MDM is featured in interview on challenges, opportunities for distributors and manufacturers in today’s markets.
Latest In Management
In part 2 of MDM’s interview with Grainger U.S. President Mike Pulick, Pulick talks about growth drivers, e-commerce, and inventory management services, and about targeting small and mid-sized customers.
Part 1 of this interview was featured in the Nov. 10, 2011, issue of MDM. Read: MDM Interview, Part 1: Grainger's Take On the Market
MDM: You have increased your focus on inventory management programs, specifically your program KeepStock. Why do you believe you are seeing increased demand for these services? What kinds of customers are you targeting with inventory management programs?
Mike Pulick: Our KeepStock program is really an important part of our business, and it continues to grow very rapidly. It all gets back to the MRO purchasing process, which is usually very cumbersome. They use many, many different suppliers and there are a lot of ways that we can help them take waste out. But there is also …
Planning, analytics and talent are critical areas for development in the new year.
Uncover new out-of-the-box ideas by approaching planning meetings differently.
Don’t be fooled by common thinking that can actually lead to a major drain on profitability.
Accounting is good at providing financial information, but not at providing managing control information.
A rep with a compelling value proposition will quickly attract C-level attention.
At HARDI convention, Mike Workman talks about what keeps distributors from effectively implementing strategy.
If you don’t actively manage for profitability, you are sliding toward failure.
Embrace fear, build partnerships & other advice from a veteran mountain climber & businesswoman at PTDA.
‘Your stuff looks great, but I need a lower price.’ Every sales rep in every sales force in every distributor hears this statement or some variation of it virtually every day. Buyers are trained and paid to drive prices downward, and the fact is most are quite good at it. So what’s a distributor to do? Get used to it, because it’s a fact of life? Train the sales force (again) to be tougher negotiators? Hold firm and ‘fire’ those customers that refuse to play along with your margin objectives?
Each of those alternatives is viable. All of them have been and are being tried. As far as I can tell though, price pressure is not going away or even becoming less severe. Maybe there is another angle. Think about classifying the value proposition for each deal you offer on a 1 to 6 scale. …
Big opportunity exists for distributors to serve as consultants to end-users in MRO procurement.
These days, leading companies form different relationships with different customers, each with different characteristics and profitability.
When was the last time you examined “the way you’ve always done things”?
In presentation, Grainger also provides updates on sales force expansion and e-commerce plans.
Is the company at risk of becoming a business school case study of what not to do?
Jack Templin, most recently of Stanley Black & Decker, joins the AD team Oct. 1.
The problem with traditional forecasting is that it is too aggregated and passive to be consistently accurate.
