Last month we released our Q1 Pulse of Industrial Supply survey results to respondents. This industry-wide researched, sponsored by William Blair, is conducted by Channel Marketing Group. Respondents are industrial supply distributors, manufacturers, and manufacturer representatives focused in the industrial supply channel. By soliciting input from each segment of the channel, we’re able to triangulate results, providing deeper, and corroborated, insights.

The benefit of this research is that it provides each channel member a barometer to measure their performance, and as a gauge to measure publicly held companies’ performance versus the broader market.

2026 Q1 Pulse of Industrial Supply Highlights

Key insights from the 2026 Q1 Pulse of Industrial Supply report includes:

• Distributors reported sales slightly exceeding 9%, exceeding a projected 6% and up significantly from Q4 with price appreciation representing 2.5% of this “growth.”
  • The report does have some sales guidance for 12 product categories.
• Manufacturers, at the same time, reported being up almost 8% and shared that they benefited from about a 5% price increase.
• Manufacturer reps reported sales approaching 9% and that pricing was up about 4% from their lines.

Additional insights

• When asked about their digital business, only 11.5% of industry sales were generated digitally with 80% of respondents starting that it is less than 10% of their business and 20% reporting that it is more than 25% of their business. This dichotomy is most likely due to the type / size of the customer that a distributor serves as well as the size of the distributor. Large distributors are more likely to serve larger customers who utilize eProcurement solutions (punchouts) and/or require vendor managed solutions, inclusive of vending machines. The quality of product content data quality is also a limiting factor for many distributors as it can be cost prohibitive to generate, albeit it is attainable from sources such as Distributor Data Solutions and AD (if a distributor is a member).
• 40% of distributors reported that they stocked less material in Q1. This could be due to working down inventory at the end of the year for tax reasons or, perhaps, they made end of year buys to meet rebate objectives. Some may have experienced a slowdown in Q1 due to weather and macroeconomic conditions.
• All audiences expressed some level of concern for Q2 and Q3 due to the war with Iran and the impact of higher fuel costs as well as uncertainty due to tariffs.
• Based upon the above, you can see that the information is comparable, especially given that this is national insights from companies of varied sizes and serving different market segments with different product categories.
• Distributor survey respondents represented in excess of $10 billion in industry sales.
• 58% of respondents were manufacturers, 23% were distributors and 19% were in manufacturer sales or were independent manufacturer representatives.
• Key markets served were industrial manufacturing, industrial safety, metal working and OEMs.

Additionally, NetPlus shared their 2026 membership outlook and the group, with over $600M in COGS and an estimated membership sales base of $2-3 billion, is projecting almost a 6% increase in 2026.

Industrial Supply Channel and AI

We also asked respondents about their involvement with AI. This included whether or not their company had an AI governance policy as well as their adoption of AI for different applications.

There is widespread usage of AI within the channel for various usages with all having some interaction with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, and/or Perplexity. Additionally, about 20% of companies have had experience with tools for pricing, inventory management, order quotation, and HR with more than 50% using AI for some type of analysis.

Note – for those interested in AI, Channel Marketing Group authored a 120-page eBook on AI titled “The AI-Enabled Distributor” which highlights going from pilot to practice, has a process for evaluating providers, and shares information on 30 AI-powered companies that are dedicated to serving distributors. The report is available for only $39 as much of the cost was underwritten by various sponsors. To learn more, click here.

Comparing Pulse of Industrial Supply vs National Chains

It is interesting to see how the above industry results compared to some of the publicly held national chains:

• Fastenal outperformed the average, reporting being up 12.4% YoY
• MSC underperformed, having reported only a 2.9% increase YoY
• Motion reported being up 5% in Q1
• And Grainger reports on May 7^th.

The full report is available by clicking here. The Q2 survey soliciting insights will be launched in mid-June via a posting on Industrial Supply Trends.

The Pulse of Industrial Supply survey is an independent venture and not aligned with any association or marketing group. Results are based upon our survey., which takes 1-3 minutes to complete.

If you have questions, or would like to learn more, please contact me.