Würth built a screw company on 34,000 salespeople who visit every customer

Reinhold Würth took over the family screw business in 1954 and turned it into a multi-billion-euro concern; he attributes 90% of that growth to the outside sales force, with IT next at 5% and everything else another 5%.

The model is deliberately narrow: Würth sells only to professionals — craftsmen and industrial firms — never to private consumers. The field force is the main channel, visiting customers with a range of more than 125,000 articles covering screws, tools, electronics components and chemical products.

Würth's own sales doctrine, learned during years on the road, is that the best salesperson listens: several of his great sellers were shy people who could hear what customers needed. The company grew from a mini-operation to more than 14 billion euros in revenue in 2019, with about 34,000 of its 78,600 employees in the field.

Sell the visit, not the screw

A visiting salesperson creates demand that catalogues and stores don't.

Regular calls build trust and capture the reorder before competitors.

Service and advice justify margin on an interchangeable product.

The field force is hard to copy: it is the moat.

For a commodity, the channel is the brand: an owned field force that shows up regularly converts a product nobody asks for into a company nobody can ignore.

The Außendienst model remains Würth's core: the group has kept roughly 34,000 field salespeople, expanded the range far beyond screws, and Reinhold Würth's '90%' quote became the standard explanation for the company's decades of growth.