Adhesives & Grouts

Adhesives and grouts are sold alongside tile but bought completely differently. The person who chooses is usually not the person who pays, the quantity cannot be looked up, and the sale depends on technical confidence rather than appearance.

What makes this segment hard

Quantity is a calculation, not a lookup. Coverage depends on substrate, tile size, trowel notch and joint dimensions. Grout consumption follows a formula across tile size, joint width and joint depth. A dealer working it out on the counter with a pen gets it wrong often enough that under-supply and over-supply are both routine, and both cost somebody.

The contractor decides. The applicator specifies the product and the retail customer accepts the recommendation. That makes technical data sheets, application training and applicator loyalty part of your sales system rather than marketing material — and it means your CRM has to model a person who influences every sale and buys none of them.

Shelf life is real. Batch dates matter, stock rotates, and old stock at a dealer is a warranty claim waiting to happen. Systems that ignore manufacture date are storing up a problem at the far end of the channel where you have least visibility.

Product selection is conditional. The right adhesive depends on tile type, substrate, location, and whether the installation is submerged, exterior or over existing tile. A product list does not help someone choose; a selector that asks four questions does.

What we build for it

• Coverage and consumption calculators embedded in your site or dealer portal, using real coverage tables rather than a flat multiplier.
• Product selectors that ask about substrate and application and return the correct product with its data sheet.
• Applicator and contractor loyalty programmes with scheme tracking, points and claim settlement.
• Sales360 for the dealer and project side, with contractors modelled as influencers rather than forced into a buyer pipeline.
• Batch and date-aware stock visibility down to dealer level.

Where implementations usually fail

Coverage figures are hard-coded from a brochure, then the formulation changes and nobody updates them. We keep coverage data configurable and owned by your technical team, not buried in code.

And loyalty schemes get built with no thought given to claim settlement. A scheme that pays late is worse than no scheme, because the applicator stops believing the next one.

If this sounds like your business

Tell us what you are trying to fix. You will not spend the first meeting explaining how adhesives are actually sold to us, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

See also: building materials overview · what we have built · what we build