BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #145

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #145

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!

Dan: Welcome. This podcast is dedicated to getting your products in more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. One of the most important aspects of your success, of every brand's success, is your trade marketing. Think about it. Trade marketing represents typically about 25% of all your gross sales, 25%. On top of that, 70% to 90% of all your trade marketing is wasted. Meaning, it doesn't help you hit the objective that you're shooting for.

In other words, you're not achieving the objective of getting more customers to try your product. With that in mind, it is critically important that you maximize each and every opportunity to get in front of the customer. It's difficult, if not, impossible to do this if you don't know exactly what it cost to get your product into the hands of the shopper, what it costs to promote your product on a shelf through the temporary price reduction or display it through an in-store demo?

In other words, which one of these promotional vehicles gives you the highest ROI or return on your investment for your trade marketing? There's a lot more to answering this question than just saying, "This is what it cost me for that particular promotion." What you need to know is not only what did it cost you, but also what was the lift, what was the increase in sales that you achieved?

Then in addition to that, more importantly, what were the sales after the event ended? As you're going through this process and you're trying to understand everything, were there out of stocks, were there any mismanagement issues, mis-merchandising issues, were there any situations where the signs weren't put up properly or the product wasn't brought into the warehouse properly? What things could you have done better to maximize this selling opportunity?

The difference between paying lip service to this and doing it well, taking this very seriously, putting the time and effort needed and required to do it well can be the difference between you being around a year, a decade, or even longer. It can also be the difference between you getting strategic investments from partners that can actually help you grow your brand as opposed to constantly having your hand out, looking for someone to give you more money at any terms you can get.

What I'm getting at here is this is how you maximize your ROI. This is how you get more runway out of your available dollars. This is how you go from being just another package on a retailer shelf to becoming a valued and trusted partner with them, and that you maximize each and every dollar that you use in your trade marketing. One of the most effective ways to do this is with in-store demos. In-store demos are great because they allow you to get your product into the hands of a future customer, to get to know that customer and understand what their needs and wants are.

It gives you that consumer research piece that we talked about on other podcast episodes. What also can give you a much higher lift, now, the challenge here is there are a lot more components to managing and measuring the success of an in-store demo. This is what we talked about in, a three-part webinar series called, "Master the Shelf." The attendance was great and the feedback was wonderful. To recap our conversation and to share more about how you can leverage these strategies to help build your brand, I invited the sponsors of the three-part webinar series, Yuval and Chris from Promomash on this podcast episode to talk more about it.

At the end of the podcast episode for this week's free download, you're going to get something that they prepared especially for you. In addition to that, we'll tell you how to access this webinar series so that you can leverage the strategies that we shared to give yourself a competitive, significant competitive advantage.

Before I go any further, I want to remind you that this podcast is for you and it's about you.

If you like the podcast, please subscribe, share it with a friend or any brand wanting to grow sustainable sales, and leave a review. I already shared with you a little bit about the free download at the end of the episode, but I always try to include one easy to download, quick to digest strategy that you can instantly adapt and make your own, one that you can use to grow sustainable sales and compete more effectively on every podcast episode.

Remember, the goal here is to get your product on more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. I'm also really excited to share with you that I just re-launched the Brand Secrets and Strategies, YouTube Channel. I just finished uploading 18 new brand building videos. In addition to that, my interview with Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, where we talked about the future of retail and how you can leverage your natural brand to help drive sustainable sales for natural retailers including strategies to help explode your sales.

My interview with Bob Burke, Bob and I talked in-depth about the retail game and how you can win the game by knowing what the roles are and then by leveraging them to help you grow sustainable sales. That's why this podcast episode is so critically important. Trade marketing can help level the playing field between you and your most sophisticated counterparts. More importantly, knowing how the retail game is played.

Being able to leverage these important strategies that we're talking about, this is how you win at shelf. You're going to want to check them out. Please, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and hit the like bell so that you'd be the first to get new brand-building content from me as soon as I publish it. I have a lot of videos already recorded in addition to interviews that I've had with leading thought leaders across our industry.

