From the Proton team
Is it just me, or is summer moving fast? We’re already about halfway done, so if you have any vacations left to plan, now’s the time. Tell them your friends at Proton approved the PTO.
Here’s what’s catching our attention in July:
- New Section 301 tariffs landed and this time they’re the permanent kind
- NAW is arguing that AI adopters are hiring more people rather than fewer
- QXO and Ferguson both spent billions to get further away from residential demand
- Kevin Weadick explains how he proved digital marketing was actually helping FleetPride’s branches.
This issue covers it all, so let’s get into it!
In our ears
Testing your way to better CAC, conversion, and industry turns | Kevin Weadick
Benj sits down with Kevin Weadick, President and CEO at TricorBraun, whose career runs through Grainger, Zoro, FleetPride, and more.
Kevin shares how he settled the oldest argument in distribution marketing: does any of it actually help the branches and the reps? At FleetPride he ran geo-paired market tests, shutting marketing off in one market and leaving it on in a matched one, then watched what happened to local sales. What he found gave the team the confidence to spend a lot more aggressively.
He also gets into why centralizing inventory and pricing has less to do with whether corporate can do it better and more to do with which branch manager you pick for your first pilot.
If you’re trying to figure out what your marketing is really doing for your sellers, where to do market tests, or how much autonomy to leave with your branches, this one’s worth your time.
AI, captain!
Does AI shrink your team? NAW says the opposite
NAW is back, this time with policy in hand. Alongside the AI Applied Consortium, it released an AI Governance Architecture built to help distributors deploy AI responsibly, with a stated goal of keeping it “responsible, practical, and centered on people.” The framework covers governance, risk management, transparency, and workforce development for an industry the group pegs at $8.7 trillion.
The part worth flagging sits in the policy brief they sent to federal and state lawmakers. Buried in priority number two is an empirical claim: distributors adopting AI are growing headcount faster than non-adopters, as long as the productivity gains get reinvested into customer-facing capability.
This might be a display of Jevons paradox, which occurs when making a resource more efficient to use causes the total consumption of that resource to increase instead of decrease. He was originally inspired by observing that while advancements in steam engines used less coal per unit of work, the lowered cost made coal use so profitable that demand for it skyrocketed in Great Britain.
The takeaway for your team: the “AI means fewer people” assumption is now getting argued against with data by your own industry association. Worth having that number handy the next time it comes up in a branch meeting.
Link(ed) in bio
Nobody writes “lost on turnaround” in the CRM
Three distributors get the same RFQ, same stock, same ballpark price. Benj makes the case that turnaround decides it, and that when it does, the loss gets recorded as price instead.
His closing question is one most sales leaders can’t answer: what’s your average quote turnaround? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Things SKU should know
This month in distribution
Tariffs got a rewrite. New Section 301 duties took effect July 24, running 10% to 12.5% ad valorem on imports from 60 countries and replacing the expired Section 122 surcharge. Coverage is close to universal at roughly 99.4% of U.S. import volume, with USMCA-qualifying goods exempt. The word to sit with is “permanent.” This isn’t another temporary surcharge to wait out, so landed cost models and customer pricing need a real pass, not a workaround.
The mega-deals closed. QXO finished its $17 billion takeover of TopBuild, its third giant swing after Beacon and Kodiak, with $300 million in annual synergies targeted by 2030 and a stated destination of $50 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, Ferguson agreed to buy FloWorks from Wynnchurch for $1.6 billion, picking up 60-plus locations and about $1 billion in revenue in technical valves and flow control for data centers, semis, power gen, and pharma. Ferguson now puts its addressable market at $400 billion. Both deals are the same bet: buy your way into higher-margin, less residential-dependent demand.
Independents are answering with scale of their own. AD signed an exclusive LOI to acquire SupplyForce, the buying group representing 200-plus independent distributors serving Fortune 1000 national accounts, with a Q3 close expected. The point is to give AD members a structured way to win multi-site enterprise contracts, which is the exact business independents usually lose to national chains on coverage alone. In a related move, Graybar and BradyPlus loaded their catalogs into OMNIA Partners’ OPUS portal to reach public sector, education, and nonprofit buyers through pre-bid contracts. Two different routes to the same destination, which is getting on the list for spend that never runs through a rep.
New on the shelf
Announcing Quote & Order Entry Automation for Distributors
A rep spends fifteen minutes typing up a single quote by hand. Reading the email, finding the part numbers, checking the price, keying it in line by line. Proton does the same job in under sixty seconds.
When an order or a quote request lands in your inbox, Proton reads it the moment it arrives and drafts the whole thing.
Every line matched to your catalog, with your contract pricing and sourcing rules already applied and each line pulled from the right warehouse. Then it hands the draft to a rep to review and approve, and it posts straight to your ERP.
Watch Benj share the news in about a minute, coffee optional.
Tool time
What’s the true cost of manual quote entry?
Let’s run some numbers. Here’s the steps:
- Click here
- Answer six quick questions about your quote operation
- Enter your email and get your annual cost of the status quo, plus what faster entry could unlock
This month’s fun fact
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is everywhere after a $264 million opening weekend, and the behind-the-scenes details are half the fun. The cyclops, for instance, was a 60-foot animatronic puppet finished off with CGI.
But here’s what nobody’s mentioning. There are over 30 adaptations of the Odyssey in tv and film. One of them, the 1997 Odyssey miniseries, built its cyclops and the rest of its monsters at Creature Shop, the company owned by Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets). So does that make the cyclops an honorary muppet? You tell me. And yes, “nobody’s mentioning” was a pun from the original story.
Stay in touch
Just because the newsletter is monthly doesn’t mean the insights have to be. Connect with Benj on LinkedIn for his latest thinking every week. Got thoughts on this issue? Send them over. What landed, what didn’t, what you want more of. I read every reply.
Until next time
Bryan NakataSr. Demand Generation Manager, Proton.ai
