Change With Your Key Partners’ Digital Desires
Barcodes sparked major, model-changes in the ‘80s for both drug and grocery distributors. Regular-calling reps gave way to: sole-supply, integrated, automated, replenishment systems. And, many extra services were unbundle for fees. 95% of the existing distributors didn’t change and disappeared. This model has since spread into other channels, especially with repetitive commodity buying.
Fast forward. Over the next 24 months, how will your buyers, who want better digital experiences and savings, change your channel’s models. Will you change to oblige and win? Or: will you watch a few innovators and disruptors steal your most, net-profitable transactions?
Are you already surveying key customers and suppliers about their emerging digital needs? Will their answers change your anchored, business assumptions? Are you experimenting with co-creating new – channel, business and selling – models with most innovative channel partners?
Your Company Relearning IQ?
Most people won’t consider – Rethinking, Unlearning and Relearning – RUR!
- It counters our reptilian, quick-reflex, habitual thinking.
- Who wants to see new, analytical facts that expose past, unintended oversights?
- Coasting-out pros don’t want their – beliefs, expertise, power and pay – challenged.
- What messengers will dare tell emperors that their clothes need to change?
- Won’t all reps fight for the status quo?
- And, aren’t you too busy with fine-tuning the past to do successful RUR?
Why Evidence-Based Management Doesn’t Work
Businesses have run on financial numbers (to pay taxes and borrow from banks) since the invention of double-entry accounting in 1494. Financial numbers and assumptions have blind spots that other analytical lenses expose.
For example: customer-profitability analytics and “Service-Process Chain” systems-thinking reveal startling insights. These combined insights enable winning-model innovations. But, holistic, system rethinking is: “too complicated … (replies the entrenched order)…let’s just keep: buying low, selling high and selling more for (false) economies of scale and rebates”.
What will your company do to win at “eCommerce 2023”? Be key partner-centric? Or: remain rep-centric; keep pushing commodity vendor deals; and fade?
More Thinking About Rethinking Conventional Channel Wisdom
This blog is the kick-off to a series of – “Rethinking Conventional Assumptions”- blogs. So, be prepared to have your sacred business beliefs challenged starting with next week’s episode.
Eager “RUR” players are welcome to digest two, big, rethinking resources at merrifieldact2.com: my 12 webinars (under the “eCommerce 2023” tab); and, my “Core Renewal Roadmap”.