Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/919877
42 FEDA News & Views touchpoints included participation in social media discussions, having videos on YouTube and getting connected with customers on LinkedIn." Developing Your Vision Of course, the first step is building a vision, a process that Dancer warns should not be undertaken with a dismissive overconfidence. Many find the task daunting, he says, and end up piecing together theirs through a series of successes and missteps. A few guiding principles pooled from conversations with distributors on how they formulated their visions: Look to other distributors in your industry to gauge how the threads of your vision compare to theirs. Turn to your customers and manufacturer partners, and seek feedback from within to identify the digital tools that are being used to respond to market change. Ask questions about the evolution of your value chain, keeping in mind customers' buying habits, the role of data and analytics and ever-changing channel dynamics. Lastly, map out a series of What Digital Tools are You Using to Reshape Your Business? By Mark Dancer, NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence Fellow E-commerce: buying and selling of products or services conducted over the Internet or other systems. Most often, our conversations with distributors focused on websites and went beyond transactions to e-commerce platforms providing a wide range of information through static and interactive means. Social media: any means of digital interaction for creating and sharing information, often through online communities. For most distributors, social media means consumer and professional platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, as well as blogs, videos, and other digital and interactive media. Videos are emerging as an effective social media tool, recorded by distributors and suppliers for training, sales, and marketing purposes. Advanced analytics: analysis of large data sets to spot trends, improve customer experience, grow sales, or improve profi ts. Distributors rejected the term big data as overhyped and trendy, but readily admitted that they fail to leverage the data that already exist in business systems and, more important, that information-based competition is fast becoming essential for profi ts and survival. Mobility: enabling salespeople or customers with software applications that run on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. We found that mobility is critical because the value created for customers and suppliers is very often created in the fi eld by mobile employees interacting with mobile customers. As one distributor put it, "We need to put information at the tip of the spear, the point where value is created. If our people in the fi eld do not have access to data and information, they are unarmed and outmatched by our competitors." Customer relationship management (CRM): software used to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support for customers and prospects. Distributor experience with CRM is deeper than other digital tools, but many are skeptical or burned by unsuccessful implementations. Still, improving sales force productivity and value-add is a top priority for distributors, and CRM is becoming an essential digital tool. Multichannel solutions: methods and tools for achieving marketing or sales objectives by coordinating multiple channels for a consistent customer experience and enhanced productivity. Most often, we found that multichannel is a digital strategy, objective, or philosophy, rather than a single or specifi c tool. Winning requires that all employees in the organization have access to essential information, especially those in customer-facing positions. As one distributor explained, "Multichannel is about the right hand knowing what the left hand has done, before, during, and after customer interactions. No surprises mean no mistakes." Reprinted with permission from the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) from Becoming a Digital Distributor: Strategies and Tools That Create Value. action steps to execute your vision. There's no cookie-cutter process but in Getting Results, Dancer recommends the following five steps for distributors struggling to find their way: -Examine your current foundation. As a team, document your current vision or visions and list company goals and challenges. As some distributors discovered, you may find that there are conf licting views, or a lack of clarity throughout the company. -Gather ideas from your team, customers, suppliers, other distributors, etc. To generate feedback, Dancer offers OPERATIONS