Featured Presentations & Articles

Pathways to Growth

Real growth requires leadership and commitment to building the right team with the right capabilities to focus on the customer's situation and develop responses that increase value. That's what Gillespie found from studying and interviewing companies in and out of the electrical industry.

Marketing for Profit's Sake
There really is a formula for making money in the wholesaling business... or any business. It takes developing "density", leadership economics, and a profitable mix. Here's how.

Marketing-The Steak, Not Just The Sizzle
Use this presentation to test yourself on attributes of good marketing, marketing process and laws of strategy.

What's In A Name?
Build your company name into a powerful brand and get customers to think of you first when making a purchase

Get Lost!
In your Customer's Business
Innovate to Differentiate

Get A Sense of Where You Are
Company, Competitor and Customer Strategic Analysis.

Market Share is For The Taking
We're not exactly sure why, but people are downloading this by the hundreds per month.

Gillespie Article Search

Business Philosophy

Philosophy? That sounds like a subject in college. However, most of what I learned about marketing and taking share came after university training.

See a summary of Neil's findings on what it takes to achieve sustained profitable growth. Click on the image.

As all good things should, my philosophy has changed, or expanded, recently. I've been harping on taking share from the competition for years. But that has become increasingly more difficult in today's hyper-competitive slow growth environment which most distributors and manufacturers face in construction and industrial markets.

Sure, most wholesaler and manufacturer results have been good for 2004, and are thriving so far in 2005. But how much of that is tied to materials inflation? And, have you really grown or just returned to 1999-2000 levels?

In response to the need to help companies truly grow their business, my top ten tenets have changed. Businesses need more options for growing the business profitably.

Gillespie's Top Ten Strategy and Marketing Tenets:

1. Profitable Growth, not operating results, should be your biggest priority
   Go ahead. Look at your objectives for each division and each manager. Do you have business growth objectives? Is growth the main priority? Are you requiring that gross profit dollars grow faster than revenues? Gross profit is the real measure of value you are bringing to the customer. Grow gross profits faster than revenues, or you're heading in the wrong direction. keep heading in the wrong direction and you'll wake up someday to learn that your creditors own your business.
   
   Do you know what your most important productivity measure is, like cost per line item delivered, or cost per mile flown? Do you know how much gross profit you need to make on each type of order to be profitable? You should. Knowledge of these things drives people to make profitable business decisions, fix unprofitable customer relationships and design the right business model to serve market segments effectively.

2. There are five  basic strategies to "Grow" your business.
   
   a. Retain and penetrate existing customers better.
   b. Take share at competitor's customers
   c. Get the best position in the fastest growing market segments
   d. Develop "adjacent markets"
   e. Get into totally new lines of business 
   
   It has become increasingly difficulty to take share and be profitable in a slow growth environment. There had to be other ways to grow the business, I reasoned. It takes thinking about growth in non-traditional ways, better, sharper execution, with a "can do", positive culture. Though I knew of these methods, I had never considered that companies should look at these as a "growth portfolio", and have more than one strategy going strong, probably a minimum of three, in each division.

3. Look at your company's past growth and future objectives in terms of these growth strategies.
   Get the facts. Until you get a good set of facts about the business, the BS artists in the company win all the arguments, and you'll not know if you have a good growth strategy. Get your facts straight. Get your teammates to see what you see. Make growth a priority!

4. Why do I say "take" share as opposed to "gain" or grow share??
   You take market share, you don't grow it. That's important to infuse into your company culture if a big part of your growth portfolio is dependent on share gain. The sales are somebody else's right now. How will you take them away? Superior Focus and Value! How will you provider it?

5. Positive Culture is a critical foundation for growth and productivity. The best marketing campaign in the world won't be able to fix bad or mediocre culture. You can't afford passive aggressive cultures where people say yes in meetings, but drag their feet performing their team roles, or only do what their immediate boss commands them to. 
   
   You need positive expression of ideas, openness, accountability for execution to the team. You need to define your objectives, boil them down to measurements and milestones along the way, and stay on them. People do what's measured. If your culture is bad, and you're a CEO, take a look in the mirror. It all flows downhill. If people don't care about each other, chances are they don't think you care about them. You can't be two faced. They'll emulate you. (That's a lot of faces... huh? ...Chaos!)

