I needn’t say too much about the current situation tied to Pandemic leftovers.  If you are one of the three people in Distributorland who hasn’t heard or talked about these three driving issues, let me tell you, they are real. 1. The difficulties in attracting quality/qualified employees. 2. Supply chain issues and shortages of the parts your customers need. 3. Ongoing price increases and inflation. I want to provide a demonstration of how the combination of supply chain issues and inflationary pressures needs some management attention. A glance at supply chain “stuff” It’s not impossible to get products from our suppliers, it’s just impossible to receive them on time.  Despite all the media hype tied to supply chain issues, our customers are not quietly sympathetic.  They still have factories to run and machinery to ship.  Most customers still judge our service on getting products to them when they need them.  They bark, bother, and badger distributor sa...

In the last three articles, we talked about the post-Pandemic  “new normal” and how life will change for distributors, customers, and suppliers.  In each post, we explored how we might position ourselves for greater success by anticipating these changes.  In the next few articles, we will spend some time thinking further about customer shifts.   Research, unrelated to distribution, has shown keen interest in several initiatives being studied by our customers.  In most instances, the interest was there ahead of the COVID shutdown, but economic storms tend to accelerate trends and push new ideas to the forefront of business executives’ minds.  Very few of these changes are as pronounced as the growing interest in robotics.  If you believe the researchers (and I do) the growth in all things robotic will come like a gigantic 64-foot wave sweeping into Honolua Bay in Hawaii.  As an industry, we are faced with a couple of choices.  We can hum ...

Free Stuff Alert It’s rare for me to promote another author or consultant, but I feel this is something you would not want to miss. I have recommended Justin Rolf-Marsh’s book, The Machine: A radical approach to the design of the sales function , to dozens of clients.  Why?  Because it questions some of the very foundations of the way those of us in sales think about the process.  The concept of an outside salesperson has been around for eons.  We could point to the old traveling peddlers making their way cross-country with a wagon load of supplies or railroad riding sellers getting off at each whistle stop to hock their wares, but instead, let us skip forward to more modern times.   The sales teams of distributors in my first year in this industry, some 40 odd years ago, followed this simple process:   The outside salesperson tooled around in shiny 1975 Ford LTDs or Oldsmobile Delta 88s dropping in on customers presenting features and benefits o...

 After the Pandemic – Working Remotely Supply-Partner Implications Earlier, we talked about the impact of distributors and their customers working remotely and how the changes impact distributors.  In the eyes of many, the story would end here.  However, a distributor is a middleman, the entity positioned between those consuming and those creating products.  Distributors are a critical part of what could officially be called the supply chain.   A bit about the supply chain  A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer.  The companies providing raw materials to supply-partners are part of their supply chain.  The distributor and supply-partners are steps in our customer’s supply chain.   If the distributor’s supply-partner experiences delivery issues and the distributor cannot deliver, the customer’s supply chain is impacted.  If the distributor m...

  After the Pandemic – Working Remotely The Customer Situation   The distributor world revolves around customer needs.   Our customer needs are an ever-evolving thing.   Knowledge-based distributors exist exclusively because of our willingness to follow, and sometimes, lead customers through their changes.   Thinking about the evolution of distributors, before the early-80s distributors all operated about the same.   Their sales efforts were mostly personality-driven and local inventory was the drawing card.     To illustrate this, allow me to journey back to the early days of my career.   The standard delivery from my factory in Milwaukee to Iowa – just over 200 miles – was five working days.   If a distributor did not have the product in stock, the customer could be out of business for a week.   This all changed when UPS and Fed-Ex entered the scene.   With local inventory out of the equation, smaller independent di...

    What was on  Distributor minds  in 2020? Welcome to 2021 and the 301st Installment of The Distributor Channel.  With this milestone of both the calendar and numerical kind, I thought it appropriate to share the most-read posts of 2020.  If I were a big country-rock star, I might call it the “Best of The Distributor Channel” or thinking back to the 1970s, we might summon up an eight-track tape I owned called, “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane”.   Since I don’t believe anything tied to 2020 deserves the title of BEST , here is The Worst of 2020, showing the most viewed posts during our Coronavirus encrusted times. Number One:  50 Questions for Distributors This article (from July 2016) outlined 50 questions distributors should periodically ask themselves.   With the COVID situation, rocky business conditions, and a new year staring us down, I still recommend you spend a few minutes answering these questions.   Number Two...