Ruby notes · Brokers · September 2026
Five years ago, distributor sales reps carried the brands. Today those teams are 15 to 20 percent smaller, and suppliers hire broker groups to cover the markets the distributor no longer does. Here is what changed, what suppliers actually want from a broker, and why the back office is where the money leaks.
On-premise and off-premise accounts still get worked every week. What changed is who does the work. Distributor field teams have thinned out. Independent brokers multiplied. And broker groups, whole teams of brokers under one roof, became the growth story of the last few years.
Illustrative. Fewer distributor reps means suppliers need representation market by market, and broker groups are filling the gap.
Distributor consolidation did most of it. When two houses merge, the combined sales force is smaller than the two were, and the brands at the bottom of the book lose their rep first. Margin pressure did the rest. A distributor sales rep is expensive, and the brands that cannot pay for attention with volume stop getting it.
None of that is a complaint about distributors. A distributor's a distributor's a distributor. They sell what moves. The result is the same either way: a supplier with a good product and a modest volume no longer has anyone in the market whose job is that product.
Ask a supplier why they pay a broker group and they will say coverage. Ask what they want from the broker group each week and the answer is different: proof. Proof the accounts were visited. Proof the tasting happened. Proof the display went up and the wine got on the list. A supplier who cannot see the work assumes it is not happening, and the contract does not survive the next budget review.
That is the whole business. A broker group sells representation, and representation is invisible unless somebody reports it.
Because they grew fast and nothing was built for them. A broker group of fifteen people typically runs three tools that do not talk to each other: a spreadsheet or a generic CRM where brokers log visits, a QuickBooks file for invoicing suppliers and paying brokers, and a set of supplier-facing decks that somebody rebuilds by hand every week from the first two.
The data the brokers send back is messy. Before anything reaches a supplier, someone in the office spends hours, often nights, reorganizing it. Every supplier pays a different rate. Every broker gets paid differently depending on which supplier they were working. Billing is a monthly headache and an easy place to lose money. And when a brand signs, nobody can see which of the eleven markets is stuck on the contract, the funding, the distributor, or the broker assignment until it is late.
The broker should enter the data once, in the field, on a phone. Everything else should fall out of that: the supplier's weekly scorecard, the trend line that shows the market being worked, the pipeline from targeted to closed, the invoice to the supplier, and the payout to the broker. If the office is retyping anything, the tool is wrong.
That is what we built the Ruby Broker Platform to do, and automated supplier reporting is the reason broker groups buy it. The CRM, the Brand Launcher, and Billing are the pieces that make the reporting possible.
The Ruby Broker Platform is $50 per broker per month plus $500 per month for Brand Launcher and Billing. Software only, 30-day cancellation, your data is yours.
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