2,500 dollars for the survey and the report Everything else is scoped on top: follow-up interviews, an on-site day, custom items, a facilitated management session, and the appointment recommendation. Three distributors on the same instrument is quoted as a project, because the comparison across them is usually what changes the decision.
What you get. An organizational readiness profile, a map of the manufacturers their people already reward, brand preference broken out by function, and a written implication for your line.
Fourteen branches and 220 million dollars in revenue tell you capacity. They do not tell you whether the organization can support the channel model you run.
Two things a manufacturer cannot see from outside
How the distributor operates. Adaptability, learning, customer focus, technical development, coordination across sales, applications and operations, decision autonomy, and change readiness. Not a grade for well run. A profile of how the place actually works.
How its people treat the brands already on the card. Leadership, outside sales, inside sales, applications, and operations, scored separately against 3 to 5 incumbents. Who they pull. Who they tolerate. Who they bury.
Put the two together and you get a sentence you can act on. This is a decentralized, high-learning organization that rewards manufacturers who give factory engineers a direct line. Or this is a centralized, process-driven organization that rewards predictable price, stock, and escalation, and will starve a line that expects local market development.
That is a fit problem rather than a quality problem. A good distributor can still be a poor partner for this line.
The questions the report answers
- How does this distributor actually operate?
- What characteristics of a manufacturer generate support from its people?
- Which brands on the card receive the strongest and weakest internal support, and where does that split by function?
- What does that imply for a manufacturer considering or managing this relationship?
The fourth question is the one that earns the fee. The survey and report cover the first three and a written implication. The appointment recommendation, the workshop, and the keep or constrain call are scoped separately.
The item set is ours
The organizational items were written for this population. Distributor and shop employees in sales, inside sales, applications, and operations are not the people a corporate culture survey was built for, and asking them corporate questions produces answers nobody can use.
What makes the read work is the pairing. One set of items characterizes how the organization operates. A second set measures how its people treat the brands already on the card. Run alone, each one is mildly interesting. Run together, on the same people, in the same week, they explain each other, and that is the part you are buying.
The items describe an operating pattern rather than scoring whether the company is good, and nothing here is presented as a validated culture measure. The method, the items used, and the tables are in the appendix of every report, so anyone on your side can check what was asked.
Where it sits next to the Channel Health Index
The Channel Health Index asks who in the network you already have leads with you. Channel Fit asks whether this one organization can support the way your line has to be sold, before anybody signs.
You cannot measure relationship quality with a manufacturer who is not on the card yet. You can measure the operating pattern and the manufacturers its people already reward, then set your model against that.
Access, and the rule that comes with it
The study runs inside the distributor, so the distributor consents and receives the findings. One paying side per relationship in any period, disclosed before contract. The pooled benchmark uses de-identified data only.