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Just like every customer is unique, so is every store. Use what you have learned in the 30 Day To Prosperity Challenge Series to find and identify your dream shopper and focus all your efforts there

Identify Your Ideal Retail Partner, Including On-Line
Welcome to Day 14: Identify Your Ideal Retail Partner, Including On-Line

The Retail solved Blueprint to teach you everything you need to know to confidently grow and scale your brand, build a connected community of loyal evangelists, and multiply your brands impact, sales, and profits.

If we are meeting for the first time, my name is Dan Lohman. I’ve had the privilege of mentoring and working with hundreds of brands from pre-revenue to multi billion dollars in sales. This a culmination of the best strategies that are working today. I’ve spent years testing and perfecting them to save you valuable time and money while giving you the edge you deserve.

If you haven’t done so yet, download the free 30 Days To Prosperity Workbook at RetailSolved.com/30DayWorkbook to help you get the most out of this brand-building series. Go back and listen to all of the episodes in this masterclass to that you don’t miss a thing. The strategies build upon each other in the order of the series. Please share these and help me raise the bar in natural.

I want to take a moment to recap the last episode - Use Clarity And Consistency To Amplify Your Message

Confusion pushes customers away. Customers don't want to go on a scavenger hunt to find your products. Make it easy for them to find and buy your products wherever they shop. Shoppers want personalization. Let them know how important they are to your brand and that they matter. Personalize your communication with them - learn to speak their language - how they talk about the problem they need you to solve.

This is how you convert occasional customers into loyal shoppers.
The best part is that this is the Achilles Hill of every brand. Literally every brand - especially big brands!

The point here is this. If you can find a way to get to know your ideal customers on a more intimate bases, like you would a good friend, then you can align your messaging to attract future shoppers with similar needs. This is why I talk about building a community or tribe outside of traditional retail - a big focus on the Retail Solved podcast.

You can then use those insights to not only help, better serve them, but more importantly, to help make your brand more future-proof and more irresistible to retailers.

This ties in nicely to today’s topic: Identify Your Ideal Retail Partner, Including On-Line. Not only is it critically important to your longterm success to serve and attract the right customer, it’s equally important to choose retailers where your ideal customer shops. Even better yet, strive to choose retailers that value the contribution you can make to their store. Remember the three things retailers REALLY want; more foot traffic, a competitive advantage in the market, and a reasonable profit. Put a different way, where does your brand have the greatest opportunity to thrive and get discovered by loyal customers and future shoppers.

The whole idea behind this series is to give you the best opportunity to thrive and scale. It begins with giving retailers the support they need and deserve from your brand. As I keep saying, retailers don't want canned generic reports. They need actionable insights that they can't get from anyone else including your competitors. If you can provide deep level insights about your unique customer and how your committed customer shops for your brand along with the other times they purchase when they buy your brand, that’s a game changer!

The reason that matters is because your customers are the customers that don't settle. They choose consistent quality over price. They want products that give them exceptional value for their hard earned money. They want products they know, like, and trust - your brand. And it's that relationship that they have with your brand that you can leverage to help that retailer compete more effectively, especially as we get beyond COVID.

One of the biggest challenges that I have with the way that we help brands in this industry, is that we constantly teach CEO’s how to raise money, and then we teach them how to raise more money, and then we teach them how to raise even more money and so on. We then effectively tell you to hand the keys to your brand, to anyone, but you, this is a huge mistake. This is exactly the reason why created the free 30 day challenge to prosperity.

You are the best person suited to manage your brand because you understand your customer and you know why your brand matters to them.

You are the best person suited to manage your brand because your brand solves they specific problem your customers asked you to solve. In fact, most natural brands were born out of problem the founder was seeking to solve for themselves first - before they decided to become brand.

Go back and think about the unique problem that your brand solves, the reason initially created your brand as we go through this entire process.

Your customers are just beginning their journey toward the solution you created. You have already conquered the mountain. You know their pain and you know how to help them. You need to be their guide, their sherpa, and you need to help them avoid the struggles and pitfalls you have already overcome.

