Over the years I have heard some pretty amazing things said about distributor inventories.   Let me share a few of these: A peddler can’t sell from an empty wagon and a distributor can’t sell without a full warehouse. It’s the distributor’s job to provide local inventory. If the distributor doesn’t stock your product and lots of it, you’ll never get its full commitment. We want distributors to prove their commitment to our company by placing a large stock order up front. The distributor’s stock provides a margin of error for logistics problems at its suppliers. While all of these probably made sense back in the day, those days are finito, over, dead and gone.  Or at least they are for the knowledge-based distributor.  Astonishingly, I still hear most of these words of wisdom bantered about; mostly by the sales teams of distributor supply partners.  What’s really bizarre is most of these folks never took the time to think seriously about their commen...