Sales and Retention · Oct 5, 2026
Walk into your distributor review with a depletion story Claude built in 20 minutes
Most brands show up to a distributor review with a spreadsheet and hope. A prepared depletion story, five rehearsed objection answers, and a one-page leave-behind is the difference between staying on the book and getting a real commitment for next quarter.
A distributor review is usually 30 minutes. If you spend 20 of them scrolling through a depletion report on a laptop, you have given away the meeting.
The work of preparing properly (pulling numbers, writing the narrative, anticipating objections, building the leave-behind) is usually four to six hours of somebody's time. Claude can get you to a solid draft in about 20 minutes, and you spend the rest of your time rehearsing instead of formatting.
What to pull before you start
Gather these into one place. Most of it is a CSV or PDF export you already have:
- Your depletion report from the distributor portal, last 12 months, by account or by market.
- Your inventory on hand at the distributor (cases by SKU).
- Your current price structure: FOB, wholesale, front-line retail.
- A list of your top 10 accounts and any you have lost in the last year.
- Whatever support you have spent: samples, work-withs, DA, POS.
If you are a brewery, swap depletions for chain and independent account velocity. A distillery, same idea by SKU and by market. A retail shop doing a supplier negotiation can run this in reverse: you are the buyer, and the same structure prepares you to push back.
The setup
Go to claude.ai and start a new chat. Upload the files directly (Claude reads CSV, Excel, and PDF). If you would rather keep this permanent, create a Project and drop your price list, brand story, and depletion exports in as standing context, so every future distributor chat already knows your numbers.
Then paste the prompt below.
When Claude gives you the draft, do two things. Read the objection answers out loud. If a line does not sound like you, tell Claude "rewrite number 3 the way a person actually talks." Then take the one-page leave-behind and ask Claude to tighten it until it fits on a single page with no more than six numbers on it. Six is the limit. Buyers do not read the seventh.
To take it further, paste the leave-behind outline into Gamma (gamma.app, free account) and generate a branded PDF version in a couple of minutes.
Good output looks like this: a depletion story you can tell in 90 seconds without notes, five objections with answers that name a specific number, and a one-pager where your ask is the largest thing on the page.