Episode 295: Proven Marketing with Sam Brown
In this interview, host Ritika Chhikara talks with Sam Brown, a veteran distributor‑turned‑marketing strategist, about how distributors can modernize their marketing. Sam explains that the biggest strategic error is clinging to a sales‑first mindset and neglecting community‑building and direct communication with end‑buyers. He describes the shift to a marketing‑led approach that reaches buyers through digital channels, emphasizes consistent touchpoints (a three‑week cadence), and leverages analytics to prove ROI. Investment guidance ranges from a 20% FTE for small firms to a full‑time marketing manager for mid‑size distributors, with the caveat that qualified marketing talent is scarce. Sam outlines a suite of tactics—email, social media, direct mail, merch, events, websites, video—and stresses the need for a hierarchy based on resources and execution capability. He defines a fractional CMO as a part‑time, expert‑level leader who can audit a brand, uncover its unique value, and design a tailored marketing plan. The conversation also covers how distributors can differentiate themselves through authentic community engagement, unique brand personality, and consistent, relevant content. Throughout, Sam shares personal anecdotes, favorite thought leaders, and practical advice on maintaining a steady marketing cadence to keep distributors top‑of‑mind with their customers.
Chapters
Sam Brown, welcome. Thank you for being here. And we're just going to jump right into the heart of this conversation because I really can't wait to talk to you about this. It's one of our favorite subjects. We're going to talk about marketing and we're going to talk about marketing with someone who's obviously had an incredible track record in the industry as a distributor, who is now doing this for distributors of all kinds of sizes companies. But I thought we could break down our conversation today into a couple of quadrants like strategy, investment, execution. But let's start with strategy. So what do you think is the number one mistake most distributors make with their marketing, even the good ones, when it comes to strategy?
It's such a rich environment. I really. So I want to preface that answer with not everybody does everything wrong and not everyone does everything right. And so there are so many different answers for the questions that I know you're going to bring to me today. And I will try to do my very best. But like everyone else, I'm on a journey. I'm learning as I go. I have 20 some years experience in this industry, having been a distributor, bought and sold distributorships, sold them, went to marketing for some of the bigger guys, started working on my own. So you know my history. Yep. Someday I'll probably never write a book, but I pretend to. So with regards to that piece that I think a lot of companies miss, is that piece where our industry is based kind of in this old world mentality. Right. Like this idea of sales drives the business. And so what's happened, and we've seen it kind of exponentially or very rapidly change over the last four years is that marketing has had to take the lead because sales really couldn't leave their house. So stuff that they knew was traditionally a sales responsibility, networking, going to meet people. A lot of the industry just couldn't figure out exactly how to do it. And these are amazingly talented salespeople that were literally tripping up over, well, now what do I do? And so what really became, I think, important and will continue to lead importance when it comes to marketing is that building of community and connecting the community to the company. So we're kind of. And I don't want salespeople to revolt when I say this. There's this element where the company has to reach right to the buyer. Right. So right to our buyers and talk to them from the company perspective. So my company is proven. So proven, wants to talk to my end users. And I don't want to have to go through a salesforce because that makes me as a company, having been an owner and still an owner now, very vulnerable to what is going on in every individual's lives or the cycle of where their life is. And so as a company, a lot of organizations will just keep investing in enabling the salespeople, drive the salespeople, drive the salespeople, educate the salespeople, educate the salespeople. But what I've seen success in even pre Covid was the idea of what if I just talk to the end user and what if I just educate the end user and that will drive the conversations like lead gen back into the company with the information. Me as the marketer, I want them to be asking. So if I want to position an audience as experts in social responsibility, if I start talking as a company to the end user as social responsibility or giving back or eco, however you want to look at it, then all of a sudden we as a company are seen that way. I don't have to make 10, 12, 15, 25, 35 salespeople understand it because that takes a long time. I just need to plant the seed in the buyer's mind that we know that.
