Marketing Your Warehouse

Have you ever thought about how you can monetize your warehouse in a way other than operational efficiency and increased throughput (which you should be doing with a continuous improvement process guided by a metric management mentality?). Think about how your warehouse can be a sales tool.

And if it can’t be, consider this video from Werner Electric

https://youtu.be/J4ndkxSs6VE

While it is designed as a corporate video, the “package” experience in the warehouse would get a prospective customer to say “why wouldn’t I buy from Werner Electric (presuming competitive pricing)?”

I encourage you to view this video to experience the capabilities and quality of their new central distribution warehouse.

And once you do…

As a distributor, ask yourself,

• How could I improve my operations to become more efficient
• How can my operational model be communicated as a reason to buy from me (this is the sale and marketing element)?
• How can I provide my sales organization with such a tool to introduce us to new customers?
  • The “tool” in this reference is a process that communicates “why” buy from us.  Most distributors, when asked why someone should buy from them respond “we have great people”, “we have great service”, “we’ll be their to support you” or similar.  In reality the customer wants something tangible.  A definable difference that they can communicate to their boss or others in their organization.  And your service … in many instances they hope not to have to use it as the desire is for no errors and everything to go well (and yes, they do want service that provides product and application information to them.)

As a manufacturer, what is your impression of a distributor with such a model?

What Werner has been able to do is find a way to monetize its investment into it’s new central distribution warehouse (CDC).  How can you monetize other services and/or capabilities for your organization?