How to track broker and distributor performance on Starch
Broker and distributor performance tracking is the work of turning a question — 'are my brokers actually earning their commission?' — into a number you can act on. It means knowing which territories are gaining new door authorizations, which ones are losing distribution, which brokers are showing up for resets and demos, and how all of that connects to actual sell-through velocity at the shelf. The workflow spans retail execution data, distributor shipment reports, POS velocity, and field activity — and it looks different depending on whether you're managing a two-broker regional network or a national DSD setup with multiple distribution partners. The underlying problem, though, is the same: brokers get paid a percentage of sales, they show up to reviews with slide decks, and you often have no data to confirm or challenge the story they're telling. On Starch, this ends up looking like a live scorecard — one place where you can see new authorizations this month versus last, distribution voids by account, sell-through velocity by territory, and trade spend efficiency by broker. You can set it up to surface weekly summaries in Slack, flag accounts where velocity has dropped two weeks running, or build a broker review dashboard you can pull up in any QBR without asking anyone to prep a report first.
Why it matters
Brokers typically take 4–6% of net sales. On a $3M brand that's $120,000–$180,000 a year going to people whose actual contribution is almost impossible to measure without this data. The operational cost of a bad broker relationship isn't just the commission — it's lost shelf placement, distribution voids that drag velocity numbers, and promotional spend that goes unexecuted. Getting performance tracking right tells you which relationships to double down on, which to renegotiate, and which to cut.
Common pitfalls
The most common mistake is reviewing broker performance quarterly using broker-provided data — by definition, that data won't show you what they're not doing. A close second is conflating shipment volume with sell-through: a distributor can show strong case shipments while product is accumulating in backrooms and aging toward deductions. Third: tracking new authorizations without tracking voids, so distribution looks like it's growing when it's actually churning. Fourth: assigning trade spend to brokers and accounts in different spreadsheets, making it impossible to calculate actual return on any single promotion.
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