Amazon is introducing large "walk-in" delivery trucks as it works to keep up with one- and two-day Prime deliveries. Training for drivers of the over 2,200 heavy-duty Utilimaster trucks, which are similar in size to UPS and FedEx vehicles, has begun in the Los Angeles area.
Supply chain professionals should create "control tower SWAT teams" comprising employees from across departments to ensure maximum visibility and information flow, write Alexandre Lefort, Johannes Berking and Maxime Cloutier of Oliver Wyman. Such teams can help a company thrive now and after the coronavirus pandemic, they write.
Automated order-to-cash systems and artificial intelligence can improve distributors' customer service by reducing the likelihood of errors, speeding up transactions and enhancing payment collection, writes Eric Smith, citing advice from Jason Anderson and Chris Graves of Esker. Such technology gives time back to salespeople for relationship-building.
Forrester's Vicki Brown advises business-to-business marketers to focus on buying groups, not individual leads, which involves identifying the role of each person within the purchasing team and ensuring marketing and sales are aligned to maximize opportunities. "It has always been about buying groups associated with opportunities, because opportunities are how a B2B organization measures revenue," she writes.
PayPal's Rama Mallika talks in this interview about the importance of predictive, dynamic insights to engage prospects in a rapidly changing landscape and why emotional intelligence is just as important for business-to-business marketers. "The sales process can converge towards greater success with a solid emotional understanding," he says.
Unused paid time off is an accounting liability, and vacation requests in April and May were approximately half of what they were from the year before, according to a Zenefits study of 3,000 companies. HR leaders should model by taking time off themselves, consider tweaking non-carryover policies, and being honest with employees that delaying PTO could put the company in a difficult financial position in the future.
Crises are inevitable, and so executives should try "to stop a disaster from turning into catastrophe," write Stanford University professors Hayagreeva "Huggy" Rao and Robert Sutton. "Leaders who take personal accountability, who express compassion, and who create conditions that give employees as much prediction, understanding, and control as possible help move them from a room called fear to a room called hope," they write.
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.
