Here are links to handy tools to have on-hand when you are doing your electrical market planning.
ELECTRICAL WHOLESALING ARTICLES
It’s Market Planning Time
August 2017 article that helps you find additional resources for your market planning.
2017 Electrical Pyramid
While full-line electrical distributors still probably sell 70% to 75% of all electrical products, all sorts of other channels to market exist. Electrical distributors use Electrical Wholesaling’s Electrical Pyramid to think through all of the sales channels electrical manufacturers use to sell electrical products in local markets, while electrical manufacturers can use the EW Electrical Pyramid to analyze available sales channels to the electrical market.
2017 Top 200
See which companies made this year’s listing of the 200 largest distributors of electrical supplies.
Electrical Wholesaling Market Planning Guide
Electrical Wholesaling’s annual Market Planning Guide has been an industry resource for close to 40 years that shows electrical distributors, manufacturers and independent reps where electrical markets are growing and shows them how to size up local markets.
OTHER INDUSTRY RESOURCES FOR MARKET PLANNING
U.S. Government
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov); the U.S. Department of Census (www.census.gov); and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (www.bea.gov). You can find monthly local market and national indicators for employment, building permits, population, Gross Metropolitan Product (GMP) and value of new construction.
Trade Associations and Company Forecasts
There’s quite a bit of monthly economic data from several key associations and companies. Here are our six favorite stops on the economic data highway:
Purchasing Managers Index – Institute for Supply Management (www.instituteforsupplymanagement.org)
Architecture Billings Index and annual Consensus Construction Forecast – American Institute of Architects (www.aia.org)
Oil rig counts – Baker Hughes Rig Count (Baker Hughes website)
Building permits – The National Association of Home Builders (www.nahb.org) offers MSA and state data in a downloadable Excel file.
U.S. Leading Economic Indicators Index – Conference Board (www.conference-board.org)
Construction activity – Dodge Data & Analytics (www.construction.com)
Electrical Wholesaling - (www.ewweb.com) The magazine’s monthly Electrostats department offers a quick read of more than 20 national indicators; the Market Planning Guide in November can’t be beat; and Herm Isenstein’s outlook articles, usually published twice each year; will get you started. And, of course, www.ewweb.com offers access to much of the magazine’s data content in a fresh, newly designed website.
DISC Corp. - If you don’t have the time to search for all of this data and have a little money in your budget, you may want to consider contacting Chris Sokoll, president of DISC Corp., Houston, TX (www.disccorp.com) about purchasing some of his forecast data. No one takes a deeper dive into the local market data than Chris.