Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Sales and Distribution Strategy

Selecting a sales and distribution approach is a key element of a successful business model. The sales approach, or more broadly the overall process of selling and delivering products to customers, at once encompasses both a company’s connection to its customers and a significant portion of its total costs. Traditionally, companies selected from a defined, limited set of options (i.e. direct sales, manufacturers representatives, distributors, dealers) and most firms in an industry made similar choices. Recently, the number of options has expanded greatly and the breadth of choices by competitors has proliferated in parallel, creating potential instability in competitive positions for current leaders and areas of opportunity for others. To make matters more uncertain, some of the traditional options no longer offer the same balance of services and costs and now cease to achieve the desired results. Therefore, many companies are forced to rethink their approaches to sales and distribution.