For two years we’ve sat in pricing reviews at service centers all over the country. The same conversation keeps repeating: a rep flips through the top-20 accounts, says “these are ours,” and moves on. Then we’d pull customs data, freight records, anything we could match against. And the same answer kept coming back — those accounts were spending most of their metal budget somewhere else.
We don’t mean a little bit. We mean an average of 71% of their wallet going to other suppliers, often four or five at a time. Service centers we worked with were not in danger of losing these accounts — they had a stable, profitable slice of each one. They just didn’t have nearly as much as they thought.
We compiled wallet-share estimates across 38 service centers and 4,800 of their accounts. This piece is what we found, what causes it, and the five plays that the highest performers used to close the gap.
What the data actually showed
We weren’t looking for a horror story. Most service center sales leaders we work with assume their best accounts give them 50–60% of wallet. That number is already a reasonable goal in our industry — nobody expects 100%. But the gap between the assumed number and the real one was the thing that surprised people.
That last number is the one worth dwelling on. The accounts where we saw real growth weren’t new logos — they were the same names that had been on the customer list for five, ten, fifteen years. The thing that changed was how much of the wallet the service center was actually capturing.
The most under-monetized customer in your CRM is almost always one you already know by name. Jordan Reese, Head of Strategy
Why it keeps happening
When we looked at why these accounts spread their spend, three patterns kept showing up. None of them are about price. Two of them are entirely within your control.
1. Quote latency that doesn’t match buyer urgency
Buyers told us — consistently — that they don’t shop on price the way sales teams think they do. They shop on response time and certainty. If your quote shows up 36 hours after a request, the buyer has already gotten two faster ones and they’re no longer evaluating yours head-to-head.
2. A narrow catalog “in their head”
Most reps cover a small set of SKUs really well for an account — the ones in the regular re-order pattern. Anything outside of that, the buyer doesn’t even ask. They assume you don’t carry it, or they don’t want the friction of finding out.
3. Friction in ordering for off-hours
A surprising share of metal is ordered before 7am or after 5pm — particularly in fabrication-heavy accounts where shop foremen plan the next day’s work. If your only intake channel is a sales rep with a phone, you’re ceding that window to whoever has a portal.
We interviewed 80+ metal buyers across fabrication, construction, and OEM segments for the 2025 Trends Report. The full data is worth reading — especially the section on how buyers actually compare suppliers in real-time. It’s rarely the comparison you’d guess.
Five plays that closed the gap
Across the service centers in our sample that did move wallet share materially, five things showed up consistently. None of them are mysterious. The hard part is committing to them in sequence.
Bring every RFQ into one place — even the messy ones.
Don’t make buyers change channels. Email RFQs, phone-in quotes, drawings dropped through the portal: get them all into a single queue with a single owner. The fastest improvement we saw was simply cycle time on first response, and you can’t shorten what you can’t see.
Publish your real catalog to your real accounts.
The point isn’t a public storefront. The point is that this buyer, with their contract pricing and their shipping defaults, can see everything you could possibly sell them — not just the four SKUs they happen to reorder. Adjacent-SKU pull is the single biggest source of share-of-wallet lift we measured.
Quote outside business hours.
You don’t need 24/7 staffing. You need a quoting workflow that doesn’t need a human to confirm a stock price or a standard fabricated part. Even shifting 10–15% of quote volume to a self-serve flow frees the rep to be present for the deals that actually require judgment.
Make the second order trivial.
The drop-off between a first order and a second one is where most wallet share is lost. Saved carts, one-click reorders, a remembered shipping address, a clearly visible “last order” — none of this is novel for B2C, but it is rare in metals. The buyers we interviewed mentioned this more often than price when describing their preferred supplier.
Pay attention to the share number, not just revenue.
Revenue per account can grow while wallet share quietly shrinks — you just rode the market up. The teams that move share consistently put a wallet-share estimate next to every top account in their CRM and review it quarterly. It’s the only number that tells you whether you’re actually winning the customer or just renting them.
Where to start
If you read all of that and felt the urge to overhaul everything, don’t. The teams that succeeded with this work picked a single segment first — usually fabricators they already had a strong relationship with — and worked the five plays through that segment before scaling. The compounding effect of doing it well once, in a contained way, is what builds the case internally to do it everywhere else.
And if you want help putting numbers against your own accounts, this is exactly the kind of analysis we do in a walkthrough call. Bring a real customer mix; we’ll show you where the share is hiding.