
Experienced distributors know that customer relationship management (CRM) has become a standard practice. By following the sage advice offered by CRM-experienced wholesaler-distributors in Getting the Most Out of CRM: Best Practices for Wholesaler-Distributors, you will avoid common mistakes, overcome predictable challenges, minimize frustration and disruption, and achieve more targeted benefits and faster business results. This book provides a soup-to-nuts planning framework, best practices from leading distributors and ready-to-implement management tools for engaging your leaders and salespeople.
CRM can help distributors because CRM fills a void. Automation tools are common in all other aspects of running a distributor’s business, but they are sorely lacking in the sales organization. When aligned with an effective strategy and deployed with thorough planning, CRM will deliver data-driven business results. Increasingly, CRM is becoming necessary to stay competitive and improve profits. In the long run, CRM will be instrumental for distributors to survive and thrive in today’s economic environment.
April Michelle Davis worked with the author to copyedit the manuscript and prepare it for publication.


An Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (a class of knighthood), Tremain spent the 17 years before 1989 running Boston’s historic Copley Plaza Hotel. He used his international contacts and social and business acumen to turn the Copley from a faltering property into a lucrative draw for the prosperous and photogenic. Tremain became a celebrity. He had a television show called Words and Music and interviewed many famous people including Luciano Pavarotti, Sebastian Cabot, Peter Falk, Elizabeth Taylor, and Thornton Wilder. His Cannes townhouse on the French Riviera even appeared on television’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. In October 2009, Tremain hosted a television show on WXEL in the Palm Beaches titled Meet the Chef. Harking back to the interview with the Serendipity Editor of the Palm Beach Society Magazine, Tremain said, “And a final answer to a question which you haven’t asked. What would I still like to do? I would like to publish a book called