Field notes · Distributor management

Prepping a distributor review in an hour

By the Sightglass team7 min read14 August 2026

The worst distributor review is the one where both sides arrive with their own numbers. Forty minutes go on reconciling two versions of the same quarter, the clock runs out, and everyone agrees to stay close on it. Nobody writes anything down. The next review opens with the same forty minutes.

A review that works is narrow. Four numbers, one slide with account names on it, and a short list of things each side agreed to do before the next one. Three of them come out of exports you already pull; the fourth is what you write from those three. If you have the files, the prep is about an hour, and it is the same hour every quarter.

Bring four numbers, not forty

The temptation is to arrive with the whole book — every brand, every month, every account. It reads as thorough and lands as noise. The brand manager across the table is carrying a book of other suppliers alongside yours, and whatever they remember from your hour is what they can repeat to their own sales team on Monday. Give them four things.

Depletion trend by brand, their territory only. Rolling twelve months against the twelve before it, in cases, brand by brand. Not the national picture — theirs. Two or three brands up, two or three down, and the honest total.
The accounts that went quiet. Named accounts in their territory that used to order and have stopped, ranked by what they used to take. This is the list that changes the temperature of the room, because it is specific and neither side owns the blame for it.
Distribution gaps. Accounts already buying one of your brands that have never taken another one they plainly should, plus — if you have venue data — the obvious accounts in the territory buying nothing at all.
The ask. One sentence per gap: what you want done, by when, and who owns it. If it doesn't fit in a sentence, it isn't an ask, it's a hope.
Bring the same four every time. A review is worth more as a series than as an event, and the second one is where the first one's commitments get checked.

Where each one comes from

The first three come out of depletion exports and a customer list; the fourth you write once you can see them. Nothing here needs a new system. What it needs is an archive: any single export shows you a window, and three of the four numbers are comparisons across windows. Keep every file you pull. With twelve months in a folder, the build below runs in about an hour on the morning of.

01Filter this period's export to the one distributor and their territory. Work on a copy and leave the raw file untouched.
02Sum cases by brand for the trailing twelve months, then do the same across last year's files. One row per brand, two columns, one difference. Number one is finished.
03Build the distinct account list for each of the two years — every account that took at least one case. Normalize names first; the same bar routinely appears three ways across a distributor's file.
04Subtract this year's account list from last year's. What's left is number two. Sort it by the cases those accounts used to take, and cut it at twenty rows.
05For gaps, pivot accounts against brands. An account with a solid record on one brand and nothing on a companion brand is a candidate — keep the ones where the placement is plausible, not merely absent.
06Write the asks last, once you can see the first three. Cap them at four.
07Check the top ten named accounts with the rep who covers them before you walk in. A closed venue on your at-risk list costs you the room.
Depletion data lags a day or two, and a slow couple of weeks is not a lapse. Wait for two consecutive empty periods before you call an account quiet, and leave seasonal SKUs out of the comparison entirely — otherwise every autumn looks like churn.

The one slide

The slide that changes the conversation isn't a chart. It's a table of accounts: name, cases they used to take, the month they went quiet, and a blank column headed "who's calling." Fifteen or twenty rows, no more. You can read it out loud in four minutes.

The shift
A chart makes the quarter something to explain. A list of named accounts makes it something to divide up. Same data, entirely different meeting.

Put the brand trend behind it as context, one page, and don't spend the hour defending it. If your shipment numbers disagree with the depletions in their file, say so in the first two minutes, agree it's timing or inventory, and park it. The named-account list survives that argument, because it's built from accounts rather than totals — a bar that stopped ordering stopped ordering in both versions of the file.

Leaving with commitments, not vibes

The end of the meeting is where reviews are usually lost. Everyone is agreeable, the hour is up, and the summary is "good conversation, plenty to work with." A quarter later nothing has moved and neither side can point to what was promised.

It's worth knowing where a distributor sits in the wider book before you prep at all. We ran this across one importer's own depletion exports: 113 of 242 distributors had not moved a case in ninety days or more. Not all of those are problems — plenty are dormant by design, a specialty listing or a market that closed. The point is that quiet accumulates quietly, and a review is one of the few moments anyone notices.

Every item gets a name and a date. Not "the team will look at it" — a person and a week. Yours or theirs, both are fine. Unowned is not.
Cap it at five. A brand manager can carry five things into their own Monday meeting. Twelve items is the same as none, and everyone in the room knows it.
Trade, don't only ask. Bring what you'll do: ride-alongs, staff education at their top ten, and — where the state permits them — samples or a promotion. A list that's all asks reads as a scorecard.
Send the list within the hour. Same names, same dates, no new items and no softened wording. The version that circulates is whichever one arrives first.
Open the next review with it. Read the five, mark each done or not, then start. Two quarters of that and the prep gets easier, because both sides know it's coming.
What a supplier and a distributor can agree to — pricing, incentives, point-of-sale support, promotional activity — varies by state, and materially. Keep your compliance people close to anything beyond calls and education, and don't assume a practice that works in one market travels across a state line.

Or have the four numbers waiting

None of this is difficult. It's an hour you have to find on the morning of, for every distributor, every quarter — and that hour is the reason reviews so often get prepped from memory. Sightglass reads the VIP depletion feed you already pay for every night and keeps each snapshot, so the trend, the quiet accounts and the gaps are already assembled by distributor and by territory when you sit down. It drafts the outreach that follows — to the quiet accounts and to the distributor — in your own voice, and sends nothing until a person approves it; approved mail goes out from the rep's own mailbox, so replies come back to them. Your reporting stays exactly where it is.

The judgment is still yours: which four asks, which accounts your rep already knows are shut, what you're willing to trade. That part is the meeting. The rest is arithmetic across files.

Want to see it on your book? Twenty minutes, screen shared. No file required. Book a 1-1 demo