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...

Questions for New Year’s Resolutions It is the season for New Year’s Resolutions.  If you are like me, you have probably made a few of them.  But I am not going to make resolutions for you.  The truth is it would be impossible for me to do that.  Instead, let’s spend a few minutes tossing out some questions that might serve to guide your resolutions.   Since we all have a lot on our minds this time of year, I have broken these questions down by position.  This is the first of three posts, each designed for specific positions within the organization.   This one is for Distributor Leaders.   Distributor Leaders What is the state of the technology you are using? Can you easily: ·         Track purchases by salesperson? ·         Track purchases by the customer? ·         Track purchases by supply-partner? ·       ...

Here is a good news/bad news kind of story.  Distributors across North America are investing to create webstores and an enhanced online presence – that’s the good news.  Conversely, the bad news is many of them have yet to establish any real level of expertise in the whole digital experience.  Simply put, they’re online but not good at it. Unlike traditional distributor selling where customer experience is based on local competitors and the guy on the other side of town, the customer compares their online experience to global options.  Customer experience with Amazon, Target, Costco, and others sets the bar for expectations.  We can’t have a schlocky webstore and expect great results.     To set the stage, one of the megatrends of the pandemic has been growth in web-based buying.  For instance, according to emarketer.com (Oct 12, 2020), e-commerce sales have grown by 32.4 percent while brick and mortar retailer sales have declined by 3.2 perc...

Words like Pandemic, Lock-down, Disrupter, Social Distancing, and Community Transmission wash over us like a tsunami in an ocean of hand sanitizer.   Whole countries are under lockdown.   Tradeshows and other events are going into cancel mode.   States are declaring health emergencies and closing all public gathering places and there are forecasts of even more stringent plans in development. Many of our customers are considering going into emergency mode.   Travel is curtailed, everyone who can do so is telecommuting and business is being conducted in non-traditional ways. As distributors I feel we have two options available to us: 1.       We can stand idly by and simply react to the situation.   2.       We can anticipate the situation, make some plans, and push forward. Anticipating the situation It might be safe to assume the following will accelerate: Increased number of...

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 ...