce site by the shopping cart. What I realized later is a lot of people in B2B shop on the web. So all the normal stuff, like having good product data and having account information, it's all super important. But when it goes to hit the buy button, they're not going through the shopping cart.

In fact, in our research, they go through the shopping cart about one in six times. Other times they choose to email you the order or they call it in. There are various reasons that that happens. What that means is that many distributors wildly underestimate the value of their ecommerce site wildly. Right?

So they think, well, you know, not that much volume goes through it, so it can't be that important. And what I learned at YCap and then especially since then with distribution strategy group is that's a huge miscalculation that it results in distributors, hugely under investing in e commerce because they're measuring its value or the return based on the shopping cart volume. And that's just not how many, many small customers buy. Man, I love that story. It's it's actually a a former mentor of mine told me a story once about, Circuit City.

Do you remember the brand Circuit City? Oh, yeah. Of course. A little old. Yeah.

They had a they they brought in some some really smart bankers and did a bunch of of analysis on their traffic and, their foot traffic in these stores, and they realized that there was some really low margin things that they could simply get rid of and use that square footage for other items. And it was the laundry and and and kitchen and those kinds of items. And what they realized when they took them out is those were the big drivers of foot traffic inside of Staples. And so very similar to your story, if you if you only attribute the value of digital in the in regards to what gets closed in ecommerce, well, then it's not worth not worth much. But if you attribute the value of a really elegant quoting process, a portal that that that fully services them and all those other utility, then you have a completely different picture.

Is that kinda what you found? Absolutely. So we at distribution strategy group, we surveyed 1,855 distributor customers. Right? So this is, this is a pretty robust dataset.

And we asked them after you shop on a distributor website, when you go to place an order, which of the following methods do you use? And email was the largest response. Wow. And only 18% of the time. Are they checking out the shopping cart only 18%?

And this is across verticals, which means on average distributors are underestimating the value of the website by 600%. That the, the website's worth 600% more than they think just by measuring sales properly and they don't do it right. Right. So they go, oh man, I'm only getting 2% of my sales through, the website. So I can't afford to spend that billion dollars on a new e e commerce site or whatever it is.

Right? I mean, the cost has come down a lot. But, yeah, I and but where if they actually did the proper calculation, if they did the attribution right, what they discover is they're getting these extraordinary ROIs on their ecommerce investment, and they need to spend more. And so what happens is they get caught. We what we call the ecommerce doom loop, where you underestimate the value of your website.

So you decide not to invest in it and the gap between you and good e commerce companies gets bigger and bigger and bigger over time. Oh, man. I love that. And so really you you should measure the effects of commerce not in the transactions that happen from commerce directly, but the second order effects. Meaning, do you make the sales reps more effective?

Do you help the time between quote to order actually shorten? Like, those types of things. Is that how you think about it as well? Well, I think all those things are very important. Right?

So a lot of lot of customers will go to the website and they'll do account management and they'll look up technical information. They'll look at training that you have out there. They'll expedite orders. All that stuff's super important. But one thing you can do is just start measuring the orders that are not coming through the shopping cart, but start with the website.

So here here's how we suggest you do this because you you could programmatically do it with software, but you know what a really easy way is just have someone call 50 or a 100 customers a month who placed orders not to the website and ask them, did you use the website in the process of placing this order? And if they say yes, give attribution to the website. If they say no, don't. And what we've what we've discovered with distributors who have done that is they're finding that, oh my gosh, this website's generating so much more volume than we thought because someone took the order on the website. But if you're a small company, a lot of times you have a purchasing process that dictates that you use email.

And so it's like, well, I put the whole order together on the website and I put it in the shopping cart just so that I could keep track of the, of the material that I needed. But then I copied and pasted that into an email, sent it off to my boss for approval, and then forwarded it to the distributor. So the the website was responsible for the order, but it got zero attribution because the customer emailed it in. Right? Another so if you've so if you just call 50 or a 100 customers a month, by the way, this is a really good opportunity to get people some customer contact in your organization who don't have a lot.

Like, say, your senior executives have have five senior executives call 10 people who placed orders offline and ask them if they use the website. And by the way, while you're on the phone with them, make it sound like a customer service thing. Hey. We saw you placed an order yesterday. This is not a sales call.

I just wanted to see how things went. I mean, who doesn't appreciate that kind of call? Right? And then while you have them on the phone, ask them, hey. What did you like about our website?

