2014 Top 50 Distributors: The Interviews
PM: What's one trait of your company that you think has made it such a success, and why do you think it's had such an impact?
MS: HALO began with the most elementary question in Marketing 101-Who is your customer? For HALO, the answer was clear. Our customer is the account executive servicing her or his end-user customers. HALO has reason to exist only if it is adding value to these customers. And we do so in many ways. We serve as their bank, with as deep and liquid a capital structure as any company in the industry. We provide efficient, responsive and effective order management, processing orders quickly and accurately. Our scale gives us sourcing advantages that we share with our account executives, both in special pricing from 400 suppliers and in rebates from more than 60 suppliers. We have the full gamut of marketing tools and sales training tools to help our account executives more nearly maximize their potential. As a result, the interests of HALO and its account executives are fully aligned, all the way down to the customer service representative on the front line-we all know who our customer is and why we are here.