Page 24 - Parquet International January 2014

DISTRIBUTION
HARGET SALES
How to accelerate
growth
To be competitive on today’s market, manufacturers and sellers must share the same goals, speak the same language and move at the same speed DAVIDE GABRIELLI
When talking with distributors, you can sense their confusion and their difficulties in understanding and accepting a manufacturer’s distribution strategies: “They don’t respect the areas”, “They don’t respect exclusive rights”, “Their discounts are getting lower and lower” and so on and so forth. Then when talking with the manufacturers, you sense their disap- pointment in the ‘inadequate’ sales network: “They won’t embrace change”, “They’re not properly trained”, “They simply wait for the orders to come in”, “They don’t understand that the market’s changed”, “They just sell discounts” and so on and so forth.
I, as is my wont, observe and listen without expressing any opinion, so that I can gather as much information as possible which I then use to make sense of the question after reflection. I try to assemble all the parts and observe all the viewpoints from various an- gles, a process that then results in a series of logical questions that hopefully shed new light on the matter:
What exactly is the manufacturer’s role?
I believe that the manufacturer’s priorities should be to design and build a quality product, con-
sistent with the price at which he intends to sell it, and to offer the sales network as many tools as he can to transmit the ‘value’ of the product. What exactly is the reseller’s role?
I believe that it should be to re-sell the products on the market, using whatever marketing tools are required: sales outlets; websites; advertising; merchandising; commercial and technical ser- vices, etc. His main goal, and thus his returns, will be proportionate to the ‘value’ generated by his commercial transactions.
Then there are the trends seen in the build- ing industry over the past few decades. The building industry enjoyed a boom period from 1970 to 2008, driven by a system of speculation that somehow managed to cre- ate work for all. Quality was certainly not the prime goal, it was quantity. Everyone managed to balance the books nevertheless. However, things have changed since 2008: the business model collapsed as the number of new building contracts dried up. No one saw it coming. Businesses did nothing to change their approach, simply because the only approach they knew was the one that had stood them so well for almost 30 years.