The CPG Sales Team Blueprint: When Brokers Aren't Enough (And How to Build What Comes Next)
How to know when broker-led sales has maxed out — and how to structure, hire, and build an internal CPG sales organization that actually drives growth.
I'll never forget hiring Nicky Vidaurreta to run sales at Suja.
She came in as VP of National Sales, and what she brought wasn't just relationships or category knowledge, though she had plenty of both. What she brought was a completely different way of thinking about sales. She didn't wait for buyers to tell her what was wrong. She showed up to every meeting with the data already in hand. She could walk into a room with a Costco or Target buyer and have a conversation that actually moved something. Not just a status update. Not just a check-in. A real conversation about the category, the consumer, and what needed to happen next.
Before Nicky, we ran through a period where nearly everything flowed through brokers.
And I want to be honest here: that was the right call at the time.
Bill Wieland at Presence Marketing was one of the best decisions we ever made in the early years. He was selective about the brands he represented. His belief in Suja gave us credibility before we had earned it through data. He opened doors we couldn't have opened ourselves. Without Bill, our first Whole Foods launch doesn't happen the way it happened.
But here's what I also know. A broker who is selective, experienced, and connected is still carrying 20 to 30 other brands at any given time. Even a great one. Even Bill. The math just doesn't work beyond a certain point. Your brand becomes one item on a very long list, and where a buyer's attention goes, the sales follow. That's not a criticism of brokers. It's just arithmetic.
The problem isn't brokers. The problem is founders who don't recognize when the equation shifts.
The signals that your broker model is maxing out
There are five things I watch for.
One: you're starting to hear things from buyers that your broker didn't tell you. That's a trust break. When a buyer calls you directly to flag a shelf problem or a velocity concern, it means information is getting filtered somewhere. The truth of your business lives at the shelf. If it's reaching you late, you have a structural problem.
Two: your distribution is growing but your velocity isn't. I'll say this plainly because I've said it a hundred times: don't confuse distribution gains with velocity gains. Getting into 200 more doors is not the same thing as building a business. If your turns per store are flat while your distribution is climbing, your broker may be great at opening doors but isn't doing the work to make you sell through them.
Three: your broker's attention is following someone else's revenue. This isn't personal. It's math. If another brand in their portfolio just landed a major national account, you know where their Tuesdays are going. You'd do the same thing.
Four: you have two or more retailers that need serious, dedicated account management. Prep for line reviews, joint business planning conversations, quarterly business reviews. That's not broker work anymore. That's a key account manager job, and those are two very different things.
Five: your business is above $10 to $15 million in revenue and you don't have someone inside your company who can own the sales story to an investor or a board member. At that point, outsourcing your sales function is outsourcing your credibility.
Who you actually hire first
Here's what I've seen founders get wrong. They try to hire a VP of Sales too early, or they hire the wrong profile when they do.
The first internal sales hire is almost never a pure executive. It's a player-coach. Someone who can manage a key account relationship on their own while also building the system around it. They're not yet leading a team. They are the team.
What you're looking for: they've worked at a small CPG brand before, not just a large one. The Fortune 500 playbook doesn't translate. You need someone who can work without a support staff, who isn't waiting for a marketing deck or a category captain before they walk into a buyer meeting. Someone who understands data ... velocity, ACV, turns per store, promotional lift ... because that's the language your buyers speak and your sales leader has to speak it fluently.
The right profile for a brand in the $10 to $25 million range is typically someone with 12 to 15 years in the industry who was the number two or number three at a respected but not massive brand. The number one often gets inflexible. The number two or three learned the whole picture while staying hungry. That's who you want.
Hire slow. You've heard me say that. This is one of the places it matters most.
Building the team structure
Once you make that first hire, here's how I think about building the rest.
Key account managers before territory reps. In most CPG businesses, your top five accounts drive 60 to 70 percent of volume. Own those relationships internally before you spread coverage across the map.
Field sales comes later, and only in markets where your velocity data tells you execution is the actual problem. If turns are low in a market where you have solid distribution, something is going wrong at the shelf. That's a field execution problem. A field rep or a retail merchandising team can solve it. But don't build a field team to paper over a distribution gap you haven't fixed. Different problem, different solution.
Category management is one of the most undervalued hires in CPG. Early at Suja I literally didn't know what a cat man was. (Nicky fixed that fast, and not gently.) Your category manager builds the data case for why you belong on shelf, why your set should expand, why your brand grows the category instead of just taking share from it. This person becomes your most credible voice in a buyer meeting. We eventually brought Jason Polinsky into a category management role reporting directly to me, and it changed how we showed up in every single retail conversation.
Managing the transition without burning the relationships
The worst thing you can do is fire your brokers the day you hire your VP of Sales. You'll lose institutional knowledge, create confusion in the market, and burn goodwill that took years to build.
The right approach is a 12 to 18 month transition. Quietly move your most strategic accounts in-house first. Keep brokers active in markets or channels where they still generate more value than they cost. Be transparent with the ones you're keeping. The good brokers actually want to work alongside strong internal teams because it makes them look better in front of the buyer too.
When you build the relationship right, a broker becomes an extension of your internal sales engine, not a competitor to it.
What Nicky taught me
In the summer of 2018, when things were hardest at Suja, we were fighting to stabilize the business after a brutal stretch. Gross margins were below 32 percent. The company was burning cash faster than it was supposed to.
Nicky walked into a Costco meeting and swapped our kombucha shelf space for wellness shots. The shots carried roughly 60 percent gross margins. The kombucha we were replacing was outsourced at about 12 percent. That single swap moved company-wide gross margins by nearly eight points.
She didn't wait to be told. She read the data. She understood the buyer's incentives. She saw what the numbers were saying and she made the call.
That's what a great internal sales leader gives you that a broker simply cannot. A broker manages the relationship. A strong VP of Sales manages the strategy inside the relationship. They're not waiting for the next scheduled check-in. They're sitting in the car before the meeting, thinking three moves ahead.
You cannot outsource that. Not at scale.
The transition from broker-led to internally-led sales is one of the most important organizational decisions a CPG founder makes. Most founders make it too late. Some make it too early and hire someone they can't afford before the brand can support the overhead. But almost nobody approaches it with a clear framework for what the signal looks like, what the first hire profile should be, and how to build the team in the right order.
Now you have one.
Hope is not a sales strategy. At some point, the math shifts and the attention your brand needs is the attention only your own people can give it. Know when that moment arrives. Make the hire. Build the team.
The revenue follows the attention. It always does.
If you want a deeper look at the infrastructure behind scaling a CPG sales organization, start at /mba-for-cpg. And if you're 90 days from a major retail expansion or fundraise, the /90-day-breakthrough program is built exactly for this moment.
Want more insights like this?
Get Jeff’s take on what’s actually working in CPG. Direct to your inbox.