Now, here are Yuval and Chris with Promomash. Chris and Yuval, thanks for coming on today. Can you please start by talking a little bit about yourself? Yuval, you want to start? What I want to know, what I want you to share please is how you got to where you at today.

Yuval: Sure. Thank you too, Dan. It all started really about 15 years ago when my wife and I launched a natural and organic skincare line in the US. We quickly grew to national distribution and retail. I have to say that it was really a humbling experience trying to set up distribution in retail, number one. Number two, promoting the product because just getting on the shelf is one thing, but then once you're on the shelf, you have to sell off the shelf.

That had introduced me to a whole new world of trade promotion. I didn't know trade promotion beforehand, but I really quickly found out when the brokers and retailers started acting as if I was an ATM machine. Funny enough, Dan, that's your saying, but they requested support. They requested support through EPRs, through co-op advertising, through demos. I have to start from scratch. All of the myriads of things that were required in order to set that up forced me to think that there's got to be a better way.

It was a really difficult challenge. I failed miserably at it. Through experience, you learn and that's how Promomash was started. I met Chris, which he'll tell you a little bit about his experience.

Chris: Yeah. I'm just the helpless victim in this whole saga.

Dan: Yeah.

Chris: Actually, I'm thankful that knowing Yuval now for a lot of years that we've known each other, I have been doing marketing for a long time, probably well in excess of 30 years. I met Yuval several years ago as well. Thankfully, I didn't start my own brand and learn the hard way he did. I've been the beneficiary of his pain, his anguish, his vision for how to make things better for himself and for everybody else in the market, and so I've just been helping him to build the company for that reason.

Dan: Cool. I don't want to jump too far ahead, but why did you guys start Promomash? Then we'll go back to the three-part webinar series we just finished, and talk about what you guys do and why it matters.

Yuval: I think I was driving home one day from a demo. Because you, as a founder, you tend to hold every position and wear many hats. I was the brand ambassador, the brand manager, and the executive on my journey to promotion land. Driving home one day, after using SalesForce for my CRM, I thought, "Wait a second. Why am I using paper and smoke signals, and horse and buggy, and managing a program?"

My brand ambassadors were faxing and mailing me reports, photos were not existent. I didn't know if they got to the store. I couldn't really analyze any of the demos that were going on. In the car, just a vision came up that there's got to be a better way, so started thinking about it and I got together with Chris, and we formed the company.

That's really the reason we formed it is that I knew that there was a lot of need in the market place such as mine to really optimize and get some accountability and visibility into the trading promotion programs or store execution that brands must deal with every day. I think that's where it all started.

Dan: Makes sense, Chris. Do you want to add anything to that?

Chris: No. Just, we just have a really good synergistic partnership. Yuval's really, really, his full of ideas. By 10 AM, he has more ideas than I'll have in a month or a quarter, so very, very visionary guy. I'm an engineer by training, super enginery guy by training. I think it works really, really well. I think we built things to scale and to last and to be really, really intuitive. It's worked out well.

Dan: What you're talking about makes all the sense in the world. This is a need in the industry. This is why we're partnering together on the webinar series, et cetera. Let's talk about, first of all, the webinar series that we just created. Three webinars, do you want to recap it? Chris, you want to start?

Chris: We can do that. Yeah. Wonderful series, a free-ranging chance to explore different ways to talk to you, Dan, the expert on all things CPG and strategy, but yeah, it was great three conversations. The first one, Dan snapped our heads back with a different way to look at getting successful and staying successful on the shelf, and how to do trade promotion. The second one was an exploration of different strategies that you could use to do that.

The third one which we just finished a little earlier today was great. It was about execution and how to actually do all this great thinking that you're doing. We all know that the rubber has to meet the road, and you have to actually execute it in-store to make it all work. It was a great experience. Each one was built different format. I think everybody should find something useful in there somewhere.

