How clients go from trade shows to fully automated wholesale systems with ShelfConnect.
A US plant-based supplement brand selling in bulk to small wellness businesses. One sales rep, capped at 60 retailers a week. Here's what we changed.
Most CPG brands chase Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target and Costco: long sales cycles, brutal buyer leverage, slim margins. This brand does the opposite. They sell protein in bulk to fitness studios, juice bars, chiropractors and wellness clinics: thousands of small businesses, each buying steady volume at better margins.
Everything ran through one sales rep doing it all by hand: research, personalized emails written one by one, CRM logs, manual wholesale account creation. 40 minutes per retailer, 60 retailers a week. The rest of the US sat untouched.
We mapped their entire US market: every gym, yoga studio, juice bar, chiropractor, naturopath and wellness clinic worth contacting, then layered qualification logic on top: review rating, review volume, wellness positioning, menu signals, multi-location potential. Research time per retailer dropped from 40 minutes to under 15 seconds. Qualified retailers receive personal introductions, and sequences pause the moment a reply lands.
In a sample program, the bottleneck is what happens after a buyer replies. So when a buyer replies positively, the system instantly creates a wholesale account, generates a unique sample link, sends the confirmation, tracks the shipment, and schedules the post-sample follow-up. The sales rep only steps in to approve the shipment.
"Before this, our rep was burning hours on Google Maps and reaching maybe 60 brands a week manually. Now the whole sample flow runs through the engine. Same person, 20x the output." CEO of plant-based supplement brand · name withheld under NDA
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Retailers reached per week | 60 | 1,000+ |
| Research time per retailer | 40 min | 15 sec |
| Rep hours per week | ~60 hours | ~5 hours (oversight) |
| Cost per lead | ~$40 | ~$1 |
| Sample fulfillment | Manual, scattered | Integrated, automated |
| Who runs outreach | In-house rep | ShelfConnect, as partners |
The engine didn't replace their rep. It replaced the manual pipeline behind them, so the rep now spends time approving shipments and talking to active buyers instead of searching Google Maps. The brand can now reach their entire US market on a quarterly cycle without adding a single person.
If you're a CPG brand that sells B2B, uses samples as a conversion lever, and has a large but underworked market (supplements, beverages, functional foods, wellness products), this is the motion ShelfConnect runs. The architecture stays the same; only the targeting changes.
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Schedule a 30-minute call with the ShelfConnect team to see how many buyers fit your product, and whether you qualify for a free pilot.