--- title: "The bottleneck is your best person | ekory" description: "B2B customers give suppliers 17% of their buying process, and the first hour decides. At a technical distributor, that hour goes queuing for one colleague." url: https://ekory.ai/blog/the-bottleneck-is-your-best-person language: en italian: https://ekory.ai/it/blog/the-bottleneck-is-your-best-person.md updated: 2026-10-10 --- Perspective 7 August 2026 11 min read Updated 10 October 2026 # The bottleneck is your best person In technical distribution the answer to the customer’s question already exists in the company. The problem is that the only reliable route to it goes through a colleague who is on another call. - **17%** of the B2B buying process is spent talking to suppliers - **7x** more likely to reach a decision maker if you respond within the hour - **42h** average first-response time in the HBR audit ## Key takeaways - **B2B customers spend only 17% of their buying process talking to potential suppliers** (Gartner research, reported in Harvard Business Review in 2022): every exchange that goes cold is a share of the only access you had. - **The first hour counts**: in research published in Harvard Business Review, contacting a lead within the hour made a real conversation with a decision maker nearly seven times more likely than an hour later; in the authors’ audit, the average first response took 42 hours. - **At a technical distributor the delay is an internal queue**: the answer exists in datasheets, price lists and past quotations, but the only reliable path to it runs through one experienced colleague. - **Hiring alone won’t fix it**: in Italy, commerce and tourism is the supply chain with the largest hiring need for 2025-2029, between 589,000 and 700,000 people (Excelsior), and a new hire learns the catalog by asking the expert. - **What works is making what is already written answerable**, with answers that cite the document and page, say when they don’t know, and keep the expert’s corrections for everyone. ## The hour in which the answer is worth something A distributor’s customer asks a question that sounds simple. Is this component compatible with that model. Is there an equivalent in stock. What is the delivery time for the non-standard variant. The question arrives by email at 9:40, and it is not a request for information: it is the visible part of a purchase that is already in motion, probably at more than one supplier. How much time there is to answer has been measured. In a Harvard Business Review study, James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington audited **2,241 American companies** by sending each a test inquiry and timing the reply. 37% answered within the hour, 16% between one and 24 hours, 24% took longer than a day and **23% never answered at all**. Among those who did reply within thirty days, the average first response took **42 hours**. The companion study, run on 1.25 million leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies, measured what that delay costs. Contacting the customer **within the first hour made a real conversation with a decision maker nearly seven times more likely than contacting them one hour later**, and more than sixty times more likely than waiting a day. The research is from 2011, and it shows: it describes a world of web forms. What it measures, though, is not a level but a relationship, between how fast you answer and whether you get to talk to the person who decides. That relationship has not become more forgiving since. It matters more now because the contact window has narrowed at the other end too. Gartner’s research, summarized by Brent Adamson in HBR, found that **B2B customers dedicate only 17% of their purchase process to talking to potential suppliers**. Everything else happens without you in the room. The few exchanges you do get are therefore worth disproportionately more, and each one that goes cold is not one lost email: it is a fraction of the only access you had. ## The queue nobody measures Here is the part the sales literature tends to skip. In a technical distributor, the delay is rarely a motivation problem. Nobody is sitting on the inquiry. The salesperson read it at 9:41 and cannot answer it, because answering requires knowing something specific about a catalog with thousands of references. So what actually happens is a queue, and it looks like this: 1. **09:41** The salesperson reads the question and knows roughly where the answer might be. Not well enough to send it to a customer. 2. **09:45** They look for it themselves: the technical datasheet, the shared folder, a similar past order. Twenty minutes, no certainty. 3. **10:05** They ask the colleague who knows. That colleague is on the phone with another customer. 4. **11:30** The colleague answers, from memory, correctly. Or asks for the model number again, because the question arrived stripped of half its context. 5. **12:10** The answer goes out to the customer. Two and a half hours after it arrived, on a good day, and only because nobody was on holiday. Two and a half hours is a fast day, and it has already spent the entire window in which the answer was worth the most. Nothing in that sequence was anybody’s fault, and no CRM would have shortened it, because the CRM knows the inquiry exists. It does not know whether that component is compatible with that model. The company was never missing the answer. It was missing a way to reach the answer that does not pass through one person’s morning. ## What it costs the person everyone asks Every company of this kind has one. Sometimes two. The technical salesperson with fifteen years on the catalog, who knows the equivalences, remembers why that customer refuses that brand, and can tell in three seconds that the code in the email is a discontinued version. That person is the company’s most valuable asset and, at the