Welcome to 2017 Planning Season

Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer as well as the unofficial beginning of the 2017 planning season in the electrical industry.  While we know a number of manufacturers and distributors who have started to embark on their planning journey, most who do planning will start in the next 30-60 days.

And consider that the NAED Eastern is in nine weeks and that the AD and IMARK national meetings will be in 6-7 weeks!  Time does fly bye (and our schedule to assist clients in developing their plans is quickly filling up).

To help you improve your planning process:

• Consider joining us on Thursday, September 8th at 1:00 pm for an executive summary and recommendations on improving your joint planning process.  We shared some of our findings recently.  This opportunity is available only to a limited number of distributors and manufacturers and there are only 6 “seats” remaining.  Email to reserve your spot.
• NAED is conducting a survey to better understand what type of information, and from where, manufacturers and distributors receive information to support their planning.  We’d like to thank NAED / TED for recognizing ElectricalTrends as a resource for the industry (and yes, please vote for us!)

You may have seen last week DISC’s Flash report that shared an early projection for 2017.  Currently DISC is projecting about 5 1/2% for the industrial market and about 8% for the contractor-served market.  The projections, however, are only half the story to support your planning.  Effective planning also requires “peeling back the onion” to identify the segments that are growing, the dynamics affecting change in those segments and determining what insights you can gather that will give you a competitive edge by targeting the segment earlier than your competition, bringing new products / services to those customers, reallocating resources and more.

To help you in these areas we will start sharing tidbits that we’ve seen that will help you plan for niche segments.  Each week we’ll offer some market segment insights that could help you prioritize a segment, stimulate an idea and help you optimize your sales performance.

Our first planning input will focus on the energy efficiency market and the role some utilities are playing.

To get started …

• Email us to register your participation in Thursday’s Joint Business Planning session to obtain a few ideas to improve your process.
• Stay tuned for market segment insights.
• Let us know what other information could help your planning process (or share tidbits, even anonymously) of what your successes and / or frustrations are regarding the traditional planning process.  Perhaps you’d an AD FMS (Field Marketing Summit) advocate? Maybe you’ve developed your own? Or you prefer to solely set purchase achievement goals or defer to manufacturer planning processes? Or you focus on internal planning? Or perhaps hope is your planning strategy?

From our viewpoint … “when you develop the plan and work the plan you’ll get the planned results.”