Category Archives: Distribution Industry Sales

178. 2020 Sales Force Plans/Questions (B*)

2020 Companies, Big Data, Distribution Industry Sales, Index, WayPoint Analytics

Selling-Model Stress Fractures?

Recent surveys find that next-gen, B2B, digital-first buyers want only-scheduled-as-needed sales rep calls. They prefer, initially, maximum e-information and real-time e-support: 24/7/365. And, texts about real issues are preferred over “how’s-it-going”, outbound phone calls. Continue reading 178. 2020 Sales Force Plans/Questions (B*) →

177. Scary Strategic Questions for 2020 (A)*

2020 Companies, Big Data, Core Renewal, Distribution Industry Sales, Distribution Strategy, Index, Profit Analytics, Service Value Innovation Guidelines, WayPoint Analytics

The Usual Drill and What Breakthrough-Insight Experiments?

Calendar-year distributors: what’s your planning routine for 2020? Is it forecasts, goal setting and budgets, to beat last year by trying harder? Plus, what big-new-competitive-advantage experiments will you be trying? If you aren’t planning something a bit scary, then you are doing same old stuff in new clothes to get fading results. Continue reading 177. Scary Strategic Questions for 2020 (A)* →

The Usual Drill and What Breakthrough-Insight Experiments?

Calendar-year distributors: what’s your planning routine for 2020? Is it forecasts, goal setting and budgets, to beat last year by trying harder? Plus, what big-new-competitive-advantage experiments will you be trying? If you aren’t planning something a bit scary, then you are doing same old stuff in new clothes to get fading results. Continue reading 177. Scary Strategic Questions for 2020 (A)* →

176. Distributor Puts Amazon’s 14 Principles to Work

2020 Companies, AmazonBusiness, Concierge Customer Service, Distribution Industry Sales, Distribution Strategy, Index, Service Value Innovation Guidelines, WayPoint Analytics

Principles for Innovating

Google: “Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles”. Here’s how a distributor put them to work.

Principle #1 (P#1); “Customer Obsession”

(CEO speaking): We subscribe to a customer/SKU, net-profit analytics service. We were initially shocked by the net-profit winners and losers. But, if we were going to reinvent service-value in a Frugal (P#10) way, we should start obsessing about our most net-profitable customers and customer niches. Continue reading 176. Distributor Puts Amazon’s 14 Principles to Work →

171. AmazonCommercial’s Towels and Tissue (T&T) “Experiment”

2020 Companies, AmazonBusiness, Concierge Customer Service, Distribution Industry Sales, Distribution Strategy, Index, Service Value Innovation Guidelines, Supply Chain Partners, WayPoint Analytics

A B2B Channel-Threat?

In June 2019, Amazon introduced a new B2B brand: AmazonCommercial. The first items in the line?  T&T! (For more search AmazonCommercial at AMZ).  

What’s Amazon thinking? Amazon Business has gotten traction with a “long-tail”, MRO/SKU strategy specifically aimed at huge entities. AMZ has attracted an army of resellers to curate millions of B2B SKUs. And, in parallel, AMZ has created two cloud solutions: integrations for 60+ internal procurement systems, and free, central-spend-management tools. This evolving proposition now wins up to 20% of a typical big-buyer’s MRO spend.  

AMZ’s next B2B moves? Target some bulky, big-volume, consumable, SKU? All employers do buy T&T… but how price-competitive can AMZ be? Or, conversely, how net-profitable are T&T for distributors?  

A Distributor’s T&T, Net-Profit Math

Checking with a “Jan-San” distributor who subscribes to Waypoint Analytics’ “Net-Profit Analytics” cloud-service, here’s what we found:

  1. The distributor breaks even overall on warehouse business. Direct sales account for all operating profits.  
  2. The 7000+ warehouse SKUs were sorted into 100+ product categories.
  3. Ranking the product categories by net-profits: the top 25 totaled big profits, enough to pay for 100% of all losing product groups.
  4. The biggest losing category was equipment parts. The category has an excellent margin percentage. But, the many small-dollar picks have less margin-dollar content than the fulfillment-dollar costs to yield losses. The size of both picks/orders and fulfillment costs matter.   
  5. Two of the top 5 most net-profitable categories were T&T! The categories’ low margin percentages were more than offset by large, average-dollars/pick.  
  6. No big customers have yet to negotiate with AMZ T&T prices.

Questions to Live Into:     

  1. What will Amazon invent for in-the-cloud buying tools, bulk-distribution capabilities, and/or business-model partnerships, to win more B2B spend? And, more B2B searches and clickstream data to monetize via advertising?   
  2. Why are legacy channel players blind to the net-profit/loss cross-subsidies that exist amongst both SKUs and customers?
  3. Won’t both AMZ and big-boxes introduce more private-label clone SKUs to eat into channels’ most net-profitable SKUs?
  4. Will channel players beat AMZ to inventing an in-the-cloud, channel-model for skid-quantity consumables? (I can envision such a game-changing model.) 
  5. What analytics do factories and distributors need to minimize AMZ’s takes while maximizing gains from slow-moving, traditional competitors?

For more, be in touch: bruce@merrifield.com. Waypoint clients can also attend my Nov 7th workshop. Link below:

WayPoint Institute 2019

169. What Happened to “Total Quality Management”, etc.

Concierge Customer Service, Core Renewal, Distribution Industry Sales, Distribution Strategy, Index, Service Value Innovation Guidelines, Supply Chain Partners, WayPoint Analytics

Remember Back In the 70’s…

When Japanese products surpassed the quality of US goods. Then, zero-defect methods jumped to the US in the ‘80’s. (Phil Crosby’s book, “Quality is Free” was published on 1/1/80.) And, “Do It Right The First Time” became the high service-value, low cost, high morale way to go.   

Continue reading 169. What Happened to “Total Quality Management”, etc. →