Fastenal saw e-commerce sales increase by 32% year-over-year in 2019, with e-commerce and vendor-managed inventory accounting for about 30% of the company's revenue, says CEO Daniel Florness. Fastenal has cut hundreds of branches since 2013 in favor of vending machines and online sales in response to changes in customer dynamics, writes John Gunderson.

Distributors can use artificial intelligence to improve product assortments and determine which value-added services may be helpful to customers, among other benefits cited by McKinsey. "With AI, distributors won't just be creating larger product selections, but leveraging those larger product selections into more sales," writes Proton.ai founder Benj Cohen.

E-commerce platforms can be instrumental in helping companies manage product data, which is one part of optimizing the customer experience for B2B. "This is not retail; customers are not ordering just one part -- they're ordering multiple variations of products, and we made ordering for our customers pretty seamless," says Misti White, e-commerce manager for Royal Brass & Hose.

Marketers are allocating more funds toward social media marketing and can boost their successes by developing "a fit between what your brand promises and delivers," write Deepa Prahalad and Ananthanarayanan V. They suggest asking four key questions regarding priorities, platforms, content strategy and creating two-way dialogue to "ensure that your social strategy aligns with your goals and adds values for your users."

This infographic from HelpSquad shares social marketing statistics for business-to-business marketers, including that 82% of prospects are active on social, so marketers should align content with trending topics relevant to their industry. Additional insights include nine out of 10 buyers have more trust in user-generated content than ads and social videos result in 1200% more shares than images and text combined.

Negative comments seem to stick with us more than praise, writes Michael McKinney, which means we must be able to see problems from different perspectives and be careful when giving negative feedback to team members. "Positive emotions broaden your perspective and enable you to build skills that help you flourish both personally and professionally," say authors John Tierney and Roy Baumeister.

Meet with employees to determine their abilities, cater training to their needs and offer on-the-job opportunities to develop skills, writes Margaret Rogers, a vice president at Pariveda Solutions. "Feedback is perhaps the most valuable aspect of this process, and it starts with setting clear expectations," she writes.

Don't miss the NAW 2020 Executive Summit: INNOVATE TO DOMINATE, Jan. 28-30! This year's forward-looking program and networking with distributors who are your peers will really shake up your thinking, provide you with fresh ideas and critical thinking, and give you a rare chance to benchmark your business. You'll walk away with valuable insights that you'll translate into ideas to help you run your business more effectively and profitably. Register today.

NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence Fellow Mike Marks says, "Many distributors think they need to look like Amazon to compete in today's market. After all, more than 197 million people visit Amazon every month to shop the more than 12 million products available, according to BigCommerce. But just because Amazon is a household name doesn't mean that distributors need to emulate its every move to be competitive in the digital distribution game." Read his post.

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