A distributor’s legacy doesn’t happen by accident.
Someone built something worth protecting, and the people who came after showed up ready to protect it.
Protecting it in today’s market means showing up where your buyers are looking before they call anyone. And it means making sure the expertise your team has built over decades is visible, accessible, and working for you, even when your reps aren’t in the room.
That’s the gap we close.
The Digital Distributor is a consultancy that builds marketing functions exclusively for wholesale distributors.
Founded by Susan Merlo, author of The Digital Distributor: Six Steps to Accelerate Sales (published by Modern Distribution Management), The Digital Distributor has served wholesale distributors for over a decade.
What We Believe
Your sales team is your greatest asset. The relationships they’ve built, the trust they’ve earned, and the way they show up for customers will not get replaced by technology. They get supported by it.
A distributor’s marketing function should work the way their business does, with the sales team at the center. And the knowledge your people have built over decades, about your customers, your market, and how you win, belongs in systems where everyone can use it. Not locked inside a few people’s heads.
How We Work
We build the marketing infrastructure that makes your reps more effective, your company more visible, and your best customers harder to lose. Every system reflects how your company actually operates.
We work shoulder to shoulder with you every week until the messaging sounds like you, not like an agency wrote it. Every distributor we work with has a different story, different customers, and a different competitive position. We learn yours before we build anything.
Who We Work With
We work exclusively with wholesale distributors. Not because we had to pick a lane, but because this industry has earned our respect. The legacy businesses, the operators who’ve been doing this for generations, the people who built something real and kept it running: this is the work we choose.
We work best with distribution leaders who know that competing digitally isn’t optional anymore, but who haven’t found a partner who actually understands their business well enough to help them do it right. We’ve been inside enough distribution businesses to recognize what’s missing and how to fix it without disrupting what’s already working.
If you’ve built something worth protecting, we make sure the market sees it the way your best customers do.
A Note from Susan
I spent years watching wholesale distributors get sold marketing programs that weren’t built for them. Generic B2B frameworks adapted for distribution. Campaigns that looked good in the report and moved nothing in the pipeline. Agencies that had to be educated on what a distributor even does.
I built The Digital Distributor because distributors deserve better than borrowed strategies. The infrastructure we build is designed specifically for how distribution works: the long sales cycles, the rep-driven culture, the ERP at the center of everything, and the margin pressure that makes every marketing dollar a real decision.
When a distributor’s marketing isn’t working, the problem is almost never the products or the people. It’s the infrastructure that should be supporting them. That’s what we build. Built to run without us, to scale with your team, and to make your best reps even better at what they already do well.
If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, I’d love to hear from you.
Susan Merlo, Founder, The Digital Distributor
Author, The Digital Distributor: Six Steps to Accelerate Sales, published by Modern Distribution Management
Ready to talk about what that looks like for your company?
