Distributing Ideas, The NAW Blog
Amazon Survey: B2B Procurement’s No. 1 Goal in 2021 is Increasing Efficiency – Leveraging the Power of AI #27
The pandemic brought with it a rise in digital B2B purchasing. Boundaries were broken down and expectations were removed as businesses began making purchases like consumers: quickly and conveniently from their home computers. Although this trend may have been well on its way, the pandemic certainly accelerated it. Amazon surveyed 250 B2B buyers and 250 B2B sellers in the U.S. and found that [...]
Pay Attention to These 3 Customer Trends – Value Creation Strategy #19
Being on the defensive is only a strategy if you want to lose more slowly. Distributors that are willing to play offense will pay attention to three key trends in terms of customer expectations: Customers expect their online buying experience to be as good as the experience in their everyday B2C life. They will not put up with an archaic ordering system. They have choices. Technology [...]
Four Steps to Effectively Manage Your Sales Organization – Driving Performance with Analytics #13
Many distributors struggle to manage their sales teams effectively. They oversimplify the sales management function, failing to recognize that every salesperson is unique and requires a customized approach. Effective sales management demands a close evaluation of your sales force with the goal of segmenting salespeople by the characteristics of their performance, also known as sales force [...]
Where Are You on Your Pricing Journey– Intelligent Sales and Profit Acceleration #10
Most distributors believe that their efforts of building home-grown pricing matrices amount to accomplishing strategic pricing, but they often experience only modest or flat or even declining (over time) profit improvements. Why? The truth is that strategic pricing isn’t a “yes” or “no” proposition. I’ll propose a new way to think of strategic pricing as a journey and explore a [...]
We Are Better Together
As we have all come out of the pandemic, we are better together as an industry of 5.6 million people who create results, which collectively contribute $5.8 trillion annually to our GDP. As each of us have faced challenges not seen since in a long time, many playbooks are still being written. Many of our members are turning pages and heads with positive results and heartwarming stories of [...]
Why Sales Reps Resist Technology, and What Distributors Can Do About It – Leveraging the Power of AI #26
One of the biggest hurdles distributors face in implementing new technology such as AI is resistance from their sales teams. Experts say sales reps tend to resist technology due to: The fear of the unknown. Change can be anxiety-inducing. Introducing new tools or technology to your organization, no matter how good they are, will alter established workflows and processes. Using new [...]
Why Sales Reps Don’t Value Traditional CRM Solutions – Leveraging the Power of AI #25
Ninety-one percent of data in CRM systems is incomplete due to duplication and outdated data, according to an analysis by Dun & Bradstreet. Pitney-Bowes found that 77% of companies believe they lost sales because of inaccurate or incomplete contact data. It’s clear that data quality is critical to sales success. Bad data can be attributed in large part to manual data entry in a CRM. [...]
Migrate from Indiscriminate Order Taking to Strategic Market Making – Intelligent Sales and Profit Acceleration #9
Every day, in B2B businesses everywhere, salespeople are having conversations intended to produce current and future revenue and profitability. For the vast majority of these sellers, whom they spend their time with on any given day is largely an unplanned or reactive outcome. Most sellers don’t have clear insight into which customers produce the greatest sales growth or net profitability, [...]
5 Best Practices to Guide Your Sales Compensation Redesign – Value Creation Strategy #18
For salespeople, the top predictor of income should be performance, not tenure. But all too often, it’s the other way around. The truth is traditional sales compensation plans that are tied to territory and tenure no longer work. If you haven’t already updated your sales compensation plan to meet pandemic-induced changes in how sales teams interact with customers, it’s time to act. [...]
Assess, Compete, Transform: The Peak Performance Cycle – Driving Performance with Analytics #13
Understandably, distributors find themselves fighting fires with distribution in such a state of flux and transformation, post-COVID. However, as easy as it is to blame the current environment, the reality of firefighting in distribution is commonplace. Most distributors suffer from breakdowns in what we call the “peak performance cycle” for any high-functioning distributor: Assess, [...]
