McKesson reported $423 million in fiscal first-quarter profit on $55.7 billion in revenue after posting a loss a year earlier. AmerisourceBergen Corp. also announced an improvement in earnings, with $301.96 million in profit on $45.24 billion in third-quarter revenue.
Should You Ignore What Your Customers Want? Perhaps. The great winemakers do. Rather than follow consumer taste, they push it in a new direction, according to Kellogg School of Management Professor Gregory Carpenter. Learn how.
Innovation should help dealings with customers be more valuable for distributors, says Joe Raventos of Sales Management Plus. To decide which ideas are best, try using a grid that names the elements in play and assigns scores to each.
Business-to-business marketers must create different approaches to attract new customers and retain existing ones, as the "status quo bias" means prospects have to be persuaded to make a change, which goes against their natural human instinct, David Dodd writes. "[M]arketing and sales professionals need to develop and use content and messaging that embodies an approach to the status quo that's appropriate for each scenario," he writes.
Modern business-to-business marketing is like a dance, you need to know "when to lead and when to follow," Latane Conant writes. During the awareness stage, marketers should target relevant display ads to key accounts, tailor site content to individuals in the consideration phase and up the ante during the decision stage with customized webinars and direct mail, she recommends.
CEOs love to bring in consultants, but doing so runs the risk of alienating employees or inadvertently communicating that the CEO is struggling or isn't open to new ideas, writes longtime CEO Joel Trammell. Consultants can offer advice and planning, but only CEOs can lead transformation, he argues.
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Creating Innovations and Shaping the Future of Business catalogs more than 40 forces organized by commerce, technology and human trends. It lists 25 out-of-the-box ideas for kick-starting innovations. According to author Mark Dancer, distributors will not achieve success by being the same. Their success will come by being different. The 40 forces and 25 innovation ideas can be deployed in countless combinations by distributors and rolled out to define a distributor's brand, customer experiences, supplier partnerships and more.
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