As you relax comfortably reading this article, vampires are plotting a diabolical simple strategy.   Their evil aim: suck the precious life’s blood from your unsuspecting business.   Like a hungry swarm of vampire bats menacing overhead, they’re everywhere.   And, based on the latest “as seen on TV vampirology”, they can feed for years before they finally finish you off. Before you start stringing up garlic necklaces for your staff and reading through ancient and musty lore of Transylvanian past, let me say these aren’t physical forms.  Rather, they come in the way of old time myths disguised as modern business practices.  So join me as we talk our way through the vampires in the Industrial Supply Business. The evil deeds of dastardly fellow, known as Count Purchasing, are legendary.  You could probably add a few anecdotal stories of your own.  But in our world, the greatest disaster to innocents with salesperson business cards comes w...

You see us write a lot about pricing and pricing strategies.  For most distributors, the obvious advantage of a disciplined pricing process is the corresponding increase to the bottom line. Research conducted by David Bauders and Strategic Pricing Associates of Cleveland, Ohio indicates that most distributors see a margin bump of more than two points. At the same time, examination of the Profit Reports generated by a number of distributor associations indicates the bottom line advantage enjoyed by the “upper quartile” members – those who outperformed 75% of their colleagues - comes from more than “just” a margin advantage. We discovered these upper-end players were at the vanguard of distributor organizations using Strategic Pricing Associates data driven pricing process. We wanted to explore two points: What non-pricing benefits/advantages have they discovered as they implemented the SPA process? How has this migrated into the overall company culture? We spoke with Ja...

Earlier this month I was asked to lead a discussion on the future of distribution.  In this case, we focused in on the future of members of the Fluid Power Distributors Association (FPDA).  Since many of our readers are not FPDA members, allow me to provide a bit of background.  The members of FPDA tend to be deeply involved in providing customer solutions.  In many ways they epitomize the knowledge-based distributor.  Their products are complex, sellers understand product technology and application nuances, customers lean on the distributors to provide technical support and most offer up additional fee based services. Referring to the infographic below and the evolution of the distributor model, FPDA distributors are the poster perfect picture of the Knowledge-based distributor.  Deep product expertise, product specialists, customer centric engineering and solution selling is their mode of operation.     While the argument for Amaz...

I attended a day long distributor planning session, a sales meeting that ended with a “round-robin” planning session.   Vendor salespeople and Distributor Specialists were assigned tables around the perimeter of the meeting room.   Salespeople spent a few minutes at each table talking about existing opportunities and future targets.   After eavesdropping, I noticed salespeople discussing accounts where they felt additional actions could push the selling process forward.   Soon after the meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks.   Salespeople knew their assigned accounts but didn’t fully understand the targeting process.   At the end of the day, nearly every salesperson listed the same three or four accounts as their targets – the same accounts and contacts were given for a diverse group of products and technologies.   Later, I asked a couple of salespeople and their managers to define “target” – the results were interesting: ·   ...

Let’s face it, summer time is filled with distractions.  Our customers are distracted; they have vacations, kids playing Little League, golf leagues, cabins in the woods, lawns to mow and who knows what else.  This distraction is contagious.  Being people too, distributor folks get caught up in all the summer stuff.   Sometime around September 1 st , we snap out of our summer induced behavior and put our noses to the grindstone.  For the next week or so, we are going to talk about a few fall tune-ups for distributors.  Think summer end elixir for a better year end.  If ever you planned to institute a new habit, this is the time.  For the next four minutes, let’s think about selling time.  We’ll ask a few questions:  How much time do our salespeople spend selling?  What distracts them? How might we put the beauty back into the process? How much time do salespeople spend actually selling? Based on observations of hun...