Your company has just released its most exciting product to date, and you're ready to take it to market.
You have hundreds of distributors located all around the world who need literature, press releases, promotional photos, prices, lead times, and more.
What do you do?
Most likely, you e-mail everything to them... and then hope that someone at each distributor reads your literature... and adds your products to their website... and e-mails your product announcements to their customer base... and uploads your new part numbers and prices into their quoting program... and keeps your product fresh in the minds of their sales staff...
In reality, none of this usually happens.
What if there was a way to ensure that all of this happens? Instantly.
Perfect Distribution
Perfect Distribution (http://perfect-distribution.com) is a web-based software program which is revolutionizing the industrial distribution industry.
By allowing your distributors to simultaneously connect to their customer databases, order databases, quotation databases, and vendors web portals, Perfect Distribution fully automates the repetitive tasks of industrial distriubtion (e.g. verifying prices and lead times) and dramatically improves your distributors' efficiency, transparency, and profitability.
Perfect Distribution is an irresistibly powerful, web-based software package that only costs $1,950 per year. What does that mean? There is no hardware to buy. There is no software to install. For only $1,950 per year (the price of a single servo motor!) each of your distributors can revolutionize their business... and in turn, revolutionize your business!
To take a tour of the Perfect Distribution software features, click here.
Once your distributors start using Perfect Distribution, the new efficiencies that you'll see in your business are simply amazing! See the example, below:
How can Perfect Distribution automate my distributor network?
CASE STUDY: Distributors Issuing Quotations - The Inefficient Way
Let's assume that one of the sales engineers at one of your distriburors has received a quote request for 50 line items (e.g. a vision system, a 24 VDC power supply, an enclosure, etc.) from 10 different manufacturers (e.g. Cognex, Phoenix Contact, Rittal, etc.)
In order to issue this quote, the salesperson needs to look up the current prices and lead times for all 50 parts. In order to look up the prices, the salesperson has a few options.
1.
In an ideal situation, someone at the distributor's office is maintaining an up-to-date database of parts and prices with the latest information from each of their manufacturers. If that’s the case, then the salesperson can simply type a part number into his current quoting program, and the database sends back the up-to-date price.
This rarely happens - as we all know. A typical distributor represents 30+ manufacturers, and most of the manufactures send out bi-annual (or sometimes even monthly) pricelists in Excel or PDF format. It is very time-consuming for distributors to convert the data from these documents into a useable format and upload it into their database, and most of them simply don’t do it.
2.
If there isn’t an up-to-date database, then the salesperson hopefully has a copy of the most recent pricelist (Excel / PDF) from each manufacturer. The salesperson can then open each document individually and look up the prices for each of the 50 parts.
3.
If the salesperson doesn’t have a pricelist for a particular manufacturer, then he has to call the manufacturer, get a hold of a customer service representative, and ask for up-to-date price information for each part from that manufacturer.
4.
In many cases, manufacturers will publish prices and lead times on a secure page of their website which can be accessed with a username and password. If this option is available, the salesperson could visit each of the manufacturer’s websites (where available), login to the site, and then look up the prices and lead times.
In the best case scenario, above, the salesperson could get up-to-date prices on all 50 parts by simply typing them into his quoting program (option #1). In the worst case, he has to sift through 10 individual pricelists… or visit 10 manufacturer websites… or call 10 different customer sales representatives (options #2 - #4).
Once he has all of the prices, he needs to get accurate lead times. In the industrial distribution industry, lead times can vary from “one day” to “8 weeks” for certain products. Customers always want to know when parts can be delivered because a single late part can hold up a multi-million dollar project.
Regardless of how efficiently the salesperson obtained the prices, above, the process of obtaining accurate lead-times is much less efficient. You can’t get up-to-date lead times from an Excel document or PDF. You have to either call the manufacturers or login to their websites to get that information.
So, in order to get lead times in this scenario, the salesperson has to either login to 10 different websites or call 10 different manufacturers.
After all of this work, the salesperson finally has up-to-date prices and up-to-date lead times. Before he can issue the quote, however, the salesperson needs to check whether or not the customer has bought any of the 50 parts before and, if so, what the customer paid for those parts in the past. In order to do this, the salesperson needs to open up his accounting program and search through the customer’s order history for each of the 50 parts.
Once he has verified that all of the quoted prices are consistent with previously-ordered prices, the salesperson can now save the quote... attach the quote to an e-mail... and send it to the customer.
As you can see, this entire process is extremely time consuming and inefficient… but hundreds of distributors and thousands of salespeople do it everyday. It consumes their time and it consumes the time of the manufacturer’s customer service staff who have to field questions about price and lead times all day long.
The worst part is... after all of that work, the outside sales staff and management team are often clueless that a quote has even been issued! Unless the salesperson decides to e-mail the quote to the outside sales engineers and management team, no one will know to follow up with the customer... attempt to expand the sale... and/or book the order!
CASE STUDY: Distributors Issuing Quotations - The Perfect Distribution Way
When a distributor issues a quote using Perfect Distribution's revolutionary web-based Quote Generator, he starts by typing in the name of the customer who requested the quote. As he's typing, our quoting program instantly connects to the distributor's CRM database and imports the appropriate contact information for the selected customer.
As he begins entering part numbers, the quoting program instantly connects to the distributor's vendor web portals... logs in to their accounts... and then extracts the real-time price and availability data for each part number. The quoting program also connect to the distributor's accounting database and checks to see if the quote recipient has ordered any of the parts in the past. If so, the quoting program instantly displays the recently ordered prices to the salesperson. This ensures that the salesperson uses consistent, high-margin pricing.
What does all this mean? Your distributor's staff can now issue accurate quotes (with lead times!) in a matter of seconds. They no longer have to call their vendors individually... or keep track of Excel / PDF files... or store 30+ login names and passwords... or manually sift through their accounting database to compare quoted prices against previously ordered prices. Quotes can be created in seconds, and it is virtually impossible to quote inaccurate or out-dated prices!
A salesperson using the Perfect Distribution Quote Generator could issue an accurate quote for 50 parts, as described above, in about five minutes or less. Without the Quote Generator, it would take several hours to complete.
As soon as the quote finished, it's instantly visible to the distributor's entire staff on their Perfect Distribution website. Management can now monitor the quoting activity of the entire company! Sales engineers can instantly see which customers are being quoted by the inside staffers! The possibilities are endless... and the increased efficiency is priceless!
Finally, at the end of each day, Perfect Distribution will automatically e-mail a quote summary to each of your staff members... smacking them across the face and saying, "Hey, follow up on this!"
SUMMARY
The quoting scenario, above, is just one example of how the Perfect Distribution software, in conjunction with LocalAutomation.com, can instantly transform the transparency, efficiency, and profitability of your business and your distribution network.
The power of Perfect Distribution lies in the fact that:
1. It is web based.
2. It can simultaneously connect to all of your distributors' databases, LocalAutomation.com, and your online web portal(s).
Imagine how efficient your business becomes when you can... instantly transmit product announcements and press releaeses to your entire distribution network... guarantee that your distributors are always quoting accurate prices and lead times... and much more!