CHICAGO (July 13, 2010)—As the final day of the IFDA/IFMA Sales and Marketing Conference drew to a close, attendees listed the initiatives they plan to pursue based on what they learned at the event:
- Understand the shared goals between manufacturers and distributors.
- Listen to customers and their needs more than what we want to sell them.
- Ask customers what they expect from food shows prior to the food show launching.
- Shifting more from paper to electronic. Think about training: training formats through video feeds.
- Whatever meeting we have, sales meeting, whatever, debrief afterwards. Talk about what we learned. Get people talking and sharing ideas.
- Understand the communication needs of the individual DSRs. We want to get more into social media, but we need to understand that some DSRs might not be there.
- We need to find new ways to make customers feel special.
- Dedicate more time to building strategic partnerships and building trust.
- Better and more mentoring.
- Work to understand each other’s needs. Work toward developing partnerships.
- We have a tremendous, overwhelming amount of information and we need to do a better job of getting that to the customer faster.
- Continually look for new ways to change our game.
Day One:
Plenty
Of Distrust To Go Around At Joint IFDA/IFMA Conference
Day Two:
6 Steps to Effective Distributor/Manufacturer Partnerships
Online Marketing at IFDA/IFMA Sales and Marketing
Conference in Chicago
Day Three:
Conference
Hears GS1 Update
Conference Attendees Plan New Initiatives
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