AmerisourceBergen has rebranded across its 28 businesses to emphasize the company's focus on the future. "Our newly unified brand better reflects who we are: a trusted partner and leader in the global pharmaceutical supply chain that acts boldly and skillfully to meet the evolving health care needs of the world," says Noah Spring of AmerisourceBergen.

Walmart plans to use automated systems that pick and pack digital orders and will add fulfillment centers at dozens of its locations to help meet the continuing e-commerce demand. One automated system, Alphabot, was initially tested at a New Hampshire store in 2019 and prepared orders so shoppers could pick them up within an hour, and the retailer says it will tap into other high-tech providers as its automation push continues.

Set aside a few days to create three sets of documents that will be invaluable should your enterprise be hit with a security breach, Jason Barr writes. Network diagrams, data flow diagrams and data map documents are useful because "every minute you waste during a crisis reduces your chances of recovery," Barr points out.

Distributors can benefit from strategic marketing people who can handle the four P's of promotion, place, product and price, writes Jonathan Bein of Distribution Strategy Group. "One important step is to wrest back control of pricing from the salespeople," he argues.

Business-to-business companies must adapt their go-to-market strategies to cater to prospects who rely on digital resources, not salespeople, to research products and vendors, Henry DeVries writes. It's more critical than ever for B2B marketers to showcase their company's niche expertise and demonstrate a full understanding of customer challenges, DeVries writes.

Small-group activities can be a helpful, safe environment for surfacing the "background" conversations employees use to complain at work. Make it clear that no one will be punished for revealing areas of common struggle.

Intuitive listening is an important skill to cultivate in the workforce because it helps people cut through everyday noise to process information. It is a natural ability but can be enhanced by techniques outlined in this article.

Old school distribution is about stocking inventory, taking orders and serving demand. New school distribution is about innovating through customer services and working side-by-side with customers in the real world. The future of distribution is about solving problems in your customer's business -- often before your customer even knows a problem exists. Innovate to Dominate provides breakthrough ideas, lessons from leading distributors who are innovating and inspiration to help you lead your customers into the future and sustain your competitive advantage.

The pandemic is forcing many distributors to reevaluate their supply chains to create more resilient models. At the heart of "Optimizing Channel Profitability" is a common ground for distributors and manufacturers to focus on making a one-to-one connection among a supplier's channel compensation, a distributor's capabilities and customer value, all leading to a process where all three entities can have constructive, objective dialogue rather than subjective, selective fault-finding. If you're looking to strengthen your value proposition post COVID-19, this resource will help.

SPARXiQ CEO David Bauders says, "Sadly, for many distributors, sales planning has historically been anecdotal, intuitive and virtually data-free. Aside from knowing what a customer (or group of customers) bought last year, and then guessing at how that might change this year, there is painfully little insight to identify, organize, drive and measure the daily activities that actually accelerate profitable, organic growth." Read his post.