With the Memorial Day weekend upon us and summer about to officially begin, I have been hit with at least a dozen emails, LinkedIn.com connects and calls from both distributors and students on the topic of Co-op programs in Distribution.   Co-op and Intern projects are good for distribution Back in our father’s day, companies made room for the kids of employees, family and friends in their business.  It was almost like a job benefit, work here and we’ll find a place for your son or daughter during the summer.  There were lots of “make work” projects.  Painting and scrapping, sweeping and shoveling, stacking and unstacking were all on the menu.  Readers who grew up in wholesaling families can probably relate to some of this.  The point is, there were a lot of jobs that nobody wanted and kids often got stuck with them.  It may still be happening… Today, business is different.  Our building is more professional (with fewer dark obscure r...

Last week I threw out some thoughts on sales training for distributors.   The response was great, but I received more than a half dozen challenges from inside sales groups.   The overall feedback could be summarized as: Don’t forget about Inside Sales.   The comments reminded me of a couple of points: Outside Sale people may make the phone ring, but it is the service the customer receives when they call that keeps customers coming back (aka customer retention). Most customers gauge Distributor customer service by the quality of the Inside Sales team. Historically, distributors have focused on outside sales improvement… Experience shows when distributors invest in skills training (which is meager at best,) they tend to focus on the outside sales position.  A quick “Google Search” on the topic of “distributor sales training” brings up something like 28,600 results.  While I didn’t read all 28 thousand of them, I did look at the first twenty listi...

When I ask the question “Do you have sales meetings?” most often the answer is to the Without teaching about the science of selling, your meeting room may as well be empty affirmative.  Weekly, monthly, quarterly or something else is the standard answer.  But when it comes to content, a few follow up questions are often needed.  That’s when the truth comes out; distributor sales meetings are rarely about sales.  Oh, sometimes the numbers are reviewed.  Goals are generally discussed near the beginning and ending of each year.  And occasionally, distributors talk about the need for results on some supply-partner’s new product line.  Rarely, if ever, do distributor leaders actually talk about the science of selling. Over the past few days, I have participated in over a half dozen conversations (phone, email and social media) on the topic of sales meetings.  Allow me to highlight.  In one conversation a manufacturer asked one of their...

Yesterday, a new manufacturer asked me a straightforward question, “Why should I use a distributor?”  He bore no malice to the world of wholesale distribution, but, as he contemplated the company's future path to the market, he righteously wondered about the whole distributor model.  Clearly, the question demanded an answer.  Fortunately, there are a lot of answers.  The Old Answers There are a ton of old-school distributor justifications which are still tossed out.   For instance, I could have gone into the finances of the whole distributor thing.   Distributors pay their bills and most pay them on time.    This can be huge; however, in a world moving toward corporate credit cards and other financial instruments, the credit subject is getting a little worn out. Local inventory used to be a big deal.  Last week I blogged on the changing role of inventory in a world crowded with next day shipping capabilities.  While I sti...

Over the years I have heard some pretty amazing things said about distributor inventories.   Let me share a few of these: A peddler can’t sell from an empty wagon and a distributor can’t sell without a full warehouse. It’s the distributor’s job to provide local inventory. If the distributor doesn’t stock your product and lots of it, you’ll never get its full commitment. We want distributors to prove their commitment to our company by placing a large stock order up front. The distributor’s stock provides a margin of error for logistics problems at its suppliers. While all of these probably made sense back in the day, those days are finito, over, dead and gone.  Or at least they are for the knowledge-based distributor.  Astonishingly, I still hear most of these words of wisdom bantered about; mostly by the sales teams of distributor supply partners.  What’s really bizarre is most of these folks never took the time to think seriously about their commen...

It’s Thursday afternoon, I’m on the beach in Florida with my friends, and I’m energized.   Let me share… I just finished spending the afternoon with attendees of the Association of High Technology Distribution spring meeting where the topic of the day was driving more value from your ERP system.  But let me digress for a moment… During the course of the last couple of downturns, analytics have gone from the growth tool of a few progressive distributors with a technology bent, to a “must have” instrument for longer range survival. To be clear on this survival thing; I’m not saying lack of analytics will put you out of business today, next year or even over the next five, but I do believe companies with analytics are getting more sales during this year’s downturn.  They are also capturing customer “wallet share” today, which will grow when economic winds blow in a more favorable direction.  They are more productive in gross margin.  They are ...