Testing your way to better CAC: 4 lessons from Kevin Weadick of TricorBraun

Kevin Weadick spent almost 21 years at Grainger, including a run leading Zoro through its shift from a Grainger side brand into a platform business. From there he went to FleetPride, America's largest heavy-duty truck parts distributor with more than 300 branches, and five months ago he joined TricorBraun as its digital and supply chain leader.

In his appearance on the In the Mind of a Distributor podcast, Kevin walked through how he proved that digital marketing was actually helping FleetPride's branches and sellers, why centralizing inventory is a trust problem more than an analytics problem, and what he's carrying into a business that sells millions of bottles at a time instead of one widget at a time.

Lesson 1: Prove your marketing works the way billboard buyers used to

The hardest question in distribution marketing is whether any of it helps the field. You can attribute an e-commerce order. You cannot easily attribute the customer who saw an ad, checked stock on their phone, and then called their rep.

“The way people would tell if billboards were working is they would actually do a match market test. So you'd create market pairs and you would do billboards in one and no billboards in the other, and then you would see how those market pairs evolved over time.

At FleetPride, he ran the same design with digital. They took markets of material size to the business, paired them up, turned marketing off in one and left it on in the other, and watched. The result was that they could say “with a high degree of confidence” that the digital marketing was “highly accretive to the local branch and sellers.”

The website and the marketing halo around it “just became the salesperson's right hand when they couldn't be there.” That reframe matters internally: digital investment stops being a threat to the field team and starts being coverage for the accounts they can't get to this week.

Lesson 2: A clean read is what lets you spend more

The point of testing isn't a slide for the board. It's permission to scale. Once FleetPride knew the halo effect was real, the conversation changed. “It allowed us to have confidence to scale our ambitions and be more aggressive,” Kevin said. And then the next test writes itself: “Well, what if I spent more?”

He's quick to note none of this is new. “It's the same as a coupon code in an email. That was what catalogs did years and years ago, before the advent of any e-commerce.” Most distribution marketing budgets are set by last year's budget plus or minus a percentage. A budget set by test results is a budget you can defend and grow.

Lesson 3: Don’t add assortment you can’t credibly serve

At Zoro, Kevin's team built a platform where partner distributors fulfilled orders under Zoro's brand, on Zoro's freight contracts, with the partner's identity protected to avoid channel conflict. But they also delisted suppliers. “Even though we had their assortment, they just couldn't deliver in a way that was meaningful for the customer.”

“You can add more items to your assortment, but you have to be able to credibly serve against that. And it has to actually tie at some level to your customer needs.

Lesson 4: Centralizing inventory is a change management problem

Kevin's take is that the analytics are usually the easy part. “You could centralize some things and destroy value, and you can centralize some things and create a lot of value. The important part is to have the right feedback loops and then to build trust.”

His approach at FleetPride was to test, learn, and scale with the least likely volunteer. “We went to one of the branches that was probably the most skeptical, and we asked the leader to be a part of the pilot.” The feedback came back better than expected: “I looked at the top 500 items that you were recommending, and I only disagreed with two.”

One thing Kevin is still trying to figure out

“We have all this information that's trapped in disparate systems. And is there a way to bring that information together and give it to our team members so that we can help them be more effective in serving the customer?

The broader answer was about the trait itself. “As a leader, what you want to do is build a team that gets really curious about how you serve the customer better and just constantly challenges itself.”

Frequently asked questions

What is a geo-paired market test?

A version of the match market test that billboard advertisers used before digital attribution existed. You pair markets similar in size and business mix, run marketing in one and pause it in the other, then compare how the pair performs over time.

How do you measure whether digital marketing helps a field sales team?

Attribution models won't get you there, because much of the impact ends in a phone call or a walk-in rather than a click. A geo-paired holdout test measures total market performance instead of tracked conversions.

Who is Kevin Weadick?

Kevin Weadick leads digital and supply chain at TricorBraun, the largest rigid packaging distributor in North America. He previously spent almost 21 years at Grainger, including leading Zoro, and then served at FleetPride.