Spline is the world’s leading manufacturer of spline gauges and master gears. Its products are used in gears and gearboxes and by the companies that manufacture them. Its customers include leading companies and their suppliers in the automotive, defence, and aerospace industries, their OEMs, and the precision engineering companies which support them. The company sells to them both directly and through a network of value-adding distributors throughout the world.
The Business Challenge
Spline operates in a niche global marketplace. It manufactures bespoke products. The business is reliant on its international distributors to provide sophisticated in-country services such as marketing, prospecting, tendering, project management and quality certification.
The majority of these distributors had been appointed some time ago. Performance across the network was variable. At a time of potential growth, it was important to objectively assess relative distributor performance in order to maximise future business opportunities.
How Chris Dunn Consulting Helped Spline Gauges
Working closely with Spline’s Commercial Management Team, Chris Dunn Consulting:
1. Developed a balanced scorecard to measure eight critical success factors, enabling Spline to benchmark its distributors and identify areas for improvement
2. Expanded the existing quotation log into a more complete sales pipeline management tool. This provided Spline with a better understanding of its win-loss ratio by product category. It also created an objective basis for Spline to work more proactively with a number of its distributors to increase sales conversion rates.
3. Produced a new distributor contract aligning terms and conditions and KPIs for new and existing distributors
The Business Benefits
Using the distributor scorecard, Spline has been able to objectively evaluate all distributors in its network. Based on this evaluation and the information from the sales forecasting tool, new KPIs have been agreed with distributors.
The evaluation process has also identified a small number of distributors who are not capable of meeting the new performance standards. As a result, the scorecard is now also being used to profile potential new business partners.
Spline’s Managing Director, Malcolm Ryman, commented:
“Chris worked very closely with us to develop customised tools to enable us to better evaluate and drive distributor performance. He took the time to really understand our business issues, remained focused on our needs throughout the project and delivered in a way that made implementation very straightforward”
Spline’s Managing Director, Malcolm Ryman
If you are looking for help to improve the performance of your international distributors, contact me now to arrange your free business consultation.
