A member wrote in this week with a small story we wanted to pass along, because it is the kind of thing that never makes a highlight reel but quietly keeps a creamery running. She is a second-year apprentice at a farmstead operation in the upper Midwest, mostly in the make room, but her mentor asked her to spend part of the holiday slowdown calling wholesale accounts that had gone quiet in the fall. She had never made a sales call in her life.
"I thought it would be awkward," she told us. "It mostly wasn't. Most of the accounts were happy to hear from someone, even if it wasn't a sales pitch. A couple of them had just switched buyers and forgot to mention it." Of the eleven accounts on her list, she reached nine. Two had genuinely moved on to another supplier. The rest just needed a nudge, and one placed a larger order than usual once she asked directly whether the case looked thin going into the new year.
Some of what she found lines up with a pattern our members are seeing across the board this winter: turnover on the buying side has been higher than usual, and a fair amount of it traces back to short-staffed retail and distribution teams working through a rough respiratory-illness season. A buyer who goes quiet in December is not always a lost account. Sometimes they are just out sick, or covering for three people who are, and the order that should have gone out got missed entirely rather than declined.
What surprised her
The apprentice said the hardest part wasn't the calls themselves — it was deciding what to say when an account had nothing new to report. Her mentor's advice was to ask one specific question rather than a general "how's it going": how did the case sell over the holidays, and is there anything that didn't move the way they expected. That single question did more work than any pitch would have, because it gave the buyer something concrete to answer instead of a vague opening they could brush off.
She also said the exercise changed how she thinks about her own work in the make room. "I used to think about a wheel as done once it went into the cave. Now I think about it as done once somebody's account manager calls to ask how it sold. That's a different kind of finished." It's a small shift, but it's the kind of thing a course can describe and a phone call actually teaches better than any handout.
By the end of the break, she had a short list of her own: two accounts to follow up with again in February, one that asked to be moved to a smaller case size, and one that wanted samples of a new wheel before committing to a standing order. None of that would have surfaced from an inbox.
If you have an apprentice or junior staff member who has never had a reason to talk to a buyer directly, the slow week after the holidays is a reasonable time to hand them a short list of quiet accounts and see what they learn. It costs you nothing but a little patience, and as this member found, it sometimes turns up an order you would otherwise have left on the table. The Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a short guide to account check-ins on the member portal if you want a starting script.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.