For US distributors and wholesalers doing $5M–$50M.

The average $10M distributor is leaking $400K–$600K a year.

Manually-keyed orders. Customers who quietly stopped ordering. Lapsed accounts no rep follows up on. Inbound calls that go to voicemail at 4:55pm. We find the leaks — and stop them.

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Tell us where your week actually goes. We email back one prescribed fix, with the math run on your own numbers. No setup fee, month-to-month, built on the software you already pay for.

Modeled on NAW, CustomerGauge, and AI2 distributor benchmarks. The math is below.

Who this is for: $5M–$50M distributors and wholesalers, nationwide

Sanders AI works with US distributors and wholesalers doing $5M–$50M in revenue: industrial supply, electrical distribution, plumbing/PVF, fluid power, fasteners, abrasives, MRO, and specialty distribution.

Many are family-owned, second- or third-generation operators with deep customer relationships and an ERP — Epicor Prophet 21, Infor SX.e, NetSuite, Sage X3, or a homegrown system — that’s been doing the job for 15 years and isn’t going anywhere. We’re US-nationwide, headquartered in Birmingham, AL.

We do not work with consumer retail. We’re built for the B2B distributor whose customers are contractors, plant managers, MRO buyers, and other resellers — where order accuracy, account retention, and speed-to-quote are the moat. Every distributor we’ve modeled at $10M has the same four leaks; the dollar amounts shift by category, but the leaks are universal.

Industrial vs. specialty vs. fast-mover: where AI lands differently

Distributor type Primary leak First agent we ship
Industrial / MRO supply Order entry from email/PDF/SMS Order Entry Agent
Electrical / plumbing/PVF / fluid power Speed-to-quote on engineered packages Receptionist (Pricing & Availability) + Order Entry
Fasteners / abrasives / commodity fast-movers Account-cadence breaks (silent churn) Customer Health Monitor
Specialty distribution (low-volume, high-mix) Lapsed accounts no rep is touching Sales Closer (lapsed-account reactivation)
Where the money goes

Four leaks. Every distributor has all four. Most owners only see two.

Sourced industry benchmarks
$10M revenue baseline
01 / Order entry

$160K

Your customers order by email, PDF, and text. Your CSRs re-key every line.

A $10M distributor runs ~12,000 orders a year and a 3–5% order-error rate is the industry norm (per AI2 and Workist). Four order-entry CSRs at $42K loaded is a $168K wage base — most of it spent parsing the same five formats over and over.

What we ship An Order Entry Agent reads inbound orders from email, attached PDFs, SMS, and voicemail, maps lines to your item master, validates customer-specific pricing, and drops a clean order into Prophet 21, SX.e, NetSuite, or Sage. CSRs handle exceptions only.

02 / Stale accounts

$140K

A customer who ordered weekly for five years goes silent. Nobody notices for 90 days.

Wholesale has the worst churn rate of any sector — 56%, per CustomerGauge. Most of it is preventable, but it requires noticing the cadence break in week six, not month four. No human is staring at 400 accounts that closely.

What we ship A Customer Health Monitor learns each account’s normal cadence, order size, and SKU mix — then fires an alert when the pattern breaks, with a drafted outreach the outside rep can send in one click.

03 / Lapsed reactivation

$95K

Accounts that stopped ordering 12 months ago are still in your CRM. No one calls them.

Outside reps focus on the top quartile. Inside reps work today’s incoming. Lapsed accounts — the ones who used to buy and quietly drifted to a competitor — get touched once a quarter at best. Per OroCommerce, B2B reactivation beats cold prospecting on close rate 3-to-1.

What we ship A Sales Closer agent runs a reactivation cadence on your lapsed list — multi-step email, call-task drafts for the rep, escalation rules, and reporting on who came back.

04 / Net-new accounts

$80K

Your reps don’t have time to prospect. Their competitors’ reps don’t either.

New-customer acquisition in distribution comes from rep-driven outreach: contractor lists, plant openings, new-permit data, trade-show follow-up. A rep doing $1.2M in book has maybe two hours a week for prospecting. That’s the leak.

