Becoming a Customer-Centric Distributor

Distribution sales and marketing executives are having a lot of conversations about topics like account-based processes, the rise of the customer, one-to-one marketing, customer experience design and more. The reason you’re hearing so much about customer-centric marketing is that is a powerful driver of profits. This is particularly true in the distribution industry where customer experience has become the primary driver of preference among B2B sources.

The reason a customer chooses you over another competitor or an online catalog has to do with your understanding of your customer’s needs, strategies and priorities.

Distributors are using self-serve data to get personal in a number of ways:

• Profiling. Distributors are using data to make the exact right offer to the right group of customer at the right time. This puts your customer’s needs first rather than simply promoting your current offers.
• Account-based marketing. Distributors are combining all of their corporate knowledge about individual customers to get a full 360 degree view of each customer and make unique offers to close deals. That’s something that an online shopping cart cannot do.
• Improving share of wallet and lines per order. Adding just a single line per order on every fifth order can raise your profits by about 40%. That doesn’t sound that hard to do as long as you have access to the right purchasing, profiling and behavioral data.
• Improving renewal sales rates. We all know that it is much more profitable to sell to an existing customer than to find and sell to a new customer. According to Aberdeen Group’s Report “Analytically Grounded Sales Teams”  companies with sound analytics see 3.1 times higher customer renewal rates.

In all, customer centricity leads to new profits by matching the exact needs of your customer with your products and services. It’s all fed by real data from your CRM and ERP systems thanks to SMP’s easy-to-use business intelligence, dashboards and data visualizations.