The Distributor Channel

How often do the services you provide cost you more than money than they bring in? What determines why one customer access to free services while others are charged? Do any of your slow pay customers receive free services? Frank Hurtte answers these and other often controversial questions in the November 14th Webinar hosted by Industrial Supply Magazine and sponsored by Epicor.  Register here to join us !  This event runs from 12:00 pm-1:00 pm Central Time. ___________________________

Does customer attrition play a part in annual planning? How many of our customers will go away? In setting growth plans for the coming year, one should ask, “what percentage of my customers might go away?” Some will go out of business and they stop buying. Others might be folded into a larger organization. If that organization has a relationship with a competitor, your business could be switched to another supplier. Further, some aggressive competitor could make inroads into your account through hard work and/or better relationships, by way of a valuable new service or through jaw dropping price levels. This is hard to face, but it happens. The question is, how much would any of these affect your business? To the best of my knowledge, the only industry to truly study this phenomenon is the HVAC/R industry. Three years ago, HARDI (Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Distributors International) hired Mike Marks and Steve Deist of Indian River Consulting Group to do