Distribution
To many companies distribution of products/services is a big problem. If
you want to sell directly to the consumers it is often hard to find qualified
sales channels.

Selling to Private Consumers
Picture yourself having found some fair priced excellent outdoor shoes of a
superior quality on a trip to Australia. You may even have visited the
production facilities who are willing to deliver the shoes. You return back
home where you want to market the shoes. How is this done?

You can go to the local market and get a stand, but you have to sell a lot of
shoos to earn an income. You can run advertisements in the newspaper,
but it is costly and who would buy shoes from a stranger?

Would it be possible to get a deal with one of the country's shoe chains?
Maybe, but most likely they are not going to offer you a 10% margin per
sold pair of shoes. They would easily be able to deal directly with the
Australian supplier simply because of their sales volume. Here the internet
comes in handy as a distributional alternative – but then again. Who would
buy a pair of shoes without having tried them on first?

Which distribution channel is the best for you?

Wholesaling
Offering services to a limited target group makes the distribution more
manageable. You may have developed a plastics components
manufacturing software for the pharmaceutical industry. Thus, your
customers are plastics manufacturers.
In your country there may be 800 such manufacturers supplying to the
pharmaceutical industry and throughout Asia there may be 10.000.

For a newly established company it is somewhat easier to contact,
distribute to and service 10.000 companies than several million individual
consumers.

Customers’ Purchasing Behaviour
Before settling for a specific distributive system you must know your
customers’ buying habits. You can ask your customer: “What, where, how
and when do you purchase goods?”.
The customer most likely makes demands on:

• Purchase volume – is the customer ordering 600,000 units or single
units?
• Delivery lead time – does the customer want the order right now or
will s/he be able to wait for 30 days?

17
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51