CPG Distribution
From guesswork to guided selling: 100% field continuity for 3,500 reps
A leading U.S. beverage distributor faced the challenge of 3,500 field reps working under five minutes per buyer with no real-time goal visibility, no account intelligence, and no offline access in low-connectivity territories, and turned to Liquid Analytics (AWS Partner) for a bespoke solution to deliver instant, accurate decision support to every rep, everywhere.
AWS Partner
Liquid Analytics
Results at a glance
100% — field continuity in zero-connectivity zones
20 mins — per full store visit: orders, goals, surveys
40 to 50+ — goals hit per month by top performers (of 70)
2 taps — from 16 deals to 8 account-relevant options
The Challenge
Goals communicated by email — no real-time tracking across 50 to 70 spreadsheet-managed goals.
Account segmentation locked in back-office — inaccessible to reps.
Pricing disconnected from account context — manual, complex, and slow.
Zero offline mode — reps stranded in low-signal territories.
Inconsistent data quality — degrading reporting and goaling accuracy.
How AWS Powers the Solution
This platform runs end-to-end on AWS, in a dedicated VPC kept separate from the distributor’s own AWS-hosted SAP and enterprise systems, connected via an encrypted AWS Site-to-Site VPN. An internet-facing Elastic Load Balancer distributes traffic from the field team’s iOS app across the platform’s EC2 fleet, which queues and processes requests before coordinating writes to a six-node, self-managed Cassandra cluster (RF3, tolerating two node failures) and then to Amazon RDS PostgreSQL, run Multi-AZ for production resilience. Three Amazon SQS queues — items, permissions, and transactions — decouple ingestion from processing so spikes and failures stay isolated by workload, while Amazon S3 absorbs overflow cart data too large to process inline.
As an AWS Partner, Liquid Analytics used this architecture to give field reps 100% continuity, even at scale.
The Results
Metric | Impact delivered |
|---|---|
Visit efficiency | Full store visit completed in 20 mins — orders, goal updates, surveys, and inventory on one device, one app. |
Goal attainment | Top performers hitting 40 to 50+ of 50 to 70 monthly goals with the new structured planning tool. |
Offline coverage | 100% field continuity in zero-connectivity zones. |
Account coverage | 3,500 reps managing 85 to 90 accounts each; active/inactive flags from SAP keep pipelines accurate and clean. |
Data quality | Focus marketing attribute accuracy materially improved, which directly impacts reporting and commercial goaling across the org. |
“Anything that we have needed, we have been able to build into the application at a very reasonable price. It has made a large difference in generating revenue.”
— Sr. Manager, Sales Enablement Platform