Top 5 Strategic Planning Areas B2B Distributors Should Care About
A lot of distributors are re-thinking their strategic plan from the ground-up. Watch James and J talk about the 5 things they should focus on for annual planning.
Video Transcript:
James Dorn: So J, we’ve been noticing an unprecedented level of distributors who are seeking to fully evaluate their strategy moving forward. I mean, I’m talking ground up. I’ve never seen this before.
So as they go into their strategic planning process I thought we could share with them our five top tips on what they should focus on going into strategic planning.
What’s the first one?
J Schneider: Focus on an audience. Focus on a segment that’s going to make a difference in your business. Get focused on them. Use the tailwinds, understand who’s winning, who’s losing. Create a scorecard, rank them, prioritize them and to focus on them.
James Dorn: That’s great.
I would say number two would be once you’ve chosen an audience, learn everything you can about that audience to understand what pain they have and more importantly, what solutions you can bring in to solve that pain.
And distributors look end-to-end, look across the entire end customer’s business to really understand where the greatest areas of pains are and seek to solve those areas.
J Schneider: I think number three is going to be kind of resetting the the partnership with your suppliers. Take a hard look at the suppliers that are creating value in the market. Partner with the ones that going to make you and your end customer successful. And then develop a joint planning session. Work together with them and really understand who the strategic suppliers are. Develop that plan for next year.
James Dorn: Yeah, very strong.
And once you’ve identified kind of those key supplier partners, I would say number four would be develop a joint innovation roadmap with your supply and manufacturing partners. So, what this looks like is share the customer intelligence you’re getting for your end customer with your manufacturers, and have your manufacturers help you develop new value-added services and new product solutions that you can jointly go into your end customers facility with and solve the pain that they’re experiencing across their operation.
J Schneider: Yeah, and I think that’s a great one.
And then I think building off of that, we talk about the fifth being buyer behavior. And then, re-allocating your resources and sales and marketing to really support and rally around that new customer buying behavior. It hasn’t changed in years. So it might be as simple as re-evaluating your external field sales team. With internal sales.
James Dorn: Yeah.
J Schneider: Right, inside sales as an example.
From there, I would reallocate those resources, develop a plan for that.
Number two, is modernize the content and the information that you’re giving them. Demand programs, lead gen programs, cross-sell, upsell, the same old won’t cut it here anymore. That’s the net, right?
James Dorn: No, that’s great.
So that’s five so. Net-net, what do we want distributors to take into their strategic planning efforts?
J Schneider: Well, I think the top of that list, put the customer at the center of that discussion. Put the center of your strategy planning, put the customer right in the middle.
James Dorn : Yeah.
J Schneider: Number two, is I would look at these five tips understands which one of these five, that you can start incorporating into your plan this year, whether it’s the innovation roadmap, whether it’s the buyer journey, whether it’s the scorecarding, reallocating the resources to name a few. Look at which ones you can implement and act and move quickly on that.
James Dorn: That’s great.
J Schneider: Perfect.