Promises kept

Successful market penetration requires more than good intentions and empty promises. Manufacturers and distributors agree that the best route to success is having a formalized, written marketing plan.

by Richard Vurva

Talk is cheap. Every year about this time, manufacturers show up on a distributor’s doorstep and vow to work more closely in the coming months to develop a plan to grow sales. Too often, however, they neglect to back up their promises with action.

“Every supplier comes in and says, ‘We’ll work with your guys or set displays or have sales meetings or do end-user safety seminars.’ But if you don’t plan it out, it never happens,” says David Henry, vice president of Walter A. Wood Supply Company in Chattanooga, Tenn. 

Smart distributors like Henry have discovered that the best way to avoid disappointment is to develop a formalized, written marketing plan with key suppliers. Companies that follow a carefully devised marketing plan achieve much greater success than those that take a more haphazard approach.

Walter A. Wood invites key suppliers - primarily members of the marketing group Affiliated Distributors - to sit down at least once a year to develop a formal plan of action to convert business from non-A-D vendors. The plan includes activities such as developing product fliers, scheduling product training sessions for salespeople, end-user training opportunities, joint sales calls and similar efforts.

Toledo, Ohio-based Bostwick-Braun Industrial Supply follows a similar approach. Each February, it brings in a group of about a dozen key suppliers for roundtable planning sessions. 

“They each have the opportunity to sit down with our individual reps to go over the target accounts that represent the most opportunity for growth within their territories and to plan the marketing activities that will help them achieve their goals,” says Chris Beach, vice president of industrial sales. “Our salespeople rotate from table to table and have a half-hour to discuss this marketing plan.”

Suppliers like Mark Johnson of Sorbent Products Company in Somerset, N.J., say the approach works. In four years, SPC’s sales through Bostwick-Braun have nearly tripled, he says.

“The most important thing is having a written plan and then following up on it periodically to see how you’re progressing,” he says. “We’re competing with many other suppliers for a distributor’s time and attention. By having a plan, we can get a little more mind share and a little more focus on what we’re going to do this year.”

A written marketing plan with measurable goals and objectives benefits both channel partners.

“With our key marketing partners, we measure everything we said we were going to do and give our outside sales force a road map to show them where they are on their way to achieving their goal,” Beach says.

The blitz is on
A focused short-term sales blitz is one of the more popular marketing promotion events distributors hold. As a result of its weeklong blitz with power tool manufacturer DeWalt last September, Empire Machinery in Norfolk, Va., sold nearly $80,000 of tools in one week. The blitz - jointly developed by Empire’s executive vice president and sales manager Jim Topping and DeWalt rep Ron Willard - more than doubled the success of similar events Empire has held in the past, says company president Hank Turner Jr.

Turner says the event took more than eight months to plan and involved sending out promotional fliers, developing special pricing on new DeWalt cordless tools and deals on discontinued models, plus joint sales calls with every Empire outside salesperson during the blitz. About a half-dozen DeWalt reps spent the entire week of the sales blitz working with Empire Machinery salespeople. A DeWalt truck loaded with the company’s newest tools and accessories plus the DeWalt race car helped draw customers to Empire’s showroom.

“We held a Monday night kickoff meeting that’s kind of like a pep rally,” Turner says. “We did a sales presentation, then took our salespeople and the DeWalt team out to dinner. We had a schedule worked out for every one of our salespeople to make end-user calls with a DeWalt rep that week. Often, they got sales on the spot. If not, within a few days someone placed an order.”

Walter A. Wood recently held a similar sales blitz with power tool maker Bosch designed to introduce customers to its new line of cordless drills. About a month and a half prior to the two-day event, Wood sent out a Bosch-produced flier inviting customers to participate in the limited time, two-for-one sale. Wood mailed the flier along with a cover letter to an extensive customer database comprised of key sales contacts.

“When we do a promotion like this, we try to get out way ahead of time to let people know about it. You get a much better response than if you just stuff something in the envelope with an invoice,” Henry says. 

Salespeople visited customers in person to introduce the program to them and pre-book orders, Henry says. The sale price was available only during the two days the Bosch trailer was at Wood’s showroom. Customers either had to visit the showroom in person or phone in orders during the two-day event, creating a sense of urgency. The company sold about 500 drills during the promotion.

A different approach
Low-price offers aren’t the only way to build a marketing program. Sherwin-Williams unveiled a new program for 2003 called CASE, which stands for Cost and Safety Evaluation. The intent is to demonstrate the cost savings and safety advantages of new non-aerosol lubricants and cleaners and low-odor paint products.

For example, Sprayon’s Liqui-Sol products feature re-useable spray triggers, eliminating the need for pressurized propellants, so every can is filled with 100 percent useable product. With no propellants, users needn’t be concerned about safety issues regarding storage, application, and can disposal. Unlike aerosol cans, there is no need to puncture the containers, capture their propellants with special filters, drain and collect and sort the can’s residues, or pay for disposal of the collected residue. Instead, users just remove the spray trigger and recycle the empty can as scrap metal.

“The CASE program is different from a typical product rollout,” says Tina Rorak, channel marketing manager for the Diversified Brands division of Sherwin-Williams. “We want to formalize a documented cost reduction and value-added program that in the past has been occurring but not in a standardized way. This program focuses on two key hot-button issues for end-users, cost savings and safety.”

Working with distributors, Sherwin-Williams will present documentation to customers to demonstrate cost savings that result from using its new non-aerosol, easy-to-dispose products. The program will target safety engineers concerned about disposal and cleanup costs.

Focused is better
Developing programs that target specific customer segments is a trend that will likely accelerate in the future. That’s a good thing, according to Ken Cantwell, director of marketing for specialty chemical manufacturer CRC Industries, because it enables channel partners to better gauge the effectiveness of their marketing investment.

“In the past, distributors viewed co-op dollars as an entitlement,” he says. They used co-op marketing funds to pay for golf outings, open houses and other entertainment-oriented activities. He says manufacturers are beginning to look more closely at how they spend marketing budgets with distributors. Instead of open-ended co-op programs, some offer market development funds, or dollars set aside for a distributor to fund pre-approved, planned activities that have some measure for return on investment.

“We want to make sure we’re investing money only in those things that will generate a sale or a sales lead,” Cantwell says. “There are some activities that you can do tied around targeting customers. We see a lot of our distributors putting together programs where they can measure return on their investment.”

He described one distributor that presented a list of marketing activities that suppliers could fund, ranging from catalogs, brochures aimed at national account customers, targeted direct mail literature for customers that use specific products, to sponsorship of training seminars for salespeople and end-users. Offering suppliers a menu of choices enables them to devise an integrated marketing program and fund it accordingly.

“I’m hearing more and more people talking about investment and return on investment,” says Cantwell. “But it all goes back to planning. If you don’t have a good plan for how you’re going to grow the business and where we’re going to invest our dollars, it’s harder to make things happen at the end of the year.”

This article originally appeared in the January 2003 issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2003.

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