News
All the latest reporting and analysis from Distribution Strategy Group.
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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.
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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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2014 State of E-Commerce in Distribution: The Maturing E-Commerce Channel
This article examines the results of the 2014 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 e-commerce marketing, data management and operations.
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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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Bridging the Value Gap
They are undifferentiated because they say and offer essentially the same thing as their competitors. They are not relevant because they have not been tested with the market to see what customers and prospects care about the most.
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Positioning: Value Matters
When we ask executives for the value proposition of their business, they usually provide a ready, confident and well-rehearsed answer. The answer consists of a few claims about what they believe they do well.
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Your Customers WANT To Hear From You
Customers have indicated a preference to receive communications in both digital and print formats. It’s not a surprise that they still want to receive the traditional print catalog once per year. As we’ve discussed in past articles, print is still a very viable and preferred form for customers to have a complete view of your…
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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.