The current challenging market situation has awakened companies to rethink and renew their sales channels and value chains. We at Bilot have been promoting this thinking already long before, but have even more reason to do so now to help our customers ensure future success with their business.
Traditional value chains are formed by companies in different parts of the chain. Most commonly the chain follows a pattern from one step to another:
- Manufacturers, Product companies & brand owners
- Own regional sales offices
- Distributors
- Wholesale companies
- Retailers: offline and online + B2C and B2B
- End-users & Consumers
Right now, many industries have been impacted heavily by the sudden change in their business environment. Companies are planning their actions to streamline the entire value chain, drive more sales, protect margins, and strengthen brand image and customer experience. There are many opportunities to capture:
- B2B companies starting direct sales to consumers
- Product companies and brand owners selling directly to end customers in addition to using distributors and wholesale channels
- Empower the regional sales office to serve customers even better
- Create a centralized marketplace to sell products and services from many vendors
Sometimes changes in the values chain are seen as risks to harm the cooperation with the partners further in the chain. Our experience is that by planning the activities carefully, and by improving the customer experience through offering the new channels, overall sales will increase instead of cannibalizing it from other channels and partners. We at Bilot offer practical services to customer regarding, for example, these opportunities:
- Change/create ecommerce to support sales to consumers or end customers
- Identify needed changes operationally to start direct to consumer or end customer sales
- Enable direct spare part and service sales to end customers for better after sales services and management of it
- Build own marketplace to sell all the products and services your customers need
- Focus on demand generation with marketing automation and building good customer relationships with existing and new customers and empower your regional sales force and distributors
- Start providing rich product information to your partners and selling through marketplaces
We have experience of making these changes to various companies in different industries. Many projects are already live or soon going live. Contact us and we can help you ensure business continuity and growth, no matter what the future brings.
