To assist leading distributors in transforming their social selling practices, the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence is partnering with Texas A&M University on a new research consortium, “Digitizing the Sales Process” (DSP). The DSP consortium is sponsored by the Council for Research on Distributor Best Practices, an alliance between the NAW Institute and Texas A&M.

Under the leadership of Dr. F. Barry Lawrence of Texas A&M University, the DSP Consortium will create—through both its assessment of distributor consortium members and extensive supporting research—the answers to the following questions:

• What portions of the sales process will be digitized?
• What will remain in the hands of the sales force?
• What new value-add will be created in the new digitally enhanced sales process? 

The DSP consortium will also create an assessment tool to support strategy development and a compendium of best-practice findings for different solutions and their implementation. Distributors who sign up to participate in this one-of-a-kind consortium will be the first in the distribution industry to benefit from this in-depth research.

The DSP Consortium will develop the following for distributors who participate in the consortium:

• Current best practices in leveraging digital tools across channels, customer types, industry vertical environments, and relationships
• Comprehensive documentation of current technologies and resulting processes being used in the distribution industry
• An assessment tool for digitization of the sales process that a firm can use to develop and sustain its digital strategy
• Process mapping and comparison to best practices for implementation of new distributor technologies
• Processes to determine what digital tools will best support the sales team and which would be most efficient for different customer types
• A design of differing models for a digitally supported sales force
• Processes to develop business plans for launching new digital tools and achieving return on investment
• A framework for designing the Digital Sales Process and Digitally Supported Sales Force

Consortium members:

• Will receive all tools created to complete the study, assessment methodologies, and best practices.
• May send up to five members of their team (up to a $10,000 value) to the two research summits developed and delivered on Digitizing the Sales Process in the fall of 2020 and the fall of 2021. 

The membership fee per company in this consortium is $25,000, and the registration deadline is Aug. 31, 2019.

Consortium members will meet at Texas A&M on the kick-off date, Oct. 10, 2019, to discuss initial findings from the background research conducted by the research team, understand the research process and priorities, and direct the research team on topics of interest and desired outcomes. The final meeting will also be held at Texas A&M on April 30, 2020, to present final results and individual company assessments.

In between the meetings, each participating company will have an individual two-day meeting with Texas A&M researchers for process mapping and an initial assessment of the firm’s digital strategy.

According to Patricia A. Lilly, executive director of the NAW Institute, “We are especially pleased to partner with Texas A&M again on another important distributor consortium. An NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence/Texas A&M University research consortium is an economical way for wholesale distribution executives to bring leading-edge best practices back to their companies for implementation ahead of general industry usage. This creates competitive advantage for consortium participants.”

More information on the consortium is available on the NAW Institute website. To discuss further and to register, contact Patricia A. Lilly at plilly@naw.org or 202-263-4072.