Dan: Absolutely, thank you. Yuval, you want to chime in, anything-

Yuval: Yeah, absolutely. I just want to thank you, Dan. We've been searching ... at least, when I was a young company, I would have been so excited to have someone like you by my side helping me, navigating me through the journey and through the rough waters of retail execution. I think now that we have our company and we seemed to be so aligned in our focus, and what is our focus?

Despite the fact that we are business and the business is for-profit enterprise, I think both of us really understand that yeah, we need the revenue in order to grow and to succeed, but really our main purpose is the customers, our clients or those who we can help navigate the water so they don't have to go through the same experiences and pain points that we went through. If we can help, I think that's really what drives us to wake up every morning and do what we do. That's just-

Chris: I would add to that since I'm on the phone with two guys here who are all about value, the thing that I really found appealing about working with Yuval ... Because I'd had several decades of doing marketing for people, and their motives weren't always that great. The one thing that I noticed about Yuval and then a couple of years later, meeting Dan, is that they're here to serve the industry and to help everybody get better at it.

Value has preceded your money and monetization. I think that's good advice probably for any of you listening as well if you're looking to see how to make your brand successful, create the value and then figure out how to tell everybody, and the money will just come. That's basic philosophy, but you'd be surprised so many people miss it.

Dan: I appreciate the kind words. Thank you. I couldn't agree with you more. That's exactly why we're doing this. I appreciate the opportunity to partner with you on the webinar series. We'll talk about that in a minute. To frame this, the industry does I think a phenomenal job with teaching brands how to raise money. Then we teach brands how to raise more money and then how to raise more money and then how to raise more money.

Then, when you finally get in front of a retailer, get out your checkbook, and so the point being is how do one we get the help their brand succeed? How do we help the brand compete more effectively on the shelf? Then one of the things I think a lot of people overlook that we've been talking about is that if you're borrowing money from an investor, how do you make your brand more attractive to an investor?

There're a lot of things going on here. The benefit is, is that by doing this, by focusing on these strategies, we're able to help you get your products on more store shelves and hands of more shoppers. At the end of the day, helping you compete more effectively, and helping you grow and get runway. Again, thank you for the opportunity to do this.

Now that we've recapped a little bit about what we've done In terms of the webinar series, let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you've seen your clients talk about and the struggles that you've identified with them that you're trying to solve. What problem you're trying to solve and then what are you doing to solve that?

Yuval: I think that's a great question. I'll let Chris answer that as well to get his viewpoint.

Chris: Good.

Yuval: We see a life cycle in any type of event, but definitely on trade. In order to be successful, we're looking at what we call our five pillars. We're looking at planning, we're looking at staffing, we're looking at training, executing, and then analyzing. That's really important because as you stated earlier, Dan, how do you make yourself stand out to the investor, to the retailer who requires a lot of support?

How do you get beneficial treatment, preferential treatment? That is you have to stand out and have a better message, and showcase that you're going to be more profitable to that retailer and to that investment as a result of your message and your tactics and strategy. By looking at the five pillars, by looking at the fact that if you plan really and you understand how to plan, and if you hire the right people whether they're brand ambassadors, your marketing managers, or your reps, sales reps, if you train them well so they have message to convey to your customers and to your retailers, and then you make sure that you're executing in the right way so that the efficiency opportunity comes into your model but then ultimately, accountability.

Accountability is huge. You want to make sure that your brand ambassadors are trained and ready to tell your story and that they're accountable, they're showing up your demos, you're making sure they're not texting during your demo, they're reporting correctly so you're getting that information on your sales site.

You want to make sure they're not making mistakes when they're talking about different TPRs. You want to make sure that the products they're offering are the correct products based upon what you want to do as a promotional activity. You want to make sure that they're speaking and trying to negotiate the right promos with the retailers. More importantly, you want to make sure that you're standing out compared to your competitors so that you get invited more often to other opportunities.

Then once you got that execution set perfectly, then you need to analyze it. If you don't have a way to really analyze that unless you hire a couple of analyst at a hundred thousand apiece, you need to be able to do that so then you can plan better the next time. That's the wash, the rinse, and repeat method. You have to do it right because most people, it's so disorganized, it's so fragmented. They have 34 spreadsheets, 15 people working on different things.

