Can You Beat Amazon at Their Game? 🕒 5 min read By Frank Hurtte The vultures are circling again.   Every few years, the doomsayers resurface: Amazon's eating distribution. E-commerce is the death of wholesale. Distributors are obsolete. The headlines are predictable. The advice? Equally predictable and predictably wrong.   Build your own Amazon. Hire consultants to help you compete on speed and price. Invest millions in e-commerce platforms. Match their logistics. Underprice the giants.   If you take that advice, you'll lose. And you'll waste time, money, and energy doing it. Here's why: You're competing on their battlefield instead of yours. W hat Amazon Does Better (And Always Will) Let's be honest. Amazon, Grainger, Faire, and the newer B2B marketplaces have invested billions in logistics, data, and algorithms. A mid-sized distributor can't match their speed or price. Competing on those terms is like a neighborhood bookstore trying to o...

The National Association of Wholesalers (NAW) publishes a daily email called SmartBrief.  It goes out to over 100,000 leaders in every “line of trade” in the distributor landscape – this is the biggest circulation of any publication electronic or otherwise.  Because our work is laser-focused on a very narrow group of Knowledge-based distributors, they rarely see our work.  As a matter of fact, in the course of 16 years of writing about our kind of distribution, we have only been recognized by NAW’s SmartBrief a handful of times.  Here is the article as posted in Industrial Supply Magazine and featured by SmartBrief.  For those needing to copy and paste, here's the link.  https://industrialsupplymagazine.com/pages/Print-edition---SepOct21_Hurtte.php Frank Hurtte, Founding Partner of River Heights Consulting, has been featured in dozens of national and regional trade magazines.  His easy-going demeanor and “Iowa-speak” make him a relatable favorite as a...

  True confessions, way back in the early stages of my career, a friend who knew I was in sales gave me  a Zig Ziglar calendar.  Each day came with random quotes from the famed sales trainer.  Quite frankly, most of them were throwaways that applied more to guys selling waterbeds or satellite TV contracts than to the electrical and automation products I was selling.  Sandwiched into those 365 days (maybe 366, it could have been leap year for all I know) were two quotes that I continue to share with others:   Thought One: “Enthusiasm for the product or service comes from product knowledge. How can we develop enthusiasm for something about which we have little or no knowledge?”    Thought Two: “Stop selling. Start helping.”   These should be the mottos of every salesperson on the planet regardless of industry.  If you consider yourself a Sales Engineer, they are mandatory descriptors.  For the past 40 plus years, I have considered my...

What happens when every distributor in town represents the same manufacturer?  Extending this thought, let’s assume at least a few of these distributors “sell” several of this manufacturer’s competitors. To better understand the situation, let’s change the scenario up a bit and take a trip to America’s number one retailer, Walmart.  Wandering through the megastore, we find ourselves in an aisle containing colas and other soft drinks.  Looking around we see Coke, Pepsi and over a half dozen other brands, including a “house brand” named after the iconic Sam Walton.  Walmart has them all. Does this giant retailer sell a lot of cola?  If you consider “selling” as a transaction, the answer is yes.  However, if you count “selling” as an activity where users are convinced to by one brand over another, the answer is a definitive no.  The truth is, Walmart doesn’t care which brand you buy as long as you conduct your transaction within their walls. ...

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a number of distributors at the EPICOR INSIGHTS conference in Las Vegas.  Actually, I had the honor of speaking to the group on the future of distribution.   Just to give you an idea of the content, we covered four main topics: ⦁ Technology Power and the need for distributors to quickly embrace cloud computing technology. ⦁ Artificial Intelligence and how to start using it today instead of waiting five years. ⦁ Demographic Trends and how to profitably ride the shifting tides. ⦁ Positioning for the next Recession.  The economists are saying 2022, so we have a couple of years to prepare. During conversations, I had the chance to meet up with several distributors who had read my book, The Distributors Fee-based Service Manifesto , and followed the principles laid out in the book.   These folks had successfully moved low-profit customers to the right side of the profitability charts and were enjoying the...

Just in case you happen to be one of the three people on the planet not familiar with the term AI (or Artificial Intelligence for long), the topic seems to be the subject of thousands of blogs; technical, political and otherwise. Based on a few of the headlines I have seen, AI is destined to: • Take jobs away from millions of people (ranging from drivers to cardiologists) • Destroy the Earth (which kind of reminds me of a million old drive-in movies) • Change Human Relationships (where people seek robots for companionship) • Replace people in Burger Joints (I wonder if a robot will ask if I want fries?) If time permitted, I could go on and on with other examples of scary headlines. I won’t. Before I proceed further, allow me to say, a 1950s kids book about AI launched me into my career in technology. Even at age eight, I thought AI sounded like a pretty cool concept. Allow me to digress. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine changed the course of my life. A brief recap of t...