Share of wallet: how plumbing suppliers grow without new customers

Why share matters more than new accounts

A new account costs real money to win. A rep's time, a campaign, credit checks and the first few months of small orders all come before the account is worth much. An existing account has already cleared those costs.

Compare two ways to add $5,000 a month in sales:

Neither route is wrong, and good plans do both. But suppliers that only chase new names tend to fill the top of the funnel while leaving a lot of margin on the table with accounts already on their books.

Step 1: estimate total material spend

You can't see a plumber's invoices from other suppliers, so you estimate. Three inputs give a workable range:

1. Number of trucks or field plumbers. This is the strongest single signal for service and repair shops.
2. Type of work. Service and repair, new construction, renovation, commercial mechanical or a mix. Each has a different material intensity.
3. What your reps and counter staff observe. They know which shops are busy, which are growing, and which buy only emergency parts from you.

Build a rough monthly material spend per truck for each type of work from your own data. Look at your most loyal accounts, the ones you are confident buy almost everything from you, and divide their monthly purchases by their truck count. That gives you a local benchmark grounded in your market rather than a national average.

A worked example

Say your most loyal service and repair accounts buy about $2,200 a month per truck. A six-truck service shop that buys $4,000 a month from you probably spends somewhere near $13,200 in total. Your share is roughly 30%.

The estimate will be imperfect. That's fine. A rough number that is updated every quarter is far more useful than a precise one nobody calculates.

Step 2: sort accounts by opportunity

Once you have estimates for your top accounts, sort them into four groups:

The openings group is where share-of-wallet marketing pays. A large plumbing shop giving you 15% of its spend is a relationship you've already started. The job is to find out why the other 85% goes elsewhere.

Step 3: find out why the spend goes elsewhere

Plumbers split their buying for practical reasons. The most common ones:

• Location. Another counter is closer to where their jobs are, or opens earlier.
• Category gaps. You're strong in PVF but they buy water heaters or fixtures elsewhere.
• Habit. A long relationship with another branch's counter staff.
• Credit and terms. Better terms elsewhere, or a dispute that never got resolved.
• Availability. You were out of stock once at a bad moment, and they haven't forgotten.
• Project buying. Their larger jobs go through another supplier's project desk.

Ask your reps to note the main reason for each account in the openings group. You'll see patterns quickly, and each pattern points to a different fix.

Step 4: match the marketing to the reason

This is where most supplier marketing goes wrong: it sends the same campaign to every account. Share moves when the message matches the reason the spend is leaving.

Our plumber account growth service is built around this matching. The seasonal campaigns service covers the availability problem, because the time to prove you have stock is before the rush.

Step 5: build consent into the counter

Many share-raising moves rely on texts and emails to accounts: reorder reminders, category introductions and seasonal notices. In Canada, those messages fall under the anti-spam law, which the CRTC summarises as needing consent, clear identification of the sender and a working way to opt out, with the sender able to prove consent.

The practical answer is to collect consent where you already meet plumbers:

1. At account opening, with a clear checkbox or signed line for each type of message.
2. At the counter, when a plumber asks to be told when an item is back in stock.
3. Through reps, recorded in your account system with a date.

Never buy contact lists. Apart from the legal problem, plumbers know when they've been added to a list without asking, and it damages the relationship you are trying to deepen.

Step 6: track it quarterly

Each quarter, update the estimate for every account in the openings and anchor groups and compare:

• Share by account against last quarter
• Share by group, to see whether marketing is moving the openings
• Gross profit added from share gains, against marketing cost
• Accounts that slipped, which are often more urgent than accounts that grew

A worksheet you can use

For each of your top 30 accounts, fill in:

1. Account name and branch
2. Type of work (service, new construction, renovation, commercial, mixed)
3. Trucks or field plumbers
4. Estimated total monthly material spend
5. Your average monthly sales over the last quarter
6. Estimated share (line 5 ÷ line 4)
7. Group (anchor, opening, loyal small, occasional)
8. Main reason spend goes elsewhere
9. Planned marketing move
10. Share next quarter

Thirty accounts is enough to start. Most suppliers find that five or six openings account for the bulk of the available margin.

Common mistakes

• Waiting for perfect data. The estimate only needs to be good enough to rank accounts.
• Treating discounts as the main lever. Price matters, but plumbers split their buying for many other reasons, and a discount doesn't fix a location or availability problem.
• Ignoring slipping anchors. An anchor account dropping from 70% to 55% share can cost more than a new account brings in.
• Measuring marketing by clicks. Share of wallet is a business measure. Traffic is context.

Putting it to work

If you'd like help building the estimates, sorting the accounts or matching campaigns to reasons, that's the starting point of our plumber account growth work. The other guides cover the showroom handoff and the plumbing supply calendar. To talk about your accounts, call, text or email.