What a distributor actually has in hand
The registered base is long. The active base is short. Most accounts bought once, bought a single line and were never contacted again with a reason to buy the second one.
On top of that comes a condition that a manufacturer does not have: the portfolio belongs to several represented brands, each with its own target, its own commercial calendar and its own margin. What is a priority for one line is noise for another.
The result is a routine of reacting to whoever calls. The customer who calls gets served. The customer who stopped calling disappears without anyone deciding that he could disappear.
The service does not start by promising new customers. It starts by turning the base you already have into decisions with an owner and a deadline, one monthly cycle at a time.
The information exists, it is just not in one place
The order is in the ERP. The reason it was not closed is in the salesperson's head. The quote is in an email attachment. The stock position of the line is in the brand portal. Coverage per region is in a spreadsheet that only one person updates.
Nothing there is wrong. It is only scattered, and scattered data produces meetings of opinion instead of meetings of decision.
That is why every contract begins with Stage 0, three weeks before any mechanism: proof of extraction, meaning what the ERP really delivers, and a signed commercial baseline with active accounts, inactive accounts, average frequency, recency and how many quotes became orders.
If the extraction turns out to be more limited than expected, the analysis scope is adjusted by mutual agreement before moving on. Prebound™ is the method that keeps this context organized cycle after cycle, so nobody rebuilds the same spreadsheet every month.
Five questions, and the decision each one requires
They are five different questions with the same answer: nobody, in a systematic way. In distribution, each of them has a specific shape.
Marketing generates interest. Who decides today whether that account goes to nurturing or to the salesperson's phone? Decision to make: a routing rule by line and by region. An account that already buys one line and asks about another goes straight to the regional salesperson. An account with no purchase history enters nurturing for the line it asked about. One named owner per region, and a stated deadline for the first contact.
Who tracks whether it was opened, whether it became an order, and what to do when it does not? Decision to make: a follow-up window by value bracket, who registers the reason for each loss and which reasons are accepted as a closed list, such as price, delivery time, availability at the represented brand or technical specification. Without a closed list of reasons there is no way to tell a pricing problem from a supply problem.
Who notices, and how long does it take? Decision to make: define the expected purchase frequency by customer profile and by line, since a maintenance shop and a machine builder do not buy on the same rhythm. Then define who receives the list of accounts outside their frequency, whether the first move is a call or a quote, and by when. Frequency turns silence into a signal that someone has to answer.
Who identifies it and who activates it? Decision to make: for each represented brand, list the accounts that already buy an adjacent line and have never received an offer for the neighbouring one. Then decide who presents it, whether the approach goes through the salesperson or through a campaign, and which commercial material needs to exist first, since offering a line without a technical sheet, price and delivery time only burns the visit.
Was the problem marketing, sales, logistics or price? Decision to make: bring management, sales and operations to the same table, separate the cause and state whether it is worth recovering the account. Some losses come from the represented brand and not from the distributor, and that changes who has the conversation. Whatever is decided gets an owner, a next step and a date to be reviewed in the following cycle.
If three of these five questions have no answer today, the problem is already installed. The decisions above are what a cycle produces, and they are reviewed every month against what actually happened.
Where these decisions get made
Every month, management, marketing and sales meet in a Smarketing Meeting. The agenda is short: review the previous decisions and what they produced, read the data from the business itself, decide on the boundary questions and define the owner and the next step for each one.
Between meetings, the cycle runs: see, understand, decide, act, measure, correct. What improves, in this order, is acquisition, conversion, recurrence and expansion. For a distributor, recurrence and expansion tend to come first, because they live inside a base that is already registered.
The step by step of each phase, plus what the company needs to deliver in Stage 0, is on the page How It Works. The full scope of the service, the plans and what varies between them is on the service overview.
Fit, and lack of fit
- Distributors with a registered base much larger than the base that buys in a year.
- Operations with several represented brands, where mix per account is low and nobody owns the offer of the adjacent line.
- Companies willing to extract data from the ERP and sign a commercial baseline before anything else.
- Anyone looking for isolated actions, with no recurring decision cycle.
- Anyone unwilling to bring management, marketing and sales to the same table every month.
One warning worth stating before signing: a cycle that works increases the number of qualified opportunities reaching the sales team. If the team is already at its limit, the bottleneck simply moves. Deciding how to reorganize the team is the company's call, and it needs to be on the table from the first meeting.
Start with your own base
Tell us how many accounts are registered, how many bought in the last twelve months and which lines you represent. That is enough to size the first cycle.
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