Blog · Coverage and territory · Industrial distributors
How an industrial distributor or trade supplier finds the repeat cash and card customers at the counter who have no trade account, from the point-of-sale export: repeat visits matched on card token or phone, spend per month, the items they buy against what account customers of that size buy, the value of converting them, and the branch list that turns a cash customer into a covered account.
A branch has a customer who comes in three mornings a week, spends two thousand a month, pays by card and has no account. No rep knows the name, no report counts the spend as a customer, and the competitor across town would open an account for him tomorrow. The point-of-sale export has him. This guide sets out repeat counter customers without accounts, their value at the account norm, and the branch list.
Per counter identity, per month:
Visits, spend, categories bought, from transactions grouped on card token or phone Repeat if visits ≥ a stated number per month for a stated number of months Account norm = categories and delivery share among account customers in the same spend band Value at norm = (norm categories − categories) × median category spend in the band
Tokens and account identifiers only.
counter revenue = account counter transactions + identified walk-in + unidentified walk-in
Every counter transaction in one class. The unidentified share is reported; a branch where it is high has a point-of-sale process gap, and the list for that branch is smaller than it should be.
| Identity | Visits/month | Spend/month | Categories | Norm categories in band | Value at norm/month | Months repeating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-2207 | 12 | $2,100 | 2 | 5 | $1,900 | 9 |
| T-4471 | 6 | $1,400 | 3 | 5 | $800 | 14 |
| T-9034 | 4 | $600 | 1 | 4 | $700 | 5 |
Three walk-in customers, each here for most of a year, spending four thousand a month between them and, at the account norm for their bands, worth another three. The branch manager's list is those three, and the conversation is next Tuesday morning when T-2207 comes in.
Per branch: repeat walk-in customers, their spend, value at norm, and the unidentified share. A branch with sixty repeat walk-ins and twenty thousand dollars a month of uncovered spend has a conversion campaign with a number on it.
Counter sales treated as noise. The largest uncovered customers are in it.
No token or phone captured. Nothing groups. Fix the point-of-sale process.
Value at norm read as forecast. It is what similar accounts buy, labelled as an estimate.
Converted customers not re-keyed. The new account and the old token are two customers until the mapping is made.
Mapped once, the point-of-sale export and the account master produce the repeat walk-in list, the value at norm and the unidentified share per branch every month. Covirage builds this from the exports as they are. The industrial distributors page describes the setup, and the category penetration guide covers what happens to a converted customer once it has an identifier.
A tokenised card reference or a hashed phone number is pseudonymised, and the branch never sees the card. The report works on the token; the conversion conversation happens at the counter when the customer is next in, where the person is already known by sight.
An account is covered: it has a rep, a price agreement, a delivery option and a place on the gap list. A cash customer spending two thousand a month at the counter is a real customer that no report has ever named, and every measure on this site excludes it until it has an identifier.
Account customers in the same monthly spend band buy a stated number of categories and a stated share on delivery. The walk-in customer at two categories and no delivery is measured against that, and the gap is what an account typically adds. It is an estimate, labelled.