The Question
A Malaysian snack distributor in Selangor was heading into a contract review with its producer. On paper, the December book looked healthy: 300 active shops, RM 2.45 million in revenue, 24.2% gross margin. The kind of numbers a distributor brings to a renewal meeting.
The owner wasn't convinced. Some of those 300 shops had ordered every fortnight all year. Others he hadn't seen since last Christmas. A few ordered early in December and then went quiet — right before the biggest sales window of the month. He knew, in his gut, that the 300-shop book was really two different businesses. He just didn't have the data to say how much of each.
The question on the table: how many shops actually keep buying — and how much of December's revenue would repeat next month without a Christmas window to lean on? They brought the question to Pau Analytics.
What the Data Showed
The pattern came back sharper than anyone expected.
We took the distributor's 6,074 order lines from December and classified every shop by when it ordered. Shops that bought in both halves of the month got labelled Steady. Shops that only showed up during the 15–31 December campaign window got labelled Campaign-only. Shops that bought early and then went silent got labelled Quiet before Christmas.
Only 127 of the 300 shops were Steady. Between them they carried 61% of December's revenue — RM 1.50M of recurring, year-round buying. Another 113 shops were Campaign-only — the festive surge, 28% of revenue, unlikely to return until next Christmas. And 60 shops had gone quiet before Christmas, carrying RM 265K of revenue that was almost certainly leaving the book.
Then came the finding the owner needed to hear. The concentration inside the Steady book was extreme: 22 shops — all supermarkets — earned half of December's revenue on their own. Outside of those 22 anchor accounts, 37 shops were underperforming their channel peers by more than half, concentrated in Minimarket (20) and Petrol Station (10).
And the carton shape was flat across every channel. A sundry shop that earned RM 916 in December got roughly the same premium-heavy mix as a supermarket earning RM 49,001 — the same Festive Gift Packs and Premium cookies pushed onto shelves that couldn't sell them fast enough. That flatness was one big reason shops were going quiet.
What Changed
The report gave the distributor three things he didn't have before.
A reframed book — not "300 shops across Selangor" but "127 shops buying year-round, producing RM 1.50M monthly, anchored in 33 urban supermarkets, plus a 113-shop festive surge." The difference mattered: one was a business he could defend in a renewal meeting; the other was a ledger count.
A named list of 60 quiet shops to call within the week. Each one got a sales rep diagnostic: recover, confirm-lost, or investigate. Honesty restored to reporting.
And a channel-by-channel scorecard with specific verdicts — Keep for the 33 supermarkets, Grow for the 67 convenience stores (the quietly loyalest channel, at 75% steady revenue), Triage for the 119 minimarkets, Rationalise for the 42 petrol stations, and Question for the 39 sundry shops where a third of revenue had already gone quiet.
The Result
Today, the distributor runs the book as two businesses instead of one. The 127 recurring shops each have a named account owner with a weekly check-in cadence. The 60 quiet shops were called — the sales team recovered a handful, confirmed others as lost to a competing distributor, and dropped a small number from active reporting.
Three carton templates have replaced the uniform push: premium-heavy for supermarkets and urban convenience, balanced for minimarkets, everyday and low-cost for petrol stations and sundry shops. Same 40-SKU catalogue — different allocation per channel.
When the producer review meeting came, the distributor opened with a new line: "We run 127 recurring shops producing RM 1.50M monthly, anchored in 33 urban supermarkets, with a festive surge of 113 Christmas-only accounts on top." A narrower story, a more honest one, and a far harder one to argue with.
"We thought we had 300 shops. Turns out we have 127 we can count on every month, 113 we only see at Christmas, and 60 we needed to chase down this week. That's a different business to run — and a different one to renew a contract against."