You are Marieke Doornbos, eleven days into a newly created post: Group Controller of Nordveld Industrial Supplies in Rotterdam. The new owner wants a credible redesign of how Nordveld measures and pays for performance within one quarter, and the first thing you must decide is what the customer book will be ranked by.
The situation
It is Monday, 19 January 2026. Nordveld distributes bearings, seals, fasteners and fluid-power parts to 3,400 business customers across the Benelux and western Germany: 720 people, 95 field representatives, three distribution centres and its own delivery fleet. It closed the year on a record €410 million of revenue, but operating margin slipped to 6.5% (€26.6 million). The private-equity fund that has just bought it wants 9% within two years. If there is no credible redesign by the end of the quarter, it will impose an across-the-board cost cut and a revenue-only sales target.
Today Nordveld manages margin at the gross level, product line by product line, and spreads overhead across accounts in proportion to their revenue. The books take eleven working days to close, and more than forty indicators circulate, nearly all of them counting volume. Representatives earn 80% of their variable pay on revenue and 20% on gross margin. What it costs to serve an account — how often it orders, expedited freight, returns, support hours — appears in no figure a representative ever sees.
A pilot commissioned before you arrived loaded those costs onto the 200 largest accounts. Ranked by operating profit, the bottom fifth lost money: about €6.5 million a year that the gross-margin report never shows. A band of mid-sized accounts earned far more than anyone thought. And the account at the very bottom of the list belongs to the highest-earning representative on the force. Ruud Balder, the commercial director, argues that the pilot's cost keys are debatable, that the small accounts' volume keeps three warehouses and a fleet busy, and that the sales force trusts the revenue ranking.