Scary Business Practices: The Tricks That Haunt Your Brand 🕒 4 min read By Desiree Grace TL;DR Bad business practices like hidden fees, privacy violations, labor abuses, and late supplier payments can do lasting damage to a brand, and they happen in both private and public companies. Private firms can hide misconduct longer because they disclose less, while public firms feel the fallout faster through markets and regulators. Either way, leadership sets the ethical tone, and personal responsibility is what keeps a scary practice from becoming an even scarier outcome. Think ghosts and goblins are scary? Try bad business practices for a truly frightening shock to your system. Serious damage to your brand can occur, and in many cases, the damage cannot be undone. Both private and public companies can behave in harmful or unethical ways, but the scope, detection, and consequences differ. It's all due to regulatory and transparency challenges. Whether you are an investor, customer, su...

Is Your Marketing a Haunted House? 🕒 3 min read By Jenny Shannon Every October, the haunted houses open their doors. Cobwebs in the corners, floors that creak, a phone that rings with nobody on the other end. It's fun for one night. It's a lot less fun when it describes your marketing. Most distributors have a few ghosts hiding in their marketing. Not because anyone is careless, but because everyone is busy, and marketing is the room nobody walks into until company comes over. Here are the rooms worth checking before your customers do. The Dusty Website The "News" section was last updated two years ago. The team page still shows people who retired. The product lines changed, but the website didn't. Customers check your website before they ever call you. If it looks abandoned, they start to wonder what else is. From our files: We know of a company that is eager to acquire contacts and ultimately clients with long-term contracts. The trouble is, none of their publ...

Everybody Said Yes. So Why Didn’t You Get the Order? 🕒 4 min read By Desiree Grace You are a Rock Star. You uncovered a vital customer need. You crafted the perfect solution at the perfect (profitable) price. You sold the technical team (engineers), the buyer, and the users (electricians AND production), and you are heading to the bar ready to celebrate and start looking at beach vacation options. Then you get the awful text message: "Sorry, Rock, we cannot place the order this year. Maybe next year." Adios, Cancun. Before you drown your sorrows in tequila, do a debrief. In all your sales sleuthing, did you ask about the procurement process? Oh, Shite. You did not. This is an often overlooked but vital part of customer reconnaissance. Selling everybody on the solution doesn't amount to a Mexican jumping bean if you don't understand how the customer actually buys. Your Customer's Buying Process Checklist Review the checklist below as part of your debrief, an...

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...

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...

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...