The Prison Had No WiFi: Lessons in Building Digital Tools for B2B Distribution

Justin Samaniego runs product and digital strategy at Medline, one of the largest medical distribution companies in the world. Before that, he spent years in industrial B2B distribution, moving from sales rep to sales ops to building digital tools from scratch.

This conversation is for any distributor or manufacturer wondering if "going digital" means replacing your sales team. It doesn't, and Justin explains why.

What we cover:

• Why the smartest distributors don't try to automate everything, they automate the repeat, predictable orders and free up reps for the complex problems
• The MVP approach to digital tools: build with your employees first, since they represent your customers and know the pain points
• How Justin found his first use case by going after customers who physically couldn't be visited, including correctional facilities that needed offline, self-service tools
• Why over-indexing on full-time employee support for small accounts can quietly bleed margin
• The real cost of tribal knowledge: what happens when a 15-year sales rep leaves and takes the whole customer relationship with them
• Why CRM data isn't valuable because it's "complete," it's valuable because it lets you spot what a customer should be buying but isn't
• The difference between treating reps like funnel operators versus treating them like analysts who actually think about the account
• Where to start if your whole sales process lives in one rep's head and phone

If you're running a distribution or industrial business with no in-house product or digital team, this episode is a practical playbook: start small, find one segment with a real problem, build trust before you build automation.

Connect with Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinsamaniego/