To pay tribute to members of the middle tier in the beverage alcohol industry, Beverage Wholesaler has put together our first annual Distributor Best Practices Awards. This first year was a success, and we are honoring five companies who have demonstrated innovation in running efficient, successful operations.
With the right training, team leaders can become coaches and mentors for others, helping to propel others and the company forward. Breakthru Beverage Group‘s employee training efforts earned them a win in our Best Workforce Development Program category.
The company made developments to their Route-to-Market strategy, which helped shift the roles of the field sales managers to an expanded span of control with more direct reports, ultimately resulting in greater focus and more time coaching and developing their teams.
Breakthru Beverage’s Leadership Development Program
The Field Sales Manager Learning Journey is Breakthru’s multi-tiered leadership development program that is designed to equip its front-line sales managers with the skills, information and confidence to lead their teams to success.
“We wanted to create a better experience for our customers, as well as our FSMs and the sales reps, so we focused on training them in three distinct areas: time management, coaching and development, and skill building,” says Melanie Lundberg, vice president, talent management for Breakthru Beverage.

As a first step in this learning experience, FSMs participated in a one-hour workshop that Breakthru Beverage calls “Accelerate,” focused on sharing new ways of working that align with the recent strategic changes. This was followed by skill-building in the three specific core FSM competencies.
Additionally, as part of the FSM Learning Journey, Breakthru Beverage is introducing a new ‘work-with’ standardized feedback form to provide consistent feedback in an easy format, delivered via an in-house-developed app. This action also enables the company to report metrics to the top of the organization, identify areas where they need to continuously improve and isolate skill gaps that require further training and development.
According to the company, these live training sessions have been very successful so far, with 95% (480 of 506) of Breakthru’s FSMs attending one of the 36 sessions conducted. The training effectiveness ratings are also high, with 100% of respondents answering that they had at least one key actionable takeaway and a 4.69 out of 5 overall course effectiveness rating.
“The feedback has been excellent,” Lundberg notes. “We’re measuring success throughout this whole process, and the biggest surprise we’ve had from the feedback so far is that they want more of it. It’s almost like they’re hungrier for it because we haven’t done something at this scale before.”
As part of the Accelerate workshop, Breakthru Beverage also developed an in-house full suite of resources called the “FSM Playbook” that includes quick reference guides, checklists and other tools to continually reinforce the FSMs learning during their everyday management duties.
“This program is definitely not a one-and-done thing. It’s an ongoing journey for FSMs,” Lundberg says. “With the feedback we get from them, we’re able to offer additional tools and resources to continue engaging with them.”
To embed the learning and new ways of working even further, Breakthru beverage has also launched FSM Connect Forums. These are organized and facilitated sessions where FSMs can hear from one another on best practices and lessons learned, helping them to succeed in their roles.
“We’ve created a new FSM onboarding program,” she continues. “We’ve created a tools and technology workshop, and it really is an ongoing learning experience. We all learn differently, and this isn’t a classroom, so people are liking the application of the program.”