Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/919877
November/December 2017 41 Throughout his many years of listening to distributors try to articulate a path forward, he's noticed a trend. The ones who can succinctly walk through their vision and connect the dots tend to see the greatest return from their digital investments. Visions are about how you will use digital tools to execute strategy, says Dancer, who defines the term as "a well-developed and actionable direction for the use of digital tools that is obvious to your people, your customers, and your suppliers because it resonates with your company's specific business opportunities and challenges." E-commerce is Not Everything And by digital tools, he's not just referring to building an e-commerce platform. There are a number of solutions that distributors can use to help them differentiate: data and analytics, CRM, social media, websites, omnichannel marketing, marketing automation, ERP. (See sidebar on page 42.) "If you're only thinking about a website and conducting transactions on it, you're not really differentiating your business, relative to a disruptor like Amazon," says Dancer. "Digital strategies are about helping the customer across the shopping, buying and ongoing-support phase. Keeping this in mind, it's really important for distributors to think about their value- add, whether it's defensible and how that value-add can be enabled by digital tools." Seeking to position itself as a company attuned to its customers' pain, one distributor organized its website around the top five issues reportedly plaguing its base. All videos, testimonials, product questions, etc., on the site, point back to what's consuming the customer. "They are not a big distributor, so they really wanted to make the point that even though larger competitors might have more resources, they can offer their customers a more customized product line and the assurance that they are focused on their problems," says Dancer. Another distributor wanted to improve sales results and enhance its customer service so it invested in CRM to monitor the sales process. Using established metrics, it tracked the number of leads that were converted into opportunities and then into sales. That led to even more telling information about the various layers of customer interaction throughout the company. "Our sales process is about what we want to do, what we do behind the scenes, and what we do with customers," explained the distributor in Dancer's latest book Getting Results from Your Digital Investments. " We started to use the phrase touchpoints to mean how we can stay in touch with customers through digital or traditional methods. For us, A vision is more of a story. It has a plot, and like all stories, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. — Getting Results from Your Digital Investments