Use a Specialist to Do a Specialized Job

The root cause of most failures in sales and distribution management is the failure to recognize the specialized nature of these organizations. The solution is simple in concept but requires discipline in practice: use a specialist to do a specialized job.

This means that before a product is launched or a market is attacked, the company must ask:

1. What specialized skills does the sales and distribution channel require to be successful with this product in this market?
2. Does our current channel possess these skills?
3. If not, can we afford the massive investment in time and money required to retrain them? (See Redirecting a Sales Channel is Expensive and Time-Consuming)
4. Or do we need to build or find an entirely new channel that already has the required specialization?

By asking these questions upfront, a company can avoid the most common and costly mistakes:

• Using the wrong channel for the job.
• Spending too much money to distribute a product.
• Losing sales and wasting the careers of specialists who are asked to do the wrong job.

The goal is to design programs that make sales and distribution channels experts at selling specific products to targeted market segments. This requires a deliberate matching of the specialist channel to the specialized job.