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 Sugar 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.

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 Sugar sales-i, a solution that delivers sales insights from ERP data.

Before Sugar 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 Sugar sales-i:

With Sugar 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 Sugar 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 intelligence switched on, reps get daily risk and opportunity alerts that your ERP has tracked for years.

There are two methods to get started with sales intelligence.

Customer/3rd party ERP export

We can be system-ready in under 1 week on average from receiving data.

Sugar-led export

For common ERPs, go from access to system-ready in 30 days on average.

See what your ERP is already trying to tell you.

Book a demo