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The encyclopedia · Sales & Retail · Strategic decision · 1954–2020

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

Reinhold Würth credits 90% of the firm's success to its field force: salespeople visit craftsmen with a 125,000-product range, and listening beats talking.

Würth Group

the move

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.

why it works

  • 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.
the payoffSell the visit, not the screwclever

what transfers

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.

what came after

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.

references

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