Selling wholesale to thousands of mini accounts, instead of chasing big retail.
Most CPG brands chase the big retailers: Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, 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.
In CPG, mini-account wholesale is one of the most profitable channels available, and one of the least worked. Margins are higher, the cycle is shorter, and the lock-in is real. The catch is operational, reaching thousands of small buyers requires a system, not a team. That's the part most brands skip, and the part that makes it profitable.
The model worked. The manual execution didn't.
The product was strong, reviews were excellent, the model was proven. Demand wasn't the issue, execution was.
Everything ran through one SDR doing it all by hand: Google Maps research, Instagram scans, menu checks, personalized emails written one by one, Salesforce logs, manual Shopify wholesale account creation when a reply came in. 40 minutes per brand. 60 brands reached a week. The rest of the U.S. sat untouched.
Build and run an end-to-end sample-to-customer engine.
When the brand brought us in, there were two questions: "How do we reduce the manual work that's eating our SDR's week?" and "How do we cover the entire B2B wellness market without adding headcount?" That's a different problem than just "let's automate the SDR's emails," and it required redesigning the sample-to-customer flow from scratch.
We replaced what would have taken a 10-person SDR team and an ops manager. Now we run two engines for the brand, shipping new plays every week.
1. The Cold Engine
First, we mapped their U.S. TAM, every gym, yoga studio, juice bar, chiropractor, naturopath, and wellness clinic worth contacting. We loaded it all into Clay, then layered qualification logic on top: review rating, review volume, wellness positioning, menu signals, multi-location potential. Research time per brand dropped from 40 minutes to under 15 seconds.
Qualified brands flow into Instantly with dynamic personalization pulled from scraped data. Sequences run automatically and pause the moment a reply lands. Our team operates the whole thing, shipping new plays every week.
2. The Fulfillment Engine
Outreach is only half the work. In a B2B sample program, the bottleneck is what happens after a buyer replies. That's where their SDR was burning the rest of the week. So we built a Fulfillment Engine across Make, Shopify, and Salesforce. When a buyer replies positively, the system instantly creates a Shopify wholesale account, generates a unique sample link, sends the confirmation, tracks the shipment, and schedules the post-sample follow-up. Their SDR only steps in to approve the shipment. Everything else runs as infrastructure.
Re-plumbing a manual sample program into integrated infrastructure took a few weeks. Once the system was live, the SDR went from running outreach to approving shipments, and the brand started reaching parts of their market they'd never touched.
