To the Future and Beyond

By: Norm MacLeod

This article could also have been called, Quick, before someone turns out the light at the end of the tunnel, Some facts to consider:

Typical mobile users check their phone on average every nine minutes.

Millennials rely on user generated experiences to make most of their purchasing decisions.

When they purchase, the quality of the experience is judged by how well you meet THEIR expectations in terms of ease of transaction and quality of service.

It takes twelve positive interactions to make up for one negative experience.

All of the above come from a Future Trends article I was reading during the holidays. It did nothing to make me feel better about where our little industry is headed. Faced with irreversible declines in the use of paper, filing, bindery, even tech products like media and cartridges, how are both dealers and vendors going to continue with a business-as-usual  approach?

Sure, there are a few bright spots, like Cleaning/Breakroom supplies, services and ergo trends in furniture that will bring some sales growth but I don’t think we’ve seen anything more than the tip of the iceberg yet. When the millennials start influencing more of the office purchasing decisions, the great divide between how we think and do business and what they think and want will dramatically effect sales. And that day is coming faster than you probably think.

My 24 year old daughter was hired after graduation into a Human Relations position within a medium size engineering firm (around 300 employees); within a year she was making key office supplies purchasing decisions and having to deal with an Office Supply representative she can’t stand or communicate with.

Office supplies purchasing is such a minor concern to a company like this that it has been delegated to a rather junior person with little knowledge of what to buy. Her only resource is online.... and she thinks the industry websites suck!

Millennials don’t use print catalogues, they don’t look at flyers, they think sales people are creepy, they stream all their entertainment direct when they want it and they resent the fact that the world still seems to be run by old boomers too stubborn to ride into the sunset. So how are you going to keep them happy if you currently enjoy their business, how would you gain them as customers if they aren’t?

At this point, I’m supposed to give you a few great suggestions about meeting these challenges, wrap up the article and make you feel  a little more positive that there is still a chance of surviving the future. Unfortunately, I don’t have the magic answers and I suspect virtually no one else in our industry does either. So what do I recommend?

Apprenticeship programs and mentoring

We need people in our industry who understand and can relate to this new breed of customer. More importantly, we need people that millennial customers can trust and communicate with. To get these people, we need to aggressively market our channel to them and offer quality jobs to graduates. No one coming out of the soft science or marketing courses is thinking “Hey, maybe I’ll call my local stationer, there’s a real opportunity area I’d love to get into.” They usually wind up under-employed doing something they can’t stand.  

Local community colleges and even universities would welcome business sponsorships and guaranteed job placements in course areas like Business Administration and Marketing. If a large vendor like Acco or 3M or Fellowes gave grants to business students it would help our industry’s awareness as a possible future employer and God forbid, if one of these students became a product manager or sales rep at Staples or G&T or Basics, they might even remember who helped pay their tuition. A Dealer sponsored grant would be even more powerful in terms of enticing graduates to check out our industry since they have a local presence in every city across the country.

The fresh blood is our industry’s best chance at finding new relevance and connection with the customer base. We need to get on their radar when they need us. When they reach the work force, it’s too late.

Dealer Sales Reps – An Endangered Species?

By: Norm MacLeod

It was late summer back in the day and a bunch of us industry guys were out on Lake Simcoe cruising around on a vendor’s giant yacht (a converted PT boat actually) when an enormous wind gust came up out of nowhere. A couple of the deck chairs were swept into the water and we gleefully yelled out Deck chairs overboard. Some wit then yelled to the President of the then second largest national commercial stationer, “Hey, one of your reps has blown overboard too.” Without any hesitation the President yelled back, “Save the deck chairs.” That was back pre-web of course but are sales reps any higher on the respect scale in these days of on-line digital sales, marketing and customer service?

 

 Based on the current practices of the major North American chains I think the answer has to be No. Whenever their stock craters, the first thing they usually announce is that they are successfully implementing their synergistic, customer-centric, negatively optimized growth plan and that by the way, they’ll also be cutting back the outside sales force. Do dealer sales reps have a life expectancy longer than Lady Gaga’s current hair style and how on earth do they get to a level of respect commensurate with their real value?

I think the answer to the first question is a conditional yes. There is still something to be said for the personal touch in securing, negotiating and maintaining a solid customer relationship, at least in the B2B world. To ensure that this value is maintained and also to begin increasing their respect level dealer reps must work smarter than they ever have before. A large part of working smart is learning to use Analytics. Whether a rep is a hunter, farmer or just a nice smile with a free hot lunch, they need to go past the usual CRM clichés (how about those Leafs?) and actually understand their customers’ needs and where the opportunities lie within each account. While the digital world may be threatening the rep’s existence it is a double edged sword in that it also provides gigabytes of data on each and every customer and allows them to touch customers more frequently and effectively than ever before.

Back a few years ago, when reps were being pointed and incented in the direction of the new frontier of Cleaning, Breakroom supplies, I checked, where I worked, with the person who orders all supplies for the office whether our Office Supplies rep had mentioned that they now sell CB supplies. The answer of course was no. All of our purchase transactions are processed online, a simple request to Google Analytics or Coremetrics would have provided the rep with a complete breakdown easily sorted by product category. The rep could then easily see that no CB supplies were being ordered. They could also see that every 3^rd or 4^th cycle of toner ordering was going to someone else and that on some orders the copy paper was being dropped as well. This kind of knowledge and understanding is POWER.

These types of analytics allow maximum account penetration and can also help identify product areas where pricing or quality may be an issue. This is also a role the rep is best suited to fill since they have the most to lose and/or gain. I’m not sure how much autonomy reps have in altering the customer’s price matrix but having the ability to tinker with the complex product/price matrix would allow the reps to address cost issues while maintaining the overall account GP. Is this within the rep’s current skill set?

The digi-com world can also allow a much closer relationship to form with the actual end users within a company rather than just a cost-conscious purchasing agent. When a design firm orders the Econo 4’ X 8’ whiteboard, an e-mail followup should probably be sent to the department chief pointing out that a board designed to last 2 or 3 years of use isn’t the most economical choice when the multiple re-order and mounting costs are factored in over a longer period. This would certainly be a better response than calling to say the board they want is back-ordered.

When the same firm orders a suite of Bush or Sauder RTA furniture, maybe the rep should be texting to point out that the products will require a day’s labour to assemble and that the products are not designed to be moved once in place. Of course, these followups require a reasonable level of product knowledge (which is a whole other topic) but for reps to ever be respected it’s an area they really need to work harder at. Building trust and providing genuine value added service is the best form of job security a rep can have. Even if there is a termination due to “right-sizing” that account will probably belong to the rep more than the company.

Another type of analytic can also help account openers. Have you googled the company you are making the pitch to? At the very least, you’ll be able to get some basic stats like how big they are, whether they have other branch offices, who owns them, how many employees they have. If they are publically held, check out their financial status and read their Investor Relations information. Most companies will also have a mission statement and a more qualitative summary of who they are, what they stand for. Knowing that the mission statement of the company emphasizes their environmental sensitivity or a commitment to buying local can make all the difference in the focus of your proposal.

Do reps routinely check out the principals listed on the web-site on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to understand their special interests and past history? Knowing that the key decision maker used to work for one of your current accounts could help in winning a contract. Do the homework, it’ll pay off. The customer will respect the efforts you have made and the bosses will be impressed by your proactive approach.

Digital tools are there to be used and rather than budgeting x number of hours for cold-calling a week, perhaps there would be a greater return if those x hours were allocated to studying and applying customer analytics. The rep’s future really comes down to survival of the tech-smartest.

 

Web Marketing – Opportunity or Oxymoron

By: Norm MacLeod

If there was a movie about Web marketing it would probably be called A Shot In the Dark and the same words Inspector Clouseau used to sum up the original movie, “I believe everything, I believe nothing,” would also aptly apply.

