Why the Manufacturer Playbook Fails Distributors

A manufacturer's buyer is often working out whether a supplier can make something. The cycle is long, and buyers rely heavily on content about capability and process.

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A distributor's buyer knows what they want already. They have a part number or a brand, and the questions are about stock and price. Switching to another supplier costs them very little, so the value of winning an account comes from the orders that follow.

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For most distributors, that leaves two kinds of lead worth going after: new trade accounts, and more orders from accounts you already have, including the ones that have stopped ordering.

Start With the Data You Already Have

The cheapest leads are in your ERP. It records when every account last ordered and which product categories it buys.

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An account that ordered every month and has not ordered since spring is a better prospect than any bought list. So is an account that buys your fixings but buys its sealants somewhere else. A short email sequence to each group, with a named contact at your end, is a far cheaper way to win orders than finding new accounts.

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The system has to work end to end. The data needs to get from the ERP into the email platform, and someone on the sales desk needs to follow up the replies. In practice the data is rarely clean, with duplicate accounts and contacts who left years ago, so expect the first week to be spent tidying it.

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Reordering matters too. A 2025 survey of senior procurement leaders by B2B Online Insights and OroCommerce found that 45% of buyers are still dissatisfied with their distributors' online experience, and only 33% can reorder with a single click. If reordering takes ten minutes, a good reactivation email ends in a phone call to someone else.

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Winning New Accounts

New accounts mostly start with a search. Trade buyers search for part numbers or brand and product names, often with "in stock" or "next day" added.

That means your product and category pages need the specifications and stock availability a buyer is looking for, written as text Google can read. A category page that shows forty products and no copy will struggle to rank.

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Paid search works well here when it is set up around margin. Run Google Ads on the lines you hold in stock and make money on, and exclude the lines where you compete on price alone.

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Microsoft Ads is worth testing alongside it. If you sell online, a product feed into Google Shopping puts your price and a product image in front of buyers before they click.

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Many distributors are not set up for this yet. Research by eCommerce agency PushON, reported by Builders' Merchants News, found that 56% of the UK construction suppliers and merchants surveyed are struggling to align their eCommerce strategies with wider business goals. In practice, the website gets treated as a catalogue, and nobody is responsible for whether it brings in accounts.

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The right channel also depends on who your buyer is. Exo Supplies, a landscape merchant in Cardiff we have worked with, sells to contractors who find suppliers on Instagram, Facebook and email. For a business like that, Meta ads and social content reach buyers that search alone would miss.

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Once a buyer finds you, they still have to open an account before the first order. At many distributors, that means a PDF credit application filled in by hand and a wait of several days.

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Both of those lose buyers who could order from a competitor today. An online account application, with the credit check running in the background and a clear promise on how long approval takes, removes most of that delay.

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It also gives you data. You can see how many applications are started and where people give up, which tells you exactly where to fix the process.

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Outreach for the Accounts Worth Winning

Some accounts are worth more than search will bring in on its own, such as a regional contractor or a manufacturer buying consumables across several sites.

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For those, targeted LinkedIn and email outreach to the buyers and site managers at each company works well, with LinkedIn Ads shown to the same list. We cover how to run the two together in our guide to LinkedIn and email for industrial lead generation.

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Outreach has a limit: some accounts will only switch when their current supplier fails them on stock or delivery. It makes sure yours is the name they already know when that happens.

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Ask the manufacturers whose lines you stock what marketing support they offer. Many run co-op or marketing development funds for the distributors that carry their products.

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Measure Accounts and Orders

Clicks and form fills are useful signals, but a distributor should judge lead generation on new accounts opened and whether those accounts order again within 90 days.

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Those numbers live in your ERP, so the reporting needs to connect to it. Without that link, you end up optimising for enquiries that never turn into a second order.

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Once the link is there, divide what you spent in a quarter by the accounts that ordered twice. That gives you a cost per account you can compare across channels and use to decide where to spend next.

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Where I Would Start

If I were starting at a distributor with no marketing in place, I would spend the first month on the account data and the reorder process. That is where the quickest revenue is, and it shows you which customers are worth finding more of.

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After that, I would build search around the product lines with the best margin, and add outreach once there is a clear list of target accounts. Each step depends on the one before, which is why the order matters.

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If you would like to talk through how this applies to your business, see how we work with wholesale and distribution companies at Solvi Digital.

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Written by:

Andreas Philippou

‍Solvi Digital Co-Founder | Director

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