The #1 Secret Mid-Size Promotional Product Distributors Use to Boost Sales

Is being in the middle a market advantage?

Something we’ve noticed: Small distributors (less than $2.5 million in annual sales) now comprise nearly 50% of the industry’s (reported) $25+ billion in revenue. And according to ASI’s Top 40 Distributors list of 2022, the Top 40 distributors (by annual revenue) range from $800+ million (at the top) to $37 million (at the bottom).

Meaning: Somewhere between $2.5 million and $37 million rests a very large middle swath of distributors who have an incredible advantage for growth: speed.

Years ago, there was a book titled It’s Not the BIG Who Eat the SMALL It’s the FAST Who Eat the SLOW. It announced a world to come, a world in which speed would be the dominant factor shaping market leaders, and its message was prescient. 

Never before have we moved so fast. Every sector of our lives is quicker, the way we consume news, media, the way we shop. NPR offers news updates by the hour. Slack allows us instantaneous connections with any colleague across the globe. You can go from “I need to order some detergent” to having detergent in your hands that afternoon delivered by Amazon.

Speed has become so common and, more importantly, expected, so that it’s now taken for granted. 

But in the promotional products industry, speed has always been the most dominant factor. In a deadline-driven business, where clients often wait until the last minute, and where inventory is sometimes short and production times are always tight, speed has become a differentiator. All things being equal between distributors: speed has become THE differentiator.

So much so that if —right now— were I to email any number of the most respected distributors I know, they would immediately reply. Why? They have trained themselves to be incredibly responsive because they know, speed wins.

For mid-size distributors, speed is the most distinct advantage. There’s a key market advantage between being small enough as an organization to move faster than the big guys, and yet big enough to handle the largest projects. It’s often the middle-sized distributor who represents some of the most innovative thinking in our industry because they often tackle projects outside their own scope and beyond their comfort zone, and the speed at which they make decisions is lightning-fast. 

Why speed is the winning advantage: 

1. Competition: A study published in Harvard Business Review showed that a response time of 5 min or less is the optimum response time to reply to a lead, and a simple 10 min delay can decrease the odds of landing a deal by 400%. And a lead —for our industry— can simply be a new project from an existing client.

2. Buyer Expectation: Today, 80% of B2B buyers expect real-time interaction (or as near real-time as they can get), most expect a response to their email within an hour and many now contact you via text or Slack.

3. Deadline Demands: Projects are produced faster than ever. From the most complex projects involving knitting or shop development to a simple drop-ship order, deadlines delayed are deadly. 

4. Inventory: In a recent interview with PCNA’s sales leaders Erin Harris and Emily Douglas, one major advantage of ePO integration —the ability for you to automatically enter an order through commonsku and it directly inputs into the suppliers ERP, bypassing human intervention–– is about securing inventory first, before any other distributor can. “It’s a true first-in, first-out process,” said Erin. “So this is a huge advantage to distributors who are integrated.”

Erin went on to add that being integrated (the ultimate in speed) could save you, “three to seven emails out of your inbox, a day, per order that needs to be validated, whether that is an order processor or an account manager or a sales rep. That takes a chunk of work away so that you can focus your efforts elsewhere.” 

The lack of speed has downstream effects.

Not being fast enough means not being able to secure inventory for that large order. Not being fast enough means not getting information to clients in a timely manner, thereby jeopardizing the relationship. Not being quick enough means allowing the competition to gain an edge. 

Moreover, the average project today is 10x more complex than a typical order from five years ago: design, kitting, shops, fulfillment, packaging, and client expectations haven’t slowed; they’ve quicked. Every client demands speed and every project requires it.

And since orders are now more complex, there are more team members involved in each project. The speed of your workflow today is more important than ever.

Which is why we obsess about workflow and workflow speed, it’s why we obsess about the average time it takes to create and complete an order. It’s why we create as seamless a solution as possible, to move from project to sales order to shop to DONE in minutes, all completely transparent to every member of the team. Because the rapid response team that values agility and speed, wins. It’s why we created portals so that clients could get their answers in real-time and place reorders without you having to touch anything. It’s why our pop-up shops are setting record sales each month because the speed from “I want a shop” to “I have a shop” is now minutes. 

Speed, as Matthew May once wrote, is the new currency, and it’s the mid-size distributor’s (secret), #1 strength.

Questions for you and your team: 

1. How fast do you respond to customer requests today? 

2. How quick do you and your team process projects from ideation to completion?  Does your workflow (spreadsheets, multiple platforms, email hell) keep you from performing at top speed?

3. How soon from a customer “yes” on an order, do you get to production? 

4. How quick can you pop-up a shop for a client?

5. Is speed considered a critical asset for each member of your team?

6. Where are your slowest response times? Can you spot the sludge in your ordering processes?