Distributors of all sizes can meet customers' demand for personalized service, get salespeople on board with digital sales strategies and increase lead conversion by following six steps, including picking the right technology and segmenting audiences, according to consultant Susan Merlo. It's also crucial to align sales and marketing teams and get salespeople to share a "brain dump" of customer data with marketers to help them create buyer personas, Merlo says.

The threat of a rail strike during the past several months and a last-minute prevention via an act of Congress underscore the vulnerability of a supply chain still recovering from the pandemic. "We are exposing cracks in our supply chain's ability to handle all of the things that we demand of it," says Balaji Guntur, chief operating officer at Hoptek. "Supply chains used to move a little bit more slowly, and there was enough slack in the system that provided some resilience."

The shift from the "Age of Mass Markets" to the "Age of Diverse Markets" means distributors need new key performance indicators as they "target the right customer segments with the right combinations of account selection and management, operating costs and capabilities, and supplier costs and activities," writes Jonathan Byrnes, founder and CEO of Profit Isle. Byrnes explains how Enterprise Profit Management can help distributors get more from their "profit peak" and "profit drain" customers, while spending less on "profit deserts."

Business-to-business marketers should pay particular attention to five key content marketing trends for next year, including injecting personality into brand voice and increasing visuals in microcontent, advises Kate Wolters, director at Flowmesh. Wolters explains how to make content more meaningfully inclusive and how to create content designed to improve customer retention.

Satisfaction in advance of the buying process and the actual process of buying -- not just the aftermath of the sale itself -- play a large role in customer loyalty, according to recent Rain Group research. Given that a 5% customer retention bump can boost per-customer profit as much as 95%, Rain Group President Mike Schultz writes about six ways to improve loyalty.

Leaders who show accountability in everything they say and do tend to inspire their members to do the same, leading to improved productivity and a positive work environment, writes startup consultant Martin Zwilling. Aside from accepting responsibility for outcomes, leaders should also give credit where it's due and keep providing constructive feedback.

When your team gets stuck in a rut focused on how things have been done in the past, it's time to ask insightful questions, such as how to redesign meetings or eliminate time-wasting tasks, write Karin Hurt and David Dye. "Courageous questions help eliminate FOSU (fear of speaking up) and create the psychological safety your employees need to speak up and ask for what they need," they write.