On my first week on the job as a distributor 25 years ago, that quote that Dick Schmid told me at Crescent Electric Supply stuck with me.
From 2000 to 2025 a lot has changed in the distribution channel – smart phones, instant access to data, end customers who want self-service tools and full-service support, and many other changes (with AI being another fundamental and impactful change).
What is fundamental is that you have to serve your customers, give them the support they want, and deliver the products where and when they need them.
To make that pick ticket print…. you need sales. Your largest accounts need full-service attention from your Account Managers
*Channel Marketing Group Research and Analysis Slide presented by John Gunderson at MDM Shift 2025.
At Channel Marketing Group we are fortunate to work with distributors in the both the B2B Construction and Industrial Distribution Channels, and the above chart is on average how sales on average across those channels. It is not an 80/20 business; it is closer to a 90/10 business.
For B2B Distributors in the C&I channel, close to 90% of sales (88%) come from 10% of customers, and those 10% are almost always served by an account manager/salesperson and other sales support teams (Application Engineers, Inside Sales, Specialized, etc.)
Your front-line sales team is calling on your top customers every day to earn business and make those pick tickets print in the warehouse.
There have been many advances in technology to arm your sales team with better data and tools to make better sales calls that result in more business.
The next big breakthrough for Sales is here – AI
Distributors often have millions of SKUs (e.g. MSC Industrial reports publicly that they have 2.4 million SKUs they sell) that they sell to thousands (for larger distributors that is 100’s of thousands) of end customers. They have to gather data from their ERP and other platforms to create forecasts, sales reports, what a customer is buying, what should they buy, and much more.
If you can put the right information in the hands of the sales team accurately and with speed you will be in a position to grow sales effectively.
“It’s all about time – time for Account Managers to identify insights, and then proactively reach out to top customers, and follow-up with them.”
While nearly 90% of the business comes from about 10% of the customers, the time being allocated to each segment doesn’t necessarily reflect that. What happens is more like 50% of the representatives time is spent with the top 10, and 50% of their time with the smaller customers who do not have the sales volume to grow.
AI tools like Canals can help shift some of that time/effort to better align with the business split with automation. Much of the time a distributor sales team spends servicing the smaller accounts is just manual order entry, answering questions about order status, and service-related questions. If a lot of that work can be automated, they’ll have more time to give that full-service attention to your largest accounts
Where the breakthroughs happen with AI is the ability to take that data and provide insights to the salespeople in real-time.
A quote that I think that summed up that opportunity, and caught my eye was from a conversation I had with Michael Delgado from Canals AI.
“As a salesperson you need to understand what’s going on with your best customers. AI makes data that would’ve been hidden in a routine reports, and surfaces it in a more insightful way.”
You have a sales team that can sell millions of distinct product SKUs and having an AI tool and process to help them identify the right SKUs at the right time to present to customers is a true sales accelerator.
Delgado also shares that “The significance of AI now is that you don’t need a team of engineers to program this new data into your reports, and then program the interface for your frontline people to be able to interact with that data. Now everybody can use plain language to say, ‘Hey, what’s really going on here?”
Even just a year ago, you needed to piece all that data together using a BI tool and data lake pulling in your ERP data and all the ERP bolt-Ons. Your IT teams had to manually carve out the parameters and do the pre-programmed reporting.
AI, by contrast, is not pre-programmed. It’s not deterministic; it’s probabilistic, and you can interact with it using natural language. That conversation with Canals AI made me hungry to talk more about how to bring practical solutions to B2B C&I Distribution Sales teams
On September 4, I’ll be a guest on that Canals Ai CEO Michael Delgado is leading on Practical AI Tactics you use to help your Distribution Account Managers Increase sales I hope you will join Canals AI and myself for the discussion (or sign up to watch the recording).
Investigating ways to help your sales teams make more pick tickets print in the warehouse is crucial for the future of any industrial distribution business.
As always, we appreciate your support and comments. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime.
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