Cutting Through the Fog by Recognizing That Success Begins at Home My ongoing conversations with distributors reveals, over and over again, that leaders are inundated with a flood of urgent pronouncements about the need to make investments and build digital capabilities. Experts and vendors proclaim that distributors must go online to keep up with rapidly [...]

Digital tools are changing the way you and other wholesaler-distributors leverage information, run your operations, and create value. More than that, digital tools are changing the way your value chain works and how your competitors operate. Customers prefer to go online for all kinds of information because it is convenient. New online competitors are emerging [...]

Wholesaler-distributors have a very strong awareness of digital tools, but, as of today, relatively low experience, on average. We found that we often needed to provide a simple working definition of the six digital tools that were the subject of our research, and we provide them here for clarity. E-commerce: buying and selling of products [...]

In my research for my book, Getting the Most Out of CRM, I found that the majority (61%) of wholesaler-distributors surveyed already use CRM in implementations that range from basic to advanced. If you’re looking for perspectives to get to a “go” decision for adopting CRM or expanding its use at your company, here are [...]

1. Manage customer contact information. Perhaps the most basic of benefits, CRM helps salespeople create and maintain a database of customer information from basic information about names and positions, to personal information about business goals, professional affiliations, and family members. 2. Manage sales pipeline or territory results. CRM has the potential to transform a salesperson [...]