We work the dormant customer accounts at industrial and MRO distributors. The customers who used to order, stopped, and have no rep assigned to them now. By phone and email, on your behalf, on a monthly retainer.
Example, not a real customer list. The proportions are the usual ones.
An outside rep in this industry carries somewhere around fifty assigned accounts and can proactively work about half of them. Everything past that is a house account. In a distributor with five thousand customers and twenty reps, that leaves roughly four thousand accounts with nobody assigned at all.
The rep is paid on the whole book, including the accounts they never call. So a customer who bought nothing last year pays nobody anything to chase this year.
Inside sales does not close the gap either. Ask most distributors and they will tell you their inside team spends under a quarter of its time selling proactively, because order entry, quotes and returns come first and always will. So the dormant account is not neglected. It was never anybody's job.
Every owner we speak to says some version of the same thing: the tail is not worth chasing. There is good data against that, from a study of one branch of a large distributor tracking 231 customers over a year.
| Tier | Customers | Sales | Net profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | 6% | 61% | 65% |
| Opportunistic | 2% | 3% | 8% |
| Service drain | 4% | 18% | 7% |
| Marginal | 88% | 17% | 20% |
The bottom 88% took 17% of sales and returned 20% of net profit, so proportionally better than their share. The tier that actually destroyed value was the opposite end: big, demanding accounts at 18% of sales for 7% of profit.
The tail is not the problem. It is just the part nobody is paid to call.
Out of Prophet 21, Eclipse, Infor, DDI or whatever you run. It is a standard sales history by customer report and your controller can build it in an afternoon. The exact specification is at the bottom of this page.
A customer who ordered every two weeks and has been sixty days quiet is a completely different conversation from one who orders every March. A trailing twelve report cannot tell those two apart. That distinction is most of the value.
The same two people every week, so they learn your line card and your branches. Every call is dispositioned, so you end up knowing which parts of your customer base are still worth anything.
To whoever should own that account, with the full history of what was said. They pick it up from there.
The first question is always whose customers these are. Yours, and they stay yours. We make the reopening call and hand the account back warm.
Pull every customer with a last invoice date and sort ascending. Count the ones that have not bought in eighteen months, then add up what they spent in the year before they stopped. Most owners are surprised twice, once at how long the list is and again at how much of it was real money from customers who never actually left for anybody else.
This is the report to ask your controller for:
Tell us roughly what came back and we will tell you what it would take to work it.