Monday pipeline review. A seller spots a snacks brand she has pitched three times, turned down each time by its trade team, now winning slots on your grid through its media agency. 

Her first question: "Who gets the number?"

Closing his June post on onsite programmatic demand, Pentaleap CEO Andreas Reiffen named one likely objection: "breaking a sales team built to sell direct." Our answer: the channel doesn't break a sales team. Settling credit after the first programmatic bid lands does. Settle the rule before you connect any demand.

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TL;DR

Connecting programmatic demand doesn't have to cut out a direct sales team. Strategic brands stay in direct sales, every other brand enters programmatically only when the retailer whitelists it at a floor price the retailer sets, and the retailer keeps control of eligibility and placement. The real risk is internal: deciding credit and ownership after a programmatic bid competes for a brand a seller thought was theirs. Pentaleap's recommendation is to settle the credit rule first, and to credit both the direct and network teams on the deals they touch.

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Will Connecting Programmatic Demand Cut My Sales Team Out?

No, and the reason is structural. Programmatic demand reaches a different buyer than your sellers do. Your sellers work brand relationships, joint business plans and trade conversations. Programmatic demand comes from the agencies and brand media teams who control media budgets and spend them inside the tools they already use every day. Those people usually aren't in your trade meetings.

Andreas put it in one line in June: "Direct sales and programmatic are not rivals." The operating model he described is a blend. Your top brands stay with direct sales, where custom programs and long relationships justify the hands-on effort. The torso and tail of your advertiser list connect programmatically, where automation reaches budgets that manual selling never could. Both feed the same grid.

It helps to remember why most retail media networks run a direct sales model in the first place. On the eCommerce Podcast, Andreas described how many retailers copied Amazon's direct-sales model largely to protect their own brand relationships. That instinct was reasonable. Connecting demand doesn't ask you to give up the relationships worth protecting. It asks you to stop leaving the rest of the advertiser list to a sales team that was never sized to cover it.

The market is likely to sort itself along these lines. On the Commerce Media Matters podcast, Andreas predicted a tiered retail media market: a handful of very large retailers will run closed networks with full sales organizations, a middle tier will run hybrid direct-plus-programmatic models, and smaller retailers will rely on networked demand. If you sit in that middle tier, the question isn't whether your sales team survives programmatic. It's which brands each channel owns.

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Which Brands Stay with Direct Sales, and Who Decides?

Start with a ratio, not a debate. The five-step sequence Andreas laid out in June sorts brands by comparing each brand's ad revenue with its ecommerce revenue on your site. Strategic brands stay direct. Brands with a low ratio are giving you trade dollars while their media dollars sit somewhere else, which makes them the first candidates for demand partners. For scale, Andreas notes in the same post that Amazon's ad revenue runs above 13% of its ecommerce revenue, while most other networks hit a ceiling between 1% and 3%.

The ratio earns its place for a reason that has little to do with math. It turns a turf question into a data question. "Which brands does my team lose?" is a conversation nobody enjoys. "Which brands spend almost nothing on media with us today?" is a list. A seller looking at a brand with strong ecommerce sales and near-zero ad revenue is looking at a brand she hasn't converted yet, not one she's about to lose.

On who decides, we'd suggest this split:

1. The retail media lead owns the final list.
2. The head of RMN sales signs off on it before any demand partner is connected, not after.
3. Sellers can nominate brands to keep in direct, with a reason attached: an active negotiation, a custom program in planning, or a relationship with the brand's media team rather than its trade team.

Pentaleap helps define which brands to target and how demand is divided, but the list belongs to you, and it should be written down. One addition to Andreas's sequence: review the list on a fixed cadence, quarterly as a default. A brand a seller converts into a real media partner can move back to direct. A strategic brand that stalls can move the other way.

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How Do We Handle Credit Between Our Direct and Network Sales Teams?

The rule we suggest: credit both teams on the deals they touch. It's the simplest rule that keeps a brand's movement between direct and network from producing a loser.

A strict split looks cleaner on paper, but it creates an incentive to hoard. If a programmatic dollar counts only for the network team, sellers have every reason to keep marginal brands off the whitelist just in case, and the brands that would have spent through a demand partner never do. If it counts only for direct, the network side has no reason to grow it. Crediting both teams means your team targets won't add up neatly to total revenue, and it's worth agreeing on that trade-off before the first quarter closes. It still costs less than a sales team that quietly blocks incremental demand.

"Touch" needs a definition before the rule is useful. Three decisions are worth putting in writing:

1. What counts as a touch. An active proposal, a meeting in the current planning cycle, or a custom program in flight. Not an unanswered email from last spring.
2. How long a touch lasts. Credit that never expires turns into a land claim. Tie it to the planning cycle, so it renews when the relationship does.
3. Where untouched revenue goes. A large share of the programmatic upside will come from brands your team never had the headcount to chase. Decide upfront whether that revenue counts toward the network team's target, the overall RMN target, or both.

The frame to give sellers comes from Andreas's June post: connecting to demand partners extends the sales motion to budgets the team could never have won on its own. Credit should say the same thing.

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What Happens When a Programmatic Bid Competes for a Brand a Seller Thought Was Theirs?

