Digital Strategy

The 2017 State of E-Commerce in Distribution survey indicates the percentage of respondents with a mature e-commerce offering (at least 10 percent of total revenue through the e-commerce channel) decreased slightly by 2 percentage points from 2015 to 2016.

For the best customers, Distributors can devote resources to maximizing the business relationship, while for less profitable and less efficient customers, Distributors can find ways to lower cost-to-serve and increase dollars per transaction.

A surprise for many Distributors is that a lot of accounts they consider “good customers” because of the frequency or regularity of orders, the total amount of revenue they contribute or the total gross profit or gross margin percentage they seem to provide are actually costing them significantly more money than they bring in to…

While most distributors learned long ago to avoid managing for top-line sales revenue as a measure of results, many of today’s distribution businesses still believe that managing by gross margin is effective. In particular, sales compensation is typically rewarded based on gross margin for a particular deal.

To be successful, you need to make the case that your plan serves the company’s – and management’s – best interests. Emphasize results, not features, and be ready to make your business case with numbers and support from your counterparts in sales, customer success, and other stakeholders.

Every organization experiencing success with marketing automation has a different answer to this question. Here are the three that surface most often.

Increasingly, we hear distributors say that their e-commerce site is not getting the revenue traction they expected. The distributor went into the initiative thinking, “Build it and they will come.”

Millennials now outnumber Boomers and GenX in the work force (see Figure 1.)  In 4 years they will significantly outnumber Boomers and along with GenZ will significantly outnumber GenX.  That means that the majority of the workforce will have grown up in the digital era.

In the research we performed with over 3500 customers of distributors, we learned that three methods for purchasing (email, web, phone) were significantly more frequently used than other methods including in store, at job site, mobile, EDI, punchout, text, and fax.