In 2006, Susan Levering, Ph.D., partnered with the NAW Distribution Research
& Education Foundation (now known as the Institute for Distribution
Excellence), to survey wholesale distributors about their training practices. Forty-four
market segments, including plumbing and PVF, were represented, with responding
companies ranging in size from $20 million to more than $1 billion in sales. Through
the data that Levering collected, they were hoping to identify a correlation
between training and development (T&D) and a company’s ultimate
profitability.
While the hard data to support a direct connection wasn’t readily available, what
Levering did find were provocative
similarities among some top performing companies as to how they approached the
training and professional development of their employees. In her research,
which included in-depth personal interviews, she noted that wholesaler
distributors usually don’t think about training investments in the same way
they might think about inventory or sales management.