 In the Office Products world, web marketing used to mean a number of boxed ads for randomly selected products spread around the landing page. These ads were funded by vendors usually out of the same pot that pays for flyers and catalogues. And was there a return on this investment?

You can choose either:

A) YES - 102,816 impressions over the month the ad appeared

B) NO - 14 clicks and possibly 3 sales actually attributable to the ad.  

 
Of course web marketing has evolved since then. Now we have stalker ads and search based personalized ads that are at least somewhat relevant to the customer. What’s that you say, you don’t really care that a Staples ad appears on Kijiji after you’ve been to their site and didn’t find either the item or price you were looking for? Rather than copying current fashionable ways of spending web dollars, perhaps our industry needs to concentrate more on finding marketing tools that genuinely benefit our particular breed of web customer.

For better or worse, our industry’s products really aren’t that emotionally important to our customers and ads for them will never be of much interest to anyone other than someone with that exact burning need the moment the ad is seen. So does that mean web marketing is a waste of money?

Based on the fact that the telemarketing industry still exists by trying to sell duct cleaning to everyone in the world with a land based phone, the shotgun approach must deliver some small percentage of success. But is there a way to turn web marketing funds into a higher percentage form of campaign, preferably one that is not annoying or intrusive to the customer? I believe the answer is a resounding YES.

The most effective use of Web marketing funds is to help the customer find what they are looking for even if they aren’t quite sure what that exactly is. Why is this the most effective spend? Because the decision about what to buy has not been made yet. People searching specifically, knowing what they want or shopping from a contract/favourites list, can’t be easily influenced. The decision making is already done. 

Imagine yourself as a customer shopping for an item. You know roughly what you want, be it a pen or a USB drive or a binder but you aren’t sure about brand or feature set. You enter the general item name into the search field and a scroll down of choices appears. At this point, it can either be eenie-meenie pick one at random or if some web marketing dollars have been allocated, specific products can be made more appealing.

For example, one of the items in the list could have a 30% off sale sign, or a $10 off coupon or a banner saying Customer Top Choice or ECO Choice. Another very simple and cheap approach is to make the item photo of the most profitable product more attractive than the ones around it, either bigger or with a more colourful background. A useful attention getter is a click for video demo icon or detailed fact sheet. The key at this point is to help the customer make a buying decision (even if it is on a paid for basis). At the very least, the search sequence should be based on some internal rationale, whether that is coop funding driven or dealer profitability driven.

So how do the big 3 industry web sites stack up? Totally at random, I selected the category of Retractable gel pens for a search, and here’s what I found on October 16^th, 11:30AM:

None of the sites attempted any direct marketing once the scroll down appeared, one site actually had no discernible sequence logic at all and included products that weren’t even in the selected category (a refill is NOT a pen). The other 2 sites had returns that were likely based on sales ranking as well as a directive to place private brand high in the list.

You would think that at least a boxed ad could appear relevant to the product group selected since all 3 of these sites run timed promotions which would usually have some product on sale in the selected category. It’s already on sale, how about letting the web customer know it up front rather than having to specifically sort by On Sale. How many vendors have tried to influence the sequence of the product scroll down, realizing that most customers aren’t going to get past about #10? How many vendors have demanded that when they coop for a promotion, the save amount be highlighted on the web search? How many vendors have proposed an aggressive cross sell campaign to dealers funding a switch over special offer if their product is not the first selected? How many vendors pay to ensure their collateral materials are used properly on the web site?

All of these web marketing tactics are well within the capabilities of the industry web sites. Dealers need to allocate more resources to their web activities, moving away from things like catalogues and flyers, to make them happen and if the dealers aren’t going to do it on their own, the vendors need to drive the process and ensure their marketing dollars are spent effectively. Otherwise, start buying shares in Amazon.