July 25, 2011

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Commentary: Learn to Love Disconnects as a Vehicle for Profitability

Management, Strategy, Subscriber Only / Tom Gale

Create new ways to help customers or streamline your own operations to become more profitable.

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Price vs. Value: How Distributors Position Their Businesses – Part 1

Sales & Marketing, Subscriber Only / Robert Kelley

When it comes to positioning and messaging, the overwhelming majority of distributors in a recent MDM survey have three things in common:

About 90 percent of distributors believe that they deliver more value than their competitors for a comparable price.

More than 88 percent of distributors place a large emphasis in their messaging on a handful of features: product selection, availability, speed of delivery, pre-sales technical support and professional sales representatives. If everybody is messaging on the same items, it means that nobody is really differentiating.

Nearly 70 percent of distributors use informal methods for positioning and messaging.

This article, the first in a two-part series, explains why distributors hold this belief about their value and shows how they can develop differentiated messaging around a broader set of features.

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2Q MDM-Baird Benchmarking Survey: Positive Trend Continues

Quarterly MDM-Baird Distribution Survey, Research & Analytics, Subscriber Only / Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier

Robert W. Baird & Co., in partnership with Modern Distribution Management, conducted a survey of nearly 600 distributors and manufacturers to gauge business trends and the outlook for the distribution industry in diverse sectors. Here is a summary of second-quarter results.

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On average, respondents to the latest quarterly MDM/Baird survey said second-quarter revenues were up 9.7 percent year-over-year. In the first-quarter survey, respondents indicated …