After the Pandemic – Working Remotely The Customer Situation

 

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 expertise around core products offering expert assistance tied to the products they sold.   

 

This played well as customers went through what was known as “re-engineering” their organizations as outlined in Michael Hammer’s 1993 book, Reengineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution.  Engineering, maintenance, and technical teams were often re-engineered/downsized (bent, folded, stapled, and otherwise mutilated) to the point of resembling nothing of their former condition.  Early adopters of the expertise model were joined by other distributors in becoming what is commonly referred to today as a Knowledge-based distributor. 

 

These dramatic shifts in customer behavior, as in the case of the re-engineering mentioned above, were propelled by economic storms.  Since the recessions of the late 80s and early 90s, the distribution business model has further morphed with each new economic storm.  Make no mistake, the COVID Pandemic will live in infamy as a whopper of a storm.  Ignoring customer shifts driven by this phenomenon can lead to devastating consequences.  Those distributors who pause to consider the shifts and prepare for them will outperform their peers. 

 

Join me as we explore what is happening and how to prepare for one of the biggest changes.

 

Customers working remotely

According to new numbers from World Economic Forum, 75 percent of workers want to maintain a certain level of “flex time” after the dust of the Pandemic dies down.  Surprisingly, 74 percent of managers are in favor of the idea.  The economics involved in finding qualified workers will force many customers to follow the flex time practice with many of the jobs that typically report to the office. 

 

While maintenance, production, and shop floor technicians will continue to report to work daily due to the hands-on nature of their work, the rest of our customer contacts have a high probability of becoming flex workers.  This presents some issues for distributors. 

 

Customer contact will require greater use of appointments

After a year with extraordinarily few or no customer visits, most sellers report an urge to jump into the car and drive like the wind to the nearest customer.  Thinking further, most of the in-person calls made during the Pandemic were at the request of the customer.  Scheduling was easy, the customer called, asked the seller to come look at some situation, and off they went.  Basically, the customer made the appointment. 

 

Past research with dozens of traveling supplier salespeople uncovered a systemic issue with distributor salespeople.  Most are not good with targeted appointments.  Some are still “milk route” sellers, substituting their ability to show up every Tuesday for actual appointments.  Pre-COVID these guys wasted a lot of time for the customers to meet with them.  Things will be worse in a post-COVID world.  Flex workers may or may not be present; those who are in the facility will be consumed with other activities.  The only answer is developing (or redeveloping) the habit of setting appointments. 

 

One of the underlying reasons appointments are not used may be a lack of planning.  Setting appointments has always been difficult and I suspect some gave up because they saw the arduous nature of the task as not worth the effort.  Here are a couple of pointers on setting appointments:

·         Always have a clearly defined and customer-focused reason for your appointment.  Just stopping to say “hi” is probably not going to cut through the clutter.  If you do not have a reason to visit, create one.  Remember, there must be something in it for the customer.  And customers do not value new product introductions as highly as back in the “good old days.”

·         Whenever possible confirm a time for your next visit with the customer.  This could be as simple as saying, “I have a few things to research for you.  Is there a good day and time for us to get back together?”

·         Use text messages to set appointments.  Younger customers report they prefer texts for activities like this.  A quick text with a proposed date and time can avoid a lot of phone tag.

·         Use email and outlook invites.  Send a meeting request along with a message that you would be open to a different time if the original time does not work.

·         Old fashion phone calls still work but sometimes require
multiple calls.  In our work with new sellers working in underdeveloped territories, we have discovered that a single call rarely results in getting an appointment with a prospective customer.  The question these sellers ask is this:  How many calls are too many?  Our research indicates it takes as many as seven phone calls to reach a person these days.  Really.

 

Customers are ditching their catalogs

Back in June of 2013, I wrote this:

“Every engineering department, maintenance group or contractor on the planet still maintains a library of product catalogs.  Even though a good many turn to the internet for some level of product selection, they ultimately end up with a hard catalog for the final stages of their decision making.”  

