Before VXP I spent fifteen years at Atlas, our beer distributorship in Battle Creek, Michigan. Somewhere in there we picked up the Sazerac malt products. Fireball, Southern Comfort, one of the coconut rums, that whole line.
The 100 mils were the interesting one. They only came one way, a six-pack with a little carrier. That’s it. If you wanted the malt Fireball, you bought the six-pack.
So our rep walks into the account with a volume goal and a placement objective in his pocket, looks around, and sees that the six-pack of Fireball is the same size as a six-pack of beer. And there’s an opening in the cooler right where a six-pack of beer used to be. Perfect. Slide it in, get the placement, move on to the next stop.
And it sat there. It didn’t turn. It was dead.
You know what everybody said? Nobody wants the malt version. It’s a malt product, the flavor’s off, consumers won’t pick it up. We wrote the brand off. My own dad told me it was a low volume brand and we’d never sell any of it.
Here’s the part that took me a while to admit. The rep did nothing wrong. He did exactly what we asked him to do. We asked for a placement and he got us a placement. His job was done.
Then we changed up the view and it made all the difference.
Then we made the switch to focusing on GP per case.
One of the very first things that jumped off the screen was Fireball. Look at the GP per CE on this thing. Twenty bucks a case. It was one of the most profitable items in the entire book and it was sitting in a beer cooler dying a slow death because that’s where a six-pack fits.
A rep named Jared walked into the office of Mike, one of our sales managers back then and my co-host on the podcast now. He said I need to get these hundred mils out of the beer cooler, they don’t belong there. I need them on the counter. The two of them pulled up the Sazerac order form, went through the display pieces, and ordered acrylic racks and fishbowls. A bunch of them. We had fishbowls hanging around that place for years.
Then the six-packs started getting popped open. Singles on the counter, right at the register, impulse buy at eye level where a 100 ml belongs.
And we watched that brand explode. It went from a write-off to our third or fourth largest GP brand in the total portfolio.
Would any of that have happened without the focus on GP? Probably not. Because before that, his job was done.
That’s the whole thing, right there. Nobody got smarter. Nobody got a training class. We didn’t hire a better rep. We changed what the rep could see, and he went and solved it himself in about a week.
Give your reps the information they need.
Your reps make a couple hundred micro decisions a day. Where does this go. Is this worth the argument. Do I spend fifteen more minutes with this guy or do I get back in the truck. And every one of those decisions runs through the same filter: is it worth my return on effort?
If the only thing they can measure is cases, then return on effort means the fastest path to a case. That’s not a character flaw. That’s math. You built the filter.
Change what they can see and the same rep starts spending twenty extra minutes with the pesky c-store owner, because now he can look at it and know it’s worth incremental profit. Same rep, same route, same day. Different answer.
I tell clients all the time when they come out the gate with this: watch your inventory. Stuff you never sold much of is suddenly going to be a winner and you’re going to go out of stock on it. That’s not a bug. That’s the point.
I know what the hangup is. Owners get squeamish about showing reps the margin.
It gets blamed on the older generation, that they don’t talk finances, everything’s a secret. I don’t buy it. If that were true, car dealers wouldn’t pay their people on profitability. Plumbing supply, construction supply, chemical distributors, they all pay reps on profit and a bunch of them let the rep set the price. Those places are owned by the same generation that owns beer houses. It’s not an age thing. It’s an innovation thing. We rode volume growth for fifty or sixty years and never had to figure this out.
Mike’s been on site with more sales teams than I can count, and the reaction he gets from reps is almost always some version of the same sentence. That makes perfect sense. I wish we’d been doing this a long time ago.
Now, there is one real objection in there, and it’s worth separating out. When you expose a rep’s own pay and their at-risk dollars, the veterans do get uncomfortable. The younger guys mostly don’t care. But that’s pay transparency, and that’s a different, narrower problem than showing somebody the margin on a case of Fireball. Don’t let the second one stop you from doing the first.
Then start asking questions.
If you want to try something Monday, ask your team leads to start asking reps three questions.
What are you doing to grow GP? What are you doing to grow volume? What are you doing to limit finished product loss?
Then listen to the answer. You don’t want two plus two equals four, boss. You want a story. I’m doing this, I’m working on that, I’ve got this idea for the Circle K on the corner. When you get the story back, you know the thinking has moved. When you get a shrug, you don’t have a rep problem. You’ve got a coaching opportunity, and now you know exactly where it is.
Here’s the thing most people get wrong about profit focus. Orienting the company toward profitability is the easy part. Everybody nods in the CFO’s meeting. The hard part is the last mile. You have to get it all the way down to the point of decision, which is a rep standing in an account with about ninety seconds to make a call.
That’s what VXP does. But the tool isn’t the point. Jared didn’t need a dashboard to be creative. He needed to know that the thing he was standing next to was worth twenty bucks a case.
Give your people the number and get out of the way.
Want the full conversation?
We went deep on all of this in Episode 113 of the Tapped In Sales Podcast, “When the Tide Goes Out.” The Fireball story, why profit growth has to outrun cost inflation, the return on effort argument, and a bunch on the aluminum squeeze at the end.
If you’re sitting on a portfolio full of Fireballs and your team can’t see them, let’s talk. vxptech.com
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