This is the moment the last step of Andreas's sequence exists for: align with your sales team on who owns what, so nobody is surprised when a programmatic bid competes for a brand they thought was theirs. Most of the damage in this scenario comes from the surprise, not the bid.

A brand only enters through a demand partner once your team has whitelisted it. So if a seller's strategic brand shows up through a demand partner, one of two things went wrong. Either the brand was on the whitelist and nobody told her, or the ownership list and the whitelist are maintained by different people and have drifted apart. Both are process gaps, and both can be closed before launch: one list, one owner, visible to every seller.

The harder case is a brand that is whitelisted and also working with a seller. That's the scene at the top of this piece, and it happens more often than it sounds, because, as Andreas has noted, a brand's media buyers and its trade team rarely talk to each other directly. When both budgets compete for the same slot, the auction doesn't know which team booked which campaign. Both feed the same grid, and unified ranking decides which ad earns the position on relevance and bid, the same way it does for every other ad.

That means the rule can't live in the auction. It lives in the credit agreement. If both teams get credit on the deals they touch, the seller at Monday's pipeline review has a different first question. Her brand's media team is finally spending with her retailer, and she now has performance data to bring into her next meeting with its trade team.

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What Stops Programmatic from Undercutting Our Rate Card?

Your team does, through two controls that belong on the must-have list of any vendor evaluation.

The first is brand-by-brand whitelisting. No brand enters through a demand partner unless your team approves it. The June post raises a detail worth pressing every vendor on: whitelisting per platform, not just per brand, so you can approve a brand through one demand partner and not another.

The second is floor prices your team sets. Programmatic bids compete above a floor you control, which means programmatic can't undercut your rate card without your sign-off. If a vendor sets the floor, or gives you one default you can't change per brand, pricing on your own inventory has moved to someone else.

Beyond pricing, the retailer keeps the controls that decide what shoppers see: what's eligible, who can bid, and where ads appear. This is endemic onsite inventory, meaning sponsored products, display and video on your own grid, not anonymous impressions or links sending shoppers to other sites.

The buyer version of this question often comes phrased as a fear of a free-for-all: a Wild West of vendors taking a cut. The useful test for any multi-partner setup is control. Who decides which brands enter? Who sets the floor? Who owns the brand relationship? If the answer to all three is your team, you haven't opened the gates, whatever else changes. Running several demand partners at once is a new dynamic and it takes real work to manage well, but the work is operational, not a loss of control.

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Is This New Money, or the Same Trade Budget Moved Around?

New money, for a specific reason. The trade budget your sellers negotiate is close to fixed, and no vendor will talk your brands into padding it. Programmatic demand reaches a second budget those same brands control: their media budget, which sits in the DSPs and agency tools their media teams already use, The Trade Desk among them. Different money, different decision-maker, same brand. That's why the "no" a seller got from a brand's trade team doesn't answer the question for its media team.

One distinction to hold every vendor to: where a budget sits and what is actually connected are not the same thing. Pentaleap's connected demand partners today include Teads, plus agency tools brands already use, like Skai and Pacvue, through our APIs. Ask any vendor for the same list, and ask which sources are live today and which are planned.

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Three Diagnostic Questions

#1 If a programmatic bid won a slot for one of your top ten brands tomorrow, would the seller who owns that brand hear about it from you, or from the report?

#2 Is there one written list of which brands stay in direct sales, and does whoever maintains your whitelist work from that same list?

#3 Does your sales compensation plan say what happens to credit when a brand moves between direct and network, or will someone decide that after the first dispute?

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Key Takeaways

• Direct sales and programmatic demand reach different buyers. Sellers work trade relationships; programmatic reaches brand media teams and agencies inside the tools they already use.
• Strategic brands stay in direct sales. Every other brand enters through a demand partner only when your team whitelists it, at floor prices your team sets.
• The damage to a sales team comes from settling credit after the first programmatic bid lands, not from the channel itself.
• Pentaleap recommends crediting both the direct and network teams on the deals they touch, with "touch" defined in writing before launch.
• A brand's media budget and trade budget have different owners, so a past "no" from the trade team doesn't apply to the media team.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Will this cut my sales team out, or turn into a Wild West of vendors taking a cut? No. Strategic brands stay in direct sales, and every other brand enters only when your team whitelists it, brand by brand, at floor prices your team sets. The retailer keeps control of entry, pricing and the brand relationship.

How do we handle credit between our direct and network sales teams? Decide it before connecting any demand partner. Pentaleap recommends crediting both teams on the deals they touch, with a written definition of what counts as a touch and how long it lasts.

How does brand-by-brand whitelisting work for programmatic demand? A brand can only bid on your inventory through a demand partner after your team approves that brand. Retailers should also be able to whitelist per demand partner, approving a brand through one partner and not another.

Who sets floor prices for programmatic bids on onsite inventory? The retailer should. With retailer-set floors, programmatic demand can't undercut the direct rate card without the retail media team's sign-off.

Which brands should move from direct sales to programmatic demand first? Compare each brand's ad revenue with its ecommerce revenue on your site. Brands with a low ratio are spending trade budget with you while their media budget goes elsewhere, which makes them the first candidates for demand partners.

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