Wholesale distributors have invested heavily in CRM systems, analytics, and digital tools. The sales gaps from 2023 are still there in 2026.
That is the central finding of Distribution Strategy Group’s State of Distributor Sales and CRM 2026, which brings together two bodies of research: Objective Management Group sales competency benchmarks — covering more than 12,500 salespeople across 12 organizations over 16 years — and DSG’s 2026 State of Distributor CRM and Sales survey. Together, they reveal an industry that has improved much of the machinery surrounding the salesperson while making far less progress improving how the salesperson actually sells.
The benchmark data is specific. Distributor salespeople trail peers across all industries in five competencies that matter most to growth: hunting for new business (60% vs. 72%), reaching decision-makers (44% vs. 52%), relationship building (45% vs. 52%), consultative selling (43% vs. 54%), and selling value (40% vs. 52%). The gaps are not explained by attitude or willingness to change — coachability scores for distribution sellers are essentially at parity with the broader benchmark. The problem is skill, which means it is solvable. But three years of persistent gaps make clear that awareness and training investment alone are not closing them.
The CRM findings tell a parallel story. Adoption is improving — 48% of distributors now deploy and reach adoption within a year — and ERP integration, the strongest predictor of CRM satisfaction, is at 57%. Yet data quality remains uneven: only 16% of respondents rate contact information as excellent, and only 26% rate transaction history that way. A CRM cannot manufacture the relationship context that only better selling behavior can produce.
The report maps the five core sales gaps to five practical frameworks — including the POSE Value Story for prospecting, relationship mapping for decision-maker access, and the COINOP discovery model — and details the management system required to make skill development stick: distinguishing training from coaching, building in practice, and using rolling reviews to inspect whether new behaviors are appearing in the field.
Download this report to benchmark your sales organization against three years of distribution-specific data, understand where the gaps are most damaging, and build a commercial operating discipline to close them.