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Alignment—Inside Your Organization and With Your Distribution Channel
These days, it’s not enough to create alignment among internal employees. Future success depends on finding new ways to blend and align goals with distributors and other organizations in your distribution channel.
It’s called alternate channels management and it’s all about business plan deployment. As industry innovators are proving, the key is to create a common language and business planning process that everyone buys into. The result is more effective and lucrative relationships that position your company as a preferred and valued partner.
Internal alignment remains a key success factor in employees’ ability to work effectively toward achieving goals. Ralston Purina’s Pro-Visions subsidiary recently employed the Real Learning Performance Mastery System and Symphony program to align its sales force and blast past aggressive growth and market-share targets. As Manager of Training and Development Mel Kohr explains, “Jim LaVictoire and Joe Beilein and their organization have performed a key role in helping our team prepare to face the challenges of the 21st century. They have gone a long way toward helping us become a cutting-edge provider of value for our customers.”
As impressive as alignment is in achieving internal goals, when extended to the supply chain, its benefits increase exponentially.
 A New Approach to Channels Management
Brown-Forman Beverage Company is a world leader in an industry that has recently experienced increased consolidation and competition. Brown-Forman’s proactive approach to sustaining market dominance and increasing the value it provides to distributors began with a “Performance Partnership” initiative. Symphony provided the framework.
Director of Sales Channel Effectiveness, Bob Goeddel, explains, “Our internal Symphony implementation for the sales team helped us align with global plans that allow us to grow and maintain a strong brand franchise.” Response was enthusiastic. “We had top sales managers taking pieces of Symphony down to their district network within six months of their exposure to it. They just ran with it.”
Brown-Forman quickly realized the value that alignment could have for its first-tier customers—the distributors. This would be a new kind of alternate channels management that focused on a common vision and process for deploying mutually beneficial business plans. Advantage provided associate Dick Fuller, whose 17 years of beverage management experience “made him the perfect partner to co-facilitate Symphony with distributors,” says Goeddel. “The response from distributors has been very, very positive. We see distributors literally realigning themselves as they go through the Symphony process, which is very exciting.”
Fuller adds, “Brown-Forman truly has an abundance mentality. From a competitive viewpoint, they believe that ‘there’s enough for everybody.’ They want to help distributors become the best in the marketplace. This will undoubtedly benefit distributors’ relationships with other suppliers, as well as with Brown-Forman. It’s yet another example of Brown-Forman’s innovative industry leadership.”
Win-Win External Partnerships
The company’s forward-thinking actions are paying off. “Symphony has definitely strengthened our partnership with distributors,” says Goeddel. “It allows us to work together to become better at what we do. As a result of this blending and alignment of goals, our distributors treat us as a partner and a preferred supplier. It’s definitely a win-win situation. The next step is to make it a win-win-win, where we take this new business relationship down to the next tier, which is the retailers.”
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