Love Your Dealer

While the face of trade has changed remarkably over the last couple of decades, the place of the dealer has actually got strengthened.

Misunderstanding the internet, many companies tried to focus more on direct marketing and less on establishing any channels for distribution, and have found themselves on the back foot.

Within the world of distribution channels, establishing and building an effective dealer net is certainly one of the most challenging but essential tasks. Anything can be sold through dealers, and without good dealers very few things can be sold!

Your dealer is very often the primary interface that your product or service has with the customer. The relationship that your dealer develops with your end user is of critical importance to the acceptance and use of your product/service. A fact that is often ignored is that it is actually the dealer who is your primary customer. The dealer believes in your product/service and places orders for what you are selling. It is the dealer that pays you for it. Only afterwards does it reach the hands of the end user. Your CRM must therefore begin with your dealers and in turn, the dealer's CRM is critical for your success! Unfortunately we see a great deal of dysfunctional relationships between manufacturers and their dealers.

The antagonism is often mutual: Dealer's Perspective:

Poor logistics

Poor incentives

Poor service

Few or no PoS/PoP aids

Poor advertising support

Insufficient branding effort

Not responsive to customer needs/complaints

Company sales team visits are too infrequent and too brief, or not reachable

No interested in sharing expenses for special promotions/events

Poor packaging.

Manufacturer's Perspective:

Insufficient selling effort

Insufficient stock on hand

Always demanding more margins

Always demanding unreasonable ad spend

Always cribbing about delays in supply but always orders at the last minute

Not attending to customer needs/complaints

Always dissatisfied with provided PoP/PoS aids

Not cooperating with the sales team.

Always asking for funds for special promotions/events

And the lists will go on. But just look at the amount of point-wise convergence! Just scanning a typical list shows that there is more of point of view here than substance. Not that the complaints are not real, but when you have so much of common ground as the basis to build on, there's no excuse at all for not being able to create vibrant and productive relationships!

It is primarily the manufacturer who has to take the initiative to get relationships back onto a sound footing. If you don't do it and instead sit brooding over lists of complaints (as above) the result will be that your product or service will be put on the back burner. Most dealers have more than one thing to sell. They will sell what is profitable and what best cements their customers to them. 

When you eventually do 'zoom out' and take a macro view, you will see that the demotivation of this or that dealer is the least of your problems. When customers have to discover your stuff for themselves, even if what you've got is good, the best of the rest (of your channels) can only deliver 10% to 20% of what you are capable of achieving through a good dealer net. The vast bulk can only come from enthusiastic/knowledgeable dealers who will build your brand for you, and that will happen only when you create the right environment.  

Most of it is fear - fear of being taken for a ride! Fear comes from the micro-view. Go ahead and be a hard headed businessperson - Knowing where you have to get, you now know what you can and cannot do. Make no false promises. Be responsive and STAY in communication. In fact, make communication your first priority. Mutual understanding and agreement should be the entire basis for your dealer relationships. Share the actual FACTS. Put yourself in the dealer's shoes and try to sort out needs from wants. Be responsive, understanding, prompt and always keep your promises. Remember that the dealer chose you. 

Most times, this dealer is your dealer because they were convinced that what you've got is what their customers need. Take feedback from dealers seriously. If you are messing up somewhere, you can count on your dealers (who perhaps know as much or more about your type of product/service than you do) to highlight the issues, and even help pinpoint where there is waste and how the logistics etc. can be improved - or whatever happen to be the particular points of contention.  

 And if your marketing or operations people don't get this message - fire them! 

 Try it - vibrant love affairs are infectious and can be virally contagious. 

Go get the 90% that's out there waiting for you...
















Labels/Tags
#dealer #marketing #distribution channel #branding #CRM #communication #love #PoS #PoP, #advertising #logistics

Social Media Marketing trends for 2015 - Infograf

This infografic hits the major trends and changes taking place in social media marketing in early 2015

Match-Up vs Mismatch

High ideals, the Vision Statement, our Mission... perhaps a company aims for the stars, but the reality just fails to match up. There's a mismatch between what marketing says and what the company does. It's all too common.

