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Fact-based selling is advanced story telling - what I call true category management. Fact-based story telling includes actionable recommendations with measurable results to give you the edge you deserve - not the cookie-cutter strategies others use

Welcome to 17: How To Use Fact-Based Selling To Give Your Brand A Sustainable Edge

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 - How To Use Data Analytics - The Roadmap To Future Sales And Profits. Traditional strategies tend commoditize in overlook the unique shopper that your brand attracts. Canned top line reports exasperate this causing brands and retailers to overlook key grows trends in the category and across the entire store. Your ability to analyze the data and use fact based insights to enhance your storytelling will set you apart from other brands and help make you an indispensable trusted and respected retail partner. When done right you can help your retail partner get the things they really want more traffic in their store, a reasonable profit in the category, and a competitive advantage in their market. Savvy retailers may even reward you with incremental opportunities to other brands.

Now let's talk about how do use fact best selling to give your brand a sustainable edge. Traditional category management strategies rely heavily on what I call pushbutton category management where are you simply push a button and print out canned topline reports. This is especially true in the natural channel.

When you listen to successful marketers they brag about how they use guerrilla tactics to differentiate themselves from other brands. Think of your fact-based selling strategy in the same light. Your ability do use advance category management strategies to tell a compelling story that resonates with retailers and customers is how are you future proof your brand.

Before category management was started I used to share sales graphs and charts the highlight brand performance on retail appointments. I was just about the only brand doing this at the time. I remember taking images of potato chips and stacking them over the top of the bars in the chart to make them memorable and a highlight how my brand was outperforming the national brand. I had to use my shipment data instead of POS data similar from what you get from Nielsen, IRI, or Spins. Those resources were in their infancy. While this was crude, retailers loved and appreciated my insights which made it easier for them to say yes to future promotions. The point is that I learned the importance and the benefit of using fact-based insights to help me grow sales and to give me a competitive edge.

Retailers today are bombarded with graphs and charts from most every brand. So how do you stand out from the noise in the clutter? You do that by providing insights the retailer can't get from your competition. This is why understanding your core consumer is so critically important and its why I created my free turnkey sales story strategies course.

Syndicated data which is what comes from the retailers register is historical data meaning it captures what already happened. The other issue that you need to be aware of is that the data only captures what ever the retailer and competitive retailers sell which can overlook important trends in the market and beyond. This is where you have the opportunity to include shopper market data to enhance the syndicated POS data.

Remember the syndicated data only tells you what happened, sales are up at 26 weeks. The consumer shopper data tells you why what happened happened. Consumer shopper data breaths Life into your presentation. Let me explain.

Consumer data includes surveys that capture consumers opinions about different things. Shopper data captures the opinions and feelings about specific shoppers. Let me give you an example, a customer that does not have children is not a diaper shopper. Their insights about the diaper category are not going to be valid and they're not going to help you or the retailer understand why customers buy diapers.

Conversely, I new parent is a diaper shopper or a diaper buyer. Because they have children that use diapers they have a unique appreciation for that category. Savvy parents will even be able to help you differentiate between the specific diaper brands and how they perform. They will also tell you what they buy when they buy diapers - how their purchase impacts their market basket.

Remember that I told you that you should to build I thriving community around your brand outside of traditional retail. This is where you can find the best insight about the customers that love your brand. More importantly, the insights are free and they are specific to the customer who buys your brand - not the generic insights most brands rely on.

Big brands rely heavily on focus groups. Focus groups are typically include random people that share their opinion about a product. The challenge for natural brands are that most of those customers do not understand the specific benefit your products deliver and as a result they overlook how your ideal consumer shops your brand. This is why having a thriving community that knows likes and trust your brand so critically important to your success. This simple strategy can help differentiate you and give you insights other brands can't get access to.

The natural products are the R&D of the CPG Industry. This is because we are closer to our customers and our products our designed to meet their specific needs. I liken the natural products industry to where the ripple in the pond is initially formed. This is where new product trends begin before they become a title wave and end up on a main stream retailer shelf or a tsunami as they appear on a big-box store shelf. Helping your retail partners understand these key growth drivers is how you give your brand a significant competitive edge.

Conversely, Big brands work to create products that every customer wants and as a result they overlook what matters most to your customer. This is a big reason why trade marketing is so expensive. The belief is that deep discounting and promotions are the only way to sell your product. Nothing could be further from the truth. While this may be the only way to sell most main stream brands, core natural consumers choose quality over price. As a result they're less price sensitive and therefore far more valuable to retailers.

Let me give an example. Several years ago while doing a project for a big brand. They came out with a breakfast drink. They slapped a different label on it and then they had an energy drink. With a different label they also had meal replacement drink. They bragged about how they created five different products which were in reality one product with five different labels on it. Their focus was on improving their manufacturing efficiency - not on what shoppers wanted. You constantly see big brands changing flavor and calling it new product innovation. The brand had an aggressive promotion strategy to support the different products that included deep discounts and a lot of couponing. This is a strategy that is not sustainable for a small brand.

