BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #190

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #190

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Welcome. Today I'm gonna do something that I've never done before. Today's podcast is also going to be today's free downloadable guide and it’s going to be this weeks YouTube video. The YouTube version sill have illustrations you will want to go back and look at. It’s fitting to make this available in so many different formats to celebrate the really exciting news I have for you - something that's going to change your life for the better. This may be one of the most important podcast you hear. Please help me raise the bar in natural. Share this with other brands wanting to grow sustainable sales. Go back and listen to pervious podcast episodes for more brand building content. I may even solve your most pressing bottleneck, you know the things that keep you up at night. Subscribe so that you’ll get instant access to new brand-building strategies as soon as they are published.

So why is that you ask, over 80% of natural branch fell within the first year - I'm committed to change that. Today I'm helping making good on that commitment to you. Today I'm going to teach you proven strategies to help you reduce wasteful spending while growing sustainable sales at the same time. Do I have your attention?

Now obviously this requires I different mindset and a different strategy then you've been using. It also requires a skill set that’s not being taught anywhere else. Simply put there is a better way. These are the strategies that I developed early in my career that helped me make a seismic difference for the companies I've worked for as well as my clients. They've worked for me and they can work for you.

You've probably heard me talk about how ineffective most promotions are. The statistics are staggering and stacked against you. Lets face it retail is pay-to-play and large brands with deep pockets have the advantage - or at least they did before today.

Roughly 25% of a Brands gross sales are tied to their trade marketing and yet over 70% of those dollars are wasted or an effective - even more natural. You probably wonder how I can make such a claim and where that comes from. That's what this podcast episode is about.

I learned years ago the importance of maximizing your trade marketing ROI and these are some of the strategies I came up that help me push around some of the biggest most iconic brands on the planet. I share several of this stories on different podcast episodes so you’ll definitely want to check out those examples and leverage them to help give you a competitive advantage.

Trade marketing includes everything requited to get your brand into the hands of a shopper - everything! It’s usually the single largest item on your income statement. It’s also the biggest controllable expense that most brands overlook - especially small brands. It’s also the area that even sophisticated brands stumble. That’s due the largely to the complexities and hidden opportunities. I’m going to help simplify this and put you in the drivers seat.

Back to the statistics. The primary goal of your trade spending is to introduce your brand to future shoppers. It’s not to reward existing customers that buy your products. There are more effective ways to do that that I’ll cover in my Trade Marketing Essentials course. The key objective for your trade spending is to increase sales of your brand after the promotion ends - something that’s almost impossible using the cookie-cutter strategies brands rely on today. Let’s fix that!

This is a big reason promotional spending is ineffective. Current strategies simply throw good money at promotions that do little if anything to increase sales after the promotion is over. What’s the definition of insanity?

In order to fix this you need to understand the intricacies of a promotion - which strategies grow sales and reduce wasted spending.

You're probably thinking that you have a tool to help manage your promotions so you don't need to listen in. On the contrary, this is critically important for you also.

You see, even the best trade management tools are only as good as a data you put into them. Simply put, garbage in garbage out. Do you know exactly where the data comes from and how it is collected? Do you know exactly what item sales the data captures and what it misses? I'm going to shock you.

Most of the data that you're using does not accurately reflect the impact of your promotion. And if it can't accurately reflect the impact of your promotion, then how is it going to help you accurately plan and forecast sales? Good question!

Let me give you a couple simple examples of typical errors. The data that you get it from the syndicated data providers does not align with the way retailers promote. Retailers typically begin their promotions on a Wednesday and end them on a Tuesday while syndicated data providers (spins, Nielsen, and IRI) begin and end their reporting weeks on the weekend. Simply put, you are overlooking a couple days sales during the promotion while including a few days including a few days before or after the promotion. I have a great illustration for this that I included in the How To Calculate The TRUE ROI From A Promotion - Free Webinar Replay that I just loaded on the Brand Secrets And Strategies YouTube channel. You will want to check it out.

There are a lot of times where I go shopping on a Sunday when the stores are less crowded. While I get the benefit of your promotion, you may not see what I purchased because of your promotion in the sales data. Kinda defeats the purpose of you spending money to measure your brands. I have creative strategies to work around that in my Trade Marking Essentials course.

Another issue you need to be aware of is that the data that you’re getting does not reflect the accurate sales on every store shelf for every day of the promotion. Let me explain. When you use total retailer sales it lumps the sales of every store into a single number. It does not know if some stores in the chain did not participate in the promotion of which stores had out-of-stocks and for how long. In these examples you might be paying to promote your brand in a store with empty shelves, another waste of money that disappoints shoppers. There is nothing worse for a customer than making a special trip to a store only to find empty shelves for the item you want.

There are a lot of other complications and things you need to be aware of but again I’ll save that for the Trade Marking Essential course.

So how does all this relate to today’s podcast? Not understanding the key components that drive sustainable sales growth leaves you blind to promotions that are a huge waste of money.

