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The Hidden Ingredients Eating Your Selling Time

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The Food Journal for Salespeople:  Finding the Hidden Ingredients Eating Your Selling Time 🕒 6 min read By Frank Hurtte Let's face it: summer is full of distractions. Our customers have vacations, kids' ball tournaments, golf leagues, cabins up north, lawns to mow, and who knows what else. Distractions are contagious. Distributor folks are people too, and we get caught up in the summer stuff, just like everyone else. Sometime around Labor Day, we snap out of our summer-induced haze and put our noses back to the grindstone. That makes fall the perfect time for a sales tune-up. Think of it as an end-of-summer cocktail for a stronger year-end. If you've ever planned to build a new habit, this is the moment. Just ask anyone who has kept a food journal Whether they were tracking down a food allergy, counting macros, or making sure they got enough protein on a GLP-1, anyone who has kept a food journal will tell you the same thing: that first week is a shocker. The handful of chi...
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Wired for Sales: Our Future Hasn't Been Invented Yet

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Frank Hurtte's September/October piece in Industrial Supply Magazine challenges distributors to think beyond yesterday's catalog. In "Wired for Sales," he explores why the real competitive advantage isn't in what you carry; it's in how quickly you help customers adopt what's new. Read the full article HERE . Frank Hurtte is Founding Partner at River Heights Consulting and a 40+ year veteran of the distribution industry. He specializes in helping distributors commercialize innovation and build competitive advantage through strategic sales development. His work appears regularly in Industrial Supply Magazine.
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Tone Deaf Marketing: Out of Bounds

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Tone Deaf Marketing: Out of Bounds A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment 🕒 5 min read  By Desiree Grace My sister's mother-in-law is not known for her tact or her situational awareness. The Good-Good golf guys, however, make her look like Miss Manners. If any of you have been following the debacle that was their video riffing on "Obsession," you'll know that the "star" of the video on their YouTube channel shoved a woman to the ground with a comment about "Don't touch my new Callaway club!" I'm paraphrasing, but in today's day and age, when the world of golf is courting more females to take to the sport, this video could not be more tone-deaf. When it comes to marketing, as in the case of Good-Good, it's always better to err on the side of caution and do some test marketing . Sadly, both Callaway and the Good-Good team approved the video. Callaway was smart to partner with a popular YouTube channel and group of influencers. Wh...
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Joint Calls: Are You Leaving Money on the Table?

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Joint Calls: Are You Leaving Money on the Table? Stop Chasing Today's Order and Build Tomorrow's Business 🕒 6 min read By Frank Hurtte I've been making joint sales calls for almost half a century. First as the field rep for Allen-Bradley, then as a distributor trying to build a business where none existed before, and finally as a consultant assisting distributor salespeople to expand their skills. Some were great. Some were a waste of everybody's time. And a few left me wondering why we didn't just meet for breakfast and save the gasoline. Joint calls are nothing new in distribution. A supply-partner salesperson comes to town. The distributor salesperson clears some space on the calendar, lines up three or four customers, everybody jumps into a nondescript sedan, and off they go. But here's my question: Why are you making the call? If the answer is, "Because Fred from the factory is in town," you have already flunked the first test. Each call needs mo...
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Can You Beat Amazon at Their Game?

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Can You Beat Amazon at Their Game? 🕒 5 min read By Frank Hurtte The vultures are circling again.   Every few years, the doomsayers resurface: Amazon's eating distribution. E-commerce is the death of wholesale. Distributors are obsolete. The headlines are predictable. The advice? Equally predictable and predictably wrong.   Build your own Amazon. Hire consultants to help you compete on speed and price. Invest millions in e-commerce platforms. Match their logistics. Underprice the giants.   If you take that advice, you'll lose. And you'll waste time, money, and energy doing it. Here's why: You're competing on their battlefield instead of yours. W hat Amazon Does Better (And Always Will) Let's be honest. Amazon, Grainger, Faire, and the newer B2B marketplaces have invested billions in logistics, data, and algorithms. A mid-sized distributor can't match their speed or price. Competing on those terms is like a neighborhood bookstore trying to o...
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The Art of the Ask

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The Art of the Ask A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment 🕒 3 min read By Desiree Grace Does your pre-teen daughter ever greet you with a hug? If so, like me, you know she wants something. I have to give her points for effort and leveraging affection as a potent negotiating tool. While that only works in our personal lives, there's much to be said for the art of the ask. I recently received a letter from a customer demanding "your very best pricing for our new distribution center." There is so much that was wrong with this request. 1. I did not know the person sending the letter. 2. No conversation, text, or introductory email preceded the demand. 3. Nothing reciprocal was mentioned, such as increased purchase volume, displacement of a competitor, or even preferential treatment during their next planning session. I had to wonder if the woman who sent the email was fresh out of college, having barely passed her Negotiation 101 course, or if she had simply had a bad start ...
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Are You Waiting for the Perfect Time?

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A Perfect Failure Part 6: Wait for the Perfect Time 🕒 3 min read  By Frank Hurtte This may be the most expensive and most popular failure of them all. I've heard thousands of variations on the theme. In rapid-fire order, here are the top five: "My customers are really busy in the morning" (or the afternoon, or any other time). "The big guys are in the middle of budgeting, vacation season, or the holidays." "They've got another project." "They're just finishing a shutdown" (or any other named event). "Let's wait until things settle down." Here's an observation from someone who's spent a lifetime serving industrial customers: things never settle down. Successful people are busy because that's what successful companies do. Engineers always have another project, maintenance managers always have another shutdown scheduled, and purchasing always has some kind of supplier deadline. ...
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