Later in the article, I even provided advice to new sellers on how to properly place their company’s sticker on the catalog.  What a difference seven or eight years makes.

 

Finally, after 100 years and one global Pandemic, customers are ultimately ditching their collection of grease-covered, beat up old catalogs.  Research indicates that even maintenance techs, who generally do not have a dedicated work computer, are now given access to a departmental computer for researching parts and determining potential replacements.  But those flex workers have not taken their giant stack of catalogs home.  Instead, they are using the internet as their primary tool for product identification and selection.

 

A recent survey we conducted with (mostly electrical and automation) customers including panel builders, systems integrators, special machine builders, OEMs, and end-users demonstrated the impact of the internet.  100 percent of those surveyed indicated buying decisions were made via the web.  Most had two or three preferred distributors and tried to use the webstores of those companies to gather the information required for their projects.  Pushing this forward, we asked if they found themselves migrating toward the distributor with the most complete webstore.  The discovery:  for flagship brands, the purchases remained at the original distributor, but ancillary and “commodity” purchases were moving to the distributor with the most complete webstore. 

 

The moral of this story is this:

·         If you do not have a webstore:  The Pandemic has just dealt you Wild Bill Hickok’s aces and eights.  You need one and you need it right away. 

·         If you do have a webstore: Now is the time to get good at e-commerce.

 

Distributors with a webstore should invest the same energy in getting customers onto your site and familiarizing them with navigation as many of us did back in the “catalog with a sticker” days. 

 

Customers still need Training… and Training is still the new marketing

Whether working remotely or in their office, customer training will be in high demand.  Customers working from home will be searching for easy-to-understand training that could be delivered via videos over the internet. 

 

A recent study published by KPMG (the global business services company) states that in 1995 only 4 percent of companies used online learning.  Midway through the Pandemic the number had exceeded 90 percent and continues to grow.  This provides an opportunity for distributors.  Here is why.

 

In a complex technical class, the right level of training and retention often requires a person to answer individual questions.  While large “training providers” may have a team of generic subject matter experts, most have no connection to the customer and little understanding of the customer’s application.  Distributors are perfectly suited to handle these types of technical questions.  Further, each such interaction has the potential for furthering the sales relationship.  Technical specialists and application engineers already on staff can easily field questions and at the same time understand the new technologies remotely working customers are exploring.  Training as the new marketing illustrated.

 

Some types of training cannot easily be done online whether the student works in the customer facility or remotely.  On-site distributor-hosted training is the ultimate marketing tool.  When distributors can get customers into their offices for training, the customer is exposed to the distributor’s company culture, see related products, and build relationships with support people.  Essentially, the customer drives to the sales call instead of the other way around. 

 

Bringing all this together

The Pandemic aftermath will linger with our customers.  More will work remotely while employing some sort of flex work.  Customers will continue to embrace the speed and convenience of the web for finding product details.  It will be harder to see people without an appointment.  And, not making an appointment will ultimately create friction in the sales process.

 

As knowledge-based distributors, it is our duty, responsibility, and mission in life to make our customer’s lives easier and more productive.  Anticipating these shifts will create a new competitive advantage.

 

Next time

Long ago an old faded, hand-painted billboard along US 151 in western Wisconsin read, “Crazy Frank’s Discount – Eliminate the Middleman and Save!”  I liked the name.  Each of the hundreds of times I passed by it reminded me, we are the middleman they were talking about.  Distributors generally serve our customers, but we also serve the supply-partners we represent.  The pandemic has impacted them.  

Next week, we will take a similar look at their people situation. 

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Frank Hurtte is the Founding Partner of River Heights
Consulting. He combines the battle scars of 28 years of front line "in the trenches" experience with over 13 years of service to knowledge-based distributors and their manufacturer partners.

Email or call today to make these virus-driven times work for you.

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