There’s a researcher named Rory Sutherland who told a story about Royal Mail that I can’t stop thinking about.
Royal Mail was pouring money into delivery reliability. Faster service, fewer mistakes, better tracking. All the things you’d think customers care about. When they went to measure satisfaction? It didn’t correlate with any of it.
You know what drove customer satisfaction? Whether people liked their postie.
That was it. The individual who delivered their mail and whether that person took a little extra care, knew where to leave a package, remembered you’d be away that week. One human being making a contextual judgment call.
Rory’s line stuck with me: “An individual person with the discretion to take intelligent contextual action is worth a thousand algorithms.”
That’s exactly what’s happening in beer distribution right now.
We talk to distributors every day who are staring at a fork in the road.
On one side: strip it down, get lean, let technology carry the load. On the other: invest in the people who actually build the relationships and give them better tools so they can do more of what they’re good at.
I get the temptation to go the first route. I’ve been there. Cut costs, find efficiencies, run the spreadsheet. It makes sense on paper.
But here’s what we’ve seen play out over and over. The distributor that wins is the one who figures out how to free up their best people to do more human things. Not the one who figures out how to replace them.
Think about dynamic routing. On paper, it’s an efficiency win. But what do you actually lose? Your driver stops being your driver at that account. The retailer doesn’t know who’s coming. The trust breaks down. And when you’ve got a problem, there’s no relationship there to smooth it over. Nobody to say “I know these guys, I’ll go handle it.”
We watched a delivery manager turn around a blown order a few weeks before Memorial Day by getting in his truck and going back to that Dollar General himself. He knew the account, took ownership, and fixed it. That store manager isn’t going to forget that. And the next time something goes sideways, that relationship is going to matter.
That’s not something a routing algorithm does.
Here’s the thing about AI that gets missed in most of the hype.
The best analysts at the best companies aren’t being replaced. They’re becoming more valuable. Because the technology is handling the block-and-tackle stuff and freeing those people up to do the things that are uniquely human: judgment, problem-solving, relationships, reading a room.
That’s where we’re heading in distribution too. Not fewer people doing the work. Better people doing better work because the noise is cleared away.
Think about how complex the modern beer portfolio has become. We went from maybe five suppliers and 150 SKUs in 1999 to sixty suppliers and 2,000-plus SKUs today, and it’s only gotten more complex since. You cannot command and control your way to growth through that. You need scouts. You need the 20% of your people who go off the map, try new things, and find the next opportunity that no historical dataset was ever going to show you.
Big data tells you what happened. People find out what’s next.
The Schiltz Story
Schlitz used to be the number one brewery in the world. Bigger than Bud. The beer that made Milwaukee famous. Then in the mid-70s, corporate decided to cut costs. Shorter fermentation, cheaper ingredients, faster and more efficient. They won the spreadsheet and lost the consumer. The beer went cloudy. Bottles came back. Kegs came back. The FDA got involved. The brand died.
They optimized for the wrong thing.
I think about that story every time I hear a distributor talking about getting leaner by cutting people. There’s a version of that conversation that ends the same way Schlitz ended. You thought you were saving money, and you were actually destroying the thing that made you valuable.
VXP is built on this premise: your people are your edge.
Data makes them sharper. Structure makes them more consistent. But at the end of the day, the rep who walks into that account, the driver who knows exactly where the display goes, the manager who drives back out to fix a problem those people are what separate a good distributor from a great one.
We want to give them better information so they can spend more time doing what they’re actually good at. Not replace them with a dashboard.
People still buy from people. That’s not old-fashioned thinking. It’s how this industry works. And if you want to grow, you’ve got to make sure your best people have the time, the data, and the support to do what only they can do.
Want to go deeper on this?
We dug into all of this on Episode 112 of the Tapped In Sales Podcast. The postie story, dynamic routing, AI and human connection, the scout bee concept, and the full Schlitz story.
▶️ Watch the episode here:
And if you want to understand the 20% of your team that changes everything, go back to Episode 72: Rogue Unit. That one is still one of our favorites.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode:
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