Todd Burke, president of Smith, a Houston-based distributor of components, discusses his company's perspective on the continuing shortages of key microchips. The increasing spread of chips across products and industries means "that chips are bought and sold across industries and geographies under different legal, regulatory and time pressures," Burke says.

ODP Corp. had third-quarter profit of $73 million on revenue of $2.18 billion. Profit more than doubled, although revenue declined from $2.35 billion a year earlier.

Owens & Minor had third-quarter profit of $44.13 million, down from $46.08 million in the year-ago period. The distributor reported $2.5 billion in revenue, up from $2.19 billion.

Order volumes have increased at 85% of 3PL warehouses in 2021, and almost half of warehouses are struggling to hire and retain workers as labor costs rise, according to a survey by 3PL Central. Respondents are using automation, system integrations and technology to address labor and capacity concerns, according to 3PL Central Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Trindade.

Using professional identities as a targeting method will help business-to-business marketers find the right buyers, foster trust via personalized content and measure campaign performance more effectively, writes LinkedIn's Abhishek Shrivastava. "It's all about finding the right decision-makers at the right companies and communicating with them intelligently," Shrivastava writes.

Fixing meetings to minimize length, unfocused discussion and unneeded participants is probably a better idea than banning meetings, says Steven Rogelberg, director of organizational science at the University of North Carolina. "You need to do the hard stuff -- changing meetings and the ecosystem in which they sit so they're more effective" Rogelberg says.

In this 4-part series, we'll take distributors from the basics of Artificial Intelligence all the way up to adopting it within your business. Those that follow along can expect to learn how AI actually works, the way it will transform B2B sales, what kind of outcomes distributors can expect from it, and how it can be implemented successfully. Learn more.

The NAW Executive Summit is back in-person January 25 - 27, 2022 and it will be bigger and better than ever before! Learn more about the NAW 2022 Executive Summit.