Ian Heller is Founder & Senior Partner at Distribution Strategy Group, and has more than 30 years of experience executing marketing and e-business strategy in the wholesale distribution industry. He has written and spoken extensively on the impact of digital disruption on distributors.

Jonathan Bein, Ph.D. has worked with many distributors to make their marketing a profit center. He has developed and applied analytic approaches for customer segmentation, customer lifecycle management, positioning and messaging, pricing, and channel strategy for distributors.

Frank Hurtte

Founding Partner, River Heights Consulting

Frank Hurtte, Founding Partner of River Heights Consulting brings 28 years of distribution industry experience and a lifetime of sales background.  Frank grew up in a family owned business where he was selling car and truck tires wholesale before he turned 14.  During his career, Hurtte has gone through nearly every aspect of the wholes business.  He served as manager of a rapidly growing start-up location ran a cluster of branches where he worked to develop future leaders and was called on to build a winning team after the merger of two companies with dissimilar cultures.  Frank successfully established sale strategies in emerging markets and coordinated the efforts of a diverse group of distributor specialists to establish a corporate-wide blueprint for success.  In his role as VP Technical Sales, Frank developed and implemented a model for tracking and measuring the “value-adds” provided to customers and pivoting the company to a fee-based services model.