Good marketing doesn't happen by accident. And it shouldn't be left up to the whims of suppliers or salespeople. To make sure your company achieves success, you need to develop your own customized marketing plan.

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You often hear the terms sales and marketing in the same sentence, sometimes interchangeably. However, they are distinctly different, complementary functions.

In the industrial distribution environment, sales is the art of a deal. Its goals are creating sales volume at acceptable gross margins. It is often an individual skill wielded (or not) by individual salespeople.

Marketing, on the other hand, includes organizing and implementing resources to accomplish strategic and tactical sales support goals, such as lead generation, proposal support, name recognition and deal awareness. To use a metaphor, marketing sets the table and invites the guests so that salespeople can feast on the deals.

Traditionally, many industrial distributors have identified themselves as sales organizations. They view marketing, if they think of it at all, as a manufacturer or supplier function on a national basis, which the distributor occasionally plugs into for cooperative advertising or customized nationally prepared marketing programs and materials.

However, most industrial distributors have begun to understand the need to develop and implement their own marketing programs. Many suppliers have dropped all marketing, except some national trade advertising. In many cases, manufacturers have reduced or eliminated cooperative advertising programs.  When suppliers offer co-op programs, they don’t help much with customization. And, while marketing support is decreasing, industrial distributors face increasing competition in their supply chain from large national distributors, local niche distributors and even from their own suppliers selling direct.

Customers have so many demands on their time and attention that simply turning distributor salespeople loose and hoping they find the right people, get their attention and sell something just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Distributors with the most effective marketing programs understand that time horizons for marketing are significantly different from sales.  The best distributor marketing programs set three-year goals and strategies with one-year tactics to implement these plans.

Who’s the audience?  
When establishing a marketing program, distributors first need to identify the target audiences. Of course, the primary audience is the customer. However, to be effective in a more targeted fashion requires more definition. What industries? What companies? What job titles? What message gets the attention of these targets? What’s the target message?

Customers are not the only audience for distributor marketing programs. A major audience for a distributor’s marketing program is its own employees. Salespeople and front-line customer contact folks need to understand the distributor’s message clearly so that they can communicate it and support it. Effective marketing takes the message to front-line employees. 

Suppliers are another audience for distributor marketing programs. Effective marketing by distributors tells suppliers they are working with a desirable partner. It may attract new, desirable suppliers and can even help influence the marketing message of key suppliers.

What are the objectives?
There are a number of potential objectives for distributor marketing programs. These can include:

Defining the distributorship – to its employees, its customers, and its suppliers.

Generating sales leads.

Supporting business proposals.

Providing opportunities to build customer relationships.

Educating customers and salespeople.

Supporting sales calls.

Prospecting.

Protecting margins through differentiation of the distributor and its products.

Creating a sense of forward motion.

There are others, but these are among the most common marketing objectives of industrial distributors. Many of these can be addressed in a three-year program. It is important for a distributor to determine which needs are most critical in the first year and develop those first.

Menu of tactics
Once you have established key marketing objectives, a next step is to develop a possible menu of tactics and tools to meet these objectives.

As an example, if your objective is to define (or redefine) yourself to customers, employees and suppliers, the following are possible tactics.

Change or update company logo.

Change company name (perhaps drop the word supply, which can have limiting connotations).

Hire a public relations firm to get the interest of local business publications to create newspaper articles about the company. 

Media advertising.

Create a magazine or newsletter. Companies can help you do this and have it paid for by suppliers’ ads.

Create educational opportunities for customers. Seminar selling is one possibility.

Ceremonialize key strategies that define the company. One example is a customer service strategy commitment. Can you create a customer service logo? Our company did (see a sample at the start of this article). This indicates our customer service commitment to employees and customers.

Building signage.

Employee education.

There are many other tactics that could be used to meet this marketing objective. Develop such a list for each of your key marketing objectives, then prioritize it.

Communicate the plan
Once you’ve developed a marketing plan with strategies and tactics, it’s time to establish time frames, budgets and assigned responsibilities. Then it’s time to communicate the plan. 

Involve your management team, suppliers, customers and employees – particularly salespeople – when developing the plan. Once it’s developed, explain it to the management team, salespeople, front-line employees and suppliers. Marketing plans need buy-in to be effectively implemented. Also, by going public with the plan, there is public commitment to carry it out.

Hold regular feedback or update sessions. Monitor results. This allows for course corrections and helps hold people accountable for implementation.

Distributor marketing database a key
A customer marketing database is a key piece to almost any marketing strategy. While you can purchase databases, the best are developed internally by salespeople and others within the company and maintained locally. This requires a commitment by everyone from top management to salespeople and front-line customer contact folks to capture this information systematically, continually update it and use it. 

An accounting database will not work. It requires a specific marketing database with multiple individual contacts at target companies and a template of information collected for each contact. This includes information such as mailing address, phone, fax and e-mail addresses, job titles and areas of responsibilities, plus areas of potential interest. It’s crucial to select appropriate database and possibly Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Marketing for industrial distributors is too important to be left to salespeople by default, or suppliers’ whims (or — worse yet — to competitors). Distributors must develop their own marketing plans, communicate them to employees and suppliers, implement them and measure the results. •

Gary Moore is president of Materials Handling Equipment Company in Denver. He also developed a sales training program called Objective Based Selling, which he presents nationally for industrial distributors and manufacturers. He can be reached at or at .

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2002 Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2002.

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