In a move the company says still seems like "science fiction," Walmart on Wednesday began testing airborne drones as delivery vehicles for online orders. The pilot program in Fayetteville, N.C., is a partnership with Flytrex and uses a cloud-controlled, autonomous aircraft designed to help Walmart collect information on the full drone delivery experience, from the warehouse to the doorstep.
Amazon Business and its Amazon Business Prime service represent growth areas for Amazon, especially internationally where its consumer-based offerings have faced regulatory obstacles. At the least, writes Don Davis, Amazon Business could expand to seven countries where the parent company currently does business.
Amazon's demand for logistics space accounts for as much as 50% of new market activity, according to Transwestern's Walter Byrd. Other companies, including Lowe's, The Home Depot, Walmart, FedEx, Target, PepsiCo and Frito-Lay, are following suit to add to their logistics footprints, according to Pete Quinn at Colliers.
Salespeople who resist being coached to improve won't contribute in a meaningful way to a sales organization in the long term, writes David Brock. Such sales representatives won't meet performance goals and are often toxic, "dragging down the performance of others in the organization," Brock writes.
Some 37% of business-to-business companies that self-identify as "leaders" within their industry spend more than 40% of their budget on long-term marketing strategies, in comparison to 25% of other B2B firms. Additional differentiating factors between B2B leaders and other companies are more testing and learning of marketing programs and being encouraged to take risks.
The pandemic has revealed how little control most people have over life, which is a stress point that Ed Batista is seeing with executives he works with. "Even -- and especially -- as we feel a loss of control in the world at large, we can strive to create 'pockets of agency,' smaller settings within our lives in which we can 'cause or control the movement,' " he writes, paraphrasing the thinking of philosopher Shaun Gallagher.
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Guest blogger Benj Cohen writes, "There are a lot of reasons for distributors to adopt AI. As I explain in previous posts, the technology can help inside and outside sales reps sell more, transform customer service branches into revenue drivers and boost e-commerce performance by double-digit percentage points. At this point, the real question for distributors is not if they should adopt AI, but when." Read his post.
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