Yeah. So the salespeople in the pre Covid days, let's call it that, salespeople were the only conduit really toward the. To. To the audience for the most part. Whereas now because of the digital landscape and because marketing has sort of taken a lead a little bit in, in biz dev and lead gen in particular, now you have more flexibility to control the tone, voice and message and even
the products we sell. Right. And I would say I beta tested this with some of our clients as early as 2015 where we started working directly with communicating to the end audience. So not pushing it through the sales team and not having to get the sales team's attention when of course they're trying to juggle customer communications projects. Right things to keep them on fire all the time. But now I would actually have to ask for their attention on learning something additionally new aside from the supplier product knowledge session. So when we just started talking to the customer about what the customer was interested in or we thought they'd be interested in. So talking really about positioning, about trend, what the buyer mindset. We talk a lot about that at proven where how do we make our message relevant to the audience of the customer or the audience of the distributor is how we look at it now. Can I answer your question?
You totally answered my question. And this also speaks to the incredible number of people that are either rebranding or they're refurbishing their marketing materials or websites. They're completely re engineering the way they go to market. And we have seen, you know, there's been lots of studies. Gartner produced a study that something like 80% of B2B buyers will want to purchase through a digital channel of some kind. It doesn't mean they want to go through a shopping cart, but they will some digital experience of some kind. So now we're seeing distributors probably making the investments in this marketing that we haven't seen traditionally before because also we'll get into this more in the conversation. That's also where the investment has been, has been traditionally to the salesforce and not enough investment on the marketing side. We just concluded our CEO summit and Vern, whom we both know, both great friends of ours was a part of this. And one of the things that we discovered was that every, everyone in the room, this is a CEO summit by the way for what I would call mid sized distributors. They're not one or two or three licenses. These are folks that are typically have five licenses to 15 licenses. You know, their revenue can be anywhere from 5, 3, 5 million to 15 million. And those are just general parameters. But one thing that everyone struggled with was business development and most people in this industry have always struggled with keeping a pipeline full of leads. How do you see, and this is such a big question, Sam, how do you see marketing fix that problem today different from before?
Well, I'm happy to say marketing fixed it before COVID so I know it's still going to work after Covid because it's not new to us. It may be new to many distributors. And that was really the previous question we talked about. What are a lot of companies not doing? Well, they relied on the salesperson before, but companies who took advantage of relying on marketing lead gen previously and think of a lot of the tech enabled firms that I'm sure come to mind that I don't need to market for them. So I won't bother mentioning their names. But you know, they populate on the first page of most Google searches. When you talk about merch, those guys already did that, right? They, they seized when the rest of us were still literally seizing, trying to figure out what to do next. But when we talk about that, so we have the cyclical sales, traditional sales cycles, right? You get busy, you don't market anymore because you're so busy you can't possibly stop. And then of course when it's no longer busy, let's say January, right. It's not busy anymore in January. You're starting a new year, you've made new resolutions, then all of a sudden you're like, this year I'm going to do it better, I'm going to do it differently. But of course, having sat in the distributor owner seat for too many years where I was trying to figure out how to do all the things like ride all the horses or wear all the hats, whichever analogy you like, you just can't do them all well. And so really, I have to say, because we've seen great success and coming into organizations and really supporting them where they need it. So unique to each distributor. But we've been able to steady the curve if you might. So marketing is thinking about how we're going to market in January. You do that in October, you don't do it January 5th when you come back from holiday. You can't. Right. It just doesn't turn fast enough. And the sooner you plant the seeds, like anything in farming, you plant the seeds three years ago, it may blossom into a gigantic tree three years from now. You may get little, you know, things grown out of the ground over the years, but you can't just all of a sudden decide you want it now and have it grow today. So you know, we do provide through our, our services really that support that we can focus on something in the time we have allotted so that when the gaps come, we've already planted those seeds for you and you know, we'll pull teams in, we'll do however, different types of campaigns if you might, where we enable the team and we get them engaged. So it's not marketing solo doing it, but we're there to support the teams. But example, we just did something for our friend Vern where we set the team up to be ready October 2nd to do a big push for holiday.
Right.
They didn't have time in August and September because they were busy.
Sure.
But marketing was doing that kind of back end prep work, marketing campaigns, connecting all the things and then when the event literally unloaded on October 2, they just had to show up. They didn't need to be involved in the pre planning which a lot of us sitting in these multiple chairs or multiple hats, horses, whichever. My analogy was they just don't have time to do both. Drive the sales and decide, you know, in two months I want to market breast cancer. Well, if you come out in October, but talking about breast cancer, you're too late to market to breast cancer.
