COLUMBUS, Ohio – Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) has announced the speaker lineup and agenda for the 2018 Marketing & Sales Focus Conference.

Marketing and sales professionals attending the Marketing & Sales Focus Conference will learn from joint sessions that help them align their strategies and improve synergy between the departments. Attendees will also expand their core skills through concurrent sessions tailored to either marketing or sales. Topics range from leveraging emerging technologies and utilizing various marketing channels to executive sales planning and other sales boosting techniques. 

HARDI members can look forward to participating in the following six sessions:

Mike Marks - "The Evolution Of Field Sales in HVAC/R"

Field sales will be a critical role in this industry long after all of us are gone but the role will be providing different services and abandoning some of the existing ones. This session provides participants with an understanding of the forces in play and also many examples of how distributors are dealing with them. The session will actually go outside HVAC/R to other distribution markets where these changes are already well established.

Joe Ellers - "Creating Your (Unique) Value Proposition"

Customers purchase two things…the product or service that we sell + a (potentially) unseen series of rings of value that surround the product/service. These potential rings are predicated on the needs and desires of everyone that uses the product and they involve the product/service; the manufacturer; the distributor and the salesperson. To be effective, you need a different way of looking at sales. Instead of thinking solely about product features, you really need to look at each separate sales opportunity as a chain—where you forge enough links together to build an unbreakable chain.

Ian Heller - "The 10 Commandments of Distributor Marketing in the Age of Amazon Business"

In this session, Heller will compare how Amazon business does marketing vs. distributors. He will take you on a deep dive to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses distributors have by comparison to the Amazon model. This will also include a list of action items to leverage strengths while either improving weaknesses or minimizing the effects of them.

Dan Horan - "Marketing as an Investment: Why Marketing Leaders Should Be Asking for More Revenue Responsibility"

As marketing leaders, you know the question will inevitably come: “How do I know we are getting a return on our marketing budget?” Instead of deferring to past budgets, Dan Horan, a Senior Associate at Indian River Consulting Group, argues that distribution marketing leaders should be seeking more revenue responsibility, not less. In this interactive session, Dan will draw on IRCG’s years of industry experience to highlight how marketers can take increased responsibility for marketing ROI through smarter KPIs, better customer segmentation, and increased alignment with sales teams. 

John Monoky - "Utilizing the Account Portfolio as the Architecture for your Sales/Service Organization"

All customers are not created equal but all deserve a meaningful definition of value that satisfies the needs of both the customer and the distributor. This session is a pragmatic approach to segment and align your sales and service organization to create value and make money from your key, target, maintenance and why bother customers. It also looks at the requirements to take care of the unique needs of your firm’s strategic accounts.

Robb Zbierski - "The 2-Hour Solution"

Zbierski will take you through the Time Management program/approach he teaches his coaching clients and that he delivers at keynotes and as part of larger Train your Brain For Success workshops. He will teach a proven 7-step process for managing your calendar in a way that lets you run your life instead of your life running you, and move attendees from being reactive with their time and efforts to proactively accomplishing tasks and goals and still having something left “in the tank” at the end of their day.

Publication date: 4/6/2018

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