Why Distributor Sales Reps Still Aren’t Spending Enough Time Selling
Watch the full Distribution Strategy Group panel, Tools to Help Distributors Maximize Sales Productivity, to hear more from Kristen Thom, Tom Cowen, and Jonathan Bein.
Your Sales Reps Aren’t the Problem. The Work Around Selling Is.
Distributor sales reps are hired to build relationships and grow revenue. Yet in a 40-hour workweek, surprisingly few of those hours are spent actually selling.
The rest disappears into work surrounding the sale: searching for customer history, tracking down pricing, assembling quotes, logging activities, requesting reports, and piecing together information from multiple systems.
That creates an expensive problem: distributors want more productivity from their sales teams, but much of the day is already gone before a customer conversation even begins.
In a recent Distribution Strategy Group Tech Leader Panel, White Cup Senior Vice President of Customer Experience Kristen Thom joined Tom Cowen, Head of Industry Strategy at Conga, and moderator Jonathan Bein to discuss what keeps distributor sales teams from selling—and where technology can make a measurable difference.
One theme cut across the entire conversation: sales productivity doesn’t come from squeezing more activity into the day. It comes from reducing the work around the sale and helping reps make better decisions when they are in front of customers.
Here are four of the most important takeaways.
1. Reps don’t lack information. They’re buried in it.
Most distributors already have the information their sales teams need. The challenge is that it is often spread across ERP, CRM, email, spreadsheets, reports, and individual employees’ knowledge.
That leaves reps searching for answers to questions such as:
- What has this customer purchased before?
- When are they likely to order again?
- Which products aren’t they currently buying?
- What happened during the last conversation?
- Is there an open quote that needs attention?
- Has the customer’s buying behavior changed?
- Where can I find the latest pricing or product information?
The problem becomes even more pronounced when a rep is responsible for hundreds of accounts. Experienced reps may know their top 20 or 50 customers like the back of their hand, but opportunities can easily go unnoticed across the long tail of their territory. Newer reps face an even steeper challenge because they have not yet built years of knowledge about each customer.
Tom described the same issue within the quoting and contracting process. Reps may need to gather pricing, product configurations, payment terms, shipment instructions, contract clauses, and approvals before they can move a deal forward.
Each individual search may take only a few minutes. Repeated across dozens of accounts, quotes, and customer conversations, those minutes consume a meaningful share of the sales week.
The answer isn’t to give reps more information. It’s to bring the right information into their workflow and show them what deserves attention now. When customer history, buying signals, pricing guidance, and next steps are easier to access, reps can spend more time acting on the information and less time assembling it.
2. A tool that only helps management isn’t a sales productivity tool.
A new CRM may give leadership better reporting, greater visibility, and more consistent activity tracking. But if reps experience it as additional work, those benefits will be difficult to sustain.
Kristen recommended that distributors answer two questions before making an investment:
- Why would the sales team want to use this?
- What measurable business outcomes should it improve?
The first question is where many CRM initiatives go wrong.
If the primary goal is to make every rep log a required number of activities each week, the CRM becomes a tool for management rather than a tool for selling. Reps experience the administrative burden while leadership receives the benefit. Adoption becomes something managers must constantly enforce.
For adoption to stick, the value to the rep needs to be obvious. Will it make selling easier—or add another layer of administrative work? Will it identify a customer who is starting to slip? Uncover a cross-sell opportunity they would not have noticed? Prepare for a meeting faster? Follow up on a quote before it goes cold?
Reps adopt technology when it helps them win. A true sales productivity tool should help them have better conversations, close more business, and earn more.
When reps experience that value directly, many of the benefits leadership wants—cleaner data, better visibility, and more consistent processes—come along with it. The difference is that adoption is now driven by usefulness rather than enforcement.
3. Want reps to try something new? Start where they have nothing to lose.
Technology adoption does not have to begin with an organization-wide rollout or a company’s most important accounts.
One distributor took the opposite approach.
The company created a “Bottom 20” initiative using the bottom 20 accounts assigned to each of its top sales reps. These were low-spend, declining, or irregular customers that received little attention and were not considered strategic accounts.
The distributor used AI-generated product recommendations and emails to place those customers into a simple outreach sequence. The initial setup took approximately 15 minutes and required little ongoing effort from the reps.
The idea worked because the reps had almost nothing to lose.
Reps did not have to risk an important relationship or dramatically change how they managed their best customers. If the experiment failed, they had lost very little. If it worked, any resulting revenue was business they likely would not have captured otherwise.
Then small orders started coming in.
The results did not transform the entire business overnight, but they proved that AI and automation could create value from accounts that otherwise would have received no attention. Those early wins helped build confidence and prompted the team to ask where else the same approach could work.
Kristen shared another example involving a rep who committed to mentioning AI-generated product recommendations during every order conversation. Her message was simple:
“I noticed you’re not ordering X. Do you need those?”
About half of those prompts opened a conversation about an additional product need. Within two months, the rep increased her average order size by 6%.
The company then used her success to teach the same process to its inside sales team.
Reps don’t need to buy into a sweeping technology vision before they begin. Give them one practical use case. Make it easy to try. Let the results build the case.
4. Your activity dashboard may be measuring the wrong thing.
Calls made. Emails sent. Activities logged. Meetings scheduled.
These numbers are easy to put on a dashboard. They’re also easy to mistake for progress.
A rep can complete 50 activities and still miss the customer whose purchases are declining, the quote that is about to go cold, or the cross-sell opportunity sitting inside an existing account.
Activity metrics can help leaders understand whether a process is being followed. They cannot, on their own, tell you whether the sales team is becoming more effective.
The panelists recommended connecting technology investments to outcomes such as:
- Time spent actively selling
- Average order size
- Cross-sell and upsell performance
- Quote-to-order cycle time
- Win rates
- Pricing realization
- Margin improvement
- Revenue growth within existing accounts
- New customers acquired per rep
Leading indicators still matter. A distributor may initially see faster quote turnaround, better use of pricing guidance, fewer contract amendments, or more consistent follow-up before the full revenue impact appears.
Eventually, though, the measurement has to reach the business result: more revenue, stronger margins, faster sales cycles, or more customers won.
That requires specificity from the beginning. Is the goal to increase revenue from existing customers by 4–8%? Shorten the time between quote and order? Improve margins? Bring in more new customers per rep?
“Improve sales productivity” is too vague to guide an implementation or prove that it worked. Choose the result that needs to change, establish how it will be measured, and work backward from there.
Otherwise, distributors risk creating a more efficient way to track work without creating a more effective way to sell.
Make the sales day worth more
The best sales productivity tools do two things: give reps time back and help them use that time more intelligently.
They reduce the hours lost to searching, reporting, quoting, and administrative work. More importantly, they surface the customers, opportunities, risks, and next steps that deserve attention—even when the rep didn’t know to look for them.
That is the standard distributors should use when evaluating sales technology. Does it make the rep’s day easier? Improve the quality of customer conversations? Produce a measurable result in revenue, margin, or another outcome that matters?
If the answer is unclear, another dashboard full of activity metrics won’t fix it.
Start with one meaningful outcome and one practical use case. Make the value visible to the sales team. Then let the results—not the rollout plan—build momentum.
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