Yeah. Is that also because we're Obviously a very deadline driven business, as you know very well. And we tend to, we tend to, these cycles really do get us. So when the cycle gets slow, that's when we go, you know what we should start thinking about marketing. We should start marketing now when things get slow. And it's always, and it's always, it's interesting beast because then business picks back up and then what drops off is our marketing. And so it's just a vicious cycle of strategizing and then not executing and strategizing and not executing. And it's kind of an exhausting cycle. I know, I've been through it many times myself, so it's really tough. Let me ask you this about the investment and I know this is such a general question, but do you, do you see companies, if you were to sit down with the business owner, every company is going to be different. But do you have a general idea of what companies should be investing in their marketing? What distributors in particular should be investing in their marketing? They're so used, we're so used to spending money on payroll and salespeople and the investments there. But is there a percentage of net profit, gross profit? Is there anything like that that you use as an indicator for what we should start with?
So I'm going to answer the question this way because there isn't one number that applies to all the audiences, right? We've got distributors that are under a million dollars. You've got distributors that are over $50 million. If I give you a percentage, it would be grossly disproportionate. But what I would say was when it comes to starting out, if you think about the smaller shops where they know they need the help, but they're also trying to do the writing more horses than the other people because there's just not enough resource. And so I would say, you know, the smaller organizations could, could probably get away with less than a full time person in the way of marketing support, right? So if you were to think, if you were to get a 20% of a, of a full time employee in whatever your demographic economy dictates, if you had someone who knew what they were doing and had a, had comfort in, you know, who was what, like so what the end buyer was, what the distributor is, what the supplier situation is, how the buyer thinks. So the mindset piece, which is obviously a lot of what we bring to the table, then I think you can get away with like 20% of a person. So does that help those people? Give a number? And as you get bigger of Course, the larger the machine, the more departments you have to navigate through in order to make a campaign fluid. So marketing touches everything. I believe you believe, as I do, that marketing is not only in the sales world, but it also touches employer, brand. So then we have to talk to HR and then we have to talk about comp and benefits and it really becomes, I use the word prolific and some people get upset. But I think it's invasive. Marketing is. It goes everywhere.
Yes.
Right. It's pr any so stop that. So when you get into these bigger firms, I think it makes sense that you're looking at that. And you know, we've worked for firms that are, let's say they do between the 20 and $40 million mark. And for something like that, I think one FTE like one full time equivalent salary wise for a marketing, let's call them a manager because I don't know if nomenclature matters. I think that is probably the kind of support you might need in that environment. But not everyone wants to jump in. Not everyone can find someone. Like, I have to tell you, there aren't a lot of industry marketers out there. I think I know two.
Right.
I count myself one.
Right.
And the other one just got hired at ppi.
Right, Right. Well, part of, part of the reason I love your answer is because I think we 10 to think. I think we tend to think that we can throw money at marketing in a very ad hoc way. Whereas what you said was that someone needs to own marketing, whether that's 20% of someone, but someone needs to own that strategy for the business because it's a very entrenched role in the business. It's not like you can just pop in and do something for a day and then leave. You're deeply involved in the organization and their mission and their values and everything that's happening. So it sounds like you're saying somebody needs to own that investment.
I would say someone needs to own it. I disagree that you can't pop in for a day, but we can talk about that later.
Sure. Okay. Is there talk to us about strategy versus execution? I think there's a lot of us dreamers and maybe a quagmire for us is in the planning and we can fail at execution. Is there a quarterly, weekly, biannual marketing cadence or goal setting that we should be making with our marketing to keep it on track?
So clients of ours will know that we try to reach out to their audience every three weeks, whether it's through a direct mail, an email, some sort of event, but we're always trying to be in front of them. Top of mind is always what we're aiming for because we don't want to miss that opportunity. So whatever the content is, we're pushing out in front of that audience. For us, it's three weeks. We don't want to be too frequent because then we become stalkers and if we become too infrequent, that makes room for the competitors to get in.