This is why I'm a firm believer that you need to own your strategy in house and then use your brokers, your agencies, your distributors, to execute on your behalf.

Brokers, distributors, and agencies rely on cookie cutter strategies to be efficient. The same canned reports and cookie cutter strategies used to sell motor oil will not differentiate your organic baby food. Sadly most retailers rely exclusively on these reports. This is where you can differentiate your brand and stand out on the crowded shelf.

I see this a lot when I work with brands of all sizes. For example, I was helping a brand that created an amazing product. She's was based in California. She was approached by a big distributor at a trade show who promised that they could get her National distribution. She was thrilled so she said yes. They managed to get her product and a four stores, one in Florida, 2 in Indiana, and one in Louisiana. Beyond the extra freight, there is no way that she can effectively manage and support her brand in those stores. In addition, The distributor demanded she buy promotions that included stores her product was NOT selling in. This would have been a huge waste of money but I see brands making this colossal mistake all the time. Agreeing to the promotion demands of the distributor could have bankrupted her.

When I worked for Unilever and Kimberly Clark we had our own direct sales force. They represented only our products at every retail store. Our sales team, including those calling on individual stores we all paid by the same company. We all attended the same trainings and we all were incented the same. Well, when Kimberly Clark decided to outsource their store level sales team, we went to a broker model. This meant that the broker represented several different brands in addition to our brand each time they called on a store. We no longer provide a dedicated resources to retailers and as a result we lost sales share across many categories. That’s not blaming the broker. Our brand simply became less relevant as those supporting our brand at store level also supported other products during the same appointment.

Specifically, a sales rep had about two hours in every store to merchandise and manage all of our items we sold - only our brand. I’ve met broker sales reps that are responsible for hundreds of different brands while they have the same two hours dedicated per store.

A Direct sales model is extremely expensive - something that most brands can't afford. Brokers can provide a lot of value and they can help you get your brand on store shelves BUT you need to have reasonable expectations as to what they can do and can not do for your brand. The point is this. Choose retailers that attract your ideal customer and that you have the best ability to support. Don’t work to gain distribution in stores where you can’t support and promote you brand - including with a broker. Grow into those stores when it makes good sense and not before.

I get into this more in depth and my Effective Broker Management course. The reason I created this course is because a lot of brands of all different sizes and across all channels were reaching out to me and asking me these exact questions. The course teaches the key strategies I shared in-person with several brands. That’s right, companies paid me to fly out and spend time in-person with their sales team teaching them how to maximize sales by leveraging their broker. You can now get the same great content without having to reimburse me for air-travel, hotels, meals, and more. You can learn more about that course at RetailSolved.com/EffectiveBrokerManagement. You can start with downloading my free Simple Solutions To Maximize Broker/Distributor Effectiveness guide at RetailSolved.com/freeguide11.

The primary questions I was getting were how do you more effectively manage your brokers? How do you get the most out of them? How do you hold them accountable for what you need them to do? And then more importantly, how do you leverage their relationship at retail to grow and scale your brand? This is a challenge that literally every brand struggles with So don't think that you're alone.

Now getting back to what we were talking about. This is exactly why I believe that you need to own your own strategy - the focus of all my content. The problem is that many brands focus on metrics that don't help them grow. For example, you were told that the only thing that matters is velocity. Nothing could be further from the truth! That's because brands with deep pockets can buy velocity - the amount of product they sell off the shelf. Deep discounting and low prices tend to pull profitable dollars out of the category - the last thing retailers want. This also makes it extremely difficult for retailers to compete. It doesn't take a lot of creativity to have the lowest Price.

As I keep stating, the value of your unique customer is that they are willing to pay a premium for quality products they know like and trust and this is far more valuable to the retailer then any other fees they might charge.

Consider this, 25% of the average brands gross sales are tied to promotions and statistically over 70% are ineffective and have no longterm impact on category growth.

