Healthcare Supply Chain Technology and Strategy

For Halloween this year we decided to theme our blog around the coming zombie apocalypse. While the fact the apocalypse is actually coming may be in dispute, the concept is simple. Things would be kind of tough in a zombie apocalypse but we can learn this lesson now.  When the Going Gets Tough, Turn to Your Best Customers. How to focus on your long-term customers, while chasing after new ones (zombie pun intended). Combine the high cost of new customer acquisition with the fact that your best customers are likely to stay with you for the long haul (provided your company meets and exceeds their expectations), and it's easy to see why digging deeper into your existing client base is more important than ever during uncertain economic times. Today we review and share some strategies to carry out that plan of action. To get the most out of this strategy, here are a few tips for success. By using these tips distributors can increase revenue-per-customer by getting their sales staffs focu...

Motivate your team to get the most from your CRM and sales department by understanding that it’s about the process as much as the product.  It’s hard to recruit great salespeople. Harder still to keep them great.  It’s important that you get the most out of your  CRM  and sales team. While  CRM  can do it, the product is only half the story. To get the most from Customer Relationship Management, you have to get your  salespeople not just using it, but liking it. Liking the way it delivers sales targets. Liking how it helps them succeed. But how you ask?  The MDS-Nx CRM module is unique in it's semi-custom nature. You get the core product and functionality and can add a business specific process layer to help move your own business and sales models along.  Here are just some idea's that other have implemented into the  MDS - CRM  System. Show them that not all old leads are cold leads when it comes to CRM and sales. Cold doesn’t mean...

For those who have run sales organizations and are familiar with trying to tackle the sales commission model, there are no easy answers. It typically starts with something simple like paying off sales dollars and then typically as you grow, it balloons into a mess with multiple calculations, special deals and constant exceptions to the rule.  I have always been a big proponent of paying commissions based upon profit , but that has it's pitfalls as well. So today we look at another way...  Commissions and  Activity Based Costing (ABC)   The value a good Activity Based Costing (ABC) model can bring to a distributor cannot be underrated. A well-designed model can provide powerful insight on profitability drivers and provide useful inputs when making strategic decisions on sales resource allocations and pricing. However, tying sales incentives to the “profit” these models derive can be troublesome. In fact, tying sales incentives to net profit based on an ABC model can h...