Synopsis: Concrete Construction Chemicals – Channel Strategy

Our client was looking to develop programs to more profitably focus efforts on existing distributors who could and would help grow business.  The client had a very successful growing business, but the growth was driven by highly seasoned sales reps that had been with the company for years.  They had built strong relationships with specifiers, contractors and customers in their markets, result in strong brand pull for their products.

They were looking for a path to growing the business in the areas where their sales reps were much newer to the market and were trying to accelerate the sales growth in these territories.  The strategy they wanted to explore was to more effectively leverage their distributor relationships, or develop new distributor relationships that would multiply the sales reps efforts and provide more market leverage that existed today.

To this end, QDI’s consultants conducted in-depth, often face-to-face, interviews with a broad cross-section of our client’s distributors. From these interviews, we segmented the distributors based on three dimensions:

• Growth potential – essentially is the account “growable” for our client.  To determine this we developed several questions that would assess their potential to grow with our client.  Some of the questions were:
  • Do we already have dominant share for project sales and counter sales? Are we already the primary brand in-stock across our product categories?
  • Is the account willing to give us discretionary business in return for our other business development efforts for them (I.e. leads)?
  • Is the account focused on growing their chemical business?
  • Is the account large enough in terms of potential to sell our products to be worthy of our efforts to grow our business with them
  • Does the account have a productive sales force (not just counter sales)?
  • Is the account willing to let us work directly with their customers (jointly or independently)?
  • Are there marketing vehicles that we are not currently leveraging?
  • Is our competition providing a service, program, or product that we could offer to improve our share?
  • Is the account growing its overall business and willing to focus on chemicals as a part of that growth?
• Business model is a definition of both where our types of products fit in the distributor’s business and the geographic nature of the distributor’s business
  • Fit in distributors’ business
    • Primary – a lead product line with sales reps spending considerable time doing spec work and bids
    • A secondary line where sells reps sell this to key segment of their market
    • A tertiary line where customers buy because it is available, but the reps do not actively market
  • Geographic scale
    • Local
    • Regional
    • National
  • Support requirements.
    • Logistics / warehousing and delivery
    • Sales support requirements
    • Training requirements
    • Need for specialized marketing programs

Using the overlap of “growth potential” and “business model” we were able to identify territories where we could work with select distributors and specific support programs to grow our client’s business.

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