Scout · For brokers
Scout for CPG brokers
Run your whole book on Scout at no cost, and give every brand you rep a view of their own. Sell-through, distribution, and promotion reporting on the retailer and syndicated data you already have access to, so you walk into the buyer meeting with numbers rather than a spreadsheet you rebuilt on Sunday. Built for brokers and sales agencies working the natural, specialty, and conventional grocery channels.
Hiring a broker rather than working as one? Start with what a CPG broker does and what they cost.
How the broker program works
Most analytics vendors treat a broker as a small brand with a smaller budget. That is backwards. You are the party who decides what a dozen brands run on, so the sensible arrangement is that the tooling costs you nothing.
- 01You get Scout free, in full
- Not a trial and not a cut-down tier. Full access, your seats, your workspaces, and the reporting you build for your own book.
- 02Your brands get a view of their own
- Every brand you rep can be given access to their own numbers at no cost, so the recap you send is something they can also open themselves. Full access is the paid tier, and that is a conversation about what the brand needs.
- 03The rest we go through on a call
- There is more to the broker relationship than free software. It is worth a conversation rather than a paragraph on a web page, so bring us a brand and we will be straightforward about how it works.
What you actually run on it
A broker book is many small reporting jobs that each look trivial and together consume the week. Scout is built for the repeated ones.
- Every brand you rep, one login
- A broker account switches between the client organizations you belong to without signing out and back in. Each brand stays in its own workspace with its own data, which is what a brand wants to hear when it asks who else can see its numbers.
- The reporting you currently rebuild by hand
- Sell-through by account, distribution and voids, promoted lift against baseline, and the month-end recap that eats a week. Built once against the data feeds, then refreshed rather than rebuilt every cycle.
- Onboard your brand's team yourself
- Add the people at your client who need to see the numbers, and send them a welcome email that goes out under that brand's own logo and routes replies back to you. Scout stays in the background where it belongs.
- Ask questions in plain English
- When the buyer meeting throws a question you did not prepare for, type it. You get a chart and a number rather than a ticket to somebody else and a two-day wait.
- A recap that reads like a practice
- Same questions, same definitions, same cadence, for every principal on the book. Brands compare their brokers, and they talk to each other. The one whose reporting arrives on schedule and survives a follow-up question is the one that keeps the business.
The value you add between the intros
A broker gets hired for the relationship and judged on the introduction, but most of the work happens in the months after it. That work is invisible unless something is keeping score, which is usually why the renewal conversation turns into a debate about effort instead of results.
- Out-of-stocks, while they still matter
- An alert when an item stops moving at stores that were selling it, with the store list attached. That is a call you can make to the buyer this week rather than a line item you notice at the quarterly review.
- New item launches, watched week by week
- Distribution build on a new SKU, account by account, so you can see which retailers actually set it and which took the order and never shelved it. Launches fail quietly, and quietly is the expensive part.
- A record of what you did about it
- The intro is the part everyone remembers. The voids you caught, the resets you flagged, and the launches you chased are the part nobody writes down, and they are most of why the brand should keep you.
More on the measurement side of this in broker sales reporting across a multi-brand book, including how to read on-shelf availability before you take it to a buyer.
What you can show a buyer that the brand cannot
The strongest argument for keeping a broker is that you see across a category and your principal does not. That argument is much easier to make with the numbers in front of you.
- Category context the brand does not have
- A single brand sees its own item. You carry a book, and on syndicated panel data you can put an item next to its category and its competitive set. That is the read a category manager actually wants in a line review.
- Retailer numbers, not estimates
- Scout pulls the retailer portals and distributor feeds directly, so the sell-through you quote is the retailer's own reporting rather than a shipment number standing in for one.
- A promo read that survives scrutiny
- Separate baseline from incremental before you claim a promotion worked. A broker who brings that to the table is arguing from measurement, and the brands you rep notice the difference at renewal.
The data a broker book actually sits on
You rarely get to choose your sources. One brand is on SPINS, another sends you a KeHE export, a third has portal access it has never once logged into. Scout takes them as they come.
