Every supplier asks for the same thing: more focus, more placements, more attention. Most distributors answer with an over-the-top incentive and hope it sticks. Geoff Rifkin, VP of Sales at Dynamo Specialty Distributing in Texas, built something different.

We sit down with Geoff to break down Dynamo's Pay for Performance (PFP) program, the system that turned "please prioritize us" into real accountability on both sides. Each rep carries no more than four KPIs a month. Suppliers and Dynamo fund the goals together. If the team doesn't hit 80%, the supplier pays nothing, and Dynamo still pays the reps who hit on its own dime. Reps can straight-line their payout to 125%, and the team has averaged around 90% over the years.

We also get into how Geoff measures lift before and after a PFP month, how he picks CEs, placements, or distribution based on where a brand is in its journey, how to target the right accounts, and why simple beats over-engineered every time.

If you're a distributor sales leader or a supplier rep trying to get real execution out of your incentive dollars, this one is for you. Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

Non-alc beer was growing 18% a year ago. Today it's closer to six, and everybody who ran their models on the old number is feeling it. Now the same rush is happening in hard ades. In this news episode, Bud, Ross, and Mike work through six weeks of beer business headlines from the distributor's side of the table. We start in Colorado, where Constellation, Mark Anthony, and Sierra Nevada all terminated Coors Distributing Co., and ask what a franchise is really worth when winning supplier awards doesn't protect you. Then we get into Constellation buying SpikedAde, why momentum brands are suddenly back on the menu, and Ross's warning to watch the growth rate instead of the growth. Mike breaks down how PFP plans and incentives are shifting toward ades and what gets left behind. We cover the consumer squeeze, from real wages to gas prices, and close with the NBWA distributor panel and why "grow beer" isn't a strategy until you name the account, the brand, and the occasion you lost. If you're heading into 2027 budget season, this one is for you. Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

An annual salary is management math. Rep math is paycheck to paycheck. If the first check after a pay change comes in light, you’ve already lost the rep, no matter how good the year looks on paper.

A listener rolling out a new pay plan asked us what he’s going to hear from his team after the kickoff, and how to handle it. Bud, Mike, and Ross have been through more than 100 of these, and the pushback almost always comes down to four fears: you’re cutting my pay, I have to wait until the end of the month to get my money, I don’t trust the goals, and this is just another program that’ll be gone in six months.

We break down why a quiet kickoff isn’t buy-in, why reps need to see how goals get set, how pay calendars and draws keep cash flow steady, and why we’d rather wait for buy-in than rush a go-live. Technology is easy. People are hard.

If you’re getting ready to change how your reps get paid, this one is for you.

Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do. Share with a friend if you love it.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0UTOjAJePFo
Learn more about VXP: https://vxptech.com
Questions for the show: info@vxptech.com

Take away the PFP plan. Would your reps still know what to sell? That one question separates good reps from great reps, and the good news is the difference is coachable.

Recorded live at the NBWA 89th Annual Convention in Orlando, Bud, Moneyball Ross, and Data Mike walk through the five behaviors that separate the rep who covers the route from the rep who grows it: try something new, walk the whole account, sell to the buyer's problems, run the route like it's theirs, and make trade-offs out loud. Every behavior comes with a ride-with question you can ask on Monday, because most of us spend ride-withs asking what got done on PFP instead of asking what the rep is actually thinking.

Along the way: the rep whose account was down 13% in volume but up 10% in GP, and why. The team lead who led a rep down the hallway and let him open the door to the spirits section himself. The Atlas rep who failed PFP, went rogue, and grew volume anyway. And why "call Mike, he'll fix it" is the fastest way to build a team that never thinks for itself.

If you manage reps, this one is for you. Six months from now, what should they be able to do that they're not doing today?

Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

15 tap handles after a full push with money, trips, and every incentive they could find. 150 handles in 60 days once the reps were paid on objectives instead. Gus Doll, owner partner at Doll Distributing, joins Bud, Mike, and Ross to walk through how a third-generation, four-state wholesaler moved its entire sales force off cents per case without losing the room.

