Eighty-nine percent of customers don’t change suppliers in any given year, according to research we did with a distributor association. They buy what they’ve always bought, from who they’ve always used.
When they do move their business, it’s rarely because a competitor “sold better.” Customers are more than four times as likely to switch due to a “Critical Selling Event” (CSE), a disruption outside the rep’s control, than from competitive pressure. This could be a backorder, service failure or a product line change — anything that makes a customer look for an alternative.
Growth depends on one thing: seeing disruption when it happens across your account base, and being positioned to act. Most distributors aren’t set up for that.
The Coverage Gap
Most distributor sales teams are structured to maintain relationships with a small number of already-loyal customers.
A recent analysis across multiple distributor sales organizations found that the average field rep makes about four customer visits per day. Roughly 40% of those visits go to less than 2% of accounts — usually the largest, most established customers. When you calculate revenue per sales call, those over-visited top accounts usually deliver the smallest return.
Meanwhile, a meaningful share of assigned accounts – in some cases, above 10% – are never called on. When you include house or unassigned accounts, nobody is paying attention to well over half of a distributor’s customers. They exist in the CRM. But no one is watching them for CSEs. That’s a blind spot.
The Pandemic Proved It
During COVID, reps were forced to sell remotely. In doing so, many expanded their coverage: touching more accounts, more frequently, than their in-person routes had ever allowed. Many distributors saw results hold steady or even improve.
When restrictions lifted, most of those gains disappeared. Most teams reverted to 2019 behavior: same routes, same stops, same handful of customers. Our research shows that most field reps focus mostly on face-to-face selling, with no focus on remote.
Remote Selling as a Coverage Strategy, Not a Compromise
Customers are now more comfortable with remote contact for routine touchpoints. A 20-minute Zoom call for a seasonal check-in or a heads-up on an inventory situation works fine. In-person matters when there’s something complex to resolve, a new relationship to build or a job site to walk.
The distributor that adds remote touches increases frequency, and frequency is what makes CSE detection possible. A rep who adds monthly remote check-ins in between in-person visits is far more likely to be there when something changes. (It also increases the chance they catch their company’s CSEs, to keep a customer from looking elsewhere.)
Private equity-backed distributors figured this out years ago. One of the first moves after an acquisition: scrape the accounts that field reps never call on, hand them to proactive inside or hybrid reps with a regular contact cadence, and watch the growth on those accounts spike. They’ve been ignored for years. When someone starts paying attention, they respond.
The Fix: A Sales Structure Built for Coverage
Distributors who have solved the coverage gap have added specialized roles that match the right resource to the right account. That frees field sales reps to focus on complex, competitive and high-impact opportunities while ensuring no account goes unwatched.
| Role | Focus | Account Capacity |
| Traditional Field Rep | In-person visits, building relationships | 50 accounts |
| Hybrid Rep | Quarterly in-person and remote | 200-250 accounts |
| Inside Sales Rep | Remote touches, outbound calls | 240+ accounts |
| Concierge/VIP Rep | Dedicated service to top accounts | 12-20 premium accounts |
A structure like this ensures the entire account base has coverage, and that CSEs don’t go undetected simply because no one was paying attention.
None of This Works Without Management
These kinds of structural changes don’t stick without active management. Field sales reps have always been largely self-directed. They decide each morning which direction to drive. Without a manager who reviews account assignments, call cadence and time allocation regularly, reps default to comfort.
We did research years ago with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors on what drives market share among distributors. The surprising answer? Whether the sales manager had regular, structured conversations with each rep about where they were spending their time and why — not just reviewing numbers at month-end, but building a plan and holding people to it.
That practice remains largely absent. Call budgeting – strategically allocating a rep’s finite customer interactions across the full account base by growth potential rather than familiarity – is among the least-adopted practices in the industry, despite being arguably the most important for CSE coverage.
Five Steps to a Sales Structure that Actually Works
- Audit where your reps are spending their time. Map call frequency against revenue and calculate return per sales call by account. The pattern – over-investment in a small number of large accounts, chronic under-coverage of everyone else – is almost universal once you look.
- Add one new role before trying to fix the existing ones. The fastest path to better coverage is usually a hybrid or proactive inside rep who can take on the accounts field reps aren’t calling on anyway. Those ignored accounts represent real, undetected CSE opportunity.
- Build remote touches into the process as strategy, not workaround. Identify accounts that could shift from monthly in-person to quarterly in-person with monthly remote check-ins. Run a pilot and measure outcomes. The capacity gain for field reps is significant.
- Implement call budgeting as a management discipline. A field rep has roughly 1,000 customer interactions per year. Treat each one as an investment. Allocate by growth potential and CSE probability. Pair it with monthly manager reviews to make it stick.
- Redesign the outside rep role around market-making, not service. If field reps are spending a quarter of their week on reactive service calls, that’s a structural problem. Offload service functions to inside or concierge roles and redirect that capacity toward the competitive accounts where CSEs are most likely to occur.
The distributors who went back to their routes after COVID are not standing still. They’re falling behind in a market where customer loyalty is no longer something you can count on and where the first distributor to show up for a CSE usually wins it. The structure of your sales team is a strategic decision. It’s time to make it deliberately.
Mike Emerson is the managing partner of Indian River Consulting Group.
This column originally appeared as part of the 2026 Guide to the Modern Sales Organization in the March/April issue of Industrial Distribution magazine. Sign up here to subscribe to ID’s Today in Industrial Distribution daily newsletter.