Making fine statements raises fine expectations and when there is no correspondence, the result is great disappointment. Disappointment is only the initial reaction. Once the bad feeling sets, that company will PERMANENTLY lose trust.
Trust is precious. Trust is the difference between winning and losing.
Trust has to be won, and never lost. Especially in this day and age of instant information sharing, when you lose trust:

• Your channels will shun you or even shut you out
• Your customers complaints will just ooze through the social net or perhaps even spread virally
• Your products and services will lose value
• Your market share will shrink

Trust is won through integrity, consistency, and honesty.

Push cannot withstand long without a corresponding pull. Marketing can only initiate, it's your match-up from your integrity and quality that has to carry the load. More importantly, if both (push and pull) do not grow together, the company will not be able to grow at all. Pull can be initiated by effective branding and sustained marketing, but alone it will not sustain if your products/services fail:

• To meet needs to do what you have claimed
• To provide value for spend
• To be available/reach your customers cleanly on demand
• To provide decent margins in distribution
• To be reliable

 Identify the problem areas and deal with them. Be open and responsive to your  clients/customers/channels. Just maybe, you aren't getting the right feedback from your market, or your marketers are fudging things so you think it's all minor, all handleable. Keep cross checking.



Open loops have to be closed! Rather than promptly sorting the issue out, marketing too often task themselves with papering over the cracks. When there's a mismatch between the projection and the reality, it doesn't take long for the reality to win out, and you have become a creator of new pain, when what you had set out to do was to be a solution provider!

On a larger front too, Marketing is often misused to mask the reality by creating a finely crafted image. The public perception is strongest in fields like politics, but we can even observe this phenomenon in large industry groups like Big Pharma (+insurance+medical practice), where incredible amounts are spent to maintain the status quo through the projection of an image of solid science and trust BUT now the public has become (justifiably) sceptical.

Another startling recent example is the interaction of industry with environmental concerns and the high volume promotion of the concept of sustainability. A sub topic here is the denial of industry related phenomena like Global Warming/Climate Change. Relying on a big spend on marketing to stave off the inevitable can only produce a small delaying rear-end action. When such large groupings (de facto institutions) lay their foundations on myths, the consequences can be disastrous to nations and even to the world.

The older word for 'mismatch' is cheating.

Why then do we dupe people? Oftentimes it's the easy way out and perhaps there is a pressure to get started with what you've got, and iron out the kinks as one goes along. With industry groupings, they have invested 'too much' to consider backing out now. Unfortunately, there's a generic impression floating around out there (a marketing myth) that marketing alone can keep the issues at bay. We let ourselves dupe ourselves. We can be easily convinced that our pretty pictures, fine words, cute/emotive vids, fine packaging, etc. are enough. But, I assure you, if that's all you've got, it is NOT.
Instead let what you project coincide with the reality that you create AND make what you create match-up.

Be brave, be ethical, walk your talk

Originally posted on LinkedIn #Pulse as Match-Up vs Mismatch

Marketing - Get The BEAT !

They say that marketing is more of an art than a science, and that's how marketing might look to an outsider, but marketers know that there has to be a scientifically solid foundation for the art part to work its magic.

One of those mysterious (artsy looking) phenomena, is the convergence that's needed in an organization to make any marketing strategy work wonders in the marketplace. The foundation for organizational convergence is laid first by forming effective teams and second by getting the whole organization to synchronize with that marketing focus.

Sound complicated? It's not... not really.

Think of a song. Think of a song that encourages dancing. As a broad generalization, if there's a driving rhythm, a beat, folks will feel like dancing. There may be plenty of art involved in finally creating your song, but you already know the level of engagement needed for potential dancers to start moving to your beat. And just think, a great song can inspire great dance, perhaps even new genre's of dance.

To create such music first requires a solid background in music. It requires practice. It requires skill in composition. You need to try out a lot of different melodies. It involves getting a band together that gel together, who enjoy doing what they do best together, and who believe in the music that they are creating. It helps if there's oodles of talent. And before everything finally comes together, there has to be practice, corrections, more practice and more...

Finally the music is in the bag. Then it has to get out of that bag and get into the ears of all those dancers out there. It needs a catchy name to go with the catchy tune.

Another small analogy – take a basketball team, give each player a ball, get them on court and get them to all try to bounce their balls in perfect synch. At first it will be a chaos of noise, then as they get the hang and start working together, it will sort itself out into, not just a rhythm, but a thunderous rhythm – and the possibilities become astounding.

Now, is that all art and no science? I don't think so.

