Lead photo: McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Kevin Sachs (right) and Partner Alex Abdelnour (left) deliver the 2023 SHIFT keynote on Sept. 19, 2023 in Denver. (MDM Photo)

MDM’s 2024 SHIFT Conference is rapidly approaching, set for Sept. 11-13 in downtown Denver. Registration and the full agenda can be found at https://www.mdm.com/shift2024/. 

SHIFT offers two and a half days packed with an excellent lineup of speakers and content sessions across core pillars of hybrid sales, digital transformation and data analytics — giving distribution leaders a great way to sharpen their competitive edge, alongside plenty of networking opportunities.

The first full day of SHIFT kicks off with a keynote from McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Kevin Sachs and Partner Victoria Bough in a session titled “Customer Delight: The Next Horizon of Customer Engagement & Experience.”

Sachs likewise delivered keynotes for SHIFT in 2022 and 2023 that delivered insights into key drivers in wholesale distribution and what the industry’s outperforming companies have done to get to where they are today.

We invited him back to the MDM Podcast to give a preview of what the 2024 edition has in store for our SHIFT audience, to touch on the key takeaways from last year’s keynote and what his McKinsey Distribution Practice team has identified as the the top couple of factors that will drive this industry forward in the year ahead.

Our conversation centered on the future of distribution, emphasizing the need to adapt to changing macroeconomic conditions, leverage technology for growth and prioritize customer experience. Sachs highlighted the complementarity between customer experience and technology and how distributors are faring in keeping up the latter’s pace of change.

“This is a real tremendous opportunity for distribution. While many distributors would say, ‘focus on service’, yes, service is one element of customer experience, but customer experience really is a lot broader than that,” Sachs detailed. “And when you start to really adopt this journey-based lens and wire that into how you think and operate — which can be a fairly significant transformation — measure that performance and drive continuous improvement against that, it can have tremendous results in terms of growth, margin, stickiness — all the things that you want as a distributor.”

Listen to the full MDM Podcast episode via the audio player above, and you can find our complete library of podcasts here.