Who Wants to Be Just a Number? A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment   ⏱️ 4 min read By Desiree Grace Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to be treated like just a number. Not in life, and certainly not in B2B. People want to be treated like people. If you want to win the sales and marketing race, you must understand and invest in personalization. Real personalization. The kind powered by AI and enhanced by humans. Think AI + Humans So what is personalization? It’s customized communication that recognizes role, company, priorities, and buying stage. The design engineer searching for the right sensor for a new garage door opener cares about safety, response time, and what happens during a power outage.  The datacenter enterprise customer racing to activate a greenfield site cares about delivery and quality. The defense contractor? Delivery and quality come first, always. B2B personalization is the best practice of tailoring communication, content, and sales interactions to the s...

A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment Are You Marketing to Gen X… or Missing Them Completely? Know Your Target Market By Desiree Grace The “Forgotten Generation.” Yep, that’s me. Gen X, born between 1965 and 1980, we are a smaller cohort than the Baby Boomers and Millennials. Just don’t lump us in with the Boomers, no matter what those Tik-Tokkers say, because we are NOT the same. But overlooked doesn’t mean insignificant. Gex X represents roughly 65 million Americans and an estimated $5 trillion in consumer spending. We are also in our peak-earning years. Many are now in senior leadership roles, running companies, approving budgets, and shaping strategy. In other words: if you’re selling to people over 50, you can’t afford to misunderstand them. If you are crafting a sales pitch or a marketing campaign to those influential people from the Gen X crowd, know they are entrepreneurial and productive in the workplace and value work-life balance. This is the generation that didn’t automa...

Mission Possible: How to Capture Customers Before They Leave Your Website By Desiree Grace We all know the sneaky reconnaissance behaviors. These guerrilla shoppers visit your website, grab screenshots of your best information, and quietly skulk off to the next site. Much like saboteurs, you can see the evidence they were there, but you can’t catch them. Worse yet, they don’t buy. These uncaptured customers represent lost revenue. They often take your best marketing and product research straight to your competitors. In sales and marketing circles, this bad behavior is known as Webrooming . So how do you keep these shoppers from slipping away? How do you get them to stay put and buy from you ? There are A LOT of things that matter to the Webrooming customers. The strongest ways to convert webroomers are simple and research‑grounded Best Practices: reduce friction, increase confidence, and personalize the journey so they never feel the need to leave. Before we get into best...

5 Ways to Fight Showrooming Frustration A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment By Desiree Grace   Showrooming – the ultimate time-waster and frustration-factor. It’s a battle out there. Customers arrive, get you excited, then leave. It’s worse than seagull management, you know, those folks who fly in, drop a lot of sh—, then leave. Showrooming customers are a close relative of that pesky bird. Surely, you’ve heard of Showrooming. This variety of birds is the annoying customers who waste your time in the showroom or counter. They suck up an hour from your lighting specialist, then buy the product online because someone is selling it for a few dollars less. They walk out smiling AFTER getting educated by your specialist or salesperson. The good news is you’re not stuck. There ARE ways to prevent this. Savvy retailers, like industrial distributors with counters or showrooms, are smarter than the average bird. These strategies work. You have options with successful track reco...

Why Smart Leaders Celebrate Their People A Distributor Channel Marketing Moment By Desiree Grace The unsung heroes of your success are the people behind the scenes. Behind every great actor is a costumer, a makeup artist, a lighting designer, and a whole crew whose job is to make the star shine. Business is no different. You have a crew, too: suppliers, service providers, partners, and stakeholders who quietly make your success possible. No tips are required, but this is the time of year to pause and reflect on the people who support your business behind the scenes. And then? Thank them. I mean it. Take a moment. Send a text. Write an email. Maybe even pick up the phone. (I know that last one is hard for some of you.) That supplier who saved you with next-day air. That recruiter who found the perfect product manager. The cleaning service that makes your office a decent place to work. The logistics partner who gets your shipments out on time and correctly. Really, where woul...

Frequent Flyers, Forgotten Value: A Pricing Wake-Up Call By Desiree Grace and Frank Hurtte Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is marketing-speak for the value of capturing a customer early in their buying journey and keeping that customer for life. Statistics show that it takes 5-7 times MORE money to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer. Treating your best customers better is key to customer retention and reducing customer churn. This should be a company-wide effort. Pricing strategy and execution should align with that strategy, and while typically part of Finance, they should not be excluded from company-wide coordination. Let’s review a real-world example from the airline industry. Recently, I had the experience of booking a three-legged journey with United. Due to a colleague changing schedules, I had to cancel one of the legs. As a Premier 1k and Global Services customer, I expected some sort of refund for the cancelled journey, since I was essentially buying ...