Tapped In Sales and Strategy for Beer Distributors

Take away the PFP plan. Would your reps still know what to sell? That one question separates good reps from great reps, and the good news is the difference is coachable.

Recorded live at the NBWA 89th Annual Convention in Orlando, Bud, Moneyball Ross, and Data Mike walk through the five behaviors that separate the rep who covers the route from the rep who grows it: try something new, walk the whole account, sell to the buyer's problems, run the route like it's theirs, and make trade-offs out loud. Every behavior comes with a ride-with question you can ask on Monday, because most of us spend ride-withs asking what got done on PFP instead of asking what the rep is actually thinking.

Along the way: the rep whose account was down 13% in volume but up 10% in GP, and why. The team lead who led a rep down the hallway and let him open the door to the spirits section himself. The Atlas rep who failed PFP, went rogue, and grew volume anyway. And why "call Mike, he'll fix it" is the fastest way to build a team that never thinks for itself.

If you manage reps, this one is for you. Six months from now, what should they be able to do that they're not doing today?

Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

15 tap handles after a full push with money, trips, and every incentive they could find. 150 handles in 60 days once the reps were paid on objectives instead. Gus Doll, owner partner at Doll Distributing, joins Bud, Mike, and Ross to walk through how a third-generation, four-state wholesaler moved its entire sales force off cents per case without losing the room.

Gus came back to the family business in 2023 after West Point and five years with the Army Rangers, and found a comp plan built in the 1980s. Volume was down, so incentives went up, and the reps did exactly what they were paid to do, which is how a German beer ends up on tap in a Mexican restaurant. The fix was not blaming the reps. It was putting the Doll family into the pay plan for the first time: 25 to 30 percent of rep pay tied to five company-level objectives.

Getting there meant cleaning up six locations with six ways of paying people, winning a unanimous partner vote, running two test months plus an extra training month, and having one Doll where the buck stopped when reps asked how they'd get paid.

If you're thinking about changing how your team gets paid in 2027, this one is for you.

LaMonica Beverage cut finished product loss 86% in a year and replaced a PFP program that had not changed in years. Carly LaMonica and Jessie LaMonica Fletcher, third-generation owners in Rockford, Illinois, join us to walk through how they did it.

The honest part is what happened in between. They opened the GP numbers to their sales team, the reps got competitive, and the profitability results came fast. Then Carly went out on a market visit and did not like what she saw. The execution had slipped. So the pendulum swings back, and the fix is not returning to the old objective grind, it is tying supplier priorities into the program by route with real accountability behind them.

We also get into the operations side, where LaMonica does something almost nobody else does: they code close-to-code product on the way in, so they know who sent it back and who put it back out. That led to the 50% rule, and to 43 out-of-code SKUs in one account getting a manager written up alongside the rep.

Most reps rent their route. This one is about building a team that owns it.

Tapped In Sales is the podcast for beer distributors, by beer distributors. Questions for Carly and Jessie? Hit us up at [email protected] and we will pass them along.

#BeerDistribution #SalesLeadership #Profitability

Twenty five companies sell the exact same product TJ Tribell sells, at roughly the same price, with roughly the same service. He has no exclusive territory and no supplier protection. He is also up double digits nine years running in an industry that is flat.

His secret is the thing our industry keeps arguing about. Every rep sees the margin, all the way down to the counter guy. Every rep is paid on profit. Every rep can move a price without asking permission.

TJ runs sales for Aetna Supply, a family owned top ten plumbing and HVAC wholesaler. He has worked at distributors that hid profitability and distributors that show it, and he has strong opinions about which ones grew. When we raised the objection you have all heard, that reps cannot be trusted with profit, he laughed.

In this one we get into the banana question that ends that argument, the buy two get one mistake that cost two truckloads and gained a million dollar customer, negotiating margin back out of your suppliers, and why profit is always sitting in the uncomfortable.

Ross makes the point that stings most: beer's protected structure is comfortable, and comfort is a luxury TJ does not get.

Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

More at vxptech.com

Beer is down 4% after a minus 5 last year. Five straight years of decline, and the World Cup summer that was supposed to turn it around didn't. Jason and David Steinman, the third generation running Beer Marketers Insights, join Bud, Mike, and Ross to grade the first half of 2026 the honest way: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good is real but narrow. Ultra, Busch Light, and a handful of imports are growing, RTDs are still up double digits, NA has grown seven years straight, and spiked sports drinks went from an idea at NBWA to millions of cases in under a year. The bad is everything around it: gas prices, a softer consumer across all of CPG, younger drinkers drinking less, and a World Cup that packed the bars in host cities but never trickled into the off premise that drives this industry. The ugly is RNDC. A multi-billion dollar, forty-state house evaporated in about 18 months, and it's the biggest beer distributors picking up the pieces. That leaves every mid-size house with a decision: pick your lane and run it well, or get into wine and spirits before your competitor does.