What would you like to see improve? What other websites do you use that we could learn from? And so you're you're accomplishing customer service, website attribution, and market research in one call. Right? You do it 50 times a month or a 100 times a month.

Now you take that, extrapolate that over all your transactions. Boom. I've got a much more accurate picture of what my website's, generating in terms of sales versus measuring the shopping cart. The other thing you can do is look at the correlation between website engagement and overall sales. And what we've discovered is with most distributors, this there's this enormously high correlation between how much people are, are, are engaging with your website and how much their overall sales are.

So when you do these numbers, Jason, what you find is most distributors need to spend a lot more on their website because it's gonna generate more sales. The return is there. They're just doing the attribution incorrectly. Oh, man. I love this.

Okay. So number one was 18 per wait. Now number one was email. Yep. What was number two?

Number two was the shopping cart, but that was only 18% of the of the volume. And then the rest was CSR, customer service rep, then their own sales rep, and then in the branch, and then the sales rep when they came by the office. That was most of it. Right? Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants.

More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through shopware.ware. Find out more about shopware and the best value in e commerce at shopware.com. And and by the way, distributors are often their own worst enemies at this stuff. So for example, most distributors will give discounts or they they they they they extend discount authority to the people who answer the phone and to the sales reps. Okay.

Which by definition means your website's the most expensive way to buy from you, which means there's this huge disincentive to placing an order online. So I'll put the order together online. Then I'll call the CSR, my buddy, Bob at Branch 4, 418 and say, Hey, Bob, can you do a little something for me? And Bob says, yeah, sure. I'll back 10% off of this line and 5% off of that line.

Right? Well, you're literally incentivizing customers not to buy online, and then you're surprised that they don't buy online. And so, you know, again, the the the account the the website is fundamental to the order. It's just not getting any credit for it because customers aren't stupid. They learn if I make a phone call, I can save a little money, and so they do.

I mean, the and then we wonder why they don't buy online. Well, I love that. I mean, it's ultimately you we've conditioned the customers to buy from the certain way because they get better incentives. It makes total sense. It's a little bit like in the b to c world how nobody buys anything the week before Black Friday.

Yeah. Yeah. Know if they wait, they'll get a good deal. Yeah. Right.

I mean, you're just training people, you know, to buy the cheapest way, you know, and then you add to that the fact that the products are often more complicated and customers wanna get that information online. I mean, the website is absolutely fundamental to almost every distributor, even if you don't transact on it at all, Even if you don't transact on it at all, it's absolutely fundamental to the value proposition you put forth to your customers. You've gotta have great data. You've gotta have, product information. You've gotta have, you know, everything set up so that the customers can find all the information they want.

They increasingly don't wanna talk to people. They increasingly wanna get the information on a website, but don't measure the attribution just on the shopping cart. By all means, take credit for the shopping cart revenue, but then do what I said about, you know, this little research project every month or at least every quarter where you call a 100 customers and just ask them. I mean, that's really inexpensive and easy to do, and then extrapolate that to your transaction set and then correlate customer engagement with your website to their overall sales. And pretty soon, you have this ROI case that says, oh my gosh.

We're hugely under invested in our ecommerce and and our digital capabilities, but we never knew because we were measuring it wrong. Yeah. Love that. Alright. So the year now is twenty twenty, January before pre pandemic Yeah.

To say, you know what? I'm gonna start up a company. I'm gonna call it DSG, distribution strategy group. Take us through that moment in history. What was going on in the world that you decided to take the plunge and create this business?

Yeah. Well, you know, we saw an opening in the marketplace. Right? There's this there there was nobody who was providing, ongoing stream, a regular schedule of programming for virtual events. And so we thought we'd give it a try.

So I was, you know, trying to figure out what to do with my career at that point in time and thought, Hey, I know I could retire or I could risk everything on a startup at the age of 57. And I stupidly did the startup. I mean, it was worked out, but, you know, you know, at the time, you know, I'm sure my wife was going, oh my gosh. You know? I told her at the time, I said, honey, if this doesn't work out, I'm gonna be a Walmart creator in the twilight of my career.

But it did work out. And so, you know, we're doing well now, but it was really just, you know, man, I wanna take one more swing at things. I I'm not ready to retire. I enjoy this stuff. I like the thought leadership stuff.

It's really interesting. I think we've got some things to say, like, well, like even back then, Jason, we knew about this misattribution of, of websites. Right. We, we knew that this was a problem because we used to do a lot of consulting and we'd figured it out then. And we couldn't get the word out.

