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Incentive Design and the Law of Unintended Consequences

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I ncentive Design and the Law of Unintended Consequences 🕒 3 min read A Special Collaboration with Desiree Grace, River Heights Consulting Andrea Belk Olson, Pragmadik In 1958, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a five-year push to turn China from an agrarian society into an industrial power. One piece of the plan was the Four Pests Campaign: wipe out flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. The sparrows made the list because they ate grain meant for people. The entire country was mobilized against the birds. And it worked. Within a few years, sparrows were nearly gone. Then the locusts came. Sparrows ate some grain, but mostly they ate insects. With no predator left, locusts tore through the crops. Mao reportedly imported sparrows from the Soviet Union to undo the damage, but it was too late. Tens of millions of people died in one of the worst famines in history. Nobody set out to cause a famine. The goal made sense on paper. That's exactly the problem. Good intentions don...
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What's Your Brand Personality?

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What's Your Brand Personality? A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment 🕒 3 min read By Desiree Grace You know that person; they are the life of the party. Your partner in business has a never-ending supply of stories and tall tales. A colleague is super-smart, knows numbers, and is a financial whiz. These are all recognizable personalities. Brands have personalities, too. Like people, some are better than others. Why should you care about your brand personality? Brand personality is how you humanize your brand, stand out from your competition, strike an authentic chord with your target market, and, really, provide a quick, short take on who you are, what you stand for, and what customers can expect. It's also a good standard to measure your decisions against. Perhaps your brand is all about environmental responsibility. Do you rely on a third party for recycling without verifying their bona fides? No, not consistent with your brand personality. How do you express brand personal...
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Stop Working the Booth Like a Store Clerk

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Stop Working the Booth Like a Store Clerk How Specialists and Business Development People Fill a Trade Show Day with Customer Appointments. 🕒 8 min read By Frank Hurtte Fall regional trade show season is here! If you have a show on the calendar in the next few weeks, now is the time to start filling your appointment book. If you are a Specialist or Seller, start here before you pack the booth. Walk into any hardware store on a slow Tuesday afternoon. Behind the counter stands a clerk. He’s knowledgeable, friendly, and ready to help. But his entire day depends on somebody wandering through the front door. If nobody comes, nothing happens. He waits. Now picture a good attorney. Her calendar is full before she unlocks the office. Nobody 'happens by.’ Every hour is booked, and every meeting brings value and purpose. Here’s my observation after nearly five decades in distribution: most specialists and business development people work a trade show like the hardware guy. They staff t...
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A Complaint Is a Gift: How to Respond to Online Reviews

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A Complaint Is a Gift: How to Respond to Online Reviews  🕒 2 min read By Desiree Grace Oh, those pesky online reviews and quirky comments on social media. A busy businessperson doesn't have time to respond, right? Wrong! You cannot afford NOT to respond. A complaint or piece of customer feedback is a GIFT . It is a chance to right a wrong. Many companies, whether business-to-consumer or business-to-business, have staff and alerts dedicated to tracking online reviews and comments about the company. Whether it's Glassdoor, which impacts recruitment and retention of staff, or Facebook, which impacts brand image in the B2C space (especially among middle-aged consumers with disposable income), what is said on social media matters. In fancy marketing talk, we call that "viral effects." Simply put, bad word of mouth on social media can spread faster than a flu virus in winter or a sneeze on a crowded flight. You need to contain and counteract that virus NOW. How ...
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Industrial Supply Trends: Joint Calls, Am I Suffering from a Split Personality?

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Joint calls between distributors and suppliers can feel like a balancing act, part partnership and part tug‑of‑war. In his latest article for Industrial Supply Trends , Frank Hurtte breaks down why these interactions often create tension and how smart distributors can turn them into strategic advantages. Frank explores the two competing instincts that show up on joint calls: protecting the customer relationship and leveraging supplier expertise. His perspective is shaped by decades in the industrial channel, and the article offers practical guidance for anyone navigating manufacturer-distributor dynamics. Read the full article  HERE. Joint Calls, Am I Suffering from a Split Personality?
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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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