Salespeople, regional warehouses and customer credit: where margin is won or lost.
Trade moves €201.8 billion in Portugal (INE, 2024). But a distributor's result isn't decided at head office — it's decided when the salesperson issues the invoice at the customer's shop, when the warehouse restocks (or not) the right product, and when an open account goes unnoticed. This report is an operational playbook to close those leaks.
Free · PDF · Data from official sources · No invented numbers.
Issuing invoices, validating credit, collecting payments and logging visits — all in the moment, at the customer, syncing on returning to the network. Excel and the notebook cope with ten salespeople; they don't cope with forty. When the team grows, information arrives late, duplicated or never at all, and head office ends up working from a picture that lags reality.
Pushing product without reading sales history, seasonality and promotions fills regional warehouses with the wrong stock and empties them of what rotates. Replenishment must be a decision informed by data — rotation by reference, by store and by channel — not an automatism of fixed quantities that nobody reviews.
Open accounts, with no overdue alerts and no automatic block on new sales when credit is exceeded, turn into silent bad debt. Collections must be a designed process: limits per customer, real-time alerts and a brake on the sale — not the memory of an overloaded account manager.
Distributors often operate several regional warehouses and more than one company or brand. Without consolidated real-time stock and multi-company accounting, each branch becomes an island: blind transfers, local stockouts with surplus 200 km away, and account closes that take weeks to consolidate.
Distribution in Portugal operates under non-negotiable compliance requirements — SAF-T (PT), AT-certified invoicing, GDPR in the processing of customer data, and the AI Act when smart automation is introduced. In parallel, market pressure tightens: thin margins, customers more demanding on delivery times, and competition from operators who have already digitalised the sales force. Those who keep the field on paper compete at a structural disadvantage.
A distributor's operational maturity is measured on four fronts. Each can be diagnosed with simple questions — and every negative answer is an identified margin leak.
The salesperson must be autonomous at the customer: invoicing, checking available credit, logging collections and the visit, and syncing on returning to the network. Without this, the team can't scale without multiplying administrative errors.
The replenishment decision should cross historical sales, seasonality and promotions, by reference and by warehouse. The goal is to have the right product, in the right place, with no capital tied up in idle stock.
Credit limits per customer, live current accounts, overdue alerts and an automatic block on the sale when the limit is exceeded. Collections stop depending on individual memory and become a system process.
Stock and accounting must be seen as a whole: several warehouses, several companies or brands, one single source of truth. Without this, each branch optimises locally and harms the overall result.
Most distributors grow the sales force faster than their capacity to manage it. The breaking point isn't financial — it's informational. At ten salespeople, the manager can keep in their head who owes what, who sold what and which customer is at the credit limit. At forty, it's impossible. Beyond that point, each new salesperson doesn't add proportional margin: it adds invoicing delay, uncontrolled credit risk and visits nobody logs. The solution isn't to slow hiring — it's to change the method before you get there.
Get the full report and diagnose, head-on, where your distribution operation is losing margin.
Leave your name and email. Download it now and we'll also send you a copy of the link.
Discover the INFOS solutions for distribution — or talk to our team.
