ID's Top 5 Of The Week

​ID's top items over the past seven days have been a true mixed bag, including a piece written by the CEO of a Big 50 company, a sales best-practices article, and an installment of our 68th Annual Survey of Distributor Operations.

​ID's top items over the past seven days have been a true mixed bag, including a piece written by the CEO of a Big 50 company, a sales best-practices article, and an installment of our 68th Annual Survey of Distributor Operations.

Here's this week's Top 5:

Lawson Products CEO Talks Lean Six Sigma (article): Lawson Products President and CEO Michael DeCata explains how and why implementing Lean Six Sigma was a success at Lawson, and why it's a preferred solution to achieve consistent process improvement.

Amazon Hires 6K Full-Time Workers For Distribution Centers: Amazon is hiring 6,000 full-time workers to staff up across its more than 50 distribution centers in the U.S. The workers will pick, pack and ship products to fulfill customer orders. Currently Amazon has about 50,000 full-time workers at the centers. Amazon has been opening distribution centers across the country in order to speed up delivery times. Its $99 annual Prime membership service comes with free two-day delivery on many items.

The Perfect Combination of Selling Skills (article): Tom Reilly of TomReillyTraining.com discusses how in sales, probing and listening are the perfect diet for salespeople who want to excel in this profession. The good news is that these are skill sets, which means they can be taught and learned.

West Coast Port Contract Ratified As Retailers Urge Change: Dockworkers and port operators on the West Coast last week approved a new five-year contract, which brought an official end to the labor strife that stifled cargo at some of the nation's largest ports earlier this year. “The negotiations for this contract were some of the longest and most difficult in our recent history,” International Longshore and Warehouse Union International President Robert McEllrath said in a statement following the vote, which saw 82 percent of union members approve the contract. The ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association reached a tentative deal in February after months of increasingly bitter negotiations.

The 68th Survey of Distributor Operations: Value Of The Distributor (article): Be it tool repair, product training, or safety seminars, value-added services often are distributors’ bread-and-butter. But just how much of a priority are value-added services across the distributor spectrum? See the data here.

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