United Natural Foods earned $43 million in its fiscal fourth quarter on revenue of $6.74 billion. The food distributor also reported full-year profit of $149 million on revenue of $26.95 billion.
Logistics operators are posting ads on social media, raising pay and offering flexible hours to recruit more workers for the busy holiday season, but they face competition from big players such as Amazon, Walmart and UPS. "There is a huge amount of demand for jobs and people, and we have not shifted people across into our industry at the rate that demand has changed," said Kraig Foreman, president of e-commerce for DHL Supply Chain North America.
Warehouse operators can increase worker productivity by adding goods-to-person robots, which bring products to workers for them to pack, says Lior Elazary, CEO and co-founder of inVia Robotics. Such robots are especially helpful for handling the surge in e-commerce demand, Elazary says.
Salespeople should go beyond product features when talking to prospects, focusing instead on how those features can be applied to each customer's problems, writes David Brock. To encourage this strategy, sales managers should lead exercises where salespeople must pair challenges customers face with specific product features.
Cold emails can be successful if businesses take the time to clearly define their target prospects beforehand, writes Peter Navarro. Craft interesting headlines, include a call-to-action in each email and tweak strategies according to open and response rates for best results, he recommends.
You can judge the ethics of your own behavior by imagining what would happen if the media reported your actions or if a middle manager made the same decision, writes Martin Moore, founder of Your CEO Mentor. "If you'd react differently to someone else in the company doing something that you're about to do yourself, the contrast of those positions will be stark," he writes.
