The Distributor Channel

Late last night I found myself channel surfing in my hotel room. Between infomercials, old Walton’s reruns and the cooking channel, I stumbled upon a new program called “ Strange Inheritance .” The premise of the show is something like this: Great Uncle Ralph dies and leaves his favorite niece a roadside Alligator Farm in rural Florida. The recipient of this wondrous bit of good fortune suddenly finds themselves in a predicament. Pardon the pun, but it’s the old “knee deep in alligator thing” except the person struggling didn’t create the mess. Instead they inherited it. Distributors often find themselves in a similar situation. Examples are many. The last guy hired some doofus to work in the south territory and now you are left with a mess. The computer is loaded with 20 years of bad data and sales metrics won’t work until all the garbage is scrubbed and corrected. Or, territories were laid out inefficiently with salespeople crisscrossing the state in a haphazard mann