Make AI Your Friend: Hope Is Not a Sales Strategy in 2026 Customers aren’t waiting for salespeople to find answers anymore. They expect you to already have them. AI has automated the top of the funnel. Service expectations are rising. And “activity” is no longer the same thing as progress. In 2026, the salespeople who win won’t hope for an easier year; they’ll prepare for a harder one. If you want to read the full article published in Industrial Supply Magazine , click here . Frank Hurtte works with industrial distributors who want better sales performance without the hype. A consultant, speaker, and trainer, Frank focuses on practical sales strategy, customer expectations, and preparing teams for what’s next, not what was. He is the founder of River Heights Consulting and a frequent contributor to industry publications like Industrial Supply Magazine. ...

Does anyone out there love playing Darts? It’s great for beers with buddies in the bar, but not so great for designing sales territories. Once or twice in my past life as a sales rep, it felt like someone higher up used a map and a dartboard to design sales territories. It's time to take a thoughtful, analytical, and strategic approach to designing and organizing our sales territories. It's important to communicate the strategy and the data behind any changes thoroughly and respectfully to all stakeholders. That includes the sales reps, the internal support teams, and the customers.  Any significant or impactful changes also need clear and proactive change management. Here's why. Your sales territories need to align with your strategy. Let’s say you want to add industrial contractors to your mix, as you’ve learned most industrials in your market outsource some or all of their maintenance to outside industrial contractors. Your overarching strategy is to diversify your cust...

Last week we covered the topic of managing opportunities. I made this comment: “Strangely, many “experts” advise sellers to ignore the competition. I believe the competition plays a major role in planning your strategy and understanding your situation.” Some of you took note of this comment and requested more information. It’s impossible to ignore the competition. Like the forces of market supply, recessions, economic recovery and upticks in energy prices, competitors influence your business environment. Extending further, competition varies from market to market and even territories within the market. While not paying attention to competition sounds high minded, noble and customer-centric, it won’t help you make more money. Competition is specific and local Except for Amazon, your competition is manifested in the form of a specific person or team of people. They need not live in your community, but they are assigned to one of your accounts, which makes them local to...

Some might call it eavesdropping, but we call it our uniquely unscientific methodology for tracking distributor trends. We listen. Plus, we get phone calls, emails and occasional text messages from distributors. When we hear the same topic mentioned more than a dozen times in the course of a month, we know the topic is coming to the surface. For some reason, the topic of sales compensation is showing up --- repeatedly. Here are a few questions I believe are pertinent to any thinking directed to the topic. Point One: Do you see you sales efforts becoming more team focused? • Do you see your business employing more or fewer people in the sales function in five years? (Potential new positions might be Specialists, Project Managers, Customer Crib/VMI maintainers, Tele-sales, Application Engineers and others.) • Do you believe a well-developed team could sell more than semi-autonomous salespeople? • Do you believe your current outside sales force will be or should be part ...

Shouldn’t Distributors be Territory Experts? Let’s talk selling; not the normal distributor to customer kind pontificated on by consultants everywhere.  Instead, I suggest we explore the backwards sale aimed toward our supply partners.  We never talk about it, but I think every now and again we need a refresher. We distributors sell our value to supply partners in a number of ways.  For example, the gigantic catalog houses pitch their state of the art logistics team and their capability to get the manufacturer’s product from Port A to Point B in very short order.  For some mid-sized distributors, the supply partner sales story contains tales of supply contracts that “deliver” the MRO business of Fortune 500 manufacturing firms. Knowledge-based distributors in the automation world tout the solution building prowess of highly trained sales engineers.  The implied story is this: we can create new and wonderful applications for your product at OEMs w...