CTPMA has another successful Business Forum – Most attendees since 2006

CTPMA held another successful Business Forum & Tradeshow last month in Colorado Springs. The July event had the largest turnout for a CTPMA Business Forum since 2006. This member gathering provided an opportunity for marketers, vendors and senior Chevron management to network, share key learnings and discuss opportunities for our future. And this is what CTPMA is all about- providing a forum for members with common industry issues to meet and discuss ways to grow their businesses.

The program featured several guest speakers and a Lubricants Townhall meeting covering current topics that impact marketers’ businesses. The meeting began with guest speaker US Air Force Lt. General Michael Gould- 16thSuperintendent of the United States Air Force Academy. General Gould welcomed the Business Forum attendees to Colorado Springs- home of the Air Force Academy and spoke about the mission of the Air Force Academy. General Gould was followed by our motivational keynote speaker former Notre Dame Head Football coach Lou Holtz.

Coach Holtz was fantastic! The audience at the Business Forum absolutely loved him. His presentation was powerful and meaningful with the attendees on the edges of their seats. His message about caring about your employees and customers and Do Right! Were an inspiration to the CTPMA attendees. One of the other thoughts Coach Holtz was key to marketers was , “just like a tree or grass, businesses are either growing or dying…there is no such thing as status quo. He also reminded the audience that WIN stands for “What’s Important right Now”, and that we should embrace change, but not for just the sake of change…we should embrace change that 1) meets the needs of people (in our case that’s primarily customers), and 2) makes a profit.

Mike Casadont’ s presentation on Extra Mile was very informative, the Extra Mile growth program stared with a pilot site in Seattle to a future 1500 locations. There are currently 792 Extra Mile Franchise Stores- with 254 Chevron COCO Franchise Sites and 538 Retail/Marketer Franchise Sites and has been growing by 31 sites for 9 straight years. The motivating factor for marketers to be involved in the program is a high-quality backcourt offering merchandising support.

Following Mike, Chevron Marketing Manager Harry Hazen and Area Business Manager Lee Ann Spinetto, and Ken Harle presented on the subject of Building Value BasedSales and Marketing Organizational Capacity.

According to Harry Hazen Chevron will continue building out the technology and content that allows customers to learn more about Chevron products and services online, and complete as much of the sales process as they chose to…online…and all in a way that features Marketers as their Chevron Lubricants supplier.

Ken Harle described the successes of the Chevron ISOCLEAN® Certified Lubricants program, that is another powerful weapon in the fight against commoditization. It continues to lead the industry in meeting critical OEM lubricant cleanliness specifications, and ISOCLEAN customers are seeing real value in the form of reduced wear, longer equipment life and more operating uptime. With a growth rate of over 400% last year totaling over 4.5 million gallons the results speak for themselves.

The presentation concluded with Lee Ann Spinetto pointing out that Chevron is continuing to expand and improve its RBL and Best in Class Assessment tools, and in building Challenger Sales principles into 1stSource Marketers’ capabilities through the new Accelerator Program. Chevron is confident that its continuously improving RBL and BIC digital tools, combined with Accelerator will keep its partnership with marketers ahead of the competition in differentiating the products and services that both Chevron and marketers deliver to customers.

Tuesday Evening was the CTPMA Presidents Dinner. The Keynote Speaker George Wall, Vice President of Retail East who did a fantastic job and was well accepted by the audience. George used both humor and candor to make his points during his speech which were:

  1. Changes both in the industry and in leadership at Chevron
  2. Leadership
    1. Mike Wirth, new Chairman and CEO, came up through the Downstream business and led Chevron’s downstream organization for many years. Understands the value of the industry and importance of partnership
    2. Industry
    3. consolidation is real and a growing trend in our industry
    4. As the industry focuses on better fuel economy and customer demand, gasoline engines for cars and light trucks are smaller, more powerful, and feature advanced technology
  3. Importance of Innovation, Technology & continued growth
  4. Maintaining our leading fuel quality position is our contribution and commitment to our partnership
  5. Growing the consumer fueling and c-store experience through emerging technologies important
  6. We are the leading premium base oil supplier in the world
  7. The World’s fourth-largest supplier of finished lubricants
  8. Our wholly-owned additives business – Oronite Company – gives us great technology advantages
  9. We market thousands of products globally under our three internationally recognized Brands:  Chevron, Texaco and Caltex
  10. Partnerships
  11. Chevron is a strong and reliable supplier and valued partner, here for the long haul
  12. we are committed to partnership
  13. we are committed to innovation and technology
  14. to infrastructure
  15. and the quality of our fuels and lubricants