First published on LinkedIn Pulse as Marketing? Get the BEAT!

You Can Do Magic

Start-ups have gone from dime a dozen to becoming legion. That's both good and bad. Adjectives like exciting, enticing, and vibrant, describe our business environment, yet on the down side, the resulting competition for funds and for the market is simply awful.

Working as a consultant to start-ups is fun and very challenging. I've been through a longish string so far, and though the projects were diverse, as the start-ups scene has heated up, some common challenges and solutions have emerged. From my experience, here are just a few of the commonest failure scenarios.

Challenge 1 – The Dream Machine. A lovely product/service that addresses major pain points, is well designed, passionately believed in and yet won't fly. Very often the problem is over confidence. The start-up's mindset runs something like this: “My product is truly revolutionary and it's going places. The market needs me, potential customers are begging for me, so here we come!”

Taking this product or service on to the market usually ends in disaster. Typically, when all the attention has been on the development and there is an assumption of ready demand, the basic questions of timing, needing a 'fit' in the existing market space, developing channels, marketing costs etc. would not have been adequately thought through. If you then have to create a new niche for your revolution, that can be very costly – and just a bit too risky. Risky is a word that neither the Angels nor VCs relish, so when you go looking for funds...

Challenge 2 – The Me Too. 2 or 3 friends get together and look with longing at this busy and exciting start-ups dominated market. Everyone seems to be getting into the action, and perhaps some of their friends have already gotten through the 1st funding phase. Why not? It's simple enough, we have to just brainstorm, so let's put some ideas together and hash it out.

Luckily, most of such never get to Go. There never was the innovation and inventiveness present in the first place. More often than not, the resulting products/services will be copies, and unless they have a lot of luck and also can pool the funds to launch themselves and afford get some brilliant, market savvy folks on board, the results will be either a quiet fade out, or sometimes a spectacular flop. Again, it's unlikely that funding will come through, for copies just don't get much of a bite from funders. You also have a narrow time window, unless what you are copying itself goes big time.

Challenge 3 – Good But Unscalable. After lots of hard work getting all the bits and pieces to fit together, when the funding folks start asking questions on scalability, the big blind spot shows up and that's that.

A lack of market experience and not having good advisers early on very often results in unscalable start-ups. Not every good idea can be scaled up, and if it can't scale, it will not get funded!

Challenge 4 – Built To Offload. Here the idea is to hit the market running, demo the potential and then quickly get someone to buy you out. Sometimes, if the launch and initial publicity are done right, and if the market was receptive, it will work just as planned.

Unfortunately, sometimes not. If you assume that your buyers are out there waiting, and then can't identify them, you might have to go ahead and carry your baby through. Then, as you have already committed so much, it's to the funders that you will go. As the Angel/VC 's needs would not have been accounted for, you might just find that you have multiple problems and are stuck between the proverbial rock and a very hard place.

There are of course many more start-up types, but you get my point. I called each a challenge because, when us consultant types are called in and recognise a failure type, we have a real challenge getting our budding entrepreneurs to rethink their babies!

All start-ups must pay attention to The Market - while bold innovation and brilliant designs can go a very long way, scanty are the concepts/ideas that will 'just naturally' go viral and fly themselves into something much bigger. Do get good marketing advice early on, and keep that advice in mind when looking for funding and launching out.

Finally, supposing you have this great idea, and it is marketable, and even though you failed to get funded, you decide to launch anyway, remember that marketing can be done effectively even on a shoestring budget.The provisos are, IF and only if your service/product has a place to jump in in the market AND whether you will survive and sustain until you succeed.

Where is the point of no return? It's very important here to decide at the beginning when you will know that it's not panning out, and what your jumping off point is!

Study your market as deeply as you can. SWOT out your competition. Targeting is the first priority. Effective social media use with a well designed and promoted web presence (good SEO helps) will get you started, and neither demands a huge big budget. Go for good people (not just high priced!), interview in depth, and then train them as a team. Build commitment, efficiency, responsiveness, a marketing orientation, and give exceptional service (CRM helps) so that 'word of mouth' will also pitch in. If you need a distribution net, pick the small and medium players, work on loyalty, and give them the best returns in the market. Debug and keep debugging.
In short, you know you have a really great idea, think things through, get good market advice early on, be prepared to sweat, and go for it -
pitch and don't stop pitching.

