Several years ago, Jenny tied the end of year planning season to the dreaded Mid-Western season of raking leaves.  The two share several similarities. Here is the shortlist: 1. Leaf raking and annual planning are dreaded by most people. 2. You never really get into a zone, because by the time you get into the groove the work is done for the year. 3. If you ignore either one, next year you will regret it. 4. The longer you put the activity off, the harder it will be to finish. 5. An early start saves a lot of work at the end of the season. One big difference is this:  You can’t hire a neighborhood kid to do your end of year planning.  With this point in mind, we thought we would share a few things to think about for your 2022 plan. If you are planning for 10 percent sales growth, you better think again Reports from across half a dozen industry sectors indicate that manufacturers are laying down a steady stream of price increases.  One distributor told us ov...

I know, everyone body says, “We are constantly gathering feedback from our customers.” The problem is the feedback is filtered: Filtered through the minds of your sales team, strained through the conversations of busy customer service types and sometimes percolated via your supply-partners' sales teams. What’s more, your customers are nice people. Mostly, they don’t like to report bad things. A few don’t take the time to think deep thoughts about their future direction and potential for outgrowing your brand of service. Extending the point further, very few (I’ve only met one in the past 20 years) distributors arm those in contact with their customers with a measurable way of collecting customer feelings on various topics. The results speak for themselves with distributors losing key chunks of business “unexpectedly” even though the move would take months of effort on the customer’s side. An occasional conversation with customers about future direction doesn’t show tre...

Lately, Manufacturer and Distributor Joint Marketing Plans have been on my mind. This time of year I generally take a lot of calls from distributors and their supply partners on the topic. Allow me to share a few random thoughts. There are two varieties of plans which seem to go by the same name. Let’s look at both of types: Rebates designed to drive distributor behavior and reward performance. These plans typically create an incentive which comes as a rebate based on the distributor following some guideline. For example, if the distributor carries all of the manufacturer’s products, they get a bigger rebate than the wholesaler who simply cherry-picks the best of the supplier’s product line. Other versions of this type of plan incent distributors for having a specialist, properly trained staff, the right level of demo equipment or the proper inventory. I like these plans as they drive the behaviors and incent the distributor for being more than just a logistics arm for the ...

First Houston and the Gulf shores and now Florida is set to go under. Natural disasters are tough on distributors and even harder on our customers. I know from firsthand experience.  I thought this might be a good time for distributors to share their knowledge of natural disasters and would like to invite everyone who has lived through one of these events to share their experience and provide tips and support.   Without going into massive details, Iowa has had more than its share of flooding. I went through the great Des Moines flood of 1993, which put much of the downtown underwater and flooded countless industrial facilities. We went without running water for 29 days which meant no drinking water, no workable toilets and put the nearest shower at an army base nearly 20 miles away. For a week or so, every business deemed unnecessary for infrastructure rebuilding was ordered closed. Electrical distributors were viewed as important. We were told “not to close." ...

Does your OEM customer view spare parts as a revenue stream?   Solution sellers should know the answer to this You and your customer can share a love of those spare parts! very simple question.   Strangely, perhaps even sadly, many distributor sales guys have never fully explored the question.  In their daily struggle to get parts specified, solve technical issues and sometimes baby-sit orders flowing from the customer, they overlook an opportunity to move up the supplier food-chain.  For review let’s look at the types of folks selling to our customers: Type of Supplier Customer Perception Vendor A company we send lists of materials to and sometimes make purchases if the price is right and delivery schedules meet our needs. Supplier A company we regularly purchase from because they appear to provide a competitive price and good service. Valued-Supplier A company we do more ...

For the seasoned professional reading, you may scoff at this piece and see it as a restatement of the obvious. I am a veteran of thousands of customer/client lunches. Back when I was a young pup-seller, I was instructed to take customers to lunch, but not given much guidance to do so. It was the day of the two-martini lunch. For some strange reason, maybe it was my rebellious streak, I decided not to do the martini part. But I made a number of observations around the whole customer lunch thing. First, lunch with customers expanded my day. I could make a lunch appointment for 11:30 am and create time for another call. In a territory which covered most of the state of Iowa, finding time for another call was difficult. Customers tended to open up during our lunch times. They told me about their families, personal interests, career goals and often provided coaching. It was over lunch they shared the names of other people I should call on and often gave me pointers for my own pe...

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...