Navigating To A Distant Horizon: Vision and Innovation

78% of distributors believe they get trapped in the tyranny of the urgent and don’t focus enough on creating the company’s future.

In this age of disruption – when our markets, customers, and businesses are changing at a faster pace than ever before, it’s critical that leaders throughout distribution break from the tyranny of the urgent to proactively – dare I say, fanatically – commit to a discipline and focus to drive the business forward into the future.

With this 36th episode of Innovate For the Future I’m thrilled to introduce you to the leadership team of Benco Dental, a third generation privately owned full-service distributor of dental supplies, equipment, consulting, and services.

The Benco leadership team has an amazing commitment and discipline to (and I love how they frame this) …  Navigate to a distant horizon.

What we say is you spend a lot of time looking in the rear-view mirror, which is looking at the financial reports and the performance, and you could spend a lot of time looking at what’s going to happen a mile down the road, but we want to make sure we spend just as much time talking about what’s going to happen 5, 10, 15 miles down the road, or several years into the future.

In this episode (the first of a series of five with Benco leadership) managing director Chuck Cohen and VP of marketing Paul Jackson detail the processes they have embedded into their culture and leadership disciplines to put the customer at the center of defining that distant horizon.

This is an amazing conversation that I guarantee you’ll want to bookmark and come back to many times.

In this 37 minute episode we discuss:

• Navigating to a spot on a distant horizon
• The value of beginning every conversation by asking “What does the customer want?”
• One simple (yet needing of commitment) to identify the changing needs of your customers
• Why the executive management team of Benco has the non negotiable expectations of spending at least eight days each in-the-filed traveling with their sales and service organization.
• Enhancing the customer experience to collaborate in solutions design.
• Being the disrupter
• Making a bet on the future?  When you do it and how you do it.
• The power of Domain Expertise (and consequence it has on your sales team)
• Discovering innovative ideas from outside your industry

The Show Notes

• Benco Dental
• CenterPoint – Design, Technology, & Equipment
• The Disneyland For Dentist
• Larry Keeley of Deloitte – UnleashWD Presentation
• INNOVATE! How Successful Distributors Lead Change In Disruptive Times
• Dirk Beveridge Speaking
• UnleashWD Innovation Summit

Other Episodes In The 5 Part Podcast Series

• Episode 2 – Culture: February 15
• Episode 3 – Value Proposition: February 22
• Episode 4 – Business Model Innovation: February 29
• Episode 5 – Transformative Leadership: March 7

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