Industry Insights
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Why Traditional ROI Measures Shouldn’t Have a Voice in Distributors’ eCommerce Conversations
If you let potential ROI determine how much you’ll invest in your website and how you’ll measure its success, you’re going about it all wrong and you will not succeed.
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The Importance of Value-Added Services in Distribution Today
If you’re like most distributors, you already provide several value-added services at no cost to your customers. But have you analyzed the cost and value of those services? Chances are, you need to get more intentional about delivering, marketing and monetizing them.
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What Private Equity Ownership Means to a Distribution Employee
Private equity isn’t new – even if it’s new to you. Arguably, PE as an investment method has been around for more than 100 years.
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How to Use a Sales Call Guide to Drive Stronger Connections with Prospects
A sales call guide can be a useful tool to help salespeople connect with prospects and ensure they are firing on all cylinders with every interaction, whether in person or virtually.
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How to Grow Business in Small and Mid-sized Accounts
Small customers may not generate the sales volumes needed to support them as you would support your larger customers, but they usually generate higher profit margins and do not require as many resources.
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How to Get Customers to Buy More Product Categories with Cross-Selling
Increasing market share is good. However, increasing wallet share is even better because it is usually far easier to sell additional products to existing customers than it is to acquire new customers.
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Selling Value, Not Price: How Distributor Sales Reps Can Truly Connect with Prospects
We recently published an article on selling value internally along with selling externally to prospects. Because while many distributors have spent time creating a value proposition their employees will take to heart, salespeople often falter when it comes to selling the company’s value to prospects.
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After the Crisis: What Distributors Must Do Next
Despite the many columns and webcasts predicting distribution’s post-pandemic “new normal,” it’s going to be a long time before our industry settles back into a rhythm. For now, expect a “new abnormal,” where powerful forces will continue to transform the industry and redefine how you must compete to win.
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How to Acquire New Customers with Sweet Spot Analysis
Pursuing new customers in existing markets can be an expensive proposition if not done with proper planning, analysis and execution.
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How to Improve Customer Retention and Keep Customers from Leaving You
Well-run companies know that customer retention is critical to long term success as a business. For some companies, an annual increase of 1% in customer retention over each of the next ten years results in 20% increase in annual earnings. Retention is powerful for several reasons.
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Can Your Team Sell Your Company’s Value?
While some distributors have spent time creating a value proposition that employees can recite by heart, when it comes time to really talk about how to sell their company’s value, many salespeople falter.
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How to Take Business Away from Your Competitors
You must look closely at the business you want to acquire from your competitors, in order to define a specific strategy. Do you want to dominate a certain product category or a specific geography? Or do you want to focus on a particular customer type, such as large volume or a specific SIC?
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How to Sell into New Market Segments
It’s a great idea and it requires thoughtful planning. Most distributors want to increase sales by entering new markets — but what does that mean?
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Sales Force Productivity During a Global Health Crisis
How Your Reps Can Make Calls without Visiting Customers Background As of this writing, the coronavirius (COVID-19) is infecting an increasing number of people around the world. We grieve over the human toll this virus takes. With a mortality rate that appears to be about 3% (at the moment) and focused primarily on the elderly…
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7 Things Distributors Can Do Right Now with Digital to Combat the Impact of COVID-19
My colleagues have written some great articles about the uncertainty around the COVID-19 outbreak. This article is geared toward what distributors can do right now to continue serving customers and keep productive using digital tools.
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A Tale of Two Teams: Proactive Inside Sales vs Customer Service
What’s the difference between customer service and inside sales? What are the skills sets distributors should look for when hiring for a successful proactive inside sales team, and aren’t those the same as customer service?
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The Secret Method to Creating the Perfect Amount of Simple
This is a sample intro paragraph and can be used to introduce readers to your article. This is an example of a WordPress post, you could edit this to put information about yourself so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with…
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2020 State of Distributor Marketing, Part 1: Distributors Struggle to Balance Digital with the Traditional
In general, distributors’ ongoing shift to digital is a good thing; depending on the segment, customers do prefer to be communicated with digitally.
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Featured in IMARK Electrical Now: Opportunity High for B2B E-Commerce
There’s plenty of opportunity in B2B e-commerce right now. Even distributors and manufacturers who have yet to implement e-commerce capabilities can still get in the game.
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What’s the Difference Between E-Commerce and E-Business?
To many distributors, e-commerce and e-business sound interchangeable. Yet, there are important differences in the definitions.