Back office and point of sale
PDI Technologies · Petrosoft Retail360 · CStoreOffice
The systems a store already runs on. Scout reads the item file, the invoice history and the register export, then works across every site at once, which is the view a single-store back office was never built to give. Where you would rather not run one at all, Scout can hold the item file itself. More on these sources.
Distributors and wholesalers
KeHE · UNFI · C&S
Order books, cost catalogs and shipment history, pulled on a schedule rather than downloaded by hand. Cost changes and pack-size changes land as events you can see, instead of as a surprise on an invoice. More on these sources.
Retailer portals
Walmart · Kroger 84.51 · Whole Foods · Target · Publix · Costco · Sprouts · Wegmans
Each portal ships its own reports, its own column names and its own definition of a week. Scout harmonizes them so a number means the same thing across all of them. More on these sources.
Syndicated panels
SPINS · NielsenIQ · Circana
Panel data alongside first-party numbers rather than instead of them, so a category read and your own sell-through sit in the same view. More on these sources.
Whatever you already have
Spreadsheets · CSV and Excel exports · ERP and accounting
The exports nobody has gotten around to automating yet. A spreadsheet is a first-class source in Scout, which matters because it is usually the only place some of the data exists.
The list keeps growing, and it is not a menu you are limited to. If your data comes out of a system that is not named here, that is a normal onboarding conversation rather than a blocker.
What Scout is not
Worth being direct about the boundary before you spend a call on it.
- Scout does not calculate, track, or pay your commissions. It measures the sales your book produced; the commission math stays in whatever you run today.
- Scout is not a CRM or a brokerage-management system. It does not hold your principal agreements, your contact pipeline, or your call reporting.
- Scout does not give you a single blended view across every brand you rep. Each client is a separate workspace, deliberately, because their data is theirs.
What is left is the part brokers keep asking us for: the numbers, current, for every brand on the book, without a week of spreadsheet work in front of them.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Scout really free for brokers?
- Yes, and with full access rather than a limited tier. Your team, your workspaces, and the reporting you build for your own book, at no cost. The brands you rep can also be given a free view of their own numbers.
- If it is free for me, how does Scout make money?
- From brands that want full access, priced to the brand rather than off a list. There is also more to the broker relationship than the free seat, and that part is a conversation rather than a web page. Book a call and we will be straightforward about all of it.
- What is CPG broker software?
- It is the tooling a broker or sales agency runs its book on: the sell-through, distribution, and promotion reporting for the brands it represents, pulled from retailer portals, distributors, and syndicated panels. Some brokers use a CRM for the relationship and a separate analytics layer for the numbers. Scout is the analytics layer.
- Is this food broker software, or only for CPG?
- Same thing, older name. If you work the natural, specialty, or conventional grocery channel and get paid a commission on what you sell in, this is built for you. Food broker software and CPG broker software describe the same job, and so does sales agency software when the agency is the one selling the brand in.
- Do you work with natural channel brokers?
- Yes, and the natural channel is where most of our distributor coverage sits. KeHE and UNFI feeds, the specialty retailer portals, and SPINS for the panel view are the sources a natural channel broker book usually runs on.
- Can my brands see each other's data?
- No. Each brand you rep sits in its own organization with its own access control. Your broker account can switch between the ones you belong to, and nothing is pooled across them.
- Do the brands I bring pay standard pricing?
- There is no standard price, and that is not evasion: what a brand pays depends a lot on its size and on what it actually needs. A regional brand with two retailers and a national one with a full syndicated subscription are not the same engagement. We will tell you the shape of it before you make an introduction, so you are never pitching something you cannot describe.
- What data sources do you support for a broker book?
- Retailer portals, distributor feeds from KeHE, UNFI and C&S, syndicated panels from SPINS, NielsenIQ and Circana, and whatever spreadsheets and exports you already keep. Most broker books are a mix of all four.
Related: Broker sales reporting across a multi-brand book · What a CPG broker is · Who should analyze your promo data · Syndicated data · Consulting
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