 

The following morning the Lubricants Townhall meeting was attended by over 100 Chevron lubricants marketers. A lively and engaging interaction between Chevron panelists Doug Hinzie, Wayne Ederer, and Bob Stolz and CTPMA marketers took place on a range of topics of interest to marketers. The range of topics included issues regarding increased raw material costs, reasoning behind the stoppage of early payment discounts, distribution and supply, product name changes and the continuing competition of ILMA players. We thank Chevron Lubricants for engaging with CTPMA in this dialogue and look forward to a continuation of Lubricant Townhall meetings involving CTPMA in the future as this form of dialogue and communication seems to be much in favor with the marketers.

Following the Townhall, Mike Ruddock then spoke about the electric vehicle revolution that the media is claiming that is overtaking America. According to Mike’s very intriguing presentation he predicts that by 2030 78% of passenger vehicles will remain gasoline vehicles. Only 8% will be electric, 10% Hybrid and 1% Hydrogen. Mike’s presentation stressed that there is an opportunity for marketers to provide charging stations at their retail sites. Mike’s presentation provided great information to CTPMA’s retail marketers and was extremely interesting.

Our Luncheon speaker was Vice President of North American Lubricants Doug Hinzie. As in previous Business Forums Doug had another great speech about the future of the lubricants business. Doug spoke about the following points:

New Chevron Chairman, MikeWirth recently launched a corporate wide Digital Innovation & Acceleration initiative, calling the digital transformation of Chevron a competitive imperative, and appointing a dedicated team to scale the efforts quickly. Lubricants is proud to be a forerunner for this initiative, and we have provided a great deal of knowledge transfer and the organizational capability being used to scale it across the Chevron enterprise.  That’s because our digital strategy — like our primary go-to-market strategy — is based on Lubrication Marketers ‘first’. Everythingwe are doing digitally starts with the question: how do we best enable our LM partnerships for success?

The next trend I’ll highlight, commoditization, has been with us for some time but has been increasingly noticeable in the last couple of years Growth of private label products, lack of enforcement on quality standards and specifications which leads to some competitors cutting corners…sometimes big corners, and web-price transparency are all contributing to this trend. Our strategy is to resist the forces of commoditization by collaborating with Marketers to prioritize our shared resources on high quality, differentiated products and services and the organizational capability to ensure we create meaningful value for our customers.

Marketers represent roughly 90 percent of the people that our shared customers know as “Chevron Lubricants” – and we are committed to enabling that extended team with what is needed to quantify, communicate and deliver the value that our products and services represent. That is why we have been investing along with our Marketers in building Value Based Selling skills in our collective sales force.

And we are committed to building an industry leading transportation information management system.

To shorten the shipping lanes and improve lead times and reliability for the North-Central and North Eastern markets of North America, we are establishing a new packaged product warehouse in the Ohio Valley which will be in operation by early next year. We are also making multiple investments in expanding our rail transport capacity and suggest our marketers do the same. Rail isn’t realistic for all of our transportation needs, but we expect it to become an increasingly valuable supplement to trucking where it is practical.

The final presentation at the CTPMA Forum was Betsi Bixby who did an outstanding presentation of how culture is important within companies and what that means to today’s workforce.  Her insights into this issue lead many marketers to realize just how important this issue is to their businesses and to their bottom lines.  Betsi is one of the leading experts in petroleum marketer performance in the industry.

We are very grateful to Chevron for their outstanding support and participation at this year’s Business Forum. We’re also very appreciate of those Associate Members who helped sponsor the conference and those who exhibited in the Tradeshow. This convention continues to grow as evidenced by the best turnout and attendance since 2006, and we look forward to an even more successful event in 2020. I hope that you will plan to join your fellow marketers at the next CTPMA Business Forum.