Does that three weeks take the form of. It could be anything, could be any tactic, could be email, it could be a physical campaign. When you say three weeks, is that just how you need to make sure at a minimum that you're in the customer's.
That's what we are aiming for.
Right.
With what we're finding with most of our clients who aren't full time marketers and most of our clients don't have full time marketing teams, three weeks is something that we can support, that they can manage because there's an approval process, there's graphics and art. You know, so really three weeks, just make sure that we're in front of their customer for them every three weeks. Which, you know, Bobbi, I think I actually saw you three weeks ago.
Right.
And it goes fast.
Right? You're right.
Exactly. You and I talked every three weeks. We'd be great friends in a year not to run out.
Right.
That's kind of that magic cadence is just to stay on top of them enough to be and provide something relevant at those three weeks. You didn't ask me that question. I can't just be like a knock, knock, I'm here. You want to buy some.
Great point. Yeah.
Can't be the outreach. It has to be something that's poignant.
Yeah.
And that's probably another topic.
That's fantastic. Is there such a thing as a tactic hierarchy? In other words, be sure you're doing at a minimum, newsletters, self promotion campaigns. No.
What you can afford and actually execute. Would that be it? So emails are probably the least expensive way to reach out to your customers these days. Of course, you have to translate that. 100% of the audience won't read your email. Right. Read rates are super important. Analytics are one of my favorite topics of conversation these days. And just onboarding clients, we have to make sure that they understand Google Analytics, what that means, what different measurement types mean, because we like to report on those. And as I mentioned before, I find our industry is not quite as excited about big data as some of us in marketing. And so we've got clients where we've been working with them for two or three years and we want to bring analytics into the conversation. And they're not quite. They're just like, oh, it's just not important. And then. So you'll see me and my team are always like, great, what does the monthly report look like and when with. And we'll bring up Vern because we've already mentioned Vern. We took over Vern's communications in April, and between April and we're now October, we went from a read rate of 19% from their previous supplier to 46% click rate.
Love it. Wow. That's phenomenal.
Like, and that was just. You have to ask yourself what made the difference? Or you can call me and I'll tell you what made the difference.
That's fantastic. No, I love it. That's fantastic. What do the best in the industry do very well with their marketing tactics? That's either under appreciated or overlooked.
Community. I think your community is probably a great example of what has been built, where you build that feeling of, I belong to a brand, I belong to a community, I'm understood and I see people like me there. I've seen it done with a few brands and if you look around distributors in the space, they'll stick out in your mind and in the audience's mind when they think about it. Oh, I've heard of this guys. They're really good for Give Back. These guys do a lot of social good and not necessarily because it's their name, but, you know, there's organizations that are doing a really good job of just spreading their message and it's. I think that's what's going to make a difference. Those companies, my projection, if I was the bank of Canada, the projection would be that those companies will continue to grow no matter what happens to our economy. Because they've made that personal connection. Right. They've made that love connection. I like to talk about marketing being like a relationship.
Yeah.
They've got, you know, stars in people's eyes and those companies have more room for error before that client will ever leave them. Yeah.
Sam, you did a presentation at SKU Con, one of the first SKU Cons. It was an early one on where you talked about all the multiple touch points involved in the business. And I'm sure that's a part of your analysis where you look with the distributor. But how does it. I've always felt this way, probably just because I've been a distributor like you. And maybe I'm curious to get your opinion on this, But I've always sort of fought back against. Distributors are all the same, right? We're very distinct because we have distinct books of business, really. But how does a distributor begin to differentiate in this business with their marketing?
So this is probably our biggest obstacle we have in working with clients. So I thank you for. The question is that we work with different types of, like, so different. We work with all sorts of distributors and some suppliers, but they're all different. And I had this question last week with the woman I met in Austin who was interviewing proven to see if, you know, it was a good fit. And we were chatting and she's like, how do you make sure my stuff is different from everyone else's? And it's a hard question to answer unless you know me well. So when I had my own distributorship living north of the border, I know it's up north and scary up there, but I spent the first four years running my business trying to make it look like everybody else's. So it felt legit. Not that it wasn't, but it's the good old imposter syndrome, right?
Good point.