The Steinmans also cover what to watch for the rest of the year, starting with Labor Day, and why stable and predictable is the win the industry should be chasing right now.

If you're setting plans for the back half of 2026, this one is for you.

Your product is good for 270 days. Your distribution drive measures 90. A listener emailed us asking why we're still paying for placements on product that's already sitting on the shelf, and it turned into one of the more honest conversations we've had.

Bud, Mike, Ross, and Alicia work through what a distribution drive actually costs a wholesaler. A placement that doesn't turn isn't business, it's activity. Ross puts on the supplier hat and says the quiet part out loud: he's measured on depletions and shipments, so whether it sells through the store isn't his problem. Bud runs the math on what happens when you pay ten bucks a POD against three bucks of net GP per CE, and then the finished product loss bill shows up six months later.

The fix isn't refusing to run drives. It's changing what you count. A POD tells you a rep got in the door. A rebuy tells you the product belongs there. Alicia walks through how to bring a supplier a better program instead of just resistance, and why putting your foot down on late submissions protects your team's focus more than any tracker will.

If you're building distribution programs or arguing about one right now, this one is for you.

One client caps sales programs at six a month. Another runs 12 to 15, and the reps there can't name half of them. That's the mental load problem, and it's costing you execution you already paid for.

Bud, Mike, and Ross dig into how many programs a rep can actually carry in a month, and what happens to your business when you blow past that number. Ross makes the hard argument that every objective and incentive you launch distorts the two things the job is really about, maximizing space and selling the relationship, so you had better be sure the distortion points where you want it to. Mike talks about being the filter, cleaning the clutter for your team, and the line between organizing reps and babying them. Bud shares the ride-with that produced 40 to-dos and why the cap became five.

Then the story that lands it: a senior leader can't find his hottest brand at a top account, the rep says it isn't on PFP this month, and the rep doesn't think anything is wrong. That's a programmed rep. The reps who find what nobody put on the list are the scouts, and you need about 20% of them.

Plus the vodka aid run, and whose volume it's taking.

If you're building next month's programs right now, this one is for you.

Worst week since April. Down 8.6% on volume, down 5% on dollars, and the industry's official answer is that it got too hot outside. Nobody needs another weather report.

Here's what's really happening. We're sitting on mid-month client calls watching routes run down 10, 11, even 15, and a good number of those same operators are still flat or growing on GP. That gap is the whole episode. We walk through three places the dollars are still sitting when the cases aren't coming: the rest of the truck, since packaged beverage is growing 4 to 4.5% while bev alc bleeds; the influential accounts nobody has time for, including one client who took 160 under-serviced accounts, put three people on them, and projected 145% of target on the same market and the same products; and route coverage, where success happens at the margin.

Then the warning. Volume is down, so everybody's first instinct is to cut routes. There's no accounting line on a P&L for the value of attention, and you only find out what it was worth after the volume follows it out the door.

Plus the RTD run, Molson Coors giving up share, and a prediction Bud tries to change in August.

Worth a listen if you're resetting goals right now.

Two routes down 25% for the month means your whole company is down 5%. Most of us look at that number, say "Johnny was out," and move on.

This week Ross brings a pattern he kept seeing across clients big and small: when a rep goes out on leave, the route gets covered haphazardly, the results tank, and everybody shrugs. Very few distributors have an actual plan for it. Mike has run those routes himself and walks through what really happens out there, from not knowing where the back stock sits to the fear of overselling an account the regular rep has to come back to. There's a real difference between covering a route and selling it, and most relief coverage is survival mode.

We get into who should cover, whether burning a team lead is worth what stops getting done, and a more creative option: segment your impact accounts, build a sales rep in training tier, and slide everybody up the line so your best routes never get orphaned. Plus Diageo says it's rewiring distributor incentives toward rate of sale, and we have thoughts.

Worth a listen if you're building coverage plans, training reps, or wondering where your points went last month.

July did not give anybody a soft landing. You either made your number or you got crushed, and almost nobody landed in between. We dig into what actually happened last month, why A-B houses slipped off their June trends while MC clients picked up a point, and why Florida and California grew while most of the country did not.

Then it gets worse before it gets better. Gas prices bounced back up, and a new one showed up on client calls this month: electricity. One warm market saw prices double, and the numbers coming at us for a 1,200 square foot house sounded like a mortgage payment. There is even a point where it gets too hot to drink beer, and we have watched consumption nosedive in real time to prove it.

August has a selling day missing and last year's Labor Day load week has moved into September, so we talk through how to set a goal reps will still reach for. Three clients already threw out their annual budget. Set the budget as a guide, not gospel.

We also get into the hemp ban going down to the wire, 35 state attorneys general writing Congress, Kratom bans spreading, flavor carrying the whole category, and the final read on World Cup volume.

Worth a listen if you are building sales plans, incentives, or goals right now.