Joint calls have been around since the age of dinosaurs.  While I won’t go into precisely what sellers were peddling back in 10,000 BC, I can attest to the fact that joint calls were made in my father’s business in the late ‘50s.  One of my first real career tasks came in the form of joint calls with distributor salespeople.   While the concept has remained the same, the cost has not.  Experts tell us the “typical industrial sales call” costs close to $450.  We can theorize a joint call probably costs double that amount – close to a cool grand.  The money is getting too big to leave anything to chance.  It is imperative to stack the deck in our favor.   Quoting a cooking expert (by accident and for the first time in my writing): “An important concept stressed in practically every cooking class is that cooking is 10% art and 90% chemistry. Recipes are to cooks as formulas are to chemists - important instructions for a consistent result. ...

Years ago, one seasoned distributor executive said, “One of the natural laws of distribution is that you will lose between 8-10 percent of your business every year.  Companies change direction, close their operations, are acquired by others, and a mess of other things.  If you don’t plan for this, you will be forever behind the eight-ball.”  The message was shocking.  While I am not sure his percentages were entirely accurate, the message was true.  Customers do occasionally go away.   Having a solid source of new customers is important.  Yet, according to our 2022 State of Distributor Sales research, only a dismal 34 percent of distributors are happy with the number of new customers brought into their organization each year. The distributors we spoke with went on to state that traditional salespeople were their primary source of new customers.  It has been my experience, and this research further illustrates, that distributor salespeople do a poo...

Spring is in the air.  Couples are walking hand in hand,  the birds are singing and Distributors and their Supply partners are preparing for association meetings.  And, quoting a serious article on the topic, “Every April your brain unwittingly becomes a dopamine factory, turning you into a love junkie.” In essence, love is all around us.    I know you are probably wondering where I am going with all this, but there is a tie-in.  Throughout this spring I have had a couple of conversations that gave me pause.  Actually, more than a pause, these conversations provided massive flashbacks and touched a nerve far more tender than meer business.  Allow me to explain.   Recently, during a deep and serious conversation with a married couple, they shared the story of courtship.  They were high school sweethearts who, by their own admission, were not part of the small clique best labeled as the “popular” kids.  Their group of friends ...

The Supply Chain situation is creating critical issues.  Important customers are going without the products required to keep their factories running at peak performance, OEMs cannot ship machines to their customers, and contractors have projects “almost” completed, not finished.   In our research with distributors across North America, Supply Chain issues are of critical concern compared to the recent past.  We asked distributors to rank their current situation with receiving products on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being awful and 5 being just the normal flow of business.  The highest-ranking report we have received is a whopping 2 ½. Most are ranking things as awful.   The big news across the internet started with tales of an electronic chip shortage.  For the Automation industry, that equates to just about everything with Drives, Servo, and Human-Machine Interface (HMI) systems getting the most mentions.  However, the shortage extends into everything – lit...