MSC Industrial Supply will continue expanding its reliance on e-commerce despite a year-over-year decline in online sales during the most recent quarter, President and CEO Erik Gershwind says. An increase in offline janitorial and safety sales contributed to that decline, the company says.
The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the use of autonomous vehicles for goods delivery, shared taxi services and shuttle operations. For example, AVs were deployed this spring to transport coronavirus tests and medical supplies from a drive-through testing center at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla.
Distributors can increase profits by making small price increases, centralizing purchasing and standardizing prices so that contracts and websites align, write Jonathan Bein and Ian Heller of Distribution Strategy Group. "You can't eliminate channel conflict, but you can minimize situations where your web pricing is better than your contract pricing," they write.
Thibaud Clement explains five strategies business-to-business marketers can adopt to be successful amid the pandemic, including ensuring all content and messaging is continually updated based on the current context. Embrace agile marketing and engage customers to find out how your company can support unique challenges created by the crisis, he writes.
Instagram is conducting a test among a group of global users that enables them to use a Shop tab to filter products and make purchases directly from leading brands. The social platform also is enabling all users to pin multiple comments to the top of a feed post to try to better control conversations.
A survey by global staffing firm Robert Half found that 73% of respondents said breaking their workday into chunks of professional and personal time, also known as "windowed work," helps them be productive. Thirty-nine percent of workers older than 55 preferred a traditional workday compared with 22% of those ages 25 to 40, and 78% of those with children preferred windowed work.
Flexible schedules and work arrangements, as well as new projects and roles, are two ways to help employees without increasing salary, writes Anastasiia Osypova, head of people, engagement and culture at Innovecs. "Another non-monetary motivator is to make employees happier by alleviating their home routine duties, giving access to engaging webinars, online courses, podcasts on healthy eating, meditation applications, back exercises, and much more," Osypova writes.
Distributors have made progress in navigating through this unprecedented disruption, but much more is needed. In this live webinar, we will follow up with Michael DeCata, President and CEO of Lawson Products, to hear how he is navigating through COVID-19 and how it has accelerated his plans around innovation. Mark Dancer, author of NAW's "Innovate to Dominate," and Richard Blatcher of PROS will explore with Mike how distributors must implement an "innovation ecosystem" to compete in the new normal. Register today! Sponsored by PROS.
NAW's new project, "How Technology Will Transform Wholesale Distribution," will help forward-thinking distributors to develop successful marketplace strategies, form new methods of differentiation, and survive and thrive through the digital transformation and disruption before us. To ensure that our research includes the advanced technology distributors are using now or contemplating using, please take 7-9 minutes to complete this survey. All answers will be kept confidential.
