Guide Distributors to Bars That Want Your Brand, Not Where You Want It

Dear Drinks Builder,

In today’s issue, I’ll discuss the importance of clearly guiding distributors to understand where to sell your brand.

By being clearer, you’ll likely increase your strike rate in the right outlets, and your distributor will see you as adding value instead of just asking to sell more.

Unfortunately, most brand owners think “clearer” means 100 pages on PowerPoint and are uselessly analytical.

Brand Owner — Distributor dynamics are always fascinating to me.

For many years, I represented brand owners. They were some of the biggest drinks companies in the world, and when I was trying to learn from internal best practices, they were always cocky.

They were based on the fact that if you represented a large company in a local market, distributors and on-trade customers had to listen to you.

That’s what I thought until I realized I had a problem. I was working for newly established global brands. In the export department, the brands were only significant in the home market and a handful of others.

In the countries I was selling it, nobody knew my brands. I could not rely on an army of salespeople. Distributors only had a handful of them.