The best hydraulic accounts are kept, not won. A plant that has bought hose and fittings from you for ten years is not loyal by accident. Somebody sat down with the maintenance manager every so often and showed them what they bought, what it cost, and what else you could do. The problem is that preparing those reviews by hand takes hours, so most distributors only do them when an account is already in trouble.
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 in one screen. Company goal shows the month, the year to date and the year at this pace. Rep pace to goal shows each rep's month against goal. It is the view you want before a Monday meeting, on your phone.
For the account review: what to bring
A good account review for a hydraulics customer uses 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 that buys your hose but not your filtration 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.
Take that into a review and the conversation becomes specific. "You used to buy pressure filters from us every month and stopped in the spring. What changed?" is a much better question than "How are we doing?"
Reports customers see themselves
Customers can see their own spend, usage and category reports in the app. That helps the maintenance manager more than you might think. When the plant manager asks why maintenance spending went up, he can show which machines and categories drove it. When budgets are set, he has a year of usage to plan from.
It also helps you. A customer who uses your reports to run his department has your name in every budget meeting. And if they use approvals and budgets in the app, the reports line up with how they actually control spending.
For the plant that cares about quality, open corrective action reports also sit on the account, so a review can cover any open quality issues alongside the numbers.
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. That keeps the numbers in front of the team without anyone building a report.
Keep each review short and focused. Fifteen minutes with the right two or three numbers beats an hour of slides. Ask what is coming at the plant: new machines, a shutdown, a line being moved. Hydraulic work follows those projects, and the distributor who hears about them first usually gets the order.
Pick your top ten hydraulic accounts and schedule a short review with each this quarter. Bring the category gaps and the slipping items. You will likely leave with an order, a lead or at least a warning, and any of those is worth the hour.
Want to walk through it with your own accounts? Book a demo.