Verno Consulting
Verno's 2-Minute Manager newsletter (2MM) is a free resource designed to quickly equip leaders of the beverage distribution industry. Share each issue with your leadership team to start conversations that will help your company stay ahead in the rapidly changing marketplace.
2MM: Stop counting new placements. Start measuring them.
View in Browser | Sign Up Your team just finished a big placement drive. The supplier is happy, the numbers look good, and everyone gets a pat on the back. But did those placements actually sell? When we study new placements, we often find that up to 40% of them hurt sales. That's close to half the placements your team fought for. New placements should raise account profitability and keep your suppliers happy. So it's frustrating to learn that some of that hard work may be costing you. If you...
2MM: The Part of Incentive Design Nobody Talks About
View in Browser | Sign Up You've seen it happen. An incentive wraps up, and suddenly your sales managers, supervisors, and brand managers are buried in paperwork. They're pulling data, building recap spreadsheets, and chasing down information payroll needs to cut checks. They're not in the market. They're not managing their teams. They're doing data entry. We see this at small, mid-size, and large wholesalers alike. It's one of the most common operational headaches in the industry, and it...
2MM: Are Delivery Chasers Helping or Costing You?
View in Browser | Sign Up You added chasers to help your drivers, but are they helping or hurting your delivery ROI? When chaser support is managed well, it is an excellent strategy to increase efficiency and driver retention. Drivers get through heavy stops faster, routes finish on time, and your team stays intact. The problem arises when wholesalers let chasers become the default instead of the exception. Chasers ride along on routes that don't need them, and drivers get used to having help...
2MM: When Your Sales Incentive Attainment Rate is a "Red Flag"
View in Browser | Sign Up Note: For this 2MM, we use the term ‘incentives’ to include any pay-for-performance. If the entire sales team is consistently achieving its incentives, you likely have a problem. When we visit wholesalers, one of the metrics we look at is the Incentive Attainment Rate. More often than not, the Incentive Attainment Rates for the sales organizations we see are 90% or higher. This means that either the wholesaler has all super star sales reps, or the Incentive goals are...
2MM: GPS won't cut your costs. Supervisors who use it will.
View in Browser | Sign Up In a world where it's possible to track almost anything and everything, how do you get supervisors to better manage their people with the information available? The problem is that most supervisors aren’t utilizing these tools as much as they could, and getting supervisors competent in managing with technical tools doesn’t happen overnight. Many wholesalers are seeing an increase in payroll and vehicle expenses from drivers, merchandisers, and line cleaners. The...
2MM: Don’t Be Fooled By Your KPIs
View in Browser | Sign Up Business is getting more complicated each day. Implementing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is one way wholesalers can gain quick insight into the impacts of their decisions and the effectiveness of their overall strategy. We strongly believe in KPIs. We believe all wholesalers need several good KPIs to help manage their business. We also know it takes time to develop an effective KPI reporting system and to refine the KPIs so they provide the right information. We...
2MM: Don’t Let Accounts Shop the Order at the Door
View in Browser | Sign Up Every time an account "shops" the order at delivery, your warehouse and delivery absorb the real cost — up to four times the labor it took to build that order in the first place. Every wholesaler has at least some accounts that “shop” the order (try to adjust the quantity or product mix) upon delivery. No one wants to force products on an account – we get that. At the same time, allowing an account to adjust the order upon delivery not only slows down the driver but...
2MM: 9 Ways to Save Money in Delivery
View in Browser | Sign Up After making all the "right" moves to lower delivery costs, are you still seeing expenses remain stubbornly high? You’re not alone. When the numbers aren’t budging, wholesalers are left wondering why their efforts aren't translating into actual savings. Volume has been down multiple years in a row. Costs are increasing. New accounts are opening. Management wants to save money, so they look for savings in delivery (after all, delivery is the most expensive service...
2MM: When Small Inventory Variances Become Big Problems
View in Browser | Sign Up When there are high numbers of SKUs showing variances, you have sloppy inventory processes. It doesn’t matter if the variances are positive or negative, small or large - the fact that there are a lot of them is the problem. A small inventory variance is always better than a large inventory variance, but enough small variances can indicate a significant process issue. We understand that thousands of cases are being moved every day in the warehouse, and that counting...
2MM: Don’t Solve for Profit. Set It.
View in Browser | Sign Up If you solve for your annual profit goal by budgeting top down, you are not alone, but you may be short-changing your profit goal. Many wholesalers do annual budgeting from the top of the P&L down to the operating profit line. In other words, they solve for their annual profit goal. We call this “settling” for your profit. We believe ownership can get short-changed when they settle or solve for the profit that’s left. From an accounting perspective, it makes sense to...
Verno's 2-Minute Manager newsletter (2MM) is a free resource designed to quickly equip leaders of the beverage distribution industry. Share each issue with your leadership team to start conversations that will help your company stay ahead in the rapidly changing marketplace.