So, would’t if make more sense to help your retailer partner achieve the three things they REALLY want instead; more traffic in their store, a competitive advantage in their market, and a reasonable profit?

Instead of giving your retail partner the quick short lived sugar high from a promotion, let's help them grow sustainable sales and profits while better meeting the needs of their shoppers.

Here’s how this works. A customer buying organic milk may also buy organic cereal, organic snacks, and other organic products throughout the store. Their market basket, which is the total sum of all their purchases is typically far greater than the customer that buys the cheap stuff. More importantly, they are helping their most profitable customer find and buy all the items on their shopping list without INVITING them to shop their competition.

Helping customers find and buy what they want and not giving them an excuse or invitation to shop your competition is how you build loyal shoppers. This is exactly what all my content is focused on.

This is why I want you to focus on contribution. Contribution are the profitable dollars that your brand delivers to the category and to the retailer. When you add in the impact of your brand and its impact on the shopper market basket, those numbers increased dramatically. This is why I believe that you need to focus on selling your product at a fair price rather than try to be the cheapest price on the shelf. Choosing a retailer that will wants your help and that will reward you is key to your success. This will help you grow and scale faster while making it easier to thrive with other retailers - something I go into great detail about on the podcast, webinar replays, and courses.

Let me give you another great example. Podcast episode, secrets 132 Jeff with Bubba's fine foods - choosing the wrong expert can jeopardize your brand. Jeff was told by industry experts that he needed to hire a master broker. So he did. The master broker did exactly what he said he would do. He got Jeff distribution in stores all across the country, a huge win, right? Not really and here's why. Jeff didn't have the capability to support his brand in stores clear across the country. He didn't have anyone in those geographies to merchandise it, to rotate it and avoid out-of-stocks, to make sure it was signed properly, or to handle any of the issues they had with retailers. On top of that, each store wanted slotting fees and each store wanted other promotional fees. Jeff felt like an ATM machine. Sound familiar?

Jeff was forced to fire his master broker and he began to focus on the stores in his backyard where he could support the growth. He had to forfeit distribution in a lot of the stores that he'd worked so hard to get into - stores when he had to pay a premium to get on their shelves.

I hear stories like this a lot. The master broker was thinking about what was best for the master broker. They got paid for every new store that he got distribution him. His focus was on his paycheck - not the longterm health of Jeff’s brand. This is why you need to understand exactly who your customer is and you need to focus on gaining distribution where your customer shops and not trying to gain distribution where your customer doesn't shop.

Sadly, some retailers are more focused on the fees you pay them than on serving their shoppers. Avoid those retailers as much as possible. They can derail your brands and even bankrupt it.

For additional inspiration listen to podcast episodes:
Secrets 132 Jeff with Bubba's fine foods - choosing the wrong expert can jeopardize your brand. Listen to Jeff share in his own words detailed specifics from story I just shared with you.

Next listen to:
SECRETS 16 Sarah & Joe With ECRM, The Creative Strategy To Introduce Your Brand To Retailers.

Then listen to:
SECRETS 175 Brandon Leong With RangeMe, Creative Strategies To Make Your Brand Discoverable To Retailers In Uncertain Times.

You should also listen to: SECRETS 189 ECRM And RangeMe, How To Get Your Brand Discovered By Retailers And Get It Onto Their Shelves. This is the audio recording of the free webinar by that name from the free weekly webinar series I launched to help brands impacted by Covid. ECRM, RangeMe, and Whole Foods Magazine were the first sponsors of the free weekly webinar series.

Tip of the day: Just like every customer is unique, so is every store. Use what you have learned to find and identify your dream shopper and focus all your efforts there.

I’ve recorded the video which has illustrations and additional information I can’t share on an audio podcast. You can watch the accompanying video on on the podcast webpage and you can get there by going to RetailSolved.com/Session240. In tomorrows show we’ll talk about How To Become A Trusted And Respected Retailer Partner - A Category Leader.

This episode will build on today’s conversation. Thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next show.