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Introduction

Distributors face challenges from rapidly growing competitors, such as Zoro and Amazon Business, as well as retail channels entering B2B sales and manufacturers selling directly online. To safeguard and expand their market share, distributors need to enhance their marketing strategies and digital capabilities.

Distribution Strategy Group (DSG) developed the whitepaper “How Distributors Can Leverage Marketing, Services and Digital Excellence to Become More Important to Manufacturers” and sponsored by ABB.

This whitepaper discusses the challenges faced by distributors in implementing the various attributes of best-in-class distributors and aims to outline how distributors can leverage digital excellence, sales & marketing, and value-added services to strengthen their significance to customers and foster closer collaboration with suppliers for mutual prosperity – becoming more important to manufacturers.

Distributors possess significant advantages, such as daily customer interactions, omnichannel capabilities, extensive value-added services, industry expertise, and access to manufacturer resources. By strategically leveraging these advantages and executing disciplined plans, distributors can not only protect their market share but also gain ground against online marketplaces, retailers, and pure digital distributors.

Distributors who thrive in the long term generally take action in five different areas:

• Become more important to customers
• Become a great sales and marketing company
• Become a great digital distributor
• Coordinate and collaborate
• Don’t abandon the basics

ABB has created a specific ”Distributor Online Acceleration Program” supporting its distributors for the topics described in the whitepaper.