The accounts an adhesives and abrasives distributor keeps for years are usually the ones somebody reviews. A few times a year, a rep or manager sits with the plant manager, the manufacturing engineer or the body shop owner and goes over what they bought, what worked, what it cost and what could be better. The trouble is that pulling those numbers together by hand takes hours, so reviews tend to happen only when an account is already slipping.
The app puts the numbers in front of you without a spreadsheet.
For the owner: the business on one screen
The exec dashboard shows sales, margin, cash, receivables and pace on one screen. Company goal shows the month, year to date and the year at this pace. Rep pace to goal shows each rep's month against goal. It is what you want on your phone before Monday's meeting.
What to bring to an account review
A useful review draws on a few simple views:
- Top accounts up and down: the ten accounts buying more than last year and the ten buying less.
- Category gaps: what the customer buys from you and what they buy elsewhere. A plant buying your threadlockers but not your tapes, abrasives or aerosols is an opening.
- Customers slipping: regular items that have stopped coming.
- Customer health: which customers are slipping, at risk or lost.
- Pull up a customer: everything about one account on one screen.
Bring those to a review and the conversation gets specific. "You bought P400 discs from us every week until August and then stopped. What changed?" leads somewhere. "How are we doing?" rarely does.
Reports customers see themselves
Customers can see their own spend, usage and category reports in the app. They use these more than you might expect. A body shop owner who watches materials cost can see where the money goes by category. A plant manager asked why consumables spending went up can show which lines drove it. When next year's budget is set, there is a year of real usage to work from.
That keeps you in the conversation. A customer who runs the crib or the paint room from your reports brings your name into every budget meeting. If its locations also use approvals and budgets in the app, the reports match how it already controls spending, location by location under a master account.
Corrective action reports add something to reviews in this trade. Open CARs sit on the account, so a review can cover the bond that kept failing on one assembly, the root cause found and the fix made, alongside the numbers. For a manufacturer with a quality system, that conversation is often worth more than any price discussion.
Make reviews a habit
The weekly rep review email goes to each rep every Monday with their own accounts, and the GM desk gets everyone, so the numbers stay in front of the team without anyone building a report.
Keep each review short: fifteen minutes with two or three useful numbers. Ask what is coming, such as a new product going into production, a line changeover, a new paint system or a shop opening another location. Adhesive and tape business follows those changes, and the distributor who hears first is usually the one asked to help qualify the product, not just ship it.
Pick your top ten accounts and book a short review with each this quarter. Bring the category gaps and the slipping items. You will rarely leave without an order, a lead or an early warning.
Want to walk through it with your own assembly, maintenance and body shop customers? Book a demo.