Here you will find a collection of relevant, thought-provoking, and insightful newsletters written specifically to give distributors the edge over their competition.
Success is more than having the right tools - with WayPoint, you’ll also get the best practices in the distribution industry.
#29 Moneyball is at the Movies. Go to Itasca Instead
If building cost-to-serve models for your business gets a fix on the net-profitability at the line item level, then a door to a new profit pathway opens. Find out more by using a map, better tools, a bit of courage and some travel buddies.
#28 Transition Reps From Margin $ To Net Profits
Reducing errors that we can control within our own four walls reduces costs; frees up operational slack; boosts morale; and improves service-value. How does a branch manager easily eliminate 80% or more of current errors? Read on!
#27 Zero Errors: Fast, Easy & Profitable
With net profit analytics, everyone can focus on improving the root drivers of profits with the right scripts. Can your team afford to wait any longer to get working on NBC and the newest profit-driving scripts?
#26 Do More of What Works!
Too many companies are reacting to the weak economy by reflexively flogging the sales force to get new customers. A more productive strategy is to do more of what’s already working.
#25 Profit Improvement Barriers Have Fallen
Trying harder at the past doesn’t have a future. What profit improvement steps can you take immediately to reinvent: customer value up, costs to serve down and free-cash-flow profits up — all with the best Return on Management Energy?
#24 Stop Losing Profits
For our core accounts, we are now beefing up core items and have launched a cross selling program on best items to the core group. The success of the small account program gave us the energy for the more difficult plays, and the new cash flow financed inventory for more core products.
#23 Escape Commodity Hell
Are you selling mostly commodities and not feeling any improvement in the economy? How are you going to get a service-value edge in your customer’s eyes and/or get a lower-structural-cost advantage over your competitors?
#22 Crummy Economy Masks Opportunity
We can’t outsource labor costs to Asia, or book losses in high tax countries and report profits in low-tax ones. Without political clout, we get to share more in the cost of borrow-and-spend federal stimulus, than in the benefit.
#21 Questions, Guidelines and New Formulas Drive New Profits
Most firms are stuck fine-tuning 25-50 year-old practices. If you’re working too hard to make too little by selling commodities as a price-taker, will intensifying past practices really get better results?
#20 Channel Economics Falling Down
What’s amazing about super-losing customers (and suppliers) is that wherever you’re losing money, they are, too. High-frequency reorder customers will lose even more to stock-outs, late arrivals and downtime.
#19 Turn Losing Channel-Partner Costs Into Mutual Gains
Offshore-manufactured clones of the cash-cows sold at steep discounts have ended the viability of the model. Factories that outsourced their branded cash-cows had a few years of relief, but now commodity economics reigns.
#18 Sales Rep Incentives Based On Customer Net Profit?
Paying a rep 177% of territory net profits is the result, not the root cause of the problem. With customer net profit information, you can design incentive plans that will grow margins, and that your best reps will love.
#17 Think Big, Act Small, Fail Forward With Brilliant Mistakes
Why not fish where the biggest, hungriest fish are for our service-value proposition? Research confirms that there is no faster way to improve profits than to specifically identify most-profitable and biggest-losing accounts.
#16 Selling Best Practices To and Through Branch Managers
What if you could share and then discuss true, net-profit changes for every customer and for each customer niche? This data could then be centrally monitored, summarized and trend-charted against all other branches.
#15 Turn-Around Tools & Techniques
Whenever you embark on significant change within a company, make sure that you have re-aligned all important aspects of the business. From "leadership" to "incentives", all factors must be internally consistent with, and mutually supportive of one another.
#14 Resolutions for 2010
After the most challenging 18 months in decades, and with domestic industries 20-50% below their peaks, the "new consumer frugal" makes a traditional V-back recovery seem unlikely. Where’s your most promising strategic edge?
#13 Score and Boost Your Corporate IQ
Progressive distributors are boosting their "Corporate IQ Effectiveness" by using WayPoint as bridge between business-as-usual and strategic optimization and profitable growth. With the right information, they can improve the economics for all four stake-holder groups: customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders.
#12 The Eight Principles of QPM
The new martial art of Quantum Profit Management codifies the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients in the technology framework of the present and future. Use these simple principles to transform into a high-performance market leader.
#11 Too Many Items & Suppliers
Many commodity-line distributors have evolved from a relatively narrow supplier roster to today’s extensive list. Your company may be burdened by too many SKUs, with current business stretched too thin to drive good economic models for most of them.
#10 Customer Profitability Analysis Paralysis
Customer Profitability Ranking Reports (CPRR) can be the most effective tool to immediately improve operating results. Too often, companies miss the opportunity and preserve the status quo.
#9 Smart Sales Growth
Driven by declining gross profit commissions, reps may try for new business by quoting some (probably low-ball) prices. This could restore some of the rep’s earnings by adding new gross profit, but can drain company resources if the new business doesn’t have a profitable service model.
#8 Gross Margin Management Drives Losses
Nothing makes a bigger bottom-line impact than adding an extra point or two of margin to an already profitable order. The common paradox is that many small orders with high margin percentages are big losers.
#7 Align Sales Comp with Company Goals
Companies that have already crossed this Rubicon are out-performing their peers by significant margins – even in a crummy economy. The downside has always been the million-dollar systems investment required to get there.
#6 Opportunity of a Lifetime!
Every decade or two a change in business dynamics occurs, producing a paradigm shift that launches growth spurts for players who first recognize the opportunity. Others lose market share because they’re slow to catch on, and some wither and die.
#5 High-ROTA Management is Key
You have to improve your skills in managing pre-tax Return on Total Assets (ROTA). ROTA is a universal financial productivity ratio that measures how productive are with asset dollars, whether the dollars belong to shareholders, suppliers or banks.
#4 Beyond Best Practices
Quantum Profit Management (QPM) is a way for measuring profitability, in detail, where you make and, especially, lose money on which customers, in what niches, and on what specific products. How are you working on and tracking the accounts that will generate 80% of the profit growth in their markets?
#3 Measure & Manage Cross-Subsidies
By using precision cost and profit analysis tools similar to WayPoint Analytics, market leaders are closing off profit leaks to capture free cash flow. Today, identifying cross-subsidies is an essential skill, and acting to eliminate granular losses is a critical activity.
#2 What is "Cost-to-Serve"
"Cost-to-Serve" (CTS) is simply the total cost of delivering your envelope of goods and services to your clients. Since profit is what’s left when CTS is spent out of Gross Profit (GP), you’ll want to ensure CTS is lower than GP in every segment.
#1 Financial Averages Hide Profits
With the current economy crushing profits and our shrunken market still a very difficult place to find new business, it’s essential to find other ways to maintain profits and cash flows, and QPM is the key.