New Direction: Sales/Marketing US Industrial DistributorA young SMB industrial distributor in the industrial battery market.
A relative newcomer in the industrial distribution business was stuck in it's ridgeline journey and required a new path forward.
The company was focused on promoting a single brand to a small national audience which limited its potential for profitable growth. They turned to B90 Consulting to improve their overall sales operations.
Challenge
The biggest challenge for the company was it had a limited product line, one customer accounted for >80% of sales, and no sales team to help market the company. The work addressed three critical issues:
- Define new a new strategy and tactical plan:
The current plan was to double down with a limited catalog of existing products and customer targets. In order to grow the business, it needed to diversify products, diversify customers and add salespeople.
- Brand identity:
As a distributor, the company needed to identify and embrace its identity in order to expand the customer base.
- Determine the ideal customer:
The company was limiting itself by not expanding its line to attract a diversity of customers. It has all its eggs in one or two vendor baskets which greatly affected its marketing efforts.
Solution
The B90 Consulting strategy included a variety of tactical plans beginning with identifying market needs for all industrial market segments such as electrical, MRO, safety, rental, and specialty retail. In doing so this will allow for an opportunity to expand into new industrial markets. With an updated catalog, B90 presented and pitched a new battery marketing program to the battery specialist market. Soon after it began to recruit outsides salespeople focused on each segment.
As the sales team and customer base grew, targeted regional trade shows were added to increase the company brand identity.
Results
The company is now recognized as a national brand in the industrial market. It has a catalog of over 400 SKUs marketing to 4x as many customers in the industrial and specialty marketplace.
B90 vastly improved the company’s sales and marketing functions, created and implemented new CRM policies that accounted for measurable and memorable results.
By the numbers, the effort:
- Increased sales >40%
- The largest customer now equates to 40% of overall sales instead of >80%
- Increased customer base by 10x
- Increased catalog size by 8%
- Recruited new outside sales team…31 team members
- Developed and executed multiple buying group memberships
- Developed new direct relationships with vendors including P&G