I mean, we've been preaching this message for six years now, and I gotta tell you, most distributors haven't heard it. They're still going. Here's my website sales. I'm gonna divide that into my costs and that's my ROI. So we had this burning urge to get out there and spread the word about how to do things better in distribution.

And so we decided to take a chance and do it. Who's Wade? Jonathan Vine. So you described me as the founder of distribution strategy group. I'm really the cofounder.

So I have a fifty fifty partner. So Jonathan Bine is, he's got a PhD in computer science in AI. And I'm glad in 2020, AI wasn't as big as it is now because he might have, like, pushed me to get more than half the company. Well, your timing is amazing. I mean, ultimately, you went to virtual events in January 2020.

Right. And your cofounder is a guy who's an expert in AI. I mean, you're and you're serving what I consider to be a largely underserved segment. So your timing is impeccable, Ian. Well, we had we had even I mean, I mean, I hate to say it this way because COVID was a horrible thing and lots of people died.

But it just so happened that everybody moved to work from home and all the live events collapsed that year. And we had this virtual lineup that we just announced. So we just sort of dumb lucked our way into having the only robust set of virtual programs in the market, right, as everybody couldn't go to live events anymore. So it was really good for our business. Like I said, you nailed the timing.

I know. It's just dumb rush. Well, it's dumb luck. Dumb luck either way. Very cool.

So okay. So tell me about what it was like to get your first customer. I I always love the stories of people trying to convince someone they know to trust them and to to invest with them. How how did that go? Yeah.

So we you know, I'd reached I reached out to a guy named Doug Arnold, who was at Epicor at the time. They were our first customer. Right. And I said, Hey, Doug, we've got, you know, we've just launching this line of virtual programs. He said, sounds great.

Let's get on the phone. We talked about it and he sent me a PO and that was our first customer. And then once we had this anchor tenant, then we began approaching other customers. And then, you know, we, the, the quality had to be there. I mean, we've been committed from the start of making sure that our, our content's not a sales pitch.

It's gotta be educational and orientation. And so, you know, just knowing someone, and I I didn't know Doug very well, but just, you know, having a contact who he had a good reputation with because, you know, he'd seen stuff that I'd posted over the years and he liked it, I guess. And he decided to sign up. He's not there anymore, but, you know, he he he was he took a risk on us. And once he did, others did too.

This was at Epicor? Yeah. Yeah. Right on. Well, one of the podcast one of the webinars you and I did together was with, the product leader of Epicor.

That's right. So they're still connected. They're still doing business with us. Yeah. They're they've been our first client, and they've been a great customer ever since.

Well, introduce introduce the folks on the pod to distribution strategy group. Tell us whatever whatever whatever the audience needs to know. It's a it's a collection of ecommerce people, some merchants, some distributors, you know, it's a wide swath of people. Yeah. So we only work within the wholesale distribution industry.

It's an $8,000,000,000,000 industry in The United States. They're all wholesale distributors so they sell supplies and materials to other companies. There's no consumer business or very little consumer business in it. We are a media and software and events company. So we, as a media company, we produce newsletters that keep people up to speed on what's happening in the distribution industry.

We have three software products of our own. One's a net promoter score product, one's an employee engagement product, And the third one estimates demand by product line by location for distributors. And then we are an events company, virtual events and live events. So we do about 60 virtual events a year. We do one live conference a year, although we're, planning to grow that business and do other live events.

And then we have a couple of tertiary things that we do. We do a little bit of consulting and we do an increasing amount of keynote speaking done by me, Jonathan, our COO, Brian Hopkins, and then we have a speakers bureau with some other speakers on it. Phenomenal. Talk to me about your event that you're planning, the in person big one. Yeah.

So Over there. It's the only major live event on apply on on the artificial intelligence in in the distribution industry. And it's our fourth year. It's It's called applied AI for distributors. The URL is appliedai, for distributors.com, or you can go to distributionstrategy.com, and there's a banner at the top.

We'll have about 350 distribution executives. We'll have about a 100 technology executives. We have 40 different technology companies there. About 24 of them are actually presenting in breakout sessions. The others are exhibiting or on panels.

It's very different than any other distribution event that you go to. It's much more like a technology event. So it it looks different. The the audience is different. Everybody there's technology for the technology isn't, an aside to the main conference.

The conference is about technology. Our dress code is you must wear clothes. That's it. We we do enforce that by the way. We're we're strict on the on the you must wear clothes, but we don't care what you wear.

