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Ask any distributor what sets their company apart from the competition, and they’ll likely say, “It’s our people.” I pose that question to distributors regularly and virtually always receive some variation of the same response. “Our people are better because . . .”

They can’t all be right. If you had a way to measure the sales staff of every industrial distribution firm in the country against one another, one distributor would come out on top, another would come in second place, some other distributor’s people would come in third, and eventually you’d discover the distributor with the country’s worst sales force. They probably don’t read this magazine.

Up to now, the distribution industry has lacked good benchmarking data about how well distributor salespeople perform their jobs. That’s why the YPS Group of Atlanta, a sales process engineering and sales training firm, in conjunction with Progressive Distributor, conducted an online sales benchmarking assessment project last year. Its purpose was to establish baseline sales performance benchmarks for the distribution industry.

The project asked distributors to rate how well their sales forces execute a core set of 44 sales best practices and asked them how effective each of these practices could be if executed extremely well. By reading results of the study, distributors can compare how well their sales staffs perform vs. standard benchmarks.

In other words, if you really believe your people are best, the Sales Best Practices Benchmarking Assessment Report will prove you right. But if you suspect your sales staff falls short, the report’s results provide you with a set of tools to measure and continuously improve the effectiveness and performance of your sales force. It also offers specific ideas you can implement to address your sales team’s weaknesses.

This editorial appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2004.

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