Customers or wise to these tactics and this is why natural products are growing in popularity where large brands continue to struggle.

Now that you know the Achilles' heel of big brands Think about how you could use your fact-based selling strategies to differentiate your brand. Remember that canned topline reports are good starting place but they won't help you understand key growth drivers or differentiate your brand from your competition. Your deep level insights are needed to help you stand out from other brands. When you overlay your shopper insights over the retailer POS data, you get a better understanding what motivates customers to shoppers to choose your brand over other brands.

Let me give me another example of what I mean and how to leverage this. Several years ago I did a project for an up-and-coming brand with a limited budget. They had scattered distribution in a couple of stores in a big chain. They were new to the retailer and they did not know how to guide the retailer to merchandise their products. As a result their products were scattered across different categories in different stores. Like most brands, they expected the retailer to manage their merchandising - a big mistake as you are the expert in your ideal shopper.

I had them do a very informal Facebook survey of their loyal fans. Well it wasn't statistically accurate it helped us understand how their consumers shop the category and where they expected to find the brand in each store. I then bought a snapshot of data and created a fact based story. The result was a strategy that help the retailer understand exactly how they needed to have the product merchandised so that they could drive the most sales and profit for the retailer. When the brand hired me they had under $200,000 in annual sales. As a result of the presentation they manage to get their product into 1600 stores all merchandised in the produce section where customers could easily find and buy their products. In fact, customers view them as an impulse buy which dramatically increased their sales without requiring deep discounting. They leveraged their success within that retailer to grow into other chains. Within a year the brand grew to over $3 million. To recap they effectively used shopper insights and syndicated data to tell fact based story that resonated with the retailers and made it easy for the retailer to say yes to incremental products a new product innovation. The brand is even more successful today.

I should point out that's the data that they were looking at buying before we met would not have helped them with this particular customer. Buying that data would've been a tremendous waste of money at a time where they could barely afford to keep the lights on. Choosing the right data to support their primary customer made all the difference.

Sadly, most brands buy the wrong data needed to support their retail partners.

The point being is that it's not enough to have access to data if it doesn't help you address the key problem that you're trying to solve. This is some I Cover a lot in my podcast episodes, courses, webinars, articles, and YouTube videos.

This is exactly why category management is such a powerful resource to support your brand growth. Commit to using the strategies to give your brand the significant edge that it deserves.

For additional inspiration listen to podcast episodes:
SECRETS 59 Steve Hughes With Sunrise Strategic Partners & Boulder Brands, Proof That Advanced Strategies & Fact-Based Selling Stories Add Rocket Fuel To Your Growth. And this podcast episode Steve shares how he used advanced fact they selling strategies to gain explosive growth for Boulder brands another branch throughout his career. Steve shares and examples of how fact basil and give them is a significant into stainable competitive advantage. SECRETS 59 Steve Hughes With Sunrise Strategic Partners & Boulder Brands, Proof That Advanced Strategies & Fact-Based Selling Stories Add Rocket Fuel To Your Growth.

Next listen to SECRETS 88 Russ Forester With Hain Celestial, Proof That Becoming A Category Leader Opens Doors & Grows Sales. Hain Celestial it's one of the largest companies and the natural channel. Rush shares how his team relies heavily on Advanced strategies and fact-based selling. In this episode Russ shares a challenge that he has competing against big brands. I share with him several strategies to help him take a leadership role in the category and level the field against the most sophisticated competitors. And most episodes I asked my guest what are most challenging bottleneck is and I hope to solve it Live on the podcast. These are most likely your most pressing bottlenecks as well. Listen to the advice that I gave Russ and how he uses it to extend his leader ship role in the category. SECRETS 88 Russ Forester With Hain Celestial, Proof That Becoming A Category Leader Opens Doors & Grows Sales.

Next listen to SECRETS 45 TJ McIntyre With Bobo's Oat Bars, The Importance Of A Solid Business Strategy. And TJ used to work with Steve at Boulder brands and on this episode TJ sure how he's been able to get explosive growth for bobos by using fact they selling and these advance strategies. What makes this even more more remarkable is that bobos oat bars or sold in the energy bar category. Energy bars are the most hyper competitive category in every store. Think of all the different brands trying to compete for shoppers attention. On top of that some of the bigger brands what deep pockets rely on deep discounting strategies for growth. This makes it even more difficult for small brands compete. TJ and I discuss event strategies he uses and how they've giving him a significant comparable advantage while making the bread more attractive to investors. SECRETS 45 TJ McIntyre With Bobo's Oat Bars, The Importance Of A Solid Business Strategy.

Tip of the day: Fact-based selling is advanced story telling - what I call true category management. Fact-based story telling includes actionable recommendations with measurable results to give you the edge you deserve.

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/Session243. In tomorrows show we’ll talk about How To Make And Sell Products Your Customers Want To Buy.

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