Sales_Summit - Modern Distribution Management

What to Expect

Strengthen your sales performance playbook by attending MDM’s 2024 Sales Summit on July 10. This one-day virtual event connects industry leaders with the latest research and peer experience to learn how customers are changing (fast), what agile sales teams are doing differently (faster), and the innovative strategies and tools market share-takers are doing to thrive in today’s turbulent and rapidly evolving sales landscape (fastest).

Speakers

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Agenda-at-a-Glance

Many distributors enjoyed record sales the past few years, even in a decelerating 2023 growth environment and uncertain outlook. While 2024 forecasts indicate low single-digit growth across many sectors, now is not the time for autopilot go-to-market strategies.

Practical case studies and peer panels across six hours of programming explore the next stage of sales model transformation, omnichannel, technology leverage, compensation and more to create high-performance, high-profit sales organizations.

Don’t rest on your 2023 results! Push your capabilities, limits and team to grow above the market, optimize your sales performance and stay ahead of customers and competitors.

State of Sales & 2024 Strategy

Adaptive Selling: Leveraging Chaos for Strategic Advantage

Many distribution leaders put too much on the backs of their heroic sellers while the greater team struggles to adapt to changing buyer expectations. Maria Boulden shares the latest Gartner research and guidance into building organizational adaptability and the three accelerators of revenue intelligence, technology and modularity that are separating the winners in B2B selling.

Attributes of High-Performance Distribution Sales Models

The gaps between distributors selling like it’s still 2019 and those who have created more adaptive team-based, digitally-supported sales models keeps widening. Mike Marks outlines the playbook for the change management and key success factors that create a high-performing distribution sales organization in continuing choppy market conditions.

Panel: Hybrid Sales Model Migration Strategies

Each year, we check in with distributors on their progress and learnings from multi-year sales model transformation work. Always one of the most highly rated aspects of our programs, this session includes Q&A opportunity with the panelists.

How AI Can Accelerate Your Ecommerce Adoption

Ecommerce and digital sales initiatives can deliver strong improvements to customer experience, retention, and account-level profitability. But only if your customers adopt a new way of doing business with you. Chris Bauserman will share insights from a recent survey of 900 distributors and manufacturers on the benefits of digital sales, top adoption barriers, and industry benchmarks. Plus, he’ll demonstrate how latest advances in AI can dramatically improve digital sales rates and break through the digital adoption wall that many distributors run into.

Fireside Chat: Insights Into Changing Sales Compensation Plans

Aligning compensation plans to strategy is the most critical component to create more productive and profitable selling teams – especially as distributors transition to deeper hybrid selling models. But nothing produces more fear and stress than the threat of change to comp plans. Learn how one leading distributor that recently realigned their sales compensation programs managed the critical change process, a priority to dispel the greatest source of fear and ensure success.

Building the Foundation for AI-Assisted Sales: 3 Pillars of Success

Many distributors are planning to implement AI technologies soon, but before they do, they need to have three fundamental things in place: Strong business intelligence, a CRM to make your data actionable, and a customer-centric culture across your organization. In this session, White Cup VP of Marketing Helen Piña will show distributors how these three elements form the basis for successful AI initiatives and how your team can accelerate revenue growth by incorporating AI into each one.

Fireside Chat: What Enables a Distributor Sales Rep to Achieve a Nine-Figure Territory?

Gain insights from a 40-year sales veteran on how he grew his territory to multiple nine-figures by leveraging technology. Tony Pericle, a distribution analytics thought leader, will moderate this discussion. Our speakers will share valuable strategies on efficiently managing day-to-day operations, identifying risk and opportunity patterns, and optimizing decision-making effectiveness.

AI-Powered Sales Growth & Methodologies

Discover how distribution selling can level up with AI-powered technologies. We will focus on powerful and practical methodologies that businesses can implement quickly to enhance their sales processes and drive significant growth. Learn how AI tools can automate routine tasks, uncover deep customer insights, and enable personalized marketing strategies that speak directly to customer needs. Our discussion will include easy-to-adopt AI solutions that can be integrated with existing systems to make sales operations more efficient and effective. Join us to explore impactful ways to leverage AI for better, more effective selling, with concrete steps to get started and scale up as your business grows.

Increase Profits and Outperform Competitors with a Loyalty Program Designed for Wholesalers

Discover how loyalty programs address competition, lead to a strong bottom-line, and provide customers with compelling reasons to continue doing business with you. In this webinar, we will discuss key factors influencing the need for loyalty programs such as battling big-box stores, pricing pressure, and the e-commerce boom. We’ll share real-world examples of how loyalty programs impact customer and contractor retention, while helping distributors and manufacturers stand out from their competition.

A Three-Phase Methodology to Optimize Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Effective sales force coverage is tougher than ever. This session gives you in-depth insights on how to optimize your customer segmentation and account mapping to serve the right customers in the right channels in the right ways. These core strategies will help your organization perfectly align your sales force with your top opportunities and improve experiences for your most valuable customers.

Fireside Chat: Palmer Donavin’s High-Performance Sales Journey

Palmer Donavin, an employee-owned regional building materials distributor serving 19 states, has been on a multi-year continuous improvement path to elevate its sales and customer service teams and streamline operations. Matt Kaufman, Vice President of Sales, shares how the company reorganized to create a unified sales leadership across product divisions, the strategic decisions involved in redefining roles and responsibilities, the impact of these changes on team performance, and the outcomes that have defined their success.

Building a Sales-Coaching Culture for Distributors

Sales coaching is perhaps the single biggest performance lever a company can pull, but true coaching – versus managers just firing off feedback – is largely ignored in distributor sales forces (and too often the inmates are running the asylum). This session outlines for sales managers the skills and processes needed to develop a high-performing sales team.

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