With MDM’s SHIFT Conference coming up on May 13-15th in Denver, we’re rolling out a series of podcasts that feature speakers who will be at the event. 

These shorter episodes help familiarize our audience with those speakers, preview what they plan to share at SHIFT and why it’s important, and provide some meaningful nuance into their areas of expertise.

You can find all the SHIFT details — including the agenda, registration and hotel info — at MDM.com/SHIFT. 

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After a decade of relative calmness, the only constant for distributors in the 2020s has been disruption.

Whether via a global pandemic, rapid technology advances, changing customer expectations or all of the above, the participants in this traditionally slow-turning industry have been forced to become agile and make operational decisions faster, turning some tried-and-true go-to-market strategies on their head.

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John Nantz has closely studied these changes from 2020-onward and is set to share the findings of his research at MDM’s SHIFT Conference, to be held May 13-15 in Denver.

As Principal of Redwood Advisors and a former McKinsey consultant, Nantz has distilled what he’s learned into five imperatives about how high-perofrming distributors are making changes to their selling processes and teams to better engage and retain customers.

That is the focus of our latest MDM Podcast, in which Nantz joined Tom Gale to discuss Redwood’s recent work with distributors and the common themes he’s seen across a diverse set of clients in the industry.

The conversation underscores the urgency for distributors to rethink their approach, leverage new technologies and embrace a customer-centric, solution-oriented go-to-market model, and our SHIFT conference is the perfect vehicle to get those insights into the company leaders who stand to benefit from it.

Listen to the full episode via the audio player above, and you can find our entire episode library at mdm.com/podcasts.

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Most Recent Episodes

• MDM Podcast: The Expectations and Priorities of Today’s Young Talent – March 19
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• MDM Podcast: How an Industrial Distributor Grows From its Roots – Feb. 26
• MDM Podcast: Voices of NAW’s 2025 Executive Summit – Feb. 5
• MDM Podcast: PT/MC Market Evolution and Product Information Sharing – Jan. 29
• MDM Podcast: Debriefing Our Ferguson & Watsco Case Studies – Jan. 15