Distributor Drives Over $6M in Annualized Revenue Growth

Data-driven, prescriptive and actionable insights highlighted opportunities to recover margin leakage and grow revenue. This specialized distributor empowered their sales organization with science-driven recommendations that expanded (sometimes doubling!) wallet share in current customers and drove over $6M in annualized revenue growth.

CHALLENGE

Heavy reliance on sales reps’ experience had overlooked indications of customer churn, elongated the learning curve for new sales reps, and limited their overall revenue potential.

Selling on experience and gut instinct had limited this distributor’s reach within each account to the individual abilities of each sales rep and curbed the company’s overall revenue potential. Account-level analysis was performed manually and often too late to make sales teams aware of potential churn risk in their accounts. Furthermore, relying so much on experience in selling had elongated the learning curve for new sales reps. This distributor realized they needed to use a data-driven approach to making existing salespeople more effective and to assist new sales reps in getting up to speed more quickly.

SOLUTION

Specific and actionable recommendations for salespeople delivered directly through their CRM.

Segment-based, scientific logic identifies noteworthy customer purchase behaviors such as declining volumes, erratic buying trends, or gaps in ordering profiles. These opportunities are prioritized and delivered directly to salespeople through their existing CRM workflows in a simple and intuitive fashion that also allows for investigation into the supporting data for the recommendation. Salespeople have the option to accept, reject, or postpone these recommendations allowing them to maintain autonomy and flexibility in their account management.

RESULTS

60% of over 20K recommendations were accepted within the first six months for over $6M in annualized revenue gain.

Salespeople use the science-driven recommendations in their weekly planning to consider best-fit options for customers they will visit and better support their brokers in product recommendations. Strong adoption across the sales organization helped this distributor to realize over $6M in annualized incremental revenue. In several accounts, this distributor was able to double sales; and in at least one documented case, they completely unseated the #1 competitor in their space. Salespeople are also engaging more frequently in the CRM tool as a result of these valuable insights – an unanticipated, but welcomed ancillary benefit.