A distributor asked for advice on creating new opportunities for his company. It was experiencing sales erosion to alternative channels. While sales of the company’s added value items that require technical assistance remained strong, its higher profit-margin products were not being ordered. The distributor bemoaned, “Since the pandemic, 15-20% of our revenue has been lost due to reductions in sales of our basic products.” The company’s bread and butter items— like consumables, safety products, and hand tools — were being shopped online elsewhere.
Digital marketing
Paradigm shifts like digitization are disruptive but can inspire the creation of new opportunities. Mark Dancer notes that digital marketing can be a game changer “by teeing customer opportunities that are assigned to sales or support resources not according to their physical proximity to a customer but by their ability to deliver the right experience at the right time.”
Enterprise Selling
To identify and deliver these right experiences have your field sales team use Enterprise Selling. Capitalize on your long term local customer relationships and your team’s command of the latest technological developments. Find the opportunities inside the customer by asking their executive team these questions:
- What are your company’s strategic objectives for the next one to three years?
- Where are you the strongest against your competitors? Where are you lagging?
- What business problems are you focusing on with your customers?
- What are some of the latest trends in your industry?
- How will these trends affect your company?
- What is unique about your position in the marketplace?
- Where are you most vulnerable?
Use Insight
Today’s customer is awash in information — and it can all look alike. To make a good decision, he needs insight from a knowledgeable supplier. Introduce ways your customer can save money and increase earnings using your products. In “The Challenger Sales, Taking Control of Customer Conversation,” Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson relate, “We have found that 53% of loyalty was by the sales experience – namely the supplier’s ability to deliver unique insight to the customer.”
Creating Those New Opportunities
Get creative in your approach to selling. For example, Mark Dancer suggests, “Local distributors
and manufacturers could band together to pitch ‘quality of business,’ which is achieved through
their coordinated local products and services.” (Read the whole article here). Use
your product knowledge and insight to create new opportunities and recover revenue lost
to digital channels.
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