Sean McAuliffe spent 20 years in wholesale distribution, building a car-key and locksmith supply business from a couple hundred dollars into an eight-figure company before selling to private equity in 2019. Along the way he ran sales, purchasing, picking, packing, and marketing, and later served as CMO for the company that acquired his business.

Jason Hein sat down with Sean to challenge one of B2B's favorite excuses: "my customers won't respond to that." Sean makes the case that the person placing a B2B order is the same human who shops for themselves after 5pm, and that consumer tactics like flash sales and urgency work just as well in wholesale distribution, sometimes better. He walks through the Thursday flash sales he ran that trained an entire customer base to watch their inbox, why the cutoff had to be real ("real fake scarcity"), and what happened to average order size once buyers were on the site.

They also get into why every recorded sales call is an untapped FAQ database, how to turn scattered application knowledge into something AI can actually use, and the simple math that shows how many people a website can reach compared to a sales team, no matter how good that team is.

Key idea: if you're going to manufacture scarcity, it has to be real fake scarcity.