Preparing for the future – What our customers are thinking

I have long suggested distributor salespeople read the publications covering their customers’ industries. Back in the old days, I signed up for subscriptions to magazines covering everything from food processing to the mining and quarry publications. About one a week, I would devote a leisurely evening to skimming through the articles. Why? It, simple, because I wanted to know what might be on my customer’s mind. To an extent, I still look into topics I believe impact the operations of distributors’ customers.


As I perused Plant Engineering Magazine, a publication serving customers of many knowledge-based distributors, I came across an article I believe needs to be examined. This article is titled “2018 Maintenance Survey: Playing Offense and Defense” and offers some thought provoking stuff. Allow me to share.

Two ways of of viewing Maintenance
The author believes the whole topic of maintenance could be broken into a couple of components. First, as a defensive measure against the potential of downtime as in preventive maintenance. Second, as an offensive strategy aimed at improving uptime and increasing asset management. For some reason he didn’t mention the third option of “run to fail” which equates waiting for failure before doing anything about the issue.

Predictive maintenance is gaining more attention. Actually, the survey indicates 51 percent of the plant managers are actively pursuing this field. The old-school philosophy of “run to fail” is rapidly decreasing in popularity with just 57 percent of plants using this method.






IIoT presents opportunities
This opens the doors to a lot of the Industrial Internet of Things and data analytics. Distributors have a number of cool new products available to them. Customers are, or at least should be looking. Further, one of the major stumbling blocks for these customers is a lack of people with the capabilities required to implement strategies and analyze the data coming in from the customer. Once again, based on the survey, one of the critical components missing is the people factor. Just under half have the needed skillsets in-house.


Training continues to be desperately needed
According to the survey, 46 percent of the customers see a need for training their people. Here’s a list of specific training areas:

• 84 percent need Safety Training
• 68 percent need Basic Electrical Training
• 67 percent need Basic Mechanical Training
• 58 percent need Predictive Maintenance Training
• 85 percent of the respondents are concerned about the retiring workforce and how maintenance jobs will be filled

Job Security for distributors
The data laid out here applies to more than just end-user customers. I believe OEMs and other customers face precisely the same demographic trends as the plant managers who just happened to be the recipients of the survey. Simply put, everyone dealing in the industrial, manufacturing and process sectors of our economy is running critically short of trained and qualified people. Yet, the show must go on for them to survive.
No one has greater intimate knowledge of your customer’s specific needs, process and current situation. Due to the knowledge-based distributor’s propensity to learn and adopt new technologies, you likely have the deep product understanding to assist in implementation and application of new strategies. Things look pretty rosy, but there are a few hurdles.

Converting this shift into dollars - Training
One of the major issues facing our type of distribution comes

via our business model, built around gross margins generated from product sales. Adding more services without some form of direct compensation stretches a business model which is already experiencing margin erosion. While much of what we are looking at transcends the current model, for the distributor with a mechanism for fee-based services or those close to adopting a model, opportunity abounds. Let’s explore.

We have been saying “Training is the new marketing” for a long time. The data laid out above demonstrates there is a need for training and customers have money to spend; now is the time for distributors to get serious about developing a real strategy for customer training.

Here are a few random thoughts to consider:

• Don’t confuse training with product seminars. Your training should be “generic” in nature with your products only used as examples in the discussion
• Many of the potential students are not the people you generally call on. You may call on the people around them, their boss, co-workers and other, but don’t limit your training exclusively to current customer contacts.
• Your existing team probably has the expertise to provide at least some of the training required by the customers. Product Specialists are often great resources for trainers.
• Don’t necessarily train on “only” the products on your line card. For instance, safety training touches a number of disciplines. You don’t need to be a safety product distributor to add customer value.
• When customers sit in your class, the random discussions often turn into sales leads. Salespeople meeting customers during lunch and breaks generally walk away with opportunities. Don’t skip the training session just because “none of your contacts” are in attendance.

There’s Gold in the preventive/predictive maintenance area
Most distributors have at least a couple of supply-partners with IIoT related products. For the most part, the sales of these products has been less than stellar. After a short flurry of activity, many salespeople have lost interest. The sales numbers just didn’t come so they moved on to selling the bread and butter products.

Customers are interested in and pursuing the concept, but missionary work is required and can be expensive. Why not get paid for the missionary work? Nothing establishes your expertise in a new technology better than training. If one of your classes isn’t tied to preventive/predictive technologies using IIoT, we should talk.

Finally…
Many of us have already laid out a plan for the coming year. Some have already forgotten what was on the plan. As March approaches, I suggest revisiting the plan and thinking about how your efforts can better mesh with your customers’ needs. If you don’t have a good understanding of the problems facing your customers, maybe you should share the results of the Plant Engineering survey and ask your customers how closely it matches their situation. If you want to get more information, shoot me an email and we can talk about developing a survey specifically for your customers.

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