Bruce Merrifield, President — Merrifield Consulting •customer demographics •profit strategy •expert interview Monday, September 21, 2015—While long-term profits are great, sometimes you just want to speed things along. After all, there's no point in getting a return next year when you can get a return this afternoon. Randy MacLean sits down with master tactician Bruce Merrifield to talk about a time he revamped a client's business practically overnight, turning one of our customers into a massively profitable account. "The client was an $8 million dollar paper jan-san (janitorial and sanitation supply) distributor kind of guy," Bruce tells me, "with his own trucks and everything else. He had this one big hospital as a customer where he topped off 46 closets every day. It was maybe a $1.5 million account, meaning it was around 25% of his company's sales. However, the client had never gone all out investigating additional opportunities." "Because I've got a big title on my card, I manage to get us an audience with the vice president who handles the supply chain. We get there early, we meet with the mom and pop who work in the laundry during the day, and then on the swing shift, they top off the closets. We follow the couple and we get to the first closet. I looked in the closet and it's one-third full. There's stuff on the floor, they could have racks; these are good California closets, they could put three times the stuff in there." "I ask the nurse in charge of one of the closets," Bruce continues, "what she would change about the closet situation. She tells me how she has to run three floors to steal seat covers out of another closet. Completely flabbergasted, I asked her how much time she spent running around trying to get stuff as opposed to talking to patients, and she told me that basically half her time was spent running around to grab an aspirin or something." "When we sat down with the vice president," Bruce continued, "I told him that we did an audit and explained our findings to him. I then suggested some changes, explained the benefits, and even offered to reconfigure the closets for him with some before and after photos to show what had been done. The customer okay'd it, and we pushed through the usual resistance on the client side to get the things installed. Thanks to the install, a process which really started off by just talking to some nurses, the client "tripled the number of items they put in those closets and their business year over year doubled. It went from $1.5 million to $3 million in sales in one year's time and a 5% operating profit." Where else in your $8 million business are you going to get that kind of opportunity? For more information about Bruce Merrifield, visit: www.merrifieldact2.com |
Measuring & Managing Fleet CostsSophisticated New Delivery Costing Drives Higher Profits An Analytical Boost to Service ExcellenceBruce Merrifield and Randy MacLean discuss the handful of key customers in your business, and how to keep them happy and loyal. Why In-House Analytics FailsIn-house analytics initiatives are prone to delivering ineffective information or to outright failure. Here's why. Optimizing Salesforce Pay Through Deep Data AnalysisCompanies are developing more and more sophisticated approaches to sales compensation and here Bruce Merrifield and Randy MacLean examine the trends. Using Profit Analytics to Manage Your Sales ForceUse profit analytics to help drive radical profit gains by balancing volume, margin and service costs for every account, doubling and tripling territory profits Managing Product Line ProfitabilityManaging Product Line Profits shows how operations can have a significant impact on net profit and examines Peak Internal Profit, accumulated profit and more 9 Steps to More Profitable RelationshipsDiscussion about a 9-step process aimed at transforming a transactional relationship with an account into a partnership. Profit Value-Based Customer SegmentationRandy MacLean and Bruce Merrifield of WayPoint Analytics discuss profit value-based customer segmentation. The Advantages of SegmentationA discussion of the benefits of segmentation and how this approach can help distributors achieve far greater levels of profitability. How to Turn Big Data Into Big Profits!Top companies like Amazon can leverage big data to predict consumer buying habits. Bruce Merrifield discusses how you can do this too! Gross Margin Percent: A Poor Indicator of ProfitabilityMost distributors have naturally occurring, high gross margin percentage accounts and high gross margin percentage (small dollar pick) SKUs. Triage Customers & Set Priorities to Increase PerformanceRandy MacLean and Bruce Merrifield sit down for a talk about the issues and opportunities, tactics and strategies for increasing profit performance. Discussing the Enterprise Account Selling Model (#3)Continuance of the Enterprise Account Selling Model video series. Refers to a preceding video. Drawn from Bruce's presentation at APIC on March 1, 2016. Cost-to-Serve Math: Why Gross Margin May Fool You Every TimeThis video by Bruce Merrifield and Randy MacLean describes why you can't rely solely on gross margin to determine profitability. Working on Your Best AccountsWhat to do with your top accounts. Gross Margin FixationA fixation on gross margin – without looking at cost-to-serve (CTS) – has blinded countless distributors and limited their ability to achieve profitability. Cost Structures: What Makes for a Good Sale?Learn why distributors can't simply rely on gross margin when determining whether a sale will add to the bottom line. Why You Should Sweat the Small DeliveriesA discussion on how little extras can sometimes add up to a lot of infrastructure cost in wholesale distribution companies. Why You Should Be Optimizing InventoryRandy and Bruce explain why it's important to optimize inventory in the same way you optimize personnel and other resources toward the best profit opportunities Using WayPoint's High Volume Account Report to Increase ProfitRandy discusses the benefits of the extraordinarily valuable High Volume Account Report. Prioritizing Your CustomersA discussion of the perils of a cookie cutter approach when it comes to sales and service in the wholesale distribution industry. How Customer Segmentation Unlocks Hidden ProfitsBruce Merrifield of WayPoint Analytics teaches the importance of customer segmentation and the insights it can offer your distribution company. Quantum Profit ManagementRandy MacLean introduces the core principles of QPM and illustrates how it's the most effective way to run a business. Making Money by Giving Away ProductBruce Merrifield and Randy MacLean discuss profit strategies for wholesale distributors that will raise their cost-to-serve and profits. Webinar: How to Create a Sales Compensation Plan (pt 3)Webinar: Quantum Sales Compensation: Designing Your Plan |