Distribution Events
Thought Leadership and Software for Wholesale Change Agents
News
All the latest reporting and analysis from Distribution Strategy Group.
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How to Use Analytics to Make Money with Small Customers
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.
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What to Do About Accounts That Cost You Money
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…
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How and Why to Use Analytics to Segment Customers for Maximum Profit
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.
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What the Executive Suite Needs to Know About Marketing Automation
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.
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How to Make the Case for Marketing Automation
Every organization experiencing success with marketing automation has a different answer to this question. Here are the three that surface most often.
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Why They Leave Your Website Without Buying
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.”
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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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How Millennials Shop and Buy in a B2B Setting
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.
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The Electronic Postman Always Rings Much More Than Twice
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.