Believe – you can do MAGIC!

This was originally posted in LinkedIn Pulse http://linkd.in/1ypQn00 

On how to be a Better Lemming

'Tis the season to be jolly... would be quite frivolous if it were not at the same time also so profoundly real.The Christmas season in the West is a time especially set aside for spending, purchasing, buying, gifting, and generally being very, very, jolly.
In the U.S. the spending season kicks off with a bang at Thanksgiving, but all over the world, common sense will lead us to suspect that the jolliest of traditional seasons will begin soon after the annual harvest. Give a couple weeks or a month for all that excess to start getting distributed, and then them holidays, and that spending will ensue - it makes good sense.
In India we have that grand 'festival of lights', Diwali, that is strategically placed after the first harvest in October or November and then, in the South of India, there is a second celebration (Pongal) that comes right after the second monsoon season in mid-January and that forms the very exciting and satisfying climax to our times of splurging.
Economies and spending cycles that keep them vibrant have to be based on the presence of excess, and most times that excess is only available for a short while right after the harvest. Holidays are also timed to help to distribute all that 'excess' and just as efficiently as possible! Any great delay between when the excess arrives and the application of peak marketing pressure to get people to spend may result in that excess getting channeled into savings accounts - economists don't like that at all. When we have plenty, and so much that we can even think in terms of excess, the purse strings will be at their loosest. Marketing has to strike while the iron is hottest but that is not the end of the story. We too help out by apparently just temporarily choosing to collectively forget that the upcoming year may hard and long.
Marketing the world over, is geared to maximise its hype just at these times. Spend - buy - purchase - CHARGE IT - or the ubiquitous EMI with 0% interest!
This year, the absolutely essential gadget is...
Everybody simply HAS to have this!
The teaser SAAALE! drags you out, 'pushes' you over that last little hump of caution, and then...
Insidiously, we also might not notice that we will really have to shell-out just a bit more this year than we did last year to get that 'absolutely essential' something. Economic cycles rely on the feeding frenzy to slip into the inflation mode too, for this is the one time of year that folks will be blithely unaware that the essentials just got a bit dearer. The small incremental adjustments will slip quietly into place in the corners of our subconscious even before we have time to register them, for there is so much else of an exciting nature to capture and hold our collective consciousness in thrall.
Value addition is one culprit, but the yen for bigger profits is certainly another. For the corporates, turnover should increase, and so too should the return on investment, the profit margin. Balance sheets will be anxiously prepared as the financial year draws to a close. At stake is the size of the share price pie for that depends on 'the figures'.
To the economist, inflation is a godsend. Deflation, when prices actually drop, (do you see red in the diagram above?) is an absolute disaster and must come straight out of hell. Modern economies rely on inflation to create the space in which value addition creates levels of work both in manufacturing/marketing and in services/marketing. More jobs, more earning, more spending, more money - MORE
Those little entries on corporate balance sheets called profit (net after taxes) quietly also rely on inflation. The trend is paradoxically opposed by innovation and new technologies! The whole complex process works together to keep standards of living on a slow rise that is slightly worse than what the actual inflation level would lead us to expect.
At some point people do question whether this all adds up. Of course it doesn't, not nearly, but it sure looks good while it's flowing along. Pension plans will be the most obvious harbingers of the bad news that eventually inflation catches up with you. Other painful reminders include the cost of health-care, health insurance, and medicines. Long term savings plans and incremental investments will yield something but much less than they should when compared to the damage that inflation has quietly been inflicting.
Money and easy credit are the end of a very long road that has separated our spending from the realities of our actual contributions to life. Think about it, as it is you're just the last stop between the ATM and the corporation that owns the store that you're heading to with the plastique in hand!
What would happen if inflation were to stop? What would happen if our governments printed just enough notes to maintain a fixed amount of money in circulation? What would happen if value addition were to be replaced by true value? What would happen if the purchasing power of a dollar or of a rupee were to become rock steady?
Have you thought about it this year-before you start (or at least finish) spending that bonus?
What will this Christmas/Pongal bring I wonder? Is it perhaps even possible to have fun and fellowship with friends and without money? Will anyone believe that you love them anyway even though you didn't push your plastic a few thousand more over its already strained limit?
GOLD > Coins > Bills of exchange > CREDIT Þ Transactions

Originally published by Sam at http://bartramia.wordpress.com