6. Be #1 or a close #2 in a relevant segment to succeed in business. Market segments can be niched (subdivided), and as long as a niche is large enough to afford enough income, and the niche desires a unique set of benefits, you can prosper in a niche. Big doesn't guarantee profit. Number one position in a segment fares better. Segments are not just types of customers, either, they can be created based on a combination of variables: product, type of business, customer size, geographical coverage, purchasing habits, application, and more. Perhaps the most powerful segmentation variable, though, is type of customer need, if you can get to it. Whatever you focus on, you tend to be successful at!

7. Smart Marketers know their market share in total, by territory, by market segment and product line. What really makes this relevant is that they know their competitor's positions, too. And they know how they are changing, whether they are winning or losing.

8. The smartest marketers have a well maintained marketing database complete with their sales vs estimated competitor sales by customer and prospect. Preferably by product line/service, too. They use it to prioritize their targets and track progress.

9. Marketing is not just ads and promotion. It's everything you do for the customer. Which is EVERYTHING you do to maximize the customer experience. That's why the CEO is the most important marketing person in the building. The Marketing function should lead all other functions to provide the value elements customers desire, at the ROI the company desires. Hence, everybody is in marketing!

10. The Customer Experience has transcended the four P's as the most important concept in marketing. The Four P's are like bullets. The Customer Experience is the target. Hence, it is the the objective and more strategic in nature.

11. Real Marketing Strategists do the numbers. They estimate the market total, expected share, revenue, margin, investment required, costs and ROI. For the customer, channel partners and the company as well.

-Neil

Biography

Neil Gillespie is a 28 year veteran in distribution marketing and business strategy. He has been involved with the electrical distribution channel during that entire period. After gaining a BBA Marketing and MBA Finance from The University of Notre Dame, Neil started his career with GE Lamp in sales, moving up through various marketing management positions. As part of these roles, Neil was responsible for all Commercial and Industrial Marketing Programs and Distribution Strategy for the business. Neil developed a particular expertise in Market Planning, Distribution Portfolio planning, and marketing databases.

Neil moved on to GE Corporate Marketing Consulting in 1988, where he worked on strategic projects for GE Motors, GE Fanuc Automation, GE Industrial Systems and GE Lamp. Neil was also a key member of the Distribution Task force which planned GE distribution strategy for the 90's. Neil then moved on to GE Industrial Systems, where he built a market development center for the OEM (original equipment and machinery) market, including a marketing system, call center, outbound and inbound telemarketing center and an answer center for OEM specifiers.

Neil then joined Cutler-Hammer in early 1993, where he built a distribution planning system for Cutler-Hammer in anticipation of the merger with Westinghouse Distribution & Control Business Unit. Neil co-authored the Commitments distributor program and later assisted with the planning of new residential product lines and their marketing introductions.

In 1995 Neil founded The Infinity Group, which he later changed to Infinity Strategic Consulting. In this capacity, Neil has consulted to distributors, manufacturers, technology providers, and associations involved in the distribution industry. He has developed strategic plans, marketing plans, product positioning plans, marketing campaigns, customer service research, customer perception research and conducted customer advisory panels.

January 1, 2002, Neil joined forces with David Gordon to found Channel Marketing Group, dedicated to helping clients take share and develop their markets.

CMG has now turned it's attention to Total Business Growth, helping companies to grow their business through maximizing core business performance, growing in high growth segments, taking share, and developing adjacent market opportunities.

Neil has consulted to a major distributor consortium on website design, web marketing, webconferencing and ebusiness strategies while becoming a recognized expert in eMarketing. Neil wrote a series of articles (Maximum Connections) in TED Magazine and presented on eMarketing at NAED's Marketing Conference, Prophet 21's Annual Meeting, and NxTrend's Executive retreat. Neil is now a contributing writer to Electrical Wholesaling Magazine. He has been a frequent contributor to TED Magazine and has contributed to Progressive Distributor and Modern Distribution Management. He is a frequent presenter at Association conferences, Marketing Conferences, Regional and Annual Conventions. Neil has recently joined Electrical Wholesaling's stable of contributing editors.

email: Neil Gillespie Phone: 412.400.9790