An industrial MRO rep's week is mostly driving. Monday might be the industrial park on the west side, Tuesday the food plants out by the highway, Wednesday the fabrication shops downtown. Somewhere in between are storeroom counts, a lunch and learn on hearing protection, and the promise to get back to a maintenance manager about a pallet jack.
Most of what goes wrong in a rep's week isn't selling. It's forgetting: the follow-up that slipped, the account that stopped ordering abrasives and nobody noticed.
A plan for the week
The territory plan sets out zones, the companies in each and which day to work them. The calendar and route show today, this week and this month: every stop, with route and time planners. The route map puts every stop on a map, so a rep can see that the plant he's been meaning to visit is two blocks from today's storeroom count.
For distributors running their 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.
Planning by zone also cuts windshield time. Instead of crisscrossing town because a customer called, the rep works one part of the territory each day and saves the odd requests for the day he's already nearby.
Log the visit before the car door closes
Reps don't skip notes because they're lazy. They skip them because typing on a phone in a parking lot is miserable. The visit log stamps every visit with the date and time when the rep taps Serviced. Talk-to-log voice notes let him talk his notes on the way to the car, and they're typed for him.
Every promise becomes a dated follow-up with a reminder. "Send the maintenance manager a quote on a new parts washer by Thursday" doesn't live on a sticky note anymore. If the rep needs the office, message the office sends the note to customer service or purchasing from the field.
All of it lands on the account, so when the rep is out sick or the account changes hands, the next person can pull up the customer and see every visit, note and open promise on one screen.
Catch the accounts that are slipping
The most expensive problem in MRO sales is quiet. A plant doesn't call to say it's leaving. It just stops ordering cutting oil from you, then janitorial, then hand tools. By the time anyone notices, the business is gone.
The app watches for this:
- Customers slipping shows items a customer buys like clockwork that have stopped coming, with a one-tap follow-up.
- Customer health shows which customers are slipping, at risk or lost.
- Category gaps show the categories each customer buys from you and the ones they buy elsewhere.
- Top accounts up and down lists the top ten accounts buying more, and buying less, than last year.
A rep who sees that a plant's absorbent and spill kit orders stopped six weeks ago can stop by and ask why while there's still something to save.
Why it matters
An MRO rep's time is the most expensive thing you sell with. Every hour spent figuring out where to go, retyping notes or rediscovering a forgotten promise is an hour not spent at a plant. Give reps a plan, an easy way to log what happened, and early warning on accounts drifting away, and the same team covers more ground and keeps more of it.
Ready to walk through it with your own accounts? Book a demo.