MSC Industrial had $18 million in profit on sales of $774 million in its fiscal second quarter, with sales down 1.5% from a year ago but up slightly from Q1. Safety and janitorial sales were up 15% year over year.

The pandemic has forced hospitals to have different conversations with suppliers and adopt new forecasting models to avoid shortages, says Craig Dolan, vice president of business development and innovation for McKesson US Pharmaceutical. He notes that what is being distributed has changed over time, with ventilators being in demand early and medications and vaccines being in demand now.

Trucking companies will increasingly go paperless, use data in decision-making and accept digital payments in 2021, says Vector CEO and co-founder Will Chu. He also expects that truckers will handle more e-commerce and make deliveries more visible and transparent for customers.

Successful digital transformation of supply chains requires ensuring proper supply chain intelligence, architecture, sustainability and resilience, as well as integrating supply chain planning and operational excellence, according to an EY report. "[C]ompanies that move early with intent will gain sustained competitive advantage for years to come," the report's authors say.

"Nothing happens until someone sells something" is a commonly used sales phrase, but it should be updated to reflect that nothing happens until a buyer wants to make a change, writes David Brock. The salesperson's focus should be on guiding the customer along a change process, which in turn becomes a buying process, Brock writes.

Business-to-business marketers can boost lead generation efforts by using Quora -- a social platform whose users are already asking questions that could be relevant for their industry. Shane Barker explains how, including by employing the Spaces feature to connect with target audiences and getting conversational on the platform.

Innovation is better served by a dual constraint of timing and desired outcome instead of the traditional construct of budget and risk concerns, write MIT Sloan School of Management professors Fiona Murray and Elsbeth Johnson. "It's largely because people experience the passage of time much more viscerally than they do the running down of a budget," they write.

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