Industry Insights
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2017 State of Distributor Marketing, part 1: Distributors Increase Search Marketing Efforts
This article examines how distributors across sectors approach marketing, what they consider the most effective channels to be and the frequency with which they conduct their different marketing vehicles.
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Why Distributors Don’t Do E-Commerce
We have talked to many distributors who are still determining whether to offer an e-commerce store front or not. We hear common themes in the reasons for not pursuing e-commerce.
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Eat Lunch, Be Lunch, or Die
What if I told you you are losing 5-10% of revenue a year? Furthermore, you might not have even noticed. In this blog post, I’m going to explain why it is alarmingly easy to lose an obscene amount of revenue, without doing anything. Here are the 4 problems your business could be suffering from.
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Inside Sales in 2017: Survey Results
69% of inside sales people are spending less than 10% of their time making proactive outbound calls. They are spending the majority of their time doing after sale support, order entry and pre-sale support.
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How Do You Identify the Top Variables That Help You Sell More?
An analysis of distributor data often identifies a dozen or more variables, or markers, that segment customers in certain ways.
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It’s About Your Customer’s Efficiency
For many distributors, multi-channel only means adding e-commerce alongside field sales. However, there is more to multi-channel than just field sales and e-commerce. It might or perhaps should include proactive inside sales, vending machines, mobile, email, and SMS/MMS.
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Distributor Shopping and Buying Profiles: There Is No Average Joe
When shopping (finding, researching, and evaluating products), three methods are most frequently used including performing online search, going to a manufacturer website, and going to a distributor website. These electronic shopping methods were preferred over shopping by talking to people (sales reps, CSR’s, colleagues) or using print.
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2015 State of Distributor Inside Sales
Distribution Strategy Group, in partnership with Modern Distribution Management recently completed a survey about inside sales teams. The survey was designed to understand the key activities and the importance of these activities to companies’ inside sales teams, along with measurements and challenges.
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E-Commerce Platform Considerations for B-to-B Distributors
The type of products sold online have a factor, with MRO products generally having higher online adoption. However, the biggest and most important factor for a successful e-commerce adoption – and growth velocity – is having a strong strategic plan for the digital sales channel.
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The ROI Case for E-Commerce
Research from the previously published annual 2015 State of E-Commerce Study indicates that more than 41 percent of distributors are generating less than 5 percent of revenue through e-commerce.
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Why Distributors Need To Update Google My Business Listings
Just getting a listing is no longer enough. Google confirmed a few days ago that businesses must have activity within a six-month period or risk becoming unverified.
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Why Distributors Must Have an E-Commerce Site
B-to-B purchasing is experiencing a major shift toward a multichannel model with an online focus. Online firms, such as Amazon, have elevated our expectation of how a transaction is completed.
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Making Money with Small Customers: Defeating the Profit Drag
Companies typically start with small customers, grow some of them into large customers, continue to add new small customers and learn a lot from serving all of them.
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Making Money with Small Customers: Balancing Margin & Cost
Distributors and wholesalers have been dealing with the “small order problem” for decades. Now, more than ever, mastering the policies and procedures that are a near-complete solution to this issue is a necessary and fundamental skill for every distribution organization.
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Making Money with Small Customers: Channel Alignment
For most distributors, the top 10 percent of their customers represent 60 percent to 90 percent of that distributor’s revenue. Those customers are well served by field sales reps. The remaining 90 percent of the customers, often called house-accounts, have 10 percent to 40 percent of the total revenue.
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Making Money with Small Customers
If you give a salesperson 100 accounts to call on, odds are he or she will actively work the top 20 to 30, receive calls from the next 20 to 30 and ignore the remaining accounts. While this salesperson is busy maximizing his or her commission by focusing on the larger accounts, the company is…
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E-Commerce: The Multichannel Factor
E-commerce demand generation is in transition. According to results from the third annual MDM Distribution E-Commerce Survey, while most distributors are increasing e-commerce revenue from email marketing, catalog and organic search, they remain less effective with paid search and marketing automation.
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Four Marketing Moves to Increase Profit
Over the last 20 years, there has been a broad movement by distributors to make operational improvements such as supply chain management, process standardization, lean production, and others. These practices, though not universally deployed among distributors, have created tangible efficiencies that manifest at the bottom line. While there is still more benefit to be realized…
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The 6 Cs of Unifying Your Employees Under One Message
Some of the best distribution companies have unified the diverse voices that make up a business into one message, both internally and externally. I call this Many Voices, One Message. The idea is a staple of the B-to-C world.
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Why the Trend Is Your Friend
Data points in time indicate a real trend either up or down less than half of the time. By tracking trends, we can do a better job matching our expenses and cost-to-serve with the business, without fuss or emotions.