Despite early failure rates, B2B marketplaces mounted a major comeback and are rapidly outgrowing company-specific websites in many industries.
Ian Heller
Ian Heller is the Founder and Chief Strategist for Distribution Strategy Group. He has more than 30 years of experience executing marketing and e-business strategy in the wholesale distribution industry, starting as a truck unloader at a Grainger branch while in college. He’s since held executive roles at GE Capital, Corporate Express, Newark Electronics and HD Supply. Ian has written and spoken extensively on the impact of digital disruption on distributors, and would love to start that conversation with you, your team or group. Reach out today at iheller@distributionstrategy.com.
Articles by Ian Heller
Measuring profitability by enterprise gross margin is a sledgehammer approach to a problem requiring nuance and precision.
In this episode, DeCata joined Wholesale Change hosts Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein to talk about how Lawson Products is differentiating in today’s market
Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein go beyond the numbers for Office Depot (ODP), Watsco, Henry Schein, The Home Depot and Genuine Parts Co/Motion Industries
In a series of moves, including bringing on the executive who launched Amazon Business, ODP is joining the marketplace war. With a flurry of
Learn the secrets to successful strategic pricing implementation and get the results you need with buy-in from your entire team.
In this episode, Ed Gerber, CEO of the Industrial Supply Association and distribution industry veteran, joined Distribution Strategy Group’s Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein
Johnstone Supply saw its largest sales month in company history in June 2020 after responding to the pandemic with innovations at a local level
The Wholesale Change hosts Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein dug into public distributors’ earnings reports from Amazon, Grainger, Applied Industrial and Avnet.
Marketers need to learn that when sales and marketing fight, sales wins. Even when they’re wrong.
We had a lively discussion about trends in the multifamily market, as well as the recent Home Depot-HD Supply acquisition.
Customer loyalty and incentive programs can help wholesale distribution companies build meaningful relationships with their customers to gain mindshare and wallet share.
No matter how hard you try, it’s really easy to build a doomed website. In a recent episode of the Wholesale Change webcast and
Without buy-in from your entire team – including that salesperson that complains the most – a strategic pricing project will, simply put, not yield
Debbie Paul joined Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein to talk about what’s in distributors’ way, and how emerging technologies are making it easier to
John Tisera, president/CEO of Johnstone Supply, joined Ian Heller and Jonathan Bein in this episode to talk about how the distributor has built and
If you aren’t building high-tech platforms that make it hyper-efficient for your customers to execute simple transactions, you’re losing the game. But simply adopting
Independent alternatives to third-party marketplaces like Amazon are emerging, and some distributors have found success selling through them. This has many wondering if they
Learn why loyalty is a powerful emotion and how to leverage it in B2B, best practices in designing loyalty and incentive programs, and how
Home Depot pays a 25% premium for an enterprise value of $8 billion to reacquire HD Supply, putting branch-based distributors square in the middle