Broker sales reporting across a multi-brand book

Why this matters

A natural-channel broker carrying fourteen brands into UNFI and Sprouts has an awkward problem with broker sales reporting: every one of those principals has made up its mind before it reads any of it. Each brand sees its own shipment file, forms a view about whether the quarter went well, and arrives at the renewal conversation with that view already set. If the first time you contest it is in the meeting, you are arguing against a number the brand has been staring at for eleven weeks.

The work below is the reporting a broker is best placed to produce, and it is the strongest thing you own. A brand can read its own sell-through; what it cannot read is the shelf around it. You see a category, several principals, and the accounts where all of them compete. That is a genuinely better vantage point, and almost nobody uses it, because assembling it by hand across fourteen brands is a week of spreadsheet work every month and the week does not exist.

The four questions broker sales reporting has to answer

Most broker reports answer a fifth question nobody asked, which is "what did I do this month." Activity is not performance. These four are what a principal is actually deciding on.

Answer those four with real numbers and the renewal conversation stops being about your effort and starts being about the account. A recap that opens with "your Sprouts velocity is 2.3 units per store per week against a category median of 1.8" is a different meeting from one that opens with a list of buyer calls you made.

Sell-through, not sell-in

The single most common defect in broker reporting is quoting shipments and calling it performance. Sell-in is what the distributor bought. Sell-through is what a shopper actually took off the shelf. They diverge constantly, and the direction of the divergence is the whole story.

A brand that shipped 4,200 cases into KeHE in March and sold through 2,600 did not have a good March. It had a loading month, and the correction arrives in May when KeHE works the extra 1,600 cases down and stops reordering. If your March recap celebrated the 4,200, you will spend May explaining. If it showed both numbers side by side, you spend May being trusted.

The practical rule: report shipments only next to the consumption number for the same period and the same accounts. On their own they mislead, and they mislead in the flattering direction, which is why they survive in so many reports.

Distribution is where a broker earns the fee

Distribution changes are the part of the story a shipment file genuinely cannot tell, and they are the part a broker is uniquely positioned to catch. An item that quietly stops being carried at forty stores does not announce itself. Orders simply get smaller, and by the time the brand notices the trend line, the reset that caused it is two cycles back.

Two measures do the work here, and they get confused often enough to be worth stating precisely.

ACV is all-commodity volume: the total sales of the whole store, every category, not just yours. When distribution is expressed as %ACV, it means the share of total retail volume represented by the stores carrying your item. A 40 %ACV item is not in 40% of stores; it is in stores that together account for 40% of the market's total retail sales. Bigger stores count for more, which is the point of the measure.

TDP, total distribution points, is the sum of each individual item's %ACV across your whole line. Three items each at 30 %ACV give you 90 TDPs. It is a sum, not a multiplication, and the common error of quoting ACV times SKU count produces a number that is wrong and always too large.

The reason to track both: ACV tells you how well one item is placed, TDP tells you whether the line is growing or a single hero item is carrying an otherwise shrinking presence. A brand whose ACV held flat while TDP fell lost items and nobody flagged it.

Worked through on a four-item line, comparing two quarters:

Read only the hero item and this line is growing: Original picked up two points of ACV and the brand's best-selling SKU is healthier than it was. Read the TDP and the line lost 15 distribution points in a quarter, because Lime went away entirely and Chili is being cut back at whoever carried it. The brand's shipment file will show a mild decline and attribute it to softness. It is not softness, it is two items leaving the shelf, and the accounts responsible are nameable.

That is a five-minute finding that changes what the next buyer conversation is about, and it is invisible from inside the brand.

Correct the lift before you claim it

Promoted lift is the number most likely to be challenged, because most reported lift is uncorrected and the corrections all point the same way, which is down.

Take a promotion that ran four weeks and moved 12,000 units against 6,000 in the four weeks before it. The tempting claim is that the promotion doubled the business. Three corrections stand between that and the truth.

Baseline. The brand was already growing. If the underlying trend was running up 15% year over year, some of those units were arriving with or without the promotion. Lift is measured against what would have happened anyway, not against last month.

Pull-forward. Shoppers who would have bought in week six bought in week three because it was on deal. Those units are not incremental, they are early, and they show up as a hole in the weeks after the promotion. A read that stops at the end of the promoted period never sees the hole, which is exactly why so many reads stop there.

