Life in a Post-Pandemic World: A guest blog post from Frank Hurtte, River Heights consulting

Long ago a mentor once said, “Frank, if you want to anticipate customer actions, read what they are reading. If you want to increase your sales, talk the way they talk and surround your products with problems they face.” This was some heady stuff for a smart-aleck computer school cowboy with a shiny Ford automobile and two business suits. Dating myself here but let us just say it was a long time before the first Global Pandemic. I followed his advice.

Back in those day, the process involved tearing out the subscription form near the back of the magazines in the customer’s lobby, maintenance shop, or engineering library. Heeding his sage advice, I soon found myself browsing through magazines ranging from Rubber News to Food Manufacturing Magazine. Always being an over achiever, I also signed up for free subscriptions to Plant Engineering Magazine, Maintenance and Engineering Magazine, and a lot more.

The mailman hated me. I may have damaged the environment through the mass quantity of paper consumed. But I learned a quick scan of these publications showed me exactly what my customers were thinking about. It provided valuable insight into my customer’s world, helped me understand their lingo, and helped me understand many of the hot button problems they faced. Enough with the old timer stories, let us move into the 21^st Century.

Happily, today the whole process is easier - and far less taxing on the trees. A few moments alone at the computer allows us to research far and wide. Lots of industry specific stuff – I like that. But for a look at mega-trends, trends which I believe will sweep across the country almost as fast as those early COVID germs, we need to look at Pandemic driven issues and Post-Pandemic trends for business in general.

Wall Street financial folks have an unquenchable thirst for an understanding these types of macro business trends. Organizations like McKinsey, Deloitte, and others cater to this information gap by doing extensive surveys of business leaders and blasting it out to the world.

Since late last year, most of these organizations have been asking financial questions, not about products or the things we sell, but instead polling on the customer direction. Businesses, large and small are spilling their guts to these guys. The message delivered is financial, but when translated become customer problems we can wrap our products in.

We can position ourselves to play a part in the future of our customers, by creating a presence long before most of our “normal” customer contacts realize that is the direction they will be following.

Looking at the thoughts which repeated surface in these reports. Some require little imagination in how we might approach customers. A few require just a bit more of a deep dive. Today's post we will cover the first one, Drive for Profitability.

Drive for Profitability
Supply Chain Revamps/Reshoring
Robotics
Green and Social Responsibility
Renewed focus on Safety
Expanded use of online training
Digital Investment – Digitalization
Remote Team Deployment
Shortage of Skilled Workers

The Drive for Profitability

The background story for many of our customers is simple – 2020 performance tanked. These organizations are doing whatever possible to improve their profitability. If we look back at other economic recoveries, we see several customer behaviors which impact distributors and the business climate in general. Here is a quick run down of these behaviors and some thoughts about distributor positioning:

Reorganizations and restructuring of the company

This phenomenon has happened with such regularity it has almost become routine with many companies. The organization reshuffles departments, eliminates positions, and plays a game of org-chart musical chairs. For distributors this means potential for the loss (do to transfer or termination) of key contacts and allies within the customer’s organization.

Distributor activities to position and prepare include:

Expand and broaden the contacts throughout the organization. This can often be accomplished by asking friends within the account who else might value from your kind of products and services
Bolster/Establish relationships with customer upper management types as high in the organization as possible. The higher up the customer org-chart the better your chances of getting an early warning to the effort.
Acquire or create a customer organization chart to better understand how the organization works. If the restructuring has already happened, this should be a top priority.
When the restructure takes place, gather information on the goals of each of the newly created silos within the company.

Overall push for maximum productivity

On the manufacturing side, this equates to improving throughput and producing more products within the same facility. For knowledge-based distributors this plays directly into our strengths.

Distributor activities to position and prepare include:

Talking to upper management about Overall Operations Effectiveness (OOE) goals and roadblocks to obtaining them.
Discussing your plans for assisting the customer in reducing unplanned downtime.
Couching services and spare parts in terms of improved uptime.
Asking customers about bottlenecks in their production.

On the people side, many of these companies have gone through at least some kind of reduction of staff during the Pandemic. Some of the restructures described above will be attempts to do more with fewer people. Often, they see hiring of outside resources more favorably than the addition of new headcounts. This creates opportunities for distributors who provide value-add services of both the technical and non-technical variety.