We have a proven path to growth in an ever-changing industry.
As a distribution executive, you must constantly be on the lookout for new opportunities for growth or face revenue erosion from new competitors and online sources. SMP provides you with a simple three-pronged growth plan: improving your contact database, nurturing those contacts toward more business opportunities, and providing tools to manage follow-up and sales processes for more closed deals.
SMP is the leading growth program for distributors. Period.
When it comes to building revenue, there are really only three things a distribution company should focus on: growing your database of customers, nurturing those customers to increase their purchasing, and then improving follow up and execution to close more sales.
The difference between high-growth distributors and the rest of the pack is in how quickly and efficiently you can perform those three tasks compared to your competition. That’s the SMP difference.
With CRM, business intelligence, mobile sales enablement and proactive marketing tools all designed specifically for wholesale distributors, SMP makes it easy for your team to focus on the three most important processes to drive new revenue.
Three Steps to Distributor Revenue Growth
Grow Your Database
It all starts with your database of customers. With no other improvements in sales and marketing, an increase in the number of real, accurate and well-maintained contacts in your database will improve your revenue.
Nurture Your Customers
You face more competitive pressure than ever before. Staying top of mind with your customers can make the difference between winning an losing their wallet share.
Follow Up to Close More Sales
SMP is like having a sales coach in a box. Your team will know how and when to follow up, and your sales managers will have greater visibility and control over the entire pipeline.
The underlying health of your business is your sales and marketing database.
Your sales and marketing database is truly the lifeblood of your company. According to data from Marketing Sherpa, contact databases degrade by about 22.5% each year. That means that even with the best sales techniques, without careful stewardship of your contact database your sales and marketing effectively suffers similar declines each year. Many distributors are at a further disadvantage because their sales reps keep their contacts to themselves. Getting control over your contact database is the first step toward building a machine focused on revenue growth.
Centralized list management for all customers and contacts
- Create and upload lists
- Utilize all of your transactional history including open orders and quotes
- Segment your customers and contacts
- Leverage your contacts
- Leverage your marketing lists
- Create dynamic marketing lists based on profiling information
- Manage opt-ins, opt-outs, subscriptions and CAN-SPAM Act compliance
Gain Control
Your customers, prospects and contacts — and all of the information you collect about them — are some of the most valuable intellectual property in your business. SMP allows you to take control of this important asset by providing you with one place to manage all of your important information — customers, prospects, vendors and more. By entering and maintaining all of your contacts in one centralized database, everyone on your team will have the information they need to track important activities, tasks, notes, emails, and more.
Leveraging Online Leads
Many distributors are increasing their online and digital investments, yet still struggle in connecting those leads to where the rubber meets the road: real selling.
SMP makes it easy for you to integrate your online lead generation with your sales efforts in a single, centralized database. You can import contacts from any source to help maximize your ROI on search engine optimization and advertising. The contacts you generate from any source will be available for marketing and sales follow up through SMP.
Whether you seek to increase your database through vendor assistance, live events, pay-per-click (e.g., Google) ads, blogging and social media or other inbound content marketing, you will know that your investments in digital marketing will be maximized with sales enablement, data visualizations and managed follow up.
Staying top-of-mind with your customers and prospects is your #1 competitive advantage.
Most distribution companies have no defined processes for engaging and re-engaging customers before and after a sale. And typically, most of the leads generated through marketing efforts, your e-commerce store, and your inbound content strategy wind up lost, discarded or ignored. SMP gives you the visibility and the tools to make sure you stay top of mind with your customers.
Better sales and marketing with data
Dynamic and real-time reporting on digital behavior and email click-throughs gives you quick and powerful feedback on each of your campaigns and newsletters. You will be able to see responses and digital behavior when you need it to determine who the best and most qualified leads are from each of your email campaigns. Reporting makes it easy to generate new lists based on digital behavior as well as provide your sales team with the hottest leads from your marketing outreach.
“With SMP, we can easily see where we are (in sales volume) with a particular customer, vendor or product category. And when we’re down, we can make a change to try to improve that before it’s the end of the year and we realize we’re down by X% and can’t do anything about it.”
Marketing for top of mind awareness
SMP helps you stay top of mind with your customers with cost-effective and easy-to-implement marketing.
- Scheduled newsletters
- Easily profiled new marketing lists
- Planned or ad-hoc email marketing
- Customized offers based on preferences and buying history
- Built-in HTML editors
- Built-in reports for digital behavior like click-throughs to measure the success of your campaigns and qualify marketing leads
- Coordinate vendor comarketing campaigns with list management, trackable campaigns and activities and data visualizations to collaborate on new ideas
Sales that goes from thought to execution
Reps love SMP because it lets them focus on what they do best — selling — and spend less time preparing reports, emails and data-rich presentations. SMP makes it easy to explore data based on buying behavior, trends, demographics, locations, product needs and more. But most importantly, reps can put those insights into immediate actions by creating new activities and campaigns in just a few clicks.
- Identify and nurture you most profitable customers
- Create a follow up list of customers who haven’t purchased in 60+ days
- Follow up on the lastest vendor comarketing offers
- Never lose track of an important bid or quote
- Coordinate quick marketing lead follow up calls
- Identify new ways to upsell based on product trends for higher share of wallet
- Provide immediate communication to customers when a particular discount or vendor rebate is available to extend the lines they purchase from you.
- Create one-to-one messages based on your customers buying profiles
- Provide your staff with data that makes their jobs easier, like transaction history from your back-end systems
- Create reports and dashboards that identify new product positioning opportunities
Industry-leading sales execution
SMP is like a sales coach in a box. With easy-to-use data visualizations, your reps will know exactly the right plays to run at the right times. Your sales managers will have all the data the need at their fingertips to better manage your reps and coach them to success. And with automation, you will close more open bids and quotes than ever before.
Pinpoint the Right Action at the Right Time
Make Sales Meetings About Sales
With easy-to-use data visualizations, your reps will know exactly the right plays to run at the right times. Your sales managers will have all the data the need at their fingertips to better manage your reps and coach them to success. And with automation, you will close more open bids and quotes than ever before.
Effective sales coaching can improve win rates by as much as 29%. [Vantage Point Performance]. Companies that provide real-time, deal-specific sales coaching increased revenue by 8.4% year-over-year – a 95% improvement over companies that don’t provide that level of coaching. [Aberdeen Research]
With SMP, you will improve the effectiveness of your sales management, coaching, sales meetings, business and vendor reviews and allow your managers to spend more time helping close sales and less time running reports and asking questions.
Close 20-30%More Open Bids and Quotes
What would a 30% boost in your opportunity close rate mean to your bottom line? You know that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in those bids and quotes, but without a consistent follow up process it can be difficult to get them over the goal line.
SMP designed a special process to follow up on open bids and quotes and SMP users are increasing their close rates by 25% to 30% on average.
Having the right technology in place can help you close more open quotes and bids in many ways, such as:
- Automatically creating follow up activities for your sales reps for any bid or quote over a certain dollar amount
- Increasing visibility into your pipeline
- Bridging the gap between inside and outside sales
- Coaching your team to wins on important bids and quotes
Distribution Sales Trends
Based on the results of our recent focus groups, this report shares the methods that sales and marketing leaders are planning to use to gain deeper insights, build stronger relationships, serve their customers and improve their marketing effectiveness. This extensive 27-page report covers issues including:
- Distribution top sales priorities
- Sales management challenges leaders worry about
- Strategies for mobile tools
- Using business intelligence to find new opportunities
- Closing more bids and quotes
