Free Stuff Alert It’s rare for me to promote another author or consultant, but I feel this is something you would not want to miss. I have recommended Justin Rolf-Marsh’s book, The Machine: A radical approach to the design of the sales function , to dozens of clients.  Why?  Because it questions some of the very foundations of the way those of us in sales think about the process.  The concept of an outside salesperson has been around for eons.  We could point to the old traveling peddlers making their way cross-country with a wagon load of supplies or railroad riding sellers getting off at each whistle stop to hock their wares, but instead, let us skip forward to more modern times.   The sales teams of distributors in my first year in this industry, some 40 odd years ago, followed this simple process:   The outside salesperson tooled around in shiny 1975 Ford LTDs or Oldsmobile Delta 88s dropping in on customers presenting features and benefits o...

 After the Pandemic – Working Remotely Supply-Partner Implications Earlier, we talked about the impact of distributors and their customers working remotely and how the changes impact distributors.  In the eyes of many, the story would end here.  However, a distributor is a middleman, the entity positioned between those consuming and those creating products.  Distributors are a critical part of what could officially be called the supply chain.   A bit about the supply chain  A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer.  The companies providing raw materials to supply-partners are part of their supply chain.  The distributor and supply-partners are steps in our customer’s supply chain.   If the distributor’s supply-partner experiences delivery issues and the distributor cannot deliver, the customer’s supply chain is impacted.  If the distributor m...

  After the Pandemic – Working Remotely The Customer Situation   The distributor world revolves around customer needs.   Our customer needs are an ever-evolving thing.   Knowledge-based distributors exist exclusively because of our willingness to follow, and sometimes, lead customers through their changes.   Thinking about the evolution of distributors, before the early-80s distributors all operated about the same.   Their sales efforts were mostly personality-driven and local inventory was the drawing card.     To illustrate this, allow me to journey back to the early days of my career.   The standard delivery from my factory in Milwaukee to Iowa – just over 200 miles – was five working days.   If a distributor did not have the product in stock, the customer could be out of business for a week.   This all changed when UPS and Fed-Ex entered the scene.   With local inventory out of the equation, smaller independent di...

After the Pandemic – Working Remotely First in a Series on Planning for the New Normal We have been thinking a lot about life after the Pandemic and the reality of the new normal.  One thing that keeps surfacing is working remotely.  For instance, a recent post by famed CRM provider Salesforce stated, “The 9-5 workday is dead.”  Office buildings will no longer house the thousands of workers once important to maintaining operations.  Salesforce categorized the future of their workers this way: ·          Flex : When it is safe to return to the office, employees around the globe will work flex. This means they will be in the office one to three days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations. ·          Fully Remote : For employees who do not live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, they will work remotely full-time. ·    ...

I use Friday, March 13th, 2020 as the official start date of the COVID crisis.  Looking at the calendar, we are pushing toward the one-year mark of this little Global Pandemic.   Much has happened in our industry during this time.  For the first couple of months, we hunkered down expecting the winds of change to sweep this virus off to the side.  Optimistically, most of us felt the storm would pass by end of summer.  As the reality of the situation persisted, we carried on and survived.  Distributors found new and innovative ways to keep in touch with their customers.  Sales turned in an upward direction and businesses who were once down 30-40 percent versus pre-COVID times managed to end 2020 with a much smaller downward trend.  A few even managed to eke out a narrow margin of growth. I believe one thing fell to the wayside through all this illness and mayhem, that being full-blown product launches.    Amidst all the other struggle...

    What was on  Distributor minds  in 2020? Welcome to 2021 and the 301st Installment of The Distributor Channel.  With this milestone of both the calendar and numerical kind, I thought it appropriate to share the most-read posts of 2020.  If I were a big country-rock star, I might call it the “Best of The Distributor Channel” or thinking back to the 1970s, we might summon up an eight-track tape I owned called, “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane”.   Since I don’t believe anything tied to 2020 deserves the title of BEST , here is The Worst of 2020, showing the most viewed posts during our Coronavirus encrusted times. Number One:  50 Questions for Distributors This article (from July 2016) outlined 50 questions distributors should periodically ask themselves.   With the COVID situation, rocky business conditions, and a new year staring us down, I still recommend you spend a few minutes answering these questions.   Number Two...