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While attendees at last week’s online annual conference staged by the National Electrical Manufacturers Representatives Association (NEMRA), Carmel, IN, missed the networking opportunities and face-to-face interaction the NEMRA annual always provides, the association’s virtual 2021 conference showcased the potential of online educational sessions.
At the event, which attracted more than 1,300 registrants, NEMRA broadcast dozens of educational sessions, and offered its rep and manufacturer members a virtual platform for hundreds of online one-on-one and group meetings. Attendees were looking forward to next year’s live event in Dallas, Feb. 2-5, 2022, but the educational program that NEMRA provided at this year’s virtual conference was without a doubt more ambitious than anything the association had attempted in the past and was more robust than other virtual educational sessions staged to date by any other electrical industry association, with the possible exception of last fall’s NECA conference.
For the first time at any live or virtual event, NEMRA educational sessions brought together senior executives from five of North America’s largest electrical distributors — Consolidated Electrical Distributors (CED); City Electric Supply (CES); Graybar; Rexel; and WESCO/Anixter to offer independent manufacturers’ reps and electrical manufacturers tips on doing business with their firms. One common thread running through all of the distributor sessions, moderated by David Gordon, president, Channel Marketing Group, Raleigh, NC, was the need for reps and manufacturers to make appointments for sales calls at the branches because of the new COVID-19 reality.
The presenters also all provided solid corporate overviews and many provided local contact information for the reps and manufacturers. WESCO offered a status report on the integration of the Anixter acquisition and its new corporate structure for what will be a $17.2 billion enterprise — the largest electrical distributor in North America.
Graybar’s Kathy Mazzarella, CEO and president, and Bill Mansfield, senior vice president of sales and marketing, said they expect it might take until 2022 before the industry sees “some sense of normalcy.” They also updated the audience on the company’s continued investment in new technology, including what sounded like a very interesting project that would digitally link the company directly to the take-off process at electrical contractors.
Andrew Dawes and John Gray, co-COOs of City Electric Supply, Dallas, said one of the biggest differentiators in their company is its culture of promoting from within and the autonomy of local branches. Each branch has decision makers who can decide what products the branch stocks or sells or the general direction of the business, said Dawes in the presentation. Rather than increase the size of individual branches, City Electric will open a new branch of approximately the same size to serve the new area. The CES executives also mentioned that CES has plans to open 30 new locations in 2021.
Also on the program were executives from the Affiliated Distributors and IMARK buying/marketing groups, the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) and the Independent Electrical Contractors (IEC), DISC Corp., Legrand, Sonepar, StrategicX Marketing, SPARXIQ, Trade Tech, Trinet and SFBBG.
Chris Sokoll of DISC Corp., Houston, gave conference attendees a feel for 2021 business conditions in the electrical market. Despite a tough 2020 economically due to the pandemic, he predicts new opportunities and growth in renewables like wind and solar, as the government looks to ban drilling in public lands and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. In regards to recovery from the pandemic, Sokoll seemed cautiously optimistic. “It’s going to be a rough go in the first quarter,” he said. “But second quarter, we’ll see a good pickup in pent-up demand. We’ll carry that through back to kind of normal growth over the next couple of years.”
NEMRA also used the 2021 virtual conference as an opportunity to honor some of its rep and manufacturer members with its annual NEMMY Awards. Legrand won the 2020 Rep’s Choice award for electrical manufacturers, Ewing-Foley Inc., got the 2020 Manufacturer’s Choice Award and Electra Sales and Intermatic took home the 2020 Partnership of the Year.