Three Questions to Ask Your Reps and Distributors Every Month
Your reps, distributors and dealers talk to your market every day.
Almost none of what they learn reaches you.
They know which competitor is being specified into the new plant. They know which of your part numbers gets quoted and then quietly swapped at the last minute. They know the engineer who owns the drawing at your third-largest account left in March, and they know the person who replaced him came from a plant that runs your competitor's parts.
You find out eventually. Usually in a quarterly review, usually months late, and usually only the parts that make the rep look good.
This isn't a loyalty problem. They carry a portfolio of lines and you're one of them. They're paid on orders, not intelligence, and nobody has ever asked them for anything else in a structured way, so you build your plan on a market picture that's a quarter stale and filtered through people whose incentive is to keep you calm.
The fix is smaller than it sounds.
Three questions, asked the same way every month, of everyone who carries your line:
What did you quote us into that we didn't win, and who won it?
What did a customer ask for that we don't make?
Who changed jobs at an account, and where did they come from?
Write the answers somewhere everyone can see them.
The first question gets you a loss pattern by competitor and application, which is the input to whether you have a pricing problem, a product gap, or a timing problem. Those three have completely different fixes, and companies routinely treat all of them as pricing.
The second is your roadmap, arriving unfiltered. A request that shows up once is noise. The same request from several customers over six months, through different reps, is a product decision with demand attached before you've spent anything on development.
The third is the one nobody logs and it's the earliest signal you get. A new engineer who owns the drawing arrives with suppliers they already trust. You find out through the part number two revisions later, or you find out in a month and get a meeting in before the next one.
Two quarters of that and you'll have a current picture of the accounts you're already in, from people who are in them this week rather than a report written last quarter.
It won't tell you anything about accounts nobody is calling on. That's a coverage question, and it's a different conversation.
When did a rep last tell you something that changed a decision?
Originally posted on LinkedIn, 8 September 2026. Read the discussion on LinkedIn
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