Bridget is the Vice President of National Accounts for Heineken USA. Her main role is to lead the national sales team in both maintaining and offering new product lines to existing accounts as well as opening new accounts with stores and restaurants. Being on the road 51% of the year, Bridget shares what it’s like to lead the sales effort of one of the most popular beverages in the world.
Transcript
>> My name is Bridget Lasda and I am the Vice President of National Accounts for Heineken USA. I do a lot of traveling. So, in my role, I lead our national sales teams. So, those would be customers such as Buffalo Wild Wings, a Walmart, a Kroger, a Publix, 7-Eleven. And I have a team of about 70. And we are out selling our Heineken portfolio every week. And so, I'm doing a lot of traveling, meeting with those customers, whether it's Bentonville, Chicago, Atlanta, LA. And then also meeting with our distributers. I spend a lot of time again, out around the U.S., meeting with our distributors, talking to them about our programs and our products. And then also getting out in the market with them and seeing how all of our stores look and how our products look in store. Now, a lot of our products are already in many of the retailers that you would go in and purchase your groceries or stop in any convenient store or have dinner at in a restaurant. Where we don't have current availability, I would say it probably takes a couple of months for our teams to get in there. So, we'd start by talking to them about the category. What are trends? What's growing? What's declining? And then try to get some more insight from them, as to what their initiatives are in the adult beverage category. Once we get some more of those insights, we're able to go back, regroup and figure out what is our story. So, from what we've heard from the customer, what it is their business opportunity or gap? And what solution do we have to fill that? So, we'll come back, we'll work with our brand teams, get some cool sizzle marketing that they put together. And then go back to the customer and provide them with a few solutions, based on the problem that they provided for us.
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