News

All the latest reporting and analysis from Distribution Strategy Group.

  • One Thing Every B-to-B Distributor Website Should Do ASAP

    One Thing Every B-to-B Distributor Website Should Do ASAP

    It’s no secret that mobile-friendly sites are important today and will be even more important in the future. Many distributors’ website visitors are in the field and very mobile, so this future change is important.

  • Distributors Have High Expectations for E-Commerce in 2015

    Distributors Have High Expectations for E-Commerce in 2015

    This article examines the results of the 2015 State of E-Commerce in Distribution Survey and how the industry’s e-commerce offerings are maturing. Part 2 will look at best practices for distributor-integrated marketing approaches to support electronic shopping and buying.

  • Six Reasons Your Customers Leave Your E-Commerce Site

    Six Reasons Your Customers Leave Your E-Commerce Site

    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.” But, what really happened was, “We built it and they didn’t come.

  • Making Money with Small Customers: Defeating the Profit Drag

    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.

  • Distributor Marketing Survey 2014: Survey Results

    Distributor Marketing Survey 2014: Survey Results

    Distribution Strategy Group conducted an electronic survey of 305 participants to better understand trends in distribution marketing. This survey was conducted with Modern Distribution Management in July 2014.

  • Making Money with Small Customers: Balancing Margin & Cost

    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.

  • 2014 State of Distributor Marketing: A Shift to Digital

    2014 State of Distributor Marketing: A Shift to Digital

    The 2014 distributor marketing survey covered several areas of marketing, including planning, objectives, vehicles, channels and organization. Companies are using more digital marketing than they did in the 2011 survey. They consider it more important, and they are staffing accordingly.

  • Making Money with Small Customers: Channel Alignment

    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.

  • Making Money with Small Customers

    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…

  • E-Commerce: The Multichannel Factor

    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.