So you’re probably thinking that I’ve got one of those fancy tools that manages my trademarking at all that’s taken care of. Well as I’ve just illustrated there’s a lot more to trade marketing then having a fancy tool. This is one of the biggest struggles that literally every brand has including the big brands. The two simple issues that I outlined here impact every brand and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The bottom line is that if I can help you save even a little bit of money on promotions, well then that will give you more runway to grow and profits, gain incremental distribution, fund new innovation, make your brand more attractive to investors and retailers, help support more worthy causes, and much more.

In the How To Calculate The TRUE ROI From A Promotion - Free Webinar Replay I compare having one of those fancy trade promotion applications is similar to using Quickbooks. I studied to become a CPA in college so I have a pretty good understanding of advanced accounting principles and I can tell you from experience that owing a copy of Quickbooks will not qualify you to take the CPA exam. Just because you read a medical text book several times doesn’t mean that you can remove my gaul bladder. My point is that there is more to experience and expertise than having access to a cool tool. Conversely, having the experience and expertise can help you get even more from that cool tool! That’s what I’m here for - to help you maximize each and every promotional dollar.

I hope I’ve illustrated how important it is to have at least a cursory understanding of the key components that make up your trade marketing and how they impact your sales growth. At the very least, these skills will help you oversee, manage, and guide the people you task with this responsibility. Remember that your brand has your name on it and that every dollar you save can be reinvested back into it. Make this priority and don’t farm it out.

So let’s Dig into this. Before you set goals you need to have something to measure them against. Let’s start out with the statistical benchmarks. On my Brand Secrets And Strategies website I built a Free Promotion Analysis tool - click the button above the menu bar and scroll down to the tool.

The first part of The tool is designed to help you identify how much money you’re spending on trade marketing currently. Once you know what you’re spending then we can use that as a benchmark to show ways to help you maximize your promotional spending.

In the Promotion Efficiency Calculator, enter your annual gross sales. The figures on the report at just place holders. Override all the numbers on the report with your numbers the numbers. Using the example on the report, let’s say that your company sells $800,000 a year. Using the average 25% Trade Promotional Spending figure means that you spend roughly $200,00 annually on trade marketing. The % Promotional Efficiency Improvement is set to 10%. If we can save you 10% of your promotional spending then your annual savings is $20,000. That could be as simple as removing four ineffective promotions from your sales plan. What could you do with the additional $20,000?

Now move the slider and increase the % Promotional Efficiency Improvement and see your saving grow! Next let’s reduce the amount you spend on trade marketing by finding other efficiencies. Adjust the % Trade Promotional Spending and see your saving grow even more. Imagine all the different ways you can leverage that cash to confidently grow and scale your brand. Imagine how you can leverage these insights to help your retail partner grow category sales with your expert help! This is where you efforts can explode sales!

Now, let’s turn this into a reality! Scroll down to the Promotion Analysis Tool Lite. Input one of your promotions. Remember to override all the numbers on form, they are there as place holders. Scroll over the question marks for the definition of each item on the tool. I’ll include a cheat sheet on this weeks free download to highlight what figures you need. There are several podcast episodes and YouTube videos including last weeks free webinar How To Calculate The TRUE ROI From A Promotion that cover many of the key terms and strategies to populate the tool. I will take a deep dive into them on my Trade Marketing Essentials course.

Now look at the calculations. Play around with the figures above and see how tweaking the different numbers impacts the promotions ROI. For example, is it better to increase the off invoice case rate and decrease the in-store demo cost? Learn how each figure can change the promotions outcome. You can input syndicated data if you have it but it’s not necessary to make the tool work. I share creative workarounds on the How To Calculate The TRUE ROI From A Promotion free webinar recording.

I am in the process of building other more robust tools that I’ll offer a big discount to for students in my Trade Marketing Essentials course. The two free tools are designed to help you better understand the effectiveness of your promotional spending. These are just my ways of giving back.

Remember that Accuracy matters! These tools provide estimates based on the figures you input. There are a lot of factors that impact the accuracy of the inputs (data harmonization, out-of-stocks, poor retail execution, etc). These issues go well beyond all promotion tools. I have several workarounds. These are things I cover in detail in my Trade Marketing Essentials course.

The best part of these free tools is that you can get each scenario you create emailed to you. Save these and use them to compare against your actual results. You can use the tool to create the promotion and then to evaluate the promotion to see if you achieved your objective. This is how you maximize your trade marketing ROI and how you gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

Thank you for listening. Appreciate you for being here. This show is about you and it’s for your. Remember the goal here is to help you get your brand on more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. Empowering Brands |

Raising The Bar.

You can get access to this weeks free downloadable guide - the instructions to use these tools on the podcast webpage and you can get there by going to brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session190.

Thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Thanks again for joining us today. Make sure to stop over at brandsecretsandstrategies.com for the show notes along with more great brand building articles and resources. Check out my free course Turnkey Sales Story Strategies, your roadmap to success. You can find that on my website or at TurnkeySalesStoryStrategies.com/growsales. Please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

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Until next time, this is Dan Lohman with Brand Secrets and Strategies where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.