And so it, it, it feels and looks like a technology conference. You don't, you don't feel like you're sort of stepping back in time technologically, like you sometimes do at a distributor conference. I mean, these are, these are technology forward people who are, knowledgeable and curious. The networking's fantastic. It's in Chicago at the Chicago Marriott O'Hare, so it's a five minute, you know, Uber ride from the air from the airport.

We have some fantastic speakers. The opening, on the opening day, we have the SVP of marketing from Graybar speaking. We're closing with the chief technology officer from Grainger. In the middle, we've got some speakers that are, you know, really leaders in their areas. So we've got Jeff Kroom, who's, IBM technology executive.

He's got a PhD in cybersecurity. He's gonna be talking about cybersecurity in the age of AI. We've got Jeff Sigelman, who's the head of the Burning Glass Institute, talking about how AI is gonna impact jobs. We've got panels with distribution executives, panel with panels with technology executives, tremendous networking at breakout sessions and technology companies exhibiting what they're doing. For the technology companies who present, we have to approve their speaker, we have to approve their slides, and then they have to present to us in advance.

And That's different. Yeah. Right. So they have to prove to us that this is educational. It's not a sales call.

Well, okay. So let me let me share a little bit under, you know, behind the curtain. Most events are pretty much just pay to play Yeah. For technology companies. And so it doesn't matter if you're the smartest, if you have the best story, if you have the best case studies.

If you can pay the amount of money, you get to stand on stage and say whatever you want. Right. And they pretend to care by making you show them the slides, but what you just described is very different. Yeah. Well, we we're very fussy about this.

So we've we've we turned down certain sponsors if they don't really have an AI story. We reject speakers if it turns out it's the VP of sales. We said, no. It's gotta be a product person or it's gotta be a technical person. And so we take this stuff very seriously.

You know, we have a this is our reputation. And, I mean, we're kind of lucky too, Jason, because AI is such a big deal now that we're gonna sell out sponsors no matter what. So I don't wanna pretend like it's all just matter of principle. We're in a good position and and we take advantage of it to make sure the content's there for the attendees. Yeah.

Well, and then you can take just about any angle you want, on this topic. And there's it's all it's all so meaty. It's such a big topic. Yeah. Security and data control and privacy and all this stuff.

Yeah. We got some workshops too. So, Jonathan, my business partner is gonna do an opening workshop talking about the future of AI and distribution. And that's open to the first, like, 100 people who sign up. And then we have two post show workshops.

We've got, Nick Paraclete who, I don't know if you know Nick, but he's super bright. He just founded his own company called tenacity, and he's literally gonna help you build an agent in that workshop. And then Brian Hopkins, who's our COO is a world class LLM expert. He writes code with it. You know, he's, he knows how to, how to use, co work with Claude, etcetera.

And he's, he's actually doing a workshop after the fact on your AI roadmap. And he's doing a general session on how do you use LLMs to improve your productivity as an executive. Man, I love this. I mean, you know, in the, in the, in the B2C world, I would say it's it's probably they're adopting AI a lot more on the front end and and replacing designers, and they're they're kinda more cutting edge Yep. On experimentation with AI.

Yep. But I don't hear a lot of kind of b to b industry folks driving AI as a kind of tier one conversation. Usually, it's more of a laggard. Yeah. And it's funny because, that's absolutely true, and yet The US is ahead of other countries.

So we're we've been invited to go to Spain this year. We've been invited to go to New Zealand. We've been invited to go to Canada a couple of times. I was in The UK in October. So, you know, there's the the increasing demand for AI expertise.

It's helping to drive some of our programming because we're looking at doing overseas versions of applied AI for distributors now. And, the demand appears to be, you know, very, very robust. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thanks for pushing the industry forward.

It takes people like you and forums like this to make sure that the you know, our industry stays up or ahead of what's going on in the market. So that's amazing. Well, thank thank you for having me on the show so I can spread the word. Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, let's talk a little bit about how we met. I mean, we met because you guys hope you guys are a media company in my eyes. That's kind of first and foremost. Yep. And you have a very, very well attended webinar series and and content.

Talk a little bit about that. How did that get to be where it is today, and and and what is it? Describe it for folks. Yeah. So if you go to, distributionstrategy.com, you can see our archive programs, and you can see our upcoming programs.

And it's just grown over the years. Right? So we had, I don't know, a couple years ago, we probably had 30 programs. Last year, we had 40 something. This year, we've got almost 60.

