Redefining Sales Excellence in Distribution — Insights from the SWA Tech Panel

At the June 2025 SWA Tech Panel, our founder and CEO, Jason Sullivan, joined a forward-looking conversation on the role of AI in the future of distribution. Representing Distro, Jason spoke about how artificial intelligence should augment people—not replace them—and how distributors can use AI to drive more revenue while protecting their data, empowering their teams, and accelerating consultative selling. In this transcript, Jason shares Distro’s approach to AI implementation, vendor evaluation, and why now is the time to act—not wait—for transformation.

SWA Tech Panel June 2025 Transcript

Hi, everybody. I'm Jason Sullivan. As John mentioned, I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Distro. You can think of Distro as the AI wingman for counter staff, inside sales, and project teams. And what we're focused on is helping folks in those positions drive more revenue: so that looks like quoting RFQs, requests for quotes of any size, effectively, quickly, and profitably; suggesting things like upsells, cross-sells, and bundling accessories. We're focused on really anybody of any level of expertise, whether it's somebody who's relatively new on the counter all the way up to a specialist on a project team. And we're really focused on change leadership and change management at the distributor level and helping our customers manage that change into the rollout of AI. Yeah, all great points.

I'll add a little bit of a twist to the question. What should AI be and what shouldn't it be? So what it should be and how we view things here at Distro is AI plus humans. That is, the application of artificial intelligence in the distributor ecosystem, in our case on sales teams, should be enabling your people to be quoting faster, to be upselling better, to be providing your customers with a more consultative selling experience. It should add more humanity to the process rather than removing it. What AI shouldn't be, and it shouldn't be in this industry, it shouldn't be anywhere else, and I feel very strongly about this, it shouldn't be a way to cut costs by removing people from an organization.

And I would argue not only is that against what we think of ethically, it's also just bad for your business because you're going to find that you've suddenly, over years, lost all of your experts and you've tried to automate a lot of things and you really just need to have that combination of a human and a tool or a human and a platform. So I think this speaks to the very important topic of risk management when you're looking at your AI strategy and really examining a given vendor, right? So you want to make sure that you've got data privacy, data security, and data ownership. Those are the three big things. Look at the contract, have your people look at the contract, ask the founders, ask the folks that you're interfacing with, do I own my data or do you somehow own the output of this tool?

Can this data be used to train somebody else's model or help our competitors in some way or not? It's just a basic table stakes standard to have secure data, secure storage. You should own your data. You should have total transparency into this. They shouldn't be able to retain anything beyond your contract whatsoever. And your IT manager, your IT person, should be able to have that conversation clearly with whomever you're speaking with. I'll say from my perspective more broadly, and I'll echo what I mentioned before. I think the best application of artificial intelligence in this space is one in which it actually reintroduces more of a human element to the selling process than you currently see. That's really what it's all about.

So can you empower your people, whether it's at the counter or inside sales, really to be doing less order taking and less punching things in and less searching for product spec sheets and less system matching, things like that. More interfacing with the customer, developing that relationship, and importantly, being consultative. Jeff had mentioned before, a really good example. If you're in a position where your people are empowered to be able to proactively suggest accessories or make sure that the brand is aligned with what the customer wants, really anything else, that customer is going to keep coming back. They're not going to go to your competitor. I can speak to that one. So that's a big focus of ours here at Distro. And I love that phraseology, do you want fries with that?

You don't want to leave anything on the table. Certainly from an economic perspective, you want to make sure that your people are not leaving money on the table, so to speak. But again, from that relationship perspective, that's a real way that you can add value. And so in our case, I can speak to us at Distro, what we're doing is we're pulling data from many different data sources. We're connecting directly with manufacturers, we've got industry associations, we're connected into your ERP, your PIM, and using artificial intelligence to make those associations and learn over time. Hey, these are the things that you should be adding as accessories into these orders. So the net effect of that is whether it's somebody who's relatively new on the counter and doesn't necessarily have that knowledge or even somebody who's pretty experienced but maybe doesn't really have that muscle memory or never developed that muscle memory to do that suggestion, suddenly they're sort of on a level playing field.

And I think that's really key. All great points. I'll also maybe dovetail a little bit off of Nick's point. So I would say again, a lot of this stuff can feel overwhelming, maybe you're not super familiar with it beyond ChatGPT, that's okay. What's really important is that you explore, make some progress. You set yourself up for success because it's coming no matter whether we like it or not, right? So to Nick's point, what I find breeds a lot of success is whatever your organization is, find somebody to nominate to be your AI ambassador or your AI search person. This is maybe sometimes the IT manager. Maybe it's sometimes somebody on the business side who's particularly interested in the subject. But just find somebody. Create that level of ownership.

Because you don't want to be in a place two years from now where you didn't really figure out who was supposed to be looking into this stuff and suddenly everybody's on it and you're not, right? So that's a really key aspect of how we work with our customers is we find that ambassador and we really connect with them. Well, look, I'll maybe launch off my last comment, nominate somebody to be that AI ambassador, somebody to really go out there and do the search. I think the question is more what is it that you're searching for, right? You should start thinking about different areas of your business that you want to improve upon. Or what are you doing well that you want to be doing even better at scale, right?

It might be the case that you need to do a search for a new CRM. Or maybe it's, like us, revenue generation software. Or maybe it's software that helps you write emails more effectively or take voice notes. I think you just need to look at all your processes and say, okay, it's a brave new world right now. There's an AI solution for just about everything. Let's think about what we want to improve and then task that ambassador with going out and finding the list of solutions for each of those categories and go through that process I mentioned earlier of really kicking the tires on the vendor and kicking the tires on the product. Yeah, I appreciate you raising that.

So there are, as Nick said, no shortage of folks out there doing some sort of automation around a request all the way to a quote. You know, going back to that question of how do you assess a product, assess a vendor, find companies, find products that are doing something over and above. In our case, we've got what we call our agentic layer. So we've built really a super customized ChatGPT-like interface that embeds itself in each step in that quoting workflow so that your people, no matter what their level of experience is, can have the context they need to sell consultatively. That's a pretty key part of how we're doing things here at Distro. Yeah, I'll echo some of what I said before, so I think there's the technical question and I think there's the legal and contractual question. So on the technical side of things you want to make sure that your IT person is equipped to have that conversation with whatever vendor you're assessing, and by the way, I and we at Distro are more than happy to be consultative on that, no matter what it is you're looking at, something related to quoting or not, because we're trying to make the industry better and better equipped to deal with this stuff. I think at the end of the day, there's the technical side, so how is data stored, and is it stored securely, right? Then there's the legal side, so have your trusted person, whether it's internally or externally, be able to look at a contract and really be able to determine, okay, is this actually making it so that they can take our data and use it against us in some way or use it for somebody else's benefit, or are they being on the up and up?

Yeah, look, our thinking is this. We have a lot of respect for the ERP companies. Everybody's on one, right, for better or for worse. Every ERP is, every company out there, let's say, ERP or not, is incentivized to say, "hey, we're doing something with AI." We have AI capabilities. Let me tell you, if you're not solely focused on AI, if your team is not completely composed of AI experts, you're not going to be at the bleeding edge. And so I think ERPs do a great job of building an ecosystem, and I think they're fantastic products. But if you look at the Salesforce model, it's built a great ecosystem and has a lot of tools out there, platforms that you can kind of plug into it. So I'd say, you know, I wouldn’t say that you should necessarily lean on being able to do everything AI-related in your ERP system, especially not waiting, you know, a year, two years for whatever to come out. I’d say you need to be searching and finding your solutions now and find things that work with your ERP system, that integrate with, that connect with your ERP system.