One of the most used and some would say overused term in distribution is possibly demand generation. How you generate demand with our HVACR end user customers is a never-ending discussion point.
The HVACR channel business fundamentals were relatively unchanged until about 10-15 years ago when everyone got a smart phone in their pocket. Until that time the formula for driving sales in the industry was fairly simple. High or develop skilled technical support for your customers and create relationships with outside sales leaders with end customers.
In short, the playbook was to make more belly-to-belly sales calls and build relationships with end customers. This was the basic unchanged distribution model until about 2000. Then mobile phones and the internet started to change how customers consumed information and communicated with you.
The change has been so fast that we may have forgotten about what used to dominate information in the channel. New product introductions used to be lunch and learns, handing out sales collateral, and doing hands on in person events. Today, that foundation of direct personal selling, relationships, and in person training is still important, but it is not the only way to get customers to buy more.
What we wanted to ask our readers is what are they using to reach end customers effectively email, digital, apps, texts, inside sales outbound, social media, in person sales calls, and more. It what is old new again as they say, or is it more difficult than ever to break through with end customers. With the market expected to have slow growth next year, taking share to achieve your goals is critical. Capturing sales will take “all hands on deck” and that means increasing sales capacity, cost-effectively.
Leading distributors recognize that to do this they need to deploy technology effectively to improve processes while launching helping their inside sales team be able to reach deeper into accounts.
To get the pulse on the HVACR market we wanted to ask our readers to take our annual survey on demand generation.
Link to confidential sales enablement HVACRTrends survey.
It is confidential and it will help us share results on the importance of demand generation for distributors and the deployment of digital initiatives to improve sales processes that help generate incremental sales capacity … and productivity.
If you can share 3-5 minutes, we’ll aggregate industry input and be able to share with you an advance copy of a research report with ideas to drive 2025 sales.
As always, we appreciate your support and please feel free to reach out with any comments or questions. jgunderson@channelmkt.com
