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Blog · Industry

Industrial distributors: guides and articles

Which accounts buy one category from you and five from a competitor. Which branch has a hundred dormant accounts worth reactivating. Which outside rep is covering forty accounts and calling on twelve. From the ERP export you already have.

Wallet share and penetration · Industrial distributors

Category penetration and dormant accounts by branch for industrial distributors

How an industrial, MRO or building products distributor measures category penetration per account and finds dormant accounts per branch from the ERP's invoiced sales: the norm from your own accounts, the valued gap, the dormancy window, and the roll-up that reconciles to invoiced sales.

16 Sept 20264 min read
Coverage and territory · Industrial distributors

Counter sales without an account: the walk-in customers worth a trade account

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.

16 Sept 20262 min read
Coverage and territory · Industrial distributors

Lost lines: the orders a stock-out turned away, by branch and by account

How an industrial distributor measures the order lines it could not fill from the order and fulfilment exports: cancelled, substituted and short-shipped lines per branch and per account, the value at the line's price, the items that recur, and the accounts whose order frequency fell after a run of lost lines, so that the stock decision is made on what was lost rather than what was sold.

16 Sept 20262 min read
Coverage and territory · Industrial distributors

The reactivation list: dormant accounts ranked by what they used to buy

How a distributor's inside sales team builds a weekly reactivation list from invoiced sales: the dormancy rule that combines a global window with each account's own rhythm, the past-value ranking, the reasons that move an account to a watch list instead, and the branch roll-up that shows how much revenue went quiet.

16 Sept 20263 min read
Alternatives and comparisons · Industrial distributors

How to choose analytics software for industrial distributors: questions, data and traps

How to choose analytics software for Industrial distributors: the questions, the data, ten vendor questions and the traps.

24 Sept 20264 min read
Coverage and territory · Industrial distributors

Lost lines on ten order lines: the whole arithmetic on one page

The complete lost-line calculation on ten order lines from three accounts at one branch, small enough to check by hand: the order and fulfilment exports joined on order and line, each line's state, shipped in full, short, cancelled for stock, or substituted, lost value at the line's price, lost rate per account, the item that recurs, the account whose order frequency fell after the run, and the assertion that every line is in exactly one state, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own exports.

17 Sept 20263 min read
Board and management reporting · Industrial distributors

Sales KPIs for industrial distributors: ten measures that matter, each with its formula and the export it comes from

The ten sales KPIs an industrial or MRO distributor should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: category penetration by branch, dormant accounts by prior value, quote conversion by count and value, lost lines from stock-outs, counter sales without an account, account coverage at cadence, price realisation against contract, share of spend at key sites, reactivation rate, and contribution per customer. Also the three measures most industrial distributors miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.

17 Sept 20264 min read
Forecast and pipeline · Industrial distributors

What is a good quote conversion rate? The answer depends on three things you can measure

The honest answer to what share of quotes should turn into orders: the 25 to 50 percent figures quoted for distributors and manufacturers depend on how quotes are joined to orders, on whether conversion is by count or by value, and on the customer mix, because some customers quote everything three ways and some only quote what they intend to buy. This page gives the ranges by desk, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one business, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.

17 Sept 20263 min read
Covirage for Industrial distributors

Account penetration analytics for industrial distributors.

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