And it's just matching the demand of our audience. Right? So I think technology, like every other industry, Jason, as you know, from what you do at Shopware is increasingly technology driven. Right? I mean, and it's across the enterprise.

Right? It's everything from, demand generation, like marketing automation and CRM, right through to collecting rebates after the fact managing returns, managing my delivery fleet, etcetera. And technology is transforming these distributors and distributors are getting pushed hard right now, right? Because you've got Amazon business moving in, you've got QXO moving in, you've got home Depot moving in. So you've got these huge players who are either from outside the industry or they're new, who are pushing on distributors to get better.

And so what's happening is, you know, people who are thought leaders in distribution are hungry for expertise. How how do I keep up? How do I have a state of the art website? How do I justify the ROI, which is what we're talking about earlier? You know, what are the what are the capabilities that I need to build into that in into that software, and how do I pick the right system?

I mean, and and how do I optimize inventory? I mean, carrying costs on inventory have gone way up because interest rates have gone up. So that's a huge I mean, working capital is a lifeblood of distributors, you know, cash flow and or or it's, you know, financial existence. And so, you know, when interest rates go up, you know, it gets real expensive in terms of cash to maintain your distribution company. So how do I manage inventory smarter?

Can AI tools help? Well, the answer is yes. And, you know, how do I collect money faster? And, you know, how do I manage my cash conversion cycle? I mean, these are real top of mind issues for not just the CFO, but for the CEO and anyone who thinks like a general manager.

And so what we're trying to do is meet that demand with the latest and greatest, in process. You know, what, what are best practices and what are the tools out there, the technology tools that can get the job done for you. So really our, our virtual program lineup just matches what we're hearing from our audience about what they need to learn about. How do you manage I mean, there's so many topics. I mean, you just sit on, like, 10 of them and and and certainly AI is about 50 if you wanted.

Yeah. Sure. When you think about your content calendar, I mean, ultimately, a lot of these these distributors are drowning in information already. Right. How do you curate it and space it out to allow people to interact with it?

Yeah. Well, first of all, it's constantly changing. Right? So we set a calendar at the beginning of the year, and then almost every week we go through it and say, is this still the right content for what our audience is asking for? Now we don't like to change anything that's in the next couple of months, but anything after that's fair game.

And so if we see a program down the road and we feel like there's just not demand for it, like, hey, we did something like that a couple of months ago. It wasn't well attended that we change it to something that is is more in demand. We also, survey our audience. We ask them, what is it that you wanna hear about? Right?

And they're pretty candid, not what's of interest to them. We have another survey going out here shortly. And so and then and then we do some consulting and keynote speaking. So we're out in the marketplace. I mean, we're not trying to be a consulting company, but we get asked to do certain consulting engagements like strategic planning or whatever.

And we we wanna keep our hand in that because those are the people at the tip of the spear. And that's where we really learn what's happening in the market and how things are changing for the operators. Well, let me let me dig in on that. So how do you learn? How do you stay current?

So, you know, a lot of merchants and distributors are are going to places like IDC and Paradigm and, you know, Andy Hoare or or, Gartner or Forrester. Where do you pay attention to? Yeah. Well, we're on the market a lot, so we go to a lot of conferences. I follow some of the people that you just talked about.

You know, we have we have there are other organizations like the b two b ecommerce association that we pay attention to. That's, you know, that's, that's, Justin King and his friends. We pay attention to Andy what Andy Hoare is doing and Brian Beck. And we're pretty friendly. I mean, we don't really view most of those organizations as competitors.

I mean, I suppose in some ways they are, but we think, you know, there's such a huge industry and all these are all little companies, so including us. So we feel like we're better off collaborating with them and learning from them than we are, you know, doing them as rivals. So we maintain dialogue with with with some of those people. We go to some of their events, you know, and, and then it's an awful lot of of reading. I mean, I read all of the stuff that we produce, which is a lot more than just what I produce.

And then LLMs have been very helpful. So I'm we're constantly interacting with LLMs and trying to understand, you know, okay. What's the implications of agentic AI on distributors? Because that's a different answer than the implications on a manufacturer. Right?

Exactly. Or or even a retailer. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's fascinating.

So you're a media company, you're an events company, you're a software company, but you're not a consultant. It's good that you finally drew a line that you're not that. Yeah. We don't we don't have a consulting tab on our website. So when when someone asks us to do consulting, we we have a we have a three part screen.

