Two shops on the same street.
One gets a visit from a rep, or a call from the wholesaler, every couple of weeks. It reorders steadily, and when someone flags a new line it usually takes a case to try. The other has not had a visit or a call in two years. It buys the same four products it has always bought, and when it runs out on a Thursday it phones whoever answers first.
Same street, same size, same kind of customer. One is worth roughly three times the other.
The difference is not the shop. It is whether anyone is in touch.
Why the line gets drawn where it does
Every distributor has a coverage line, and drawing it is a sensible decision.
A field visit costs somewhere between $215 and $400 once you count salary, vehicle and time. A store ordering a few hundred a cycle cannot carry that at distribution margins. So the reps go where the numbers work, and everything below goes dark.
Phone coverage runs into a different wall. Calling 15,000 stores fortnightly is around 30,000 conversations a month, or roughly 37 full-time telesales staff for a single market. That team never gets approved to serve the smallest accounts, and it would be a nightmare to keep staffed if it did.
None of this is neglect. It is arithmetic.
What it costs, quietly
The loss never appears as a line on a report.
A shop runs out on Thursday and nobody called on Tuesday. That sale is not delayed. It goes to whoever the owner phones instead.
Accounts stop ordering without ever cancelling, so nothing triggers a follow-up. There is no event to react to.
And a store that hears from nobody keeps buying the same four products, because nobody has mentioned the rest of the range. Meanwhile the competitor with a rep in the area is having the conversation you are not.
It works when someone does reach them
AB InBev is the clearest example in public. By the end of 2025, 72% of its revenue was coming through its own B2B ordering platform. In the first market they piloted using it, stores were buying 57% more unique products than before.
That comes from company results rather than a case study, which is why it is worth quoting.
The catch is that it took about six years and a scale nobody else has. Beer is the highest-frequency thing these shops carry, which gave AB InBev the leverage to get an app onto the counter. A single food brand or a mid-sized wholesaler does not have that, and waiting for independent retailers to download an app has mostly not worked.
The version you can run next month
Before thinking about the whole base, do the narrow one.
Pull every account that has not ordered in six or twelve months. They are already in your system, and you have their delivery history sitting in front of you.
Most of them stopped for a reason that takes one conversation to fix.
What has actually changed
Voice AI brought the cost of a phone conversation down a long way. The more important number is headcount, because there is no longer a ceiling on it. One agent can call 200 stores or 20,000, on each shop's own ordering cycle, in the local language.
That is not cheaper telesales. It is coverage nobody could buy at any price, because no wholesaler was ever going to build a 37-person team for its smallest accounts.
Where to start
Pick one region. Take the accounts nobody calls, and measure order rate and average order value against a matched group you leave alone.
Then you have a number for your own business instead of a case study from someone else's.
Sources
- AB InBev full-year 2025 results: around 72% of revenue through its own B2B digital platform; stores in the first pilot market buying 57% more unique products.
- Field visit cost ($215 to $400 per call) and telesales headcount to cover 15,000 stores fortnightly are illustrative industry estimates, not a single published figure.