same time, the reason the queue exists. And the cost is paid twice. Once by the colleagues waiting. Once by them, because a person who answers thirty internal questions a day is a person who is not selling, not visiting customers, not training the new hire: the three things they would be best in the building at doing. The background noise is already documented. [Our study on the cost of knowledge that can’t be found](https://ekory.ai/blog/the-cost-of-knowledge-that-cant-be-found) used the IDC and McKinsey Global Institute measure: white-collar workers spend **19% of their working time** looking for information their company already owns. Gartner’s 2023 survey of digital workers found that **47% struggle to find the information their job requires**, spread across an average of eleven applications, up from six in 2019. In a distributor, that ordinary friction has a specific shape: it converges on the desk of whoever is best. There is also a quieter risk. A company whose technical knowledge runs through one person has a single point of failure that does not appear on any risk register. It fails on the day that person is at a trade fair, or ill, or has finally accepted the offer from the competitor who has been calling for two years. ## And the new hire takes a year The obvious answer is to hire another one. In Italy, the arithmetic makes that harder every year. Excelsior, the Unioncamere and Ministry of Labour forecasting system, projects that **“commerce and tourism” will be the supply chain with the largest hiring need in the country between 2025 and 2029: between 589,000 and 700,000 people, almost 19% of the national total in the more favorable scenario.** It is also the chain with the largest replacement need: **554,000 workers to be replaced**, 18% of the national figure. Among sales and service occupations, sales staff are the most sought-after profile, at 262,000 to 295,000 people. And the supply is not there. The same report expects a shortfall of **14,000 to 16,000 young people every year** with a vocational qualification or diploma in the administrative, secretarial and sales-services track alone. So the market will not hand a distributor a replacement for the person who knows the catalog. It will hand them, at best, someone capable of learning it. Which returns the problem to where it started. If learning the catalog means a year of standing next to the person who already knows it, then hiring does not remove the bottleneck: for the first year it makes it worse, because now the expert answers the customers’ questions and the new colleague’s questions. ## It is not a CRM problem, and not a catalog problem The instinct is to buy something. Usually a better CRM, sometimes a new product information system. Both are useful and neither addresses this, because the failure is not in storing the information. It is in retrieving it under time pressure, in a form someone can send to a customer. Consider what the company already has written down, in almost every case: - **Manufacturer datasheets**, thousands of PDFs, often scanned, in a folder organized by supplier rather than by question. - **Compatibility and equivalence notes**, frequently in an email thread or a spreadsheet maintained by one person. - **Past quotations and orders**, which contain the single most useful thing in the business: what was actually proposed to a customer with the same problem, and whether it worked. - **Correspondence with manufacturers**, where the exceptions live: the substitution that is allowed, the tolerance that is not. All of it is written. None of it is answerable. The gap between those two words is the whole problem, and it is why the queue forms in front of the one person who has effectively memorized the index. ## What actually shortens the queue The goal is not to replace the expert. It is to make the first hop unnecessary: the salesperson gets a usable answer without escalating, and escalates only the genuinely hard cases, which is what the expert should be spending the day on anyway. Four requirements, and the order matters: 1. **Answers must cite the document and the page.** This is first, not last. A salesperson will not forward a compatibility claim to a customer on the strength of an answer they cannot verify, and they are right not to. Without the source, the tool gets used once and abandoned. 2. **It has to read what you actually have.** Scanned datasheets, price lists, past quotations, email threads: the material is messy by nature, and anything that requires tidying it up first will never start. 3. **It has to say when it does not know.** In technical distribution a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, because it reaches the customer and then comes back as a return. 4. **What gets corrected has to stay corrected.** When the expert fixes an answer, the correction must become part of the shared memory for everyone, immediately. That is the mechanism by which fifteen years of catalog knowledge stops being biography and becomes company property. The measurable effect is not “the team is more productive”. It is narrower and easier to check: how many questions reach the expert this month compared to last, and how long the customer waits for the first useful answer. Both numbers are visible from the first week, and both are worth more than they look, because they operate on the 17% of the buying process where the supplier is still in the room. We go deeper into price lists, superseded part numbers and manuals in [AI for dealer networks and after-sales service](https://ekory.ai/blog/ai-for-dealer-networks-and-after-sales), and the examples for distributors are on the page [for distributors and dealer networks](https://ekory.ai/distributors). ## Methodological note All figures come from primary sources, read in the original. The HBR article and the Excelsior reports were read directly