Fastenal (Nasdaq: FAST) announced in January it had tripled its vending goals for 2013, with the Winona, MN-based company shooting for 30,000 new vending machines under contract by the end of the year. With the year half over, Fastenal has signed only 11,000 new machines, 20 percent ahead of the first half of 2012 but far short of the 15,000 it would have needed to stay on track.

“We maybe got a little overzealous, throwing a 30,000 out there,” CEO Willard Oberton said during the company’s second-quarter conference call. Quarterly goals also slipped; Fastenal signed 6.5 percent fewer machines in the second quarter than it did during the first, marking the first sequential decline for signings in Fastenal’s FAST Solutions program since the first quarter of 2011, when signings declined 7.2 percent.

One reason Fastenal has “consciously” slowed the pace of new signings has been the recognition of how long it takes to realize the benefits the company had hoped to gain. “Where we went wrong with the decision was I thought that vending […] was going to automatically increase the efficiency in our stores. What I was missing on that is the tremendous amount of work to get to the position where it becomes more efficient,” Oberton said.

That work was taking away from the time needed to make sales calls, he said. While Fastenal had previously pushed managers hard to sign more machines, Oberton said reps have, as a result, had insufficient time to call on contractors and small accounts, calls managers say would have had a more immediate impact on sales. So the company has backed off on some of the pressure it previously applied to sign more machines.

Fastenal’s shift is in line with what MDM found in its 2013 Distribution Trends Report, where we report that distributors are getting smarter about how they approach vending.

LeLand J. Hein, president, said reps will have more selling time moving forward, and he trusts them to make good use of that time in whatever way they see fit. “What happens on those calls will dictate what happens in our sales, whether it comes in the form of construction products, vending, national accounts, key accounts or what have you,” Hein said.

The slowdown will also help Fastenal to promote higher-quality installations, Oberton said. In some cases, he says, an analysis of customer potential in underperforming accounts has shown that aggressive sales had resulted in more machines being sold into the account than were warranted.“We've really cranked up the quality on the signings,” Oberton said.

“Vending is a long-cycle sale,” Oberton said. “And right now, our focus has to be on creating sales immediately, going out knocking on the door and walking back with an order.” Improving daily growth through the end of this year, he said, will better prepare Fastenal as it moves into the first quarter 2014.