What we ship A Lead Researcher agent builds a continuously-refreshed list of in-territory accounts that match your ICP, enriches contacts, and drafts the first-touch email or call script — so your rep’s two hours actually move.

Add it up
$10M distributor · annualized · point estimates per agent

Add it up. Order entry, churn, lapsed accounts, and prospecting are leaking $400K–$600K a year.

$400K–$600K

Order entry$160K
Stale accounts$140K
Lapsed reactivation$95K
Net-new accounts$80K

That’s the average for a $10M distributor. Yours is probably different — bigger in one spot, smaller in another. An industrial-supply house leaks differently than a fastener commodity warehouse. The free 10-minute review finds out where.

Get your free 10-minute review →

Tell us where your week actually goes. We email back one prescribed fix, with the math run on your own numbers. No setup fee, month-to-month, built on the software you already pay for.

What the free review gets you

One prescribed fix, quantified against your own numbers.

Total client time: ~10 min
Delivered by email
01 / A 10-minute intake by text — no call needed
Included
02 / The single highest-value fix for your business, named and scoped
Included
03 / The math behind it, run on the numbers you give us
Included

If the fix is worth building, we build and run it for a flat monthly fee. If it isn't, you keep the analysis.

After the review

One flat monthly fee. We hold every key, every subscription, every model.

If the review shows agents worth building — and you want to move — Sanders AI runs them as a subscription, not a project. One flat monthly invoice covers the agents, the orchestration, the model usage, the integrations into Prophet 21, SX.e, NetSuite, or Sage, and ongoing tuning. No API-usage surprises. No per-seat license stack to manage.

Two tiers exist: Sanders AI Agents (subscription) for distributors who want the agents running their order entry, customer-health, and reactivation work — and Chief AI Officer (fractional executive) for ownership groups who want a senior AI partner across the whole company, not just inside one workflow.

Pricing runs from $500 to $20,000 a month, depending on how much you want built.

The fine print

Outcomes vary by distributor. We don't guarantee any specific outcome, revenue, or savings.

Common questions

What distributors and wholesalers ask before they book

How does the Order Entry Agent work with our ERP — Epicor P21, Infor SX.e, NetSuite, or Sage?

The agent reads inbound orders from email, attached PDFs, SMS, and voicemail transcripts, maps each line to your item master, validates customer-specific pricing and availability, then drops a clean order into Epicor Prophet 21, Infor SX.e, NetSuite, Sage X3, or whatever ERP you run via its native API or order-import endpoint. A CSR reviews exceptions only. We don’t replace your ERP — we feed it accurately, faster, and around the clock.

Can the Document Copilot ingest our manufacturer cut sheets and product specs?

We can build a private spec-search index over your cut sheets, MSDS, and manufacturer data — but distribution-specific ROI on spec lookup is thinner than on order entry or customer churn, so we score it as a secondary fit and only scope it when a review shows it actually moves the needle for your shop. If you live in tech-data lookups (industrial controls, fluid power, fastener engineering), we’ll quote it. If you’re a fast-mover commodity house, we’ll point you at order entry first.

What about price-list confidentiality and customer-specific pricing tiers?

Customer-specific pricing stays inside your ERP. The agents authenticate the caller or sender against your account list, pull that customer’s contract pricing or tier from Prophet 21, SX.e, NetSuite, or Sage, and quote only what that customer is entitled to see. No price list is exposed externally. Every quote is logged with timestamp, customer ID, and source pricing reference for audit.

How does the Customer Health Monitor detect a distributor account at risk of churning?

It learns each account’s normal cadence — how often they order, average order size, mix of SKUs, last-touch from your outside rep — and fires when the pattern breaks. A customer who ordered weekly for five years going silent for 45 days is a save opportunity, not a CRM line item. The agent flags it, drafts an outreach email or call task for your rep, and tracks whether the save lands. Wholesale churn averages 56% (CustomerGauge) — most of that is preventable if someone notices in week six instead of month four.

Other industries we serve

HVAC & Home Services · Manufacturing & Metal Fab · Specialty Construction & Trade Subs · Accounting & CPA Firms · Engineering & Architecture · Auto Service & Tier-2 Suppliers · Law Firms · Medical & Dental Practices

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