MDM Editor Lindsay Konzak recently attended the Advanced Profitability Improvement Conference in Arizona, featuring some of the top speakers on wholesale distribution strategy and management, including Brent Grover, Bruce Merrifield, Tony Pericle, Jon Schreibfeder and more. The focus of the conference was how distributors can make smarter and more informed decisions about where to target their resources to boost margins going into 2013. Analytics should be the foundation of any move on this front, the speakers said. This article presents a summary of main ideas presented by some of the speakers at the conference.

Expenses exceed gross profit on too many sales, according to Randy MacLean of Waypoint Analytics. In fact, he says, “there is no correlation between gross margins and profit.” He was speaking at the semiannual Advanced Profitability Improvement Conference in September in Scottsdale, AZ. So what happens? Where do the profits go?

MacLean says there are five ways profits disappear before reaching the bottom line.

The cost to serve a …