Supporting the Supply Chain

So you’re well advised to communicate with the members of your sales channel—explain what you’re doing and why, and how they will continue to be valuable members of your company’s brand experience. There’s little doubt that your channel partners are starkly aware of changing consumer behavior and willing to work with you to better serve your customers. “I think there’s an expectation from the sales channel that you’re going to [sell on line],” McGee says. “It’s all about where it hits them in the pocketbook. If all of a sudden their major customers are now purchasing everything directly from you online, and they’re being blocked out, that’s a problem. But if you honor your distribution agreements and if you’re able to tell them that 30 to 40 percent of the people buying on line have never purchased from us before, in many ways you’ll be expanding their market for them.”

Done right, everyone can win: Manufacturers, resellers, and distributors can fortify customer relationships and reach new audiences, and consumers will get the choice they’re commanding.

“You want to complement your distribution system, not upset it,” says George Dierberger, marketing operations and international manager of sports and leisure products for St. Paul–based 3M. “To me, the Internet is a complement to your marketing strategy and reflects your strategic plan.” 

Getting Started

The first step in your online migration should be a comprehensive assessment of your brand, says Jeremy Ziegler, chairman of Aware Web Solutions, Inc., a Web development, content management, and search engine marketing company in Edina. Do you have a product and a brand identity that your consumers can readily identify? Are your customers accustomed to visiting your Web site? If so, what are they doing there, and how long do they stay? If your customers have been conditioned to buy your products through distributors or resellers, how do you intend to make them aware that they now have the opportunity to buy from you on the Web? And once they get there, are you prepared to replicate that off-line experience on line?

“Remember, the big box retailers, for example, got that big and that successful because they knew how to create a relationship with the customer,” says Ziegler. “Now, as a manufacturer, if you’re going to try to capture that customer and work with them directly, you have to offer some replacement value and recreate those touch points.”

That’s why it’s essential to acquaint yourself, intimately, with your customers—who they are and how they work and buy. According to McGee, an effective way to gather that critical customer intelligence is to observe them in their purchasing environments.