Pantry loading. The same shopper buying three units instead of one is not three shoppers. It suppresses the next several purchase cycles.

Run those three corrections against the 12,000 and the answer is no longer a doubling. What is left is the incremental gain, and how much that is depends entirely on the trend, the pull-forward and the loading in your own data, so compute it rather than reaching for a rule of thumb. Whatever it comes to, it is a real result and worth reporting: it survives being checked, and the doubling does not.

A broker who brings the corrected number is doing something few of their peers do. The brand-side view of this is candid that broker lift numbers usually do not correct for pull-forward or destocking, and that brands are told to treat them as context rather than measurement. Being the exception is a durable advantage.

Category context is your unfair advantage

Your principal sees one item's numbers. You work a category across several brands and you sit in the same buyer meetings all year. That means you can answer a question the brand structurally cannot: was this month us, or was it everyone?

A brand down 6% in a category down 9% outperformed, and its instinct will be that something went wrong. A brand up 3% in a category up 11% lost share while its own chart looked fine. Both readings change the decision, and neither is available from inside a single brand's data.

This is also the most reusable work you do. The category read you build for one principal answers the same question for every brand you rep in that category, which is the one place where carrying a book makes reporting cheaper rather than more expensive.

The renewal packet

Proving broker value is a reporting problem before it is a relationship problem. When the contract conversation comes, three things do more than any deck.

Distribution delta, itemized. Doors and %ACV gained, doors lost, and the specific accounts behind both. This is the clearest evidence of work performed, because a brand cannot claim distribution appeared on its own.

Incremental dollars, corrected. Not gross promoted volume. The number that survives the three corrections above, with the corrections shown. A smaller number you can defend beats a larger one you cannot.

What you found before they did. The void you caught in week two, the competitor price move you flagged, the item where the reorder point was set wrong. Brands renew brokers who tell them things.

Notice that all three are cheaper to produce from a live data connection than from a monthly export, which is the actual argument for putting the reporting on a system.

Doing this across a book

Everything above is straightforward for one brand and punishing for twelve. The math does not change; the assembly does. Fourteen brands across a handful of retailers and two or three distributors is thirty-odd data pulls, each with its own login, its own file format, and its own idea of what a week is.

Three things make it tractable.

Standardize the recap. One template, same four questions, same definitions of ACV and TDP for every principal. Brands talk to each other more than brokers expect, and a consistent report reads as a practice rather than an improvisation.

Connect the sources once. The pull is the expensive part, not the analysis. Retailer portals, distributor feeds from KeHE and UNFI, and a syndicated panel where the brand has one are the usual mix, and each of them is a one-time setup that then refreshes.

Separate the recurring from the ad hoc. The monthly recap should be automatic. Your time belongs in the question the recap raises, which is the part a brand cannot buy from software.

One trap worth naming, because it silently corrupts a multi-source report: your sources do not agree on what a week is. Retailer portals commonly close the week on a Saturday, syndicated panels on a Sunday, and distributor files often run on a fiscal calendar that drifts against both. Add a 4-5-4 retail calendar into the mix and a "month" is four or five weeks depending on where it falls. Sum those together without aligning them and you get a number that is wrong by a few percent every period, in a direction that changes, which is worse than being wrong consistently. Pick one calendar per report, state which one on the page, and convert everything into it before anything gets added up.

The related trap is data latency. Portals, panels and distributor feeds land on different lags, from a couple of days to several weeks. A recap assembled the moment the fastest source arrives will quietly compare a complete four weeks of one account against three-and-a-bit of another. Either wait for the slowest source or mark the incomplete periods on the report, and say which you did.

Scout is free for brokers, with full access for your own team and a view of their own numbers for every brand you rep, which is the arrangement that makes this reporting worth running from the broker's seat rather than the brand's. The details are on Scout for CPG brokers.

The short version

• Report sell-through, never shipments alone. Sell-in flatters, and it flatters right before it corrects.
• Distribution is the story a shipment file cannot tell. %ACV is volume-weighted store coverage; TDP is the sum of each item's %ACV, not ACV times SKU count.
• Correct promoted lift for baseline, pull-forward and pantry loading before you claim it. A defensible number beats an indefensible doubling.
• Category context is the one read a single brand cannot produce, and it is reusable across every principal you carry in that category.
• At renewal, lead with itemized distribution delta, corrected incremental dollars, and the things you caught first.