Oh, it's got letterhead and it's got this. And it's going to look corporate. Like, I had it making look very corporate. And I had this, I don't know, epiphany. And I think I talked about this once with you, but about four years in, the company was doing okay and we had made some good partnerships and allegiances over the years, but we weren't really exciting. And if you don't know me, I like to be exciting. I like to do exciting things. I have adhd. Life has to be like out on the edge all the time. So one thing I did is I actually, I sat back and I kind of reassessed. What was I. What did I want from the company? Sorry, I'll try to make this question even shorter answer. Shorter is that I may sell the same product as the person next door to me, but I don't have to do it with the same panache, attitude, environment, color, style, recommendations. But you, Bobby, could come to me tomorrow and say, sam, not that you'd need help. Sam, when you have an event, what would you recommend? Right? Let's pretend when I had a distributorship, I'd be like, oh, I think we should do custom rocks, glasses, and let's put lipstick marks on them. And it would be like way out there, right? Versus you can go to someone else who has the same position as I do, who'd be like, oh, great, let's do crystal chargers. And they will be very elegantly designed. So it's finding that place where you're comfortable standing, but standing on your own, like independent, you're not in the field with everyone else, you know, outstanding in your field. Always made me laugh. Well, if we're all busy standing in the field looking identical, then no one can find us in the damn field.
That's true.
And so there was a great couple Disney movies out there, and I had kids at the right age at the time, and there was this one that talked about flying your freak flag and now talking about work. So let's keep it in that place right now.
Right, right, sure, sure.
But stand for something, right? Simon Sinek is one of my faves and he talks about, you better be ready to stand for something, because if not, you stand for nothing. And I'm not saying you have to take up a political mantle. It doesn't have to be anything like that. But just, you know, how do you stand apart if you're wearing beige and your flavor's vanilla?
What services are distributors using your service for the most?
Well, I wouldn't say there's the most, but we have a wide array that we kind of put out there. And so it starts from everything, from building original email content. So just because they don't have time to consistently put out quality content, that word's important. Anyone can put an email together for you. I think I have a 12 year old that could do that. If you just want an email out. But if you want quality content that's relevant to the audience, that's kind of where we start. So emails. We do social media for clients. We always include analytics with our social media. We don't like to just build social just for fun. There are companies that do that, trust me, we've got merch shops and collections. We love to build a few. Probably why our friendship with Common SKU is working so well for us. We leverage your tool beautifully, I think really maximizing kind of that they've got the tool that can do all sorts of great things for them. It doesn't just have to be a single client piece. We do merch collections. So we'll build direct mail kits for some of our clients because of course, the cobbler never has shoes. So we facilitated that. And you always have time. Right? Even when we work with some organizations, they just don't even. They have volunteers. Well, the volunteers get busy.
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden your Christmas gift becomes a spring gift.
Right.
Ever happened?
Seriously, it's happened. Totally happened.
And so our, you know, when we work with clients, if there's a timeline, a deliverable, we, we don't miss it because that's our job. We do digital collections, so we have lookbooks, trend books. We've done events, we've owned digital and in person events in the past. Websites. So we do industry websites. We do industry websites built on background back backbones of some of our associations here in the industry. We build custom sites with others that are made. Oh, and video work. I didn't even mention that. We've done a lot of video work most recently for a lot of our clients, especially in the last four years. We have an amazing videographer as part of our team and that's phenomenal. I'm trying to think of what we don't do.
Yeah, I mentioned in the intro the commons Q and proven partnership. And for those that might not know, I'll back up just a minute. How would you define a fractional cmo? And why is the fractional CMO option ideal for our industry in particular? You might have already covered a little bit in terms of the busyness of our distributors today, but how would you answer that?
