Digital tools:

1. Strengthen the firm’s offerings
2. Provide a platform for competitive differentiation
3. Enhance solutions offered to customers
4. Help to expand the base of served customers
5. Better the customer experience
6. Capture value through margins and growth
7. Assist to improve business process quality and efficiency
8. Enrich organizational collaboration and culture
9. Perfect supply chain deliverables
10. Increase customer presence through new channels and communication methods
11. Support in building a cohesive network of suppliers and business partners
12. Fortify the distributor’s own brand.

While each wholesaler-distributor may place a different emphasis on the benefits of digital tools for its business model and business objectives, across all distributors these four benefits stand out:

1. Customer experience Digital tools must help distributors strengthen and differentiate their customer experience.

2. Processes Well-designed business processes and consistent execution are key to a distributor’s success, and digital tools must help companies up their game.

3. Platform Digital tools will help distributors reinvent themselves from a warehouse of products for serving demand to information-centric companies that find advantage in leveraging product, customer, and supplier data for competitive advantage.

4. Value capture Finally, all is for naught if digital tools do not lead to defending margins, growing sales, improving customer acquisition or retention, or any other metric specific to a distributor’s business model and strategy.

Adapted from Becoming a Digital Distributor: Strategies and Tools That Create Value

The full study shares data, analyses, tools, recommendations, and more than 250 direct quotes from distributors who provide expert advice for creating a vision and driving your wholesale distribution business forward.

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