The Distributor Channel

Free Stuff Alert It’s rare for me to promote another author or consultant, but I feel this is something you would not want to miss. I have recommended Justin Rolf-Marsh’s book, The Machine: A radical approach to the design of the sales function , to dozens of clients.  Why?  Because it questions some of the very foundations of the way those of us in sales think about the process.  The concept of an outside salesperson has been around for eons.  We could point to the old traveling peddlers making their way cross-country with a wagon load of supplies or railroad riding sellers getting off at each whistle stop to hock their wares, but instead, let us skip forward to more modern times.   The sales teams of distributors in my first year in this industry, some 40 odd years ago, followed this simple process:   The outside salesperson tooled around in shiny 1975 Ford LTDs or Oldsmobile Delta 88s dropping in on customers presenting features and benefits of new products and occasionally solving

 After the Pandemic – Working Remotely Supply-Partner Implications Earlier, we talked about the impact of distributors and their customers working remotely and how the changes impact distributors.  In the eyes of many, the story would end here.  However, a distributor is a middleman, the entity positioned between those consuming and those creating products.  Distributors are a critical part of what could officially be called the supply chain.   A bit about the supply chain  A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer.  The companies providing raw materials to supply-partners are part of their supply chain.  The distributor and supply-partners are steps in our customer’s supply chain.   If the distributor’s supply-partner experiences delivery issues and the distributor cannot deliver, the customer’s supply chain is impacted.  If the distributor mishandles an order, once again the customer’s supply chain

  After the Pandemic – Working Remotely The Customer Situation   The distributor world revolves around customer needs.   Our customer needs are an ever-evolving thing.   Knowledge-based distributors exist exclusively because of our willingness to follow, and sometimes, lead customers through their changes.   Thinking about the evolution of distributors, before the early-80s distributors all operated about the same.   Their sales efforts were mostly personality-driven and local inventory was the drawing card.     To illustrate this, allow me to journey back to the early days of my career.   The standard delivery from my factory in Milwaukee to Iowa – just over 200 miles – was five working days.   If a distributor did not have the product in stock, the customer could be out of business for a week.   This all changed when UPS and Fed-Ex entered the scene.   With local inventory out of the equation, smaller independent distributors took a different approach.   They built expertis

After the Pandemic – Working Remotely First in a Series on Planning for the New Normal We have been thinking a lot about life after the Pandemic and the reality of the new normal.  One thing that keeps surfacing is working remotely.  For instance, a recent post by famed CRM provider Salesforce stated, “The 9-5 workday is dead.”  Office buildings will no longer house the thousands of workers once important to maintaining operations.  Salesforce categorized the future of their workers this way: ·          Flex : When it is safe to return to the office, employees around the globe will work flex. This means they will be in the office one to three days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations. ·          Fully Remote : For employees who do not live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, they will work remotely full-time. ·          Office-based : The smallest population of the workforce will work from an office location four to five days per