Radar gives a UK trade distributor a live daily picture of its 400+ trade partners. A partner who stops ordering is on the right rep's list that morning, not in the month-end report.
The client supplies made-to-measure shutters and blinds to a national network of 400+ trade partners. A field team of business development managers looks after those partners across four regional territories, supported by internal sales and a partner services team.
For over 20 years the sales operation ran without a real-time view of its own partner base. Order data lived in a separate ordering portal. Partner knowledge lived in individual reps' heads. Knowing who was growing, who was slipping and who had stopped ordering meant waiting for month-end reports or relying on memory in a weekly meeting.
Most of the order value came from a segment of partners, so one major account going quiet unnoticed was expensive. By the time it showed in the month-end figures, the relationship was often already damaged. There was no systematic way to catch decline while it was still recoverable, no shared record of visits and conversations, and no single place to see how a partner was performing.
Off-the-shelf CRMs were considered. One was quoted at £550 a month in licences plus a third-party implementation fee. None of them understood the specifics: tiered partners, product-range targets, working-day order rhythms, and a field team that works from phones.
We built Radar around how the business actually sells, instead of bending the business to fit a generic CRM. Radar imports order data every morning. Each partner is scored overnight on spend, order frequency and recency, and classified as steady, growing or declining. Two years of history sits behind every figure.
Every visit, call, note and task lives against the partner, whoever logged it, so relationship history no longer walks out of the door when someone leaves. Reps log activity in four taps from a phone, or by speaking for a minute after a visit.
Partners are organised by commercial tier, and Radar shows who needs attention through four views. A partner who normally orders daily and goes quiet for three working days appears on the right rep's list that morning.
Visit cadence
Who is overdue a visit, by tier.
Order follow-up
Who has stopped ordering, measured in working days against their own pattern.
Spend performance
This month, last month and year to date, all against the prior year.
Product mix
Progress on moving partners toward target product ranges, tracked against company targets.
Visit briefs
One tap on any partner writes a plain-English briefing before a visit: how they are trading, what has changed, what was discussed last time, and a suggested focus. What took a rep 30 minutes of digging, if it happened at all, takes 30 seconds.
Monday digests
Every Monday, before anyone logs in, Radar reviews each territory's week and writes it up: what moved, who went quiet, who came back, and the priority accounts for the week ahead. Leadership get a national view. The sales meeting starts from analysis that is already done.
Voice logging
After a visit the rep presses a button and says how the meeting went. Radar transcribes it, picks out what matters, writes a clean note against the partner and suggests the follow-up tasks.
Numbers it can trust
Every figure is computed by the system. The AI only narrates. It never invents a number.
Prospecting
Each territory manages a target list of companies to win. When a prospect becomes a trading partner, the full history carries over automatically.
Internal sales
A phone-based role working accounts across every territory. Their activity supports the field team without affecting the field team's performance reporting.
Partner services
Case management for the partner services team, replacing a legacy system. Every support email is tracked against the partner.
Radar was built in-house using modern AI-assisted development, so it could be shaped precisely to the business and changed as fast as the business needed, without waiting on a vendor's roadmap. It runs at effectively zero licence cost, and the client owns it outright.
It holds the company's entire commercial relationship data, so security came first: role-based access enforced on the server, two-step sign-in, encrypted data and automated backups.
It used to show up at month-end.
One tap for an AI visit brief.
Spend, frequency, recency and trajectory.
The first real-time view of the partner base in 20 years.
"Radar is now fully operational in the sales team and is being used daily by every member of the team to provide insight, aid decision making and drive activity as intended."