Fifteen.
That’s how many tap handles Doll Distributing got on an on-premise push the year before they launched VXP. They threw everything at it. Cash incentives. Trips. Their veteran on-premise team leader working it hard. The goal was 20, and they landed at 15. Gus Doll called it “a trifle sum,” and he’s being polite.
One year later, same company, same market, a 60-day window. 150 handles.
No new incentive. No trip. No ask. Here’s how Gus put it on the show: “You’re the sales force for Doll Distributing, this is what we want, let’s get it done.”
Same reps, roughly the same beer, ten times the result. So what changed? They changed how they pay people.
If you’re building or rebuilding a comp plan, this one’s for you.
A plan built for a market that isn’t here anymore
Doll is a third-generation family house. Founded in 1965 in Council Bluffs, now running in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Gus came back to the business in 2023 after West Point and about five years with the Army Rangers, trained with the sales force, then spent a full year in on-premise.
What he found was a comp plan set up in the 1980s. Cents per case, plus whatever supplier incentives were on the table that month.
And look, that plan worked. It worked through the eighties, through the early 2000s, through the craft boom. Gus is clear about that. But he walked in right after COVID, into declining volume, more premium mix, craft giving ground to RTDs, and a whole generation drinking differently. Reps were “valuing every case the same in a market that is not that way.”
Here’s the part every owner should sit with for a minute. When volume falls on a cents-per-case plan, the only way left for a rep to make his money is incentives. Gus said it better than I can: “If the volume is down, the incentives must go up.”
So that’s what happens.
The German beer in the Mexican restaurant
Gus’s uncle Mark walked into a Mexican restaurant in their market and found a German beer on tap. Turns out one of their team leaders wanted to win a trip, told his team to go get German tap handles, and his team did exactly that. Because they’d run through a wall for that guy.
Then Gus started seeing it everywhere. Oktoberfest end caps on the Fourth of July. Winter seasonals stacked up in the middle of summer.
Now here’s where Gus earned a lot of respect from me. He didn’t go hunting for bad actors. “This is not nefarious activity by our team leaders or our account reps.” The question he brought to his family was what the Doll family had done to build a system where that was the smart play.
Because follow the money on that German beer. The rep collects the incentive. The brewery’s local guy hits his metric. The brewery books the volume. And when it doesn’t sell in the Mexican restaurant, “Doll Distributing fit the bill of the out-of-code.” They were the last one considered in the chain.
Gus has a great line for this. The incentives were “bringing more partners into the Doll family boardroom that didn’t have the last name of Doll.”
If that doesn’t describe your incentive calendar, you’re ahead of most of the people I talk to.
What they actually changed
Doll moved the whole sales force onto three tiers.
Tier one is volume and profit. Set alongside the volume goals reps have historically hit. Profit usually lines up pretty close. The difference is that some cases now carry more weight than others, so reps start thinking about which cases they’re bringing in.
Tier two is the Doll objectives. This is the one that got them 150 handles. Roughly 25 to 30% of a rep’s monthly pay, tied to what the family wants done that month. Here’s Gus: “If I’m gonna pay you a monthly and yearly wage, I don’t just want you to sell in whatever beer you think you’d like to. I want you to accomplish what the Doll family wants.”
And they capped it at five. Not fifteen. Not “here’s everything we care about this month.” Five, and as reasonable as they could make them. That cap matters more than people think. Your reps can’t execute twelve priorities, and if you pay on twelve, you’re really paying on none.
Tier three is supplier incentives. Same 10 to 15 a month they always had, now sitting in front of the rep in the app instead of buried in a monthly email. And here’s the twist. Gus says they’ve never had higher success on incentives. They’re not a negative to him anymore, “because I’ve already gotten what I wanted done.” Hit the family’s five, and you’re free to go chase whatever’s out there.
His summary of it: before, they had two tiers. Volume for the brewer, incentives for the rep. “Now we have three tiers, and the Doll family’s part of the tier now.”
The hard part wasn’t the software
Ross says it all the time: technology is easy, people are hard. Doll is a good example.
They had about six locations, each paying reps a little differently, inherited from whoever owned them before. Finance folks who’d mastered one system for 30 years. A family partnership where any big change takes a unanimous vote, and the person proposing it has to bring the data, answer every question, and in Gus’s words, “good old fashioned whip the votes.”
A few things they did that I’d steal:
An owner owned it. Gus made himself the guy where the buck stopped and gave every employee his number. Nothing in the plan was ever “a VXP thing.” Every call was a decision the family made, on purpose, for a reason. That’s how it should be. The VXP Gus runs is not the same as the VXP the guy down the road runs.
They tested longer than they had to. January and February were test months, and that’s where all the internal comp messes surfaced. By the end of February they could have gone live March 1. They didn’t. Their rule is “right by the company first, right by the employees second.” March 1 passed the first test, not the second. So they ran a full training month where every rep could see what he would have earned and check that the goals were fair but obtainable. They went live April 1.
Team leaders set their own goals. Team leaders went back on commission, and every month they pick their own team’s volume and profit numbers. Gus kept an owner’s override. He’s never used it. Best part: a team leader who came in at 95% doesn’t get to lower next month’s goal to make up for it. “No, it’s a new month.”
Launch day wasn’t the finish line. In Gus’s words, “April 1st, I didn’t just go, let’s go to the Caymans.” They run State of the Union videos for the team, did an anonymous survey and sensing sessions at 90 days, and have 6- and 12-month reviews on the calendar.
What the suppliers noticed
This is the part I didn’t expect to hear. Some of Doll’s brewery partners have called to say you’ve never hit this incentive before, great work, or that Doll ran a distribution drive faster than it ever had.
And with brands that lag on profit and volume, yeah, the conversations got harder. But now both sides are talking about the same thing. What do we need to do to win together?
That’s a better conversation than “how much do I have to spend to get your reps to look at my brand.”
What to do Monday
Pull last month’s incentive and program list. Count them. Then ask yourself two questions.
How much of what your reps got paid on last month was something you decided mattered to your business?
And if the answer is “not much,” who’s actually running your sales force?
If it’s mostly supplier money and cents per case, you’ve got the same two-tier plan Doll had. The good news is they just showed you what the third tier is worth.
Gus closed the show with something I’ve been repeating ever since. Change is hard. It’s time consuming. For a while you’re not the most popular guy on campus. But nobody who switched from typewriters to computers ever wished they had the typewriters back.
Want the full conversation?
Gus walked us through the whole thing on Episode 129 of the Tapped In Sales Podcast, “Cents Per Case vs. Objectives: How Doll Distributing Rebuilt Rep Pay.” The family vote, the test months, how team leaders set their own goals, and what’s next with FPL and Boost.
▶️ Gus tells the 15-to-150 story at the 7:30 mark: https://youtu.be/tYm6BwZS0AY?t=450
IIf you’re rethinking how your reps get paid and want to see how the objectives tier actually gets set up, let’s talk vxptech.com
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