Most distributors already know their sales coverage isn’t working. It’s been discussed in sales meetings and conferences for years — usually right before everyone goes back to doing the same thing.
So, if they know, why haven’t they changed it? In many cases, the problem isn’t quite painful enough to force a different approach.
It’s just like the old story of a hound dog lying on a porch, whining. A neighbor asks what’s wrong. The owner says, “He’s lying on a nail.”
The neighbor looks puzzled. “Why doesn’t he get up?”
The owner thinks for a moment. “Doesn’t hurt enough yet.”
That’s where many sales teams are.
Reps are over-concentrated on the same top accounts. Remote tools that briefly expanded their reach during the pandemic have been abandoned by many. Some, but not enough, distributors have grown their inside teams to touch more customers more frequently.
The coverage model is still too narrow to capture competitors’ Critical Selling Events (CSEs), a disruption outside the rep’s control that makes a customer look for an alternative.
That matters more than most distributors realize. 90% of customers don’t change suppliers each year. The remaining share—the small percentage of business that moves—is always tied to a disruption.
Which means growth doesn’t come from calling on the same loyal accounts more often. It comes from being there when something changes. And most distributors, as they’re currently structured, aren’t.
The Comfortable Route
Field sales in distribution have always been self-directed. Reps decide where they go, who they see and how they spend their time. Over years, this freedom settles into predictable patterns, familiar faces, and reliable rhythms.
This is route mentality. And it works until it starts limiting what you can see. The same accounts get the most attention, not because they always need it, but because they are responsive, good for a fun conversation and unlikely to make the day difficult.
The pandemic broke that pattern. Reps who couldn’t make in-person visits adapted quickly. Remote engagement turned out to be surprisingly effective at expanding coverage. Reps were reaching more accounts, more often, with less windshield time. It wasn’t the plan, but it worked.
Then travel returned, and so did the routes, as if the past two years had been a temporary inconvenience rather than a working experiment.
In our research conducted with the Heating, Air Conditioning, & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI), more than half of distributors reported little to no focus on remote engagement after the pandemic ended. The tools were still there, but the habits had fallen away.
Why Nothing Changes
The gap between knowing and changing has structural causes.
Commission-based compensation is one of them. When a handful of top accounts represent a sizable portion of a rep’s income, protecting those relationships is a financial necessity. Time spent broadening coverage on accounts that don’t currently generate commission feels risky because it doesn’t directly pay the bills.
Sales management is another. Most sales managers came up as closers. They know how to win a deal. They’re less practiced at coaching reps on how to allocate time across a territory, or how to think probabilistically about where growth is most likely to emerge. Pipeline reviews tend to focus on specific opportunities, not on whether time is being invested in the right places across the full account base.
And then there’s the planning gap. In our research, fewer than 1 in 3 distributors reported doing any structured call budgeting — deciding in advance how selling time will be distributed across accounts. Most are logging into what already happened, not planning where time should go next. Useful for accountability, but it doesn’t change behavior.
What Moves Share
The deeper issue is a set of assumptions about how growth happens, and the data consistently challenges. Deliberate persuasion — a rep convincing a customer to switch suppliers — accounts for only about 2% of spend changes in any given year. Most share shifts come from something else: disruption events that cause customers to reconsider their options, not because a rep sold them on it, but because something happened. A supplier failed them. A key contact left. A new requirement forced a reassessment.
These moments are not predictable. They’re distributed across the customer base throughout the year. The best distributor positioned to capture them isn’t necessarily the one with the best pitch. It’s the one whose rep is already in the customer’s awareness when the moment arrives.
That’s a coverage problem. And coverage is a time allocation problem. The market’s share-shifting moments don’t wait for a rep to show up after months of absence. They resolve quickly, often within days, with whoever happens to be top of mind.
Getting Off the Nail
A few concrete shifts move the needle without a full organizational overhaul:
- Helping reps budget their selling time in advance across their full account base, not just their top accounts.
- Using remote touchpoints deliberately for mid-tier accounts, rather than treating in-person visits as the only legitimate engagement
- Building a management cadence on how time is being distributed across the market, not just what deals are in the pipeline.
- Revisiting compensation structures that inadvertently punish broad coverage by tying income entirely to the largest existing accounts
The distributors who move first on this won’t see the results in next quarter’s report. Market share in a mature industry shifts slowly. The effects grow over years, not months.
That’s partly why the nail doesn’t hurt enough — the cost of inaction is real but deferred, while the discomfort of change is immediate. But the nail is there. And it’s not getting more comfortable.
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