Gus came back to the family business in 2023 after West Point and five years with the Army Rangers, and found a comp plan built in the 1980s. Volume was down, so incentives went up, and the reps did exactly what they were paid to do, which is how a German beer ends up on tap in a Mexican restaurant. The fix was not blaming the reps. It was putting the Doll family into the pay plan for the first time: 25 to 30 percent of rep pay tied to five company-level objectives.

Getting there meant cleaning up six locations with six ways of paying people, winning a unanimous partner vote, running two test months plus an extra training month, and having one Doll where the buck stopped when reps asked how they'd get paid.

If you're thinking about changing how your team gets paid in 2027, this one is for you.

LaMonica Beverage cut finished product loss 86% in a year and replaced a PFP program that had not changed in years. Carly LaMonica and Jessie LaMonica Fletcher, third-generation owners in Rockford, Illinois, join us to walk through how they did it.

The honest part is what happened in between. They opened the GP numbers to their sales team, the reps got competitive, and the profitability results came fast. Then Carly went out on a market visit and did not like what she saw. The execution had slipped. So the pendulum swings back, and the fix is not returning to the old objective grind, it is tying supplier priorities into the program by route with real accountability behind them.

We also get into the operations side, where LaMonica does something almost nobody else does: they code close-to-code product on the way in, so they know who sent it back and who put it back out. That led to the 50% rule, and to 43 out-of-code SKUs in one account getting a manager written up alongside the rep.

Most reps rent their route. This one is about building a team that owns it.

Tapped In Sales is the podcast for beer distributors, by beer distributors. Questions for Carly and Jessie? Hit us up at info@vxptech.com and we will pass them along.

#BeerDistribution #SalesLeadership #Profitability

Twenty five companies sell the exact same product TJ Tribell sells, at roughly the same price, with roughly the same service. He has no exclusive territory and no supplier protection. He is also up double digits nine years running in an industry that is flat.

His secret is the thing our industry keeps arguing about. Every rep sees the margin, all the way down to the counter guy. Every rep is paid on profit. Every rep can move a price without asking permission.

TJ runs sales for Aetna Supply, a family owned top ten plumbing and HVAC wholesaler. He has worked at distributors that hid profitability and distributors that show it, and he has strong opinions about which ones grew. When we raised the objection you have all heard, that reps cannot be trusted with profit, he laughed.

In this one we get into the banana question that ends that argument, the buy two get one mistake that cost two truckloads and gained a million dollar customer, negotiating margin back out of your suppliers, and why profit is always sitting in the uncomfortable.

Ross makes the point that stings most: beer's protected structure is comfortable, and comfort is a luxury TJ does not get.

Listen, learn, and enjoy what you do.

More at vxptech.com

Beer is down 4% after a minus 5 last year. Five straight years of decline, and the World Cup summer that was supposed to turn it around didn't. Jason and David Steinman, the third generation running Beer Marketers Insights, join Bud, Mike, and Ross to grade the first half of 2026 the honest way: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good is real but narrow. Ultra, Busch Light, and a handful of imports are growing, RTDs are still up double digits, NA has grown seven years straight, and spiked sports drinks went from an idea at NBWA to millions of cases in under a year. The bad is everything around it: gas prices, a softer consumer across all of CPG, younger drinkers drinking less, and a World Cup that packed the bars in host cities but never trickled into the off premise that drives this industry. The ugly is RNDC. A multi-billion dollar, forty-state house evaporated in about 18 months, and it's the biggest beer distributors picking up the pieces. That leaves every mid-size house with a decision: pick your lane and run it well, or get into wine and spirits before your competitor does.

The Steinmans also cover what to watch for the rest of the year, starting with Labor Day, and why stable and predictable is the win the industry should be chasing right now.

If you're setting plans for the back half of 2026, this one is for you.