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Most distributor sales reps learn the job from the passenger seat. A new rep gets a laptop, maybe a couple weeks of classroom time, and a ride-along with a veteran. Then they're on their own, figuring out where credits live and what item 12345 actually is.

In our latest webinar, Jason Gunn, a former US Foods DSR turned Pepper marketer, sat down with Nick Gomez, Pepper's new head of customer education. They talked through what it takes to move reps from transactional order-taking to becoming elite DSRs, and how the new Pepper Academy fits in.

Here's what we covered.

Most Training Still Happens in the Passenger Seat

We opened with a poll: how much of your rep onboarding is documented? 72% of attendees said some of it, 16% said none, about 12% said most, and nobody said all of it.

That matched what Nick heard over two years in customer success. A few distributors had a robust program, but more often the question drew a deer-in-the-headlights look. Nick spent 16 years in pharma, where new-hire onboarding ran six weeks and was scheduled to the minute. Food distribution doesn't need that level of compliance, but it can do better than "here's your laptop, go figure it out."

Jason added that many reps come from the kitchen, so product knowledge isn't the gap. The systems are: where product data lives, how orders get placed, where the credits sit. Tribal knowledge only goes so far when you can't find the item code.

Get the Zero-Value-Added Work Off the Desk

The first tenet of the Elite DSR Field Guide is eliminating zero-value-added work: taking orders, building order guides, chasing invoices, reconciling credit and debit memos. It's the work that eats Friday afternoons and Sunday nights.

A rep's job is to bring value to every visit: new menu items, value-added conversions, labor savings. Show up without it, and the conversation goes one place. An attendee called it in the Q&A before Jason finished the sentence: price. From there, it's a price war.

For customers, the table stakes are shopping the full catalog online (not just their order guide), paying in the app, getting truck notifications, and AI helping with order entry, with a human in the loop.

Nick shared what happens in nearly every rep training he runs. Ask reps what they'd do with the time back, and the whiteboard fills up with new items, menu engineering, and industry trends. Later, once they see customers ordering on their own, the first question is "what am I going to do then?" Order-taking is that ingrained in the role. The answer is everything they just listed, and in Nick's experience it means more time with customers, not less.

Reps Have to Use the Tool Before Customers Will

Jason sees it often: the app launches, reps hand it to customers, and never use it themselves. The reps who embrace it are the ones who drive adoption.

The path is simple. Get comfortable with the tool, demo it inside the customer's own account, place orders together, and reinforce it visit after visit, because some customers will still say they'd rather just call.

The reinforcement pays off. When a customer submits two orders in the app within a week, they come back on their own about 95% of the time.

Most Objections Are Really About Change

Nick walked through the three objections reps hear most:

• "I don't want to lose the personal touch." The app frees up the rep for better conversations. There's in-app chat, and visits stay on the same cadence.
• "I don't have time to learn a new app." Anyone who has ordered on Amazon can find their way around Pepper in a couple of minutes.
• "I don't trust the pricing." The prices in the app are the rep's prices. When something is off, like a bid item or contract price, it usually surfaces early in onboarding and gets fixed fast.

Attendees pushed further: what about a rep who wants to touch the price on every order before the customer sees it? Jason called it behavioral. One sales manager he knows sets pricing at the start of the week and never opens a laptop in front of customers, just a phone or iPad, so price doesn't take over the conversation. Jason's old division president told him to price every line, every time. He didn't want to then, either.

Another attendee's team simply tells new customers the app is how orders come in now. Nick has a rep in Florida who took the same line: plenty to talk about, but orders go through the app. It rubbed some customers the wrong way at first. Six months later, he was up 17% year over year.

Inside the Pepper Academy

Nick then toured the Pepper Academy, which went live a couple of months ago. Reps pick their role at sign-up and are auto-enrolled in the DSR Learning Journey: 101 and 201 courses on the core Storefront features, plus a printable objection-handling guide and an app rollout guide. The full path takes about an hour, and no video runs longer than about five minutes.

After that, Collections let reps revisit a single feature, like order guides or inviting a customer, whenever they need a refresher. The catalog also covers Finance Hub essentials, AR customer stories, and Pepper Management Center reporting dashboards. Order Agent content is due in the next week or two, with Sales Hub up next.

For sales leaders, the Academy sits behind the graduation-cap icon at the top of Pepper Management Center. Training and sales leaders can be set up as team leads to assign courses and track each rep's completion from a dashboard.

Own the Zones, Not the Competitor's Invoice

Jason closed on the two Field Guide tenets that land hardest with audiences. The first is the controllable core: the roughly 20% of items that drive 80% of sales. These are what you're known for, where your inventory runs deepest, and where you're best priced. Sell as much of it into every account as you can.

The second is total account opportunity. Sniping a competitor's invoice line by line just gives them a reason to come back lower. Instead, map the account into zones (the pantry, the walk-in, behind the bar, the restroom) and push the controllable core into each one. You may never get the competitor out, but you can make them very uncomfortable.

The data to do it lives in Pepper Management Center. The Field Guide itself is a one-page planner: one per account, used every week.

What Sales Leaders Can Do Next

Jason's closing question for sales leaders: are you creating an environment where it's easy, and safe, for reps to learn? If veterans with big books are the only trainers, new reps may not feel comfortable asking the "basic" questions.

His checklist is short. Can your reps use the tools confidently? Can they diagnose the objections they hear? Are they actually making room in their week for growth conversations? Build the Academy into onboarding for new hires, and revisit it with the reps you already have.

The early results are encouraging. Reps who take the course before their first live training show up ready for Q&A instead of a walkthrough, and leave noticeably more confident. Nick's next goal is content that shows what good value-added selling looks like in practice.

The takeaway? Order-taking won't leave a rep's desk on its own. The reps who learn the tools first get the time back, and the best ones spend it selling the controllable core into every zone of the account.

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