Sherry Harriman, former senior vice president of logistics and supply chain with Academy Sports + Outdoors, tells how she prefers to be approached by supply chain marketers — and the tactics that don’t work.

With extensive experience as a supply chain professional at both Academy Sports + Outdoors and Walmart, Harriman has been “heavily marketed to.” The two companies were quite different, however, in their stage of development and need for resources. At Walmart, Harriman’s team was often testing innovative technology that wasn’t widely present in the marketplace. Academy’s needs, by contrast, were those of a growing company that didn’t necessarily have to possess cutting-edge technology in order to become more efficient.

Successful supply chain marketers know the difference between those two types of companies, and will adjust their message accordingly. “It’s important that they really understand where the company is,” Harriman says. “Otherwise, it’s ineffective marketing.”

What she doesn’t want, however, is to hear a vague “we can do anything” message from marketers. Often smaller companies don’t have a clear idea of their actual needs. It’s better to approach them with a presentation and demo about an existing product, then talk about how it can be tailored to the needs of the buyer, Harriman says.

As to how marketers can best contact sales prospects, “e-mail is not particularly the best way,” she says. She recalls receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, most of which got deleted. “It’s overwhelming,” she says. “And in the past five years, it’s grown incrementally worse.” 

The way that a marketer can cut through the “noise” with acceptable content is to provide “sound bites of information” that demonstrate the marketer’s knowledge of the targeted industry and specific company. “It becomes more about providing information for the executive or team to digest,” Harriman says. “Then you can pick and choose what fits your strategy.”