Distributor's Link Magazine Spring 2019 / Vol 42 No2
122 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S
122 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK NELSON VALDERRAMA HOW SMART DISTRIBUTORS CAN SURVIVE AND THRIVE AS TARIFFS KEEP INCREASING from page 44 DISTRIBUTORS CAN BENEFIT FROM A DATA ANALYTICS PLATFORM SUCH AS THAT OFFERED BY INTUILIZE She ran through some thoughts about covering the 10% and then putting the 2% toward new business needs...but still I asked, “why not .5% more?” Sometimes 0.5% seems irrelevant but when you run a business of M in sales, that irrelevant number means 5K to your bottom line. That’s your kid’s college tuition, a new vacation home, or plenty more products for your inventory — but it’s also a perfect example of why data is so critical in decision making, if even over half a percent. The beauty of getting smarter about your data is that those little half-percents will start to emerge all over your business. By analyzing trends in the data already going to waste in your current ERP system (such as the hundreds or thousands of line items listed in every product quote), you’ll quickly start to see things like: ¤ Pricing of core inventory not keeping pace with less important product lines ¤ Inefficiencies in resource management causing inflated prices elsewhere ¤ Opportunities to inch-up pricing across your entire portfolio As everyone in the business scrambles to solve the very same problem — a singular global tariff increase — only so many winners will emerge. Knowing your competitors will also have to adjust their prices to continue seeing revenue, the smarter you can be about price-setting, the bigger the opportunity you have to steal market share. By fixing pricing today, you can actually find margin increases that will allow you to inch up pricing in response to tariffs in the future without taking nearly as big a hit as your competitors who fail to first look inward. Re-Evaluate Your Inventory and Accounts Just like pricing, it is always interesting to me to see how many businesses are really just making educated guesses still when it comes to things like stocking inventory. CONTINUED ON PAGE 164
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