So fractional CMO is really a, a part time expert in a field. So just like a fractional cfo, some of our friends might have, a fractional CMO is you're hiring that person for all their experience and expertise to help you with your vendetta, obstacles, dreams, what you're trying to accomplish, so you can bring them in in different iterations for different engagements. Whether there's a certain deliverable like a scope or whether it's an ongoing commitment, we kind of run it a few different ways depending on the need of the customer, why it's unique or ideal solution for this space. Well, I don't believe there's a promo marketing agency in existence that isn't proven. I don't think there's one that only serves this market. I have come in behind general marketing agencies who've tried to serve distributors and suppliers in the space. And I've gotten that report that they sold for obscene amounts of money to tell you things that you as part of this industry, eat, sleep and breathe all day. So I look at those reports and I think, oh my gosh, I wish you'd called me before you spent this obscene amount of money. Because we could have helped, like we could have offset that. And because we are all entrepreneurs at some level, Whether you're a $50 million firm, you're still trying to figure out the best way to run your organization, the best way to have an impact. But sometimes you just need someone to come in and go, you know, we have a marketing person. Are they doing the right thing? Because maybe they're not. Are they doing the best with what they can do? And we've worked with some great, really open minded marketing people who called us first. So their boss didn't call us. They reached out and said, hey Sam, I love that you've got all this experience. I come from a different industry. I really want to succeed here. Can you give us some guidelines to work with it? So did I.
It's wholly answered the question what can folks expect when they partner with proven like what are the some of the first things that you do as you engage with the new brand?
Well, we do an audit.
Fun.
I hate accounting. So not that kind of audit.
Right.
But we really start with. And I feel for. And my favorite question is what is unique about your brand? So don't curse at me. It's a hard one to answer. That's really the biggest challenge is what is unique about your organization? And the common answers I get are relationships, creativity and service. Custom sourcing.
Oh, custom sourcing. Okay. Yeah. What brands or business leaders do you follow for inspiration? Are there any two or three that come to mind?
So I have a bunch. I have a wall of quotes in front of me and it's always changing. So I'm a big Emerson fan. I think I told you that once.
You did.
So not a business today. And one that we actually have on the front of our front door of our house since our kids were little. You know, what lies behind us, what lies before us are tiny compares to what lies within us. And so that one is one of my faves. I gotta share. I'm currently loving studying Brianna Weist. If you've read any of her work. So she's Brianna Weist. You'll look it up. I know you. You're curious enough to write that up, right?
Yeah.
Love her work. I do. Just finished Shonda Rhimes book, which I liked. The Year of Change. I forgot that was. That wasn't the title exactly. Year of Promise. About a girl coming out of her shell.
Yeah.
And really owning her life. Emerson Roosevelt. I like his stuff. And I already mentioned Simon Sinek.
Yep. What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?
So I have two teenage boys and I just moved to a new state. I have a dog and a fish, so. And a husband. So I. Three kids, really. If you think about it Some days. So we're trying to make the most of living on the beach in California. So I learned to surf in the last few months with the boys.
Told me that. I love it. Wow, thanks.
I'm a yogi and so I thought it would be a lot easier than it is. And all the surfers laugh at me when I say, I'll be fine, I'm a yogi. But we do that and we spend a lot of time at ice rinks and baseball diamonds, of course.
Right. What was it?
A lot of traveling. And I love to travel, so I'm looking forward to do more of that in the next year.
Yeah. What do you think it was about the difference with the yogi versus surfing. What was the biggest. What do you think is the biggest difference that you encountered?
The floor doesn't move. That's the biggest.
Right?
My balance is impeccable. On the floor, on a board, my balance is garbage. Come to California. Try surfing. If you don't, it's not that hard. Really. The worst thing is you fall in the water. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. So, biggest mentor in your life, my friend Mike.
Gotta tell you, he was a friend of my parents. He's always been a go to for me. Super down to earth, I gotta tell you. He's always got words of wisdom. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. He loves to say that to me on a regular basis. I love that.
That's so good. Yeah. Is there any book, podcast, article or anything you'd recommend that made a huge impact on your thinking?
I don't sleep much, so I read all night long.
Right.
So no, even that one I just mentioned with Shonda in it, I have to go look at. It's on my bookshelf over there. That one really just got me looking at things differently again. Just and again. Brianna Weist, I love all of her stuff.
Yeah, I love it. I'm going to check that out. Sam, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for spending time with us, educating us about marketing strategy and tactics. I really appreciate that. It's so good to talk with you again.
I love being here, Bobby. I love any conversation with you. So three weeks from now, we'll stay in touch.
Yeah, apparently we will, because that's the new strategy. All right, thanks, Sam.
