For savvy electrical distributors, Electrical Wholesaling’s Market Planning Guide is a valuable resource.

For James Rudd, marketing manager for Elliott Electric Supply, which ranked No. 32 on Electrical Wholesaling’s most recent Top 200 listing, the MPG is a market-planning cornerstone.

“One figure that we really get a lot out of is the multiplier for how much product each contractor employee would be purchasing that year,” says Cool. “We look at each of our market areas, figure out how many electricians are in that area, use EW’s multiplier to see what our total potential in that market is, and then we compare it with our actual sales number. We have to stay in contact with our local licensing authority to find out … how many new electricians are out there, so we still have to do a little bit of leg work, but having that multiplier really helps us out.”

“I consider it a very valuable tool,” says Rudd, who’s been with Nacogdoches-Texas-headquartered Elliott Electric for nearly 35 years. The industry veteran utilizes the MPG in many ways.

Rudd uses the MPG’s electrical-contractor multiplier to calculate the sales potential for each of Elliott Electric’s electrical contractor customers. “Sales potential is directly related to the electrical contractor’s number of employees,” says Rudd. “They have to purchase a certain amount of electrical product in order to support the number of employees they have.”

Elliott Electric’s ERP software system, which was developed in house, includes the number of employees for each of its electrical-contractor customers. The distributor obtains the employee numbers by simply asking customers for the information on their credit applications and then inputs the information into the ERP system. When a salesperson gets his or her monthly sales report, the customer’s sales potential is included on the printout.

By using the Product Mix, Rudd compares Elliott Electric’s percentage of sales for specific products with industry averages to see if Elliott Electric’s product sales appear to be in line with those of other distributors in the West South Central region. If a particular product’s sales seem to be on the light side, Rudd might then go to the manufacturer and ask for marketing support to help bolster the line’s sales.

With 68 branch locations in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, Elliott Electric’s geographic market dovetails nicely with the MPG’s West South Central region, one of nine regions for which Electrical Wholesaling provides data on a regional level. The West South Central region is composed of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma.