What your sell-out data can tell you before the market does.

Claire Brunaud
3 days ago
2 min read

For a Key Account Manager, anticipation makes all the difference.

Anticipating a stock-out before it damages the customer relationship.

Anticipating an opportunity before it is captured by a competitor.

Yet in the field, many signals arrive too late.

When a stock-out becomes visible, it has already cost sales.

When growth is confirmed, the window of opportunity is sometimes already closed.

What if those signals already existed in your data… but weren’t being used?

When account management is still reactive

In many organizations, key account monitoring is still largely driven by sell-in.

Delivered volumes are used as the main indicator to assess the situation.

But for a KAM, sell-in remains an incomplete indicator.

It neither shows what is really happening in warehouses, nor helps understand the outflow dynamics to end customers.

In practice:

stock-outs are often detected when orders start to drop,
slowdowns are interpreted too late,
certain pockets of growth go unnoticed.

Account management becomes reactive, when it should be predictive.

Sell-out: an early indicator of market reality

Sell-out data plays a key role for KAMs: it acts as a leading indicator of account health.

A gradual decline in warehouse outflows can signal an imminent risk of stock-out, a availability issue, or an assortment misalignment.

Conversely, a localized acceleration in sales can reveal a development opportunity that is still invisible in the overall figures.

These weak signals are invaluable.

They allow you to act before the market—or the distributor—sets the pace for you.

Anticipating stock-outs before they become costly

For a key account, a stock-out is never just a simple product unavailability.

It degrades service quality, weakens the commercial relationship, and opens the door to competitors.

By analyzing warehouse outflows over time, the KAM can identify under-pressure depots, spot abnormally high turnover rates, or detect gaps between deliveries and actual outflows.

This insight makes it possible to anticipate logistical adjustments, prioritize discussions with the distributor, and prevent the stock-out from turning into a crisis.

Detecting growth where it truly begins

Conversely, sell-out data is also a powerful tool for detecting growth.

A product accelerating in certain depots, a category performing better with specific customer profiles, an innovation gaining traction faster than expected—these are all signals that sell-in does not capture immediately.

For a KAM, this information is strategic. It enables the proposal of targeted action plans, supports the case for additional investments, and strengthens the value of the partnership with the distributor.

Moving from a supplier role to that of a business partner

When a KAM comes into a meeting with a clear view of actual sales, the conversation shifts to a different level.

Discussions are no longer limited to ordered volumes, but focus on market performance, growth levers, and risks to anticipate.

It is this business partner mindset—supported by sell-out data—that sustainably strengthens the key account relationship.

This is precisely KaryonFood’s ambition: to centralize and harmonize sell-out data from distributors, enabling KAMs to anticipate, decide, and act before the market speaks too loudly.

Signals exist well before visible stock-outs or missed opportunities.

You just need to know where to look—and have data that can truly be used.

👉 Request a KaryonFood demo and discover how your sell-out data can become a real anticipation tool to manage your key accounts with a head start.