from their PDFs. On 10 October 2026 we re-checked every figure and moved the Excelsior numbers to the second update of the 2025-2029 forecasts, published in 2026. - **Response times**: Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, HBR, March 2011. The audit covers 2,241 US companies; the seven-times figure comes from a separate study by the same authors on 1.25 million leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies. A qualified lead is defined by the authors as “a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker”. The study is fifteen years old and is presented as such. - **17% of the buying process**: Brent Adamson, _Sensemaking for Sales_, HBR, January-February 2022, reporting Gartner research. - **Italian labor figures**: Excelsior, medium-term forecasts 2025-2029, second update (2026). The first edition, of July 2025, which this article used until October 2026, gave 574,000 to 702,000 people, 544,000 replacements, 237,000 to 272,000 sales staff and a shortfall of 14,000 to 17,000. “Commerce and tourism” is a supply chain that includes retail and hospitality, so it is wider than technical wholesale distribution: it is used here to size the pressure on commercial roles, not as a measure of the wholesale sector. - **The timeline in chapter two** is an illustration, not a measurement. There is no published data on internal escalation times in Italian distributors, and we have not invented any: the individual figures in this article are all sourced, the sequence is not. One figure we deliberately left out. The widely quoted claim that 78% of buyers purchase from the supplier who responds first traces back to a survey with no published report and no methodology: every citation leads to another blog. It is a good line and we have no way to verify it, so it does not appear here. ## Frequently asked questions ### How quickly should you answer a B2B customer’s inquiry? As fast as you can, and the first hour matters most. In research by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington published in Harvard Business Review, contacting a lead within the hour made a meaningful conversation with a decision maker nearly seven times more likely than an hour later. The study dates from 2011: it measures the link between speed and access to the person who decides, not today’s levels. ### How much time do B2B buyers spend with suppliers? According to Gartner research reported by Brent Adamson in Harvard Business Review in 2022, B2B customers spend only 17% of their buying process talking to potential suppliers. The rest they spend researching on their own. That is why every exchange with a supplier is worth far more than its length. ### Why are technical distributors slow to answer customers? Rarely for lack of effort: answering takes one precise fact about a catalog of thousands of items, and the reliable path to it runs through one or two experts. That creates an internal queue no CRM measures, because the CRM knows the inquiry exists, not whether that component fits that model. ### How do you reduce dependence on one key employee? By making what the company has already written answerable: datasheets, price lists, past quotations, correspondence with manufacturers. The tool must cite document and page, say when it doesn’t know and keep the expert’s corrections for everyone, so only the genuinely hard questions reach the expert. ### Does hiring another expert solve the problem? Rarely in the short term. Excelsior’s forecasts make commerce and tourism the Italian supply chain with the largest hiring need for 2025-2029, while trained young people fall short. And for the first year the new hire learns by asking the expert, who ends up with more questions, not fewer. ### How do you know whether it is working? Watch two numbers from the first week: how many questions reach the expert this month compared with last, and how long the customer waits for the first useful answer. Both are counts you can check yourself. ## Sources 1. James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, David Elkington, [_The Short Life of Online Sales Leads_](https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads), Harvard Business Review, March 2011. 2. Brent Adamson, [_Sensemaking for Sales_](https://hbr.org/2022/01/sensemaking-for-sales), Harvard Business Review, January-February 2022 (Gartner research). 3. Unioncamere, Ministry of Labour and Social Policies, Excelsior Information System, [_Previsioni dei fabbisogni occupazionali e professionali in Italia a medio termine (2025-2029)_, second update](https://excelsior.unioncamere.net/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/2025/report_previsivo_2025-29_agg.pdf) (in Italian), 2026. 4. Gartner, _Survey on Digital Workers_, May 2023 (4,861 full-time workers, organizations with over 100 employees). 5. IDC, McKinsey Global Institute, _The Social Economy_, 2012. 6. ekory, [_The cost of knowledge that can’t be found_](https://ekory.ai/blog/the-cost-of-knowledge-that-cant-be-found), July 2026. ## More research and articles. - [What the retiring craft is worth](https://ekory.ai/blog/the-cost-of-retiring-know-how): Research 6 August 2026 Italy needs 3.1 million hires by 2029 just to replace the people who leave. In wood and furniture there are 105.6 employees over 55 for every 100 under 35. - [Personal ChatGPT is not your company’s memory](https://ekory.ai/blog/personal-ai-is-not-company-memory): Perspective 4 August 2026 47% of Italian workers use AI at work, but only 19% of them use company tools alone. People get more productive; the company's memory does not. - [All research and articles.](https://ekory.ai/blog): Resources Data, regulation and cases, in English and Italian. ## Tell us about a process you still do by hand. We'll show it to you on your own materials. For the first call, your website or a catalog is all we need.