Spring Cleaning Your Compensation Plan: As we inch closer to summer, let’s discuss cleaning up your compensation plan. Huh? What does my organization’s compensation plan have to do with spring cleaning? The ritual of reviewing and editing your stuff, cleaning everything thoroughly, ensuring your lawnmower is ready to go, and starting fresh with the season makes sense. It keeps our homes and garages in good working order and feels good when it’s done. We should bring the same discipline to our compensation plans. Our human resource strategy and execution demand it. How you retain and recruit ideally aligns with your overall organizational strategy. Much of how your strategy adapts with the times, so should your compensation plan.  Why now? You have likely finished communicating goals, and your bonus plans to your teams. It’s not yet time for a mid-year review, so dust off your most recent comp plan, and get started. It’s important that you know how your pay scale aligns with the ma...

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...

Dire Straights’ 1987 song “ Money for Nothing ” just blasted out of my office stereo – concert volume drives creativity. It put the gears into motion. Wholesalers today live in a charmed time. Oh, we hear plenty of negative stuff – the Recession, off-shoring, closing of US manufacturing and the like. But we have tools unlike any and all of our forefathers in the industry. They say information is money – and “now days”, we get it for nothing. Here’s my take on “ Benchmarking for Free ”. So many of the folks I talk to deal in the industrial market – the great US manufacturing sector. The recovery is under way and their business is improving. The problem is they really lack any solid understanding of how much things have improved. Their business can be up 10% but they don’t really know if this is good, bad or otherwise. To combat this I suggest you benchmark yourself against some of the public companies who serve the same market (in this case I selected Industrial but it could ...