One, are we the best company in the world to do this consulting project? Two, do we like these people? And three, is it big enough to matter to us? And it's maybe two projects a year that, that past that screen. So w the consulting is important, Jason, because like I said, it keeps us at the tip of the spear, right?

And you're dealing with real issues, real people, real operators. So we like to do it a couple of times a year, but we're not trying to be a consulting company. And most of the time when people call us about consulting, we send them off to someone we think is better suited for their project. Love it. And when you think about so how do you go about acquiring new subscribers to the media company?

Is that a that is that a concerted effort, or you just do a great job and No. Come their way? We're very active on LinkedIn. So we post a lot on LinkedIn. We also spend a lot of marketing dollars on LinkedIn.

That's probably our number one destination for our content that we don't email and publish ourselves on our website. And, we do try to do innovative things. Like, we've got a we've got a a website group, AI for distributors, a LinkedIn group called AI for distributors. That's got a few 100 people in it and other new people join all the time. Also, we, for a while, didn't do very many keynotes, and we discovered that that that's a mistake, that when we do keynotes, we get a lot of new subscribers.

So we've been ramping that up quite a bit. So we go out to association meetings, buying group meetings, etcetera. We keynote typically on AI, but sometimes on marketing. I've been speaking a lot lately on how to resolve channel conflict. And the audience, you know, at the end, you put up a a QR code, you know, click here to to take a picture of this to subscribe to our newsletter, and a surprising number of people sign up.

We also have strategic partnerships with three distributor trade associations. So we have a partnership with the American supply association, which is plumbing distributors with the industrial supply association, which is industrial distributors, of course, and then NAED, the National Association of Electrical Distributors. So we're you know, I'm active on some panels on any on ASA. We're doing workshops on AI at ISA. We just completed a research project for NAED.

So we wind up you know, that winds up winds up cascading through those organizations. Love it. Well, I might need to pick your brain at how you stay involved. So we're members of, I think, all three of those as well as others. And I I well, you tell me.

These associations are probably, I'm guessing, you kinda get out what you put in. Is that a fair way to think about it? Yeah. For sure. You can't just signing up to be a member is at best a hunting license.

You really have to go out and and you've gotta engage with them. You gotta be a part of their value proposition in an obvious way. Yeah. I think there's and and did that just come natural to you or did you seek these partnerships out and and invest in them to to kinda make them bear fruit? Yeah.

I can't remember if we approached them in every case or if they approached us, but it's been a deliberate effort. So I'm on, like, I lead a task force for ASA and then I'm a part of a big committee called embracing the future, for ASA. And, you know, so we have regular calls and, you know, it's it's real work. You gotta you gotta put in the you gotta put in the the effort. But yeah, it was it's a deliberate strategy to market through or to to build partnerships with with associations and part of that is a marketing benefit.

Love it. Okay. So I'm a big fan of your stuff. I only just found you in the last year or so since I've done kind of on your show. How do people sign up to be part of your content?

Is it LinkedIn? Is it go to distributionstrategygroup.com? What's the best way to get engaged? Yeah. Go to distributionstrategy.com and you can sign up for the newsletters.

Okay. Yeah. I strongly recommend the newsletter sign up, but more importantly, I I think if you go on LinkedIn, these guys post all the videos of all of the webinars they do. Yeah. Almost all of them are on YouTube as well.

So you can subscribe to our channel on on YouTube. But it all starts with the newsletter, and people like the newsletters because there's always something going on. There's acquisition happening or, there there's a a we have an interview with, you know, some senior executive that's very interesting or or, you know, we announce a new program that might be of interest to you. So that's that's the starting point. But we all do we do also post all that stuff on LinkedIn and we have a lot of followers there.

So you can follow me or you can follow the company or you can follow Jonathan or or Brian Hopkins, who's our COO. All of us are posting all the time. Yep. And it's free. Right?

Yes. And getting engaged? Yeah. The only content that we produce that's not free for distributors is our applied AI for for distributors conference. They have to pay to go to that, and then our software is paid.

But everything all the rest of our content's free. The media part, yeah, it's paid. Mhmm. Yeah. It's free.

Right. Very, very cool. Well, Ian, I I really enjoyed kinda flipping the script on you today. I know that you're usually the one asking the hard questions, so it was fun for me to kinda hear you talk a little bit about your origin story. So thank you for joining us.

Well, Jason, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. We love working with you and with shopware and, look forward to doing a lot more with you over time. Absolutely. Thank you, Ian.

Thank you.