The “Focus Gap” Is Costing You Sales—Here’s How to Fix It
How to Unlock the 7% Revenue Growth Hiding in Your ERP
In manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale, reps are overwhelmed, and sales leaders are concerned that they’re not prioritizing the right opportunities.
It’s a basic sales challenge: where should reps focus their time to get the best results? The answers are actually in your ERP, but they’re hidden. So instead, reps focus on what’s visible: the accounts that recently placed an order, the ones sending the most emails, or those that contribute the most top-line revenue.
This is the focus gap—the space between the accounts that get attention and the ones that actually deserve it. It’s how missed reorders, stalled deals, and shrinking market share happen right under your nose.
You have a focus gap if:
- 70% of rep activity is focused on the top 10 accounts
- 40% of accounts haven’t been contacted in 90+ days
- Only 1 in 5 reps can identify accounts at risk of churn
- “Gut feel” guides account prioritization more than data
The Buying Patterns Hidden in Your ERP
Closing the focus gap means shifting your team’s attention from surface signals (last email, biggest invoice) to real buying behavior. These are the patterns hidden in your ERP that predict future revenue:
Missed reorder: An auto parts retailer that regularly ordered 200 oil filters and 150 spark plugs every month hasn’t placed any orders in the past 90 days.
Order cadence: An HVAC distributor used to order 120 units of copper tubing every 4 weeks, but has only placed one order in the past two months.
Basket gap: A packaging supplier regularly orders 80 rolls of shrink film every month, but hasn’t purchased heat sealers or tape dispensers.
Turn ERP Data into Daily Revenue Signals
Your ERP is the single source of commercial truth for your business. Your invoices don’t lie. When a company looks to acquire a business, ERP files are the first thing they pull—they expose concentration risk, margin drift, and SKU dependency in minutes.
The tragedy? Those same X-ray insights stay buried from the very team that could act on them. Transaction by transaction, your ERP already maps who’s slowing down, who’s quietly scaling up, and where margin leaks are forming—yet 99 % of that signal never reaches a rep’s desk.
What wasted truth looks like:
The churn alarm that no one hears
Order cadence stretches from 28 to 41 days.
The lost cross-sell
A customer buys the rig but skips the high-margin accessory.
The concentration risk hidden in plain sight
When 38% of revenue is tied to one OEM contract.
Find the Money Hiding in Plain Sight
You can detect these kinds of lost opportunities in seconds with sales-i. You connect the add-on to your ERP—no re-platforming—and in just 30 days reps know where to focus to drive revenue. sales-i surfaces buying patterns in a daily action list—no SQL queries—so your reps act on the same hard facts investors trust, before the quarter closes.
Expose the Quiet Revenue Leaks Your Reps Ignore
Sales directors don’t complain about effort—they complain about attention drift. Reps chase the noisiest prospects and biggest logos while quiet revenue leaks drain margin. sales-i turns on the spotlight—flagging hidden churn signals so your team can plug leaks before they show up in the numbers.
| What your team focuses on today | What they should be focusing on |
|---|---|
| Accounts with the most recent activity | Accounts whose order volume dropped 15% this week |
| Loud prospects demanding attention | Quiet customers skipping SKU-B after buying SKU-A |
| Top-line revenue numbers | Category-level growth vs. last quarter |
| Cold outreach to net-new leads | Auto-generated call list ranked by churn risk |
| Manual prep before every call | Automated account summaries with ERP insights |
| Gut feel + Excel reports | Guided selling based on order history and patterns |
Country Fare Foodservice: Focusing on Fresh Sales
Country Fare Foodservice is one of the U.K.’s leading food and beverage wholesalers, delivering 12,000 items every day to restaurants, cafés, and caterers. To pinpoint when customer buying habits shift, the company uses sales-i, a solution that delivers sales insights from ERP data.
Before sales-i:
In perishable goods, missing a change in buying behavior can lead to spoilage, lost revenue, or a lost customer. Country Fare’s sales team needed a better way to spot those shifts early—but their existing process for analyzing spending trends was manual, time-consuming, and reactive.
After sales-i:
With sales-i, reps now get instant visibility into customer behavior – from product-level gaps to year-over-year trends and sudden order drop-offs. The team can quickly spot when a customer’s habits change, take proactive action, and uncover new sales opportunities—all with less manual work and more confidence.
Results:
- 40% revenue growth from existing customers
- 21% overall company growth
- 20% more efficient with automated reports
“Much of our sales success is due to sales-i. It’s become so ingrained in our daily work that working without it would be like a construction worker missing a hammer or screwdriver.”
– Gareth Roberts, Account Manager, Country Fare
30-day Action Playbook
Close the focus gap without wrestling with a single ERP report. With sales-i switched on, reps get daily risk and opportunity alerts that your ERP has tracked for years.
| When | What happens | Who | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1: Connect (20 min.) | It turns on sales-i’s read-only connector to your ERP: no exports, no SQL. | IT admin | One-time set up — zero disruption. |
| Day 2: Baseline build | sales-i auto-indexes 2 years of invoice history and sets “normal” cadence, margin and mix for every account/SKU. | sales-i engine | Creates benchmarks people never have time to build. |
| Day 5: First risk dashboard | Managers receive a live dashboard: – Accounts with >10% order-frequency slip – Margin erosion >2 points – Top basket gaps by revenue |
Sales managers | Immediate visibility of revenue at risk — no manual reports. |
| Day 7: Rep action lists | Each account manager gets a daily list of 20 accounts that need action, complete with talking-point summaries. | Account managers | Turns data into daily calls — protects pipeline before quarter ends. |
| Day 14: Pilot wins | Pilot team runs “save the slip” outreach, recovers lapsed orders. | Account managers | Quick proof the system pays for itself. |
| Day 30: Scale and measure | Live scoreboard shows: – Revenue recovered – Spoilage/margin saved – Time saved per QBR deck Rollout for all reps. |
CS + RevOps | Focus gap closed, process locked in, upside compounds next quarter. |
See what your ERP is already trying to tell you.
