18,000 to 40,000 dollars for a first study across 15 to 25 distributors Annual re-run 12,000 to 25,000 dollars, timed to land before line review. What moves the number: how many distributors, the role mix inside them, how many interviews sit behind the instrument, and whether it has to land before a line review already on the calendar.
What you get. One scored card per distributor, a network heatmap that separates a company problem from a branch problem, and 3 lists: protect, fix, replace or constrain.
Satisfaction can read promoter while inside sales still quotes someone else. CHI scores the quote.
The argument behind the instrument is published in full: measuring channel loyalty, and what satisfaction scores miss.
The 5 dimensions
Each one is scored in the language distributors actually use, not in the language a manufacturer would like to hear.
- Ease of doing businessOrder entry, lead times, cuts, returns, and whether a real order goes through a portal or requires a phone call. This is where lines die quietly, without anybody deciding to drop them.
- PricingThe margin they keep, how often a quoted job gets blown up underneath them, whether special pricing is disciplined, and whether they get hung out against a private label or a hungrier competitor.
- SupportApplication help, inside sales, and who answers when a customer is standing there on a Friday afternoon. Distributor salespeople sell the manufacturer who makes them look competent.
- QualityWhether it hits the dock as specified, whether a warranty claim turns into an argument, and whether field failures end up riding around on their truck.
- Internal promotionWhether their people lead with you when nobody has asked for you by name. Whether you are the first quote or a page in the back of the catalog. Whether the new hire gets trained on your line or on the one the branch manager came up on. Whether an outside salesperson walking into a plant with a problem you solve thinks of you first, second, or only after the customer says your name out loud.
Internal promotion is the one that matters, and it is the one a generic instrument never reaches.
Split voices, never blended
The owner, the outside salesperson, and the inside sales team are scored separately. They disagree, routinely and predictably. An owner will describe pricing one way while inside sales describes internal promotion in a way that contradicts it, and averaging those two answers produces a number that is true of nobody.
What you receive
One card per distributor, scored against your own network rather than against an abstract norm, with cleared verbatims and a specific action per dimension.
Then 3 lists. Protect, the distributors with high promotion and workable economics. Fix, the distributors that would sell you if a single dimension stopped hurting. Replace or constrain, the distributors that will not promote you, where market development money is currently being spent anyway.
Then one network view that separates a company problem from a distributor problem. Internal promotion weak everywhere is a training, positioning, or specification story that belongs to you. Internal promotion weak in 3 branches out of 20 is a local manager.
The benchmark pool, and how it grows
Every wave adds to a pooled, de-identified database, and it grows with each engagement. Nothing in it names a client, a distributor, or a person, and no cut of it is ever thin enough to re-identify anyone.
What it buys you is comparison against organizations like yours rather than against an abstract norm: brands selling through similar channels, distributors and service groups of similar shape. Your first study compares your own network against itself, which is immediately actionable because the line, the pricing policy, and the regional manager are constant across it. The outside comparison becomes worth having in year 2 and worth more every year after.
Every report states how large the pool is and what it is composed of. A benchmark quoted without its n is the trick this practice exists to refuse.
How candor is protected
The card names the distributor, so the respondent has to be protected inside it.
We recruit from a roster you provide, name by name and role by role. We do not buy a panel, and nobody from your sales organization sits on the call or sees who answered.
Responses are anonymized by role within each distributor. No card is issued for a distributor with fewer than 3 respondents, and the shortfall is reported as a finding rather than papered over with thin data. Verbatims are cleared individually before they are attributed to anything. You never learn who said what, and every respondent is told that at recruitment.
Without those rules inside sales tells you support is fine, internal promotion scores the way you were hoping, and you have paid for a mirror.
Where it comes from
CHI is not a questionnaire assembled for a proposal. The original version was fielded between 2024 and 2025 across 3 major corporations, covering 50 industrial distributor and rep agency organizations.
A paper on the fielding is in review. Until it is out, treat the 2024 to 2025 work as fielded method rather than as a published norm. No figure from it will be quoted to you as an industry benchmark, and your results are scored against your own network.
Timing
Days, not a quarter. A 15 to 25 distributor network runs in about 2 weeks using a short structured instrument with selective interviews behind it, which puts the result in your hands before the next quarterly review rather than after the decision it was supposed to inform.
The clock starts when the roster is in hand, not when the contract is signed.
Sold with the Specialist Health Index
CHI tells you internal promotion is weak. It does not tell you whether that is because their people cannot sell the product or will not. The Specialist Health Index answers that, and the 2 together are a diagnosis rather than a symptom.