A cutting tool rep's week is part salesperson, part applications engineer, part delivery driver. Monday might be a run of job shops in one industrial park. Tuesday a production plant with a crib to count. Wednesday a test cut on a stainless job, and Thursday a follow-up with a shop owner who wants to know why his taps keep breaking.
The selling is the part reps are good at. The hard part is everything around it: planning the week, remembering what was promised, and noticing when a shop starts to drift.
Plan the week by zone
The territory plan sets zones, the companies in each and which day to work them. The calendar and route show today, this week and this month, with every stop and route and time planners. The route map puts every stop on a map, so the rep can see that the shop he's been meaning to visit is down the street from today's crib count.
Planning by zone cuts windshield time. Instead of crossing town every time a shop calls, the rep works one area each day and saves the odd requests for when he's already nearby. If you run your own trucks, delivery routes plan every open order onto the trucks in the shortest driving order, and drivers get turn-by-turn directions to the exact drop pin with a photo and signature at delivery.
Log the visit and the test cut
Notes from a test cut are some of the most valuable information a tooling distributor has: the material, the tool, what ran well, what didn't. Too often they live in a notebook in the rep's car.
The visit log stamps every visit with the date and time when the rep taps Serviced. Talk-to-log voice notes let him talk through the results on the way back to the car, and they're typed for him. Every promise becomes a dated follow-up with a reminder: "Send the shop a quote on the new drill if the test holds up" doesn't depend on memory. If he needs the office, message the office sends a note to customer service or purchasing from the field.
All of it lands on the account. When a rep is out, or an account changes hands, the next person can pull up the customer and see every visit, note and open promise in one place.
Catch the shops that are slipping
The quietest loss in tooling is a shop that starts buying its inserts somewhere else. Nobody calls to tell you. The orders just get smaller.
The app watches for it:
- Customers slipping: items a shop buys like clockwork that have stopped coming, with a one-tap follow-up.
- Customer health: which customers are slipping, at risk or lost.
- Category gaps: what each shop buys from you and what it buys elsewhere.
- Top accounts up and down: the ten accounts buying more, and the ten buying less, than last year.
A rep who sees that a shop's turning insert orders stopped a month ago can walk in and ask what changed while there's still time. Sometimes it's a competitor's test cut. Sometimes it's a job that ended. Either way, he knows.
A tooling rep's time is the most expensive thing you sell with. Give it a plan, an easy way to record what happened, and early warning on shops drifting away, and the same rep covers more shops and keeps more of them.
Ready to walk through it with your own shops? Book a demo.