The messaging and collaboration are not as unified as a whole. That's where people, that's what we see our clients fail day in and day out. Hopefully, we're helping them. You're obviously educating them on the way to do it right. Hopefully, we're giving them tools to actually do it right as well. That's really my takeout.

Chris: When you hang out with Yuval, you got to be prepared to drink from the fire hose, okay? Let me boil that down for you. This is my perspective that because there's obviously, there's a lot to handle. Any of you who have been dealing with trying to execute in-store, you know there is a lot to handle, a lot to keep track of. Variably, something's going to get dropped, so Yuval just like the tip of the iceberg, "How much there is to deal with here?"

Obviously, we've got to be organized about it. He was leading to this logical conclusion that you want to be more profitable. I caution you about that because Dan, Dan brought in investors, and how brands are taught to raise money and raise money and raise money. Let's be frank about it. There's a game out there. The game is a pump and dump. Blow the thing up, get it as big as you can, and then IPO or sell it to somebody else who's then got to figure it out and make it make sense.

I would say it depends on your investors. It depends on the game that you're getting into. That's really if you want to get to the quality of life and quality of your product, it depends. If you're here to build something yourself and build it to last, then you have to figure out like how to make that thing profitable as you go. You don't want to raise a bunch of money and spend it on a full party way. You get a little bit of money and then spend it really, really intelligently, and actually make a profit with it.

If you're about that quality game and about like, "I'm here to actually like just in case I don't get somebody to buy me, I'm not going to lose the farm," then it better be profitable. You better know how to manage this thing competently. My own belief is like if you play that long game, you don't have to get on that treadmill that Dan described where you're just constantly taking in money and you end up with 10% of something really big 1% of the time.

More reliably, you build something that's actually real and it's actually making a profit, and it's actually, you have the ability to maintain a quality product and then you can sell it for even more and you own 100% or some significant chunk, or something that's actually real. It's philosophy difference I think of what you want to get yourself into, but don't get yourself into it unconsciously. Know that that's the game.

If you want to get in there and like hit everybody before they knew what happened, then yeah, by all means, go out, get a bunch of investors who are there just to make a buck and don't really care what the impact on your health was or your potential customers.

Dan: Couldn't agree with you more. What I'm talking about the investors, and so to your point, I've mentored a lot of grants. What I see them doing wrong, to be blunt, is that it's all about raising money, raising money, raising money to that your point, yeah, you need to know what you're doing. Here's the value of leveraging what we're talking about in the series is that instead of taking the chromes or the lousy opportunities where an investor says, "You know what? I'm going to take 50% of your company," or what some ridiculous amount, now you have the ability to negotiate, and hopefully, even land to a strategic investor.

Chris: Absolutely.

Dan: Yeah. That's the advantage. That's the benefit. To your point, that's where you have a quality of life. That's where you have more runway. That's where you can grow your brand strategically instead of just-

Chris: Selling your soul to the devil.

Dan: Yeah, and so many of the brands that I talked to, the Pitch-Slams, Expo West, and stuff like that, East, et cetera, part of a lot of different groups, Nutrition Capital Network, Circle Up, et cetera. Then, the point is that a lot of the brands that I talked to initially are all about, "How much money can I get? Please, please, please, I need money. I got to have money, right?" Instead, if you leverage these strategies, then you can say, "Here's what I've got. I need you to give me a better deal."

We all love shark tank, right? It's great when we can see someone get up and pick something that's really amazing. Instead of having a shark say, "You know what? I'm going to take 90% of your company," having someone come back and say, "You know what? I'm going to give you 10% and you're going to give me a heck of a lot more money for," because there's so much ... That's really what we're getting at. Thank you for sharing that. The webinar series that we just do, if anyone wanted to watch it, how would they get access to it again?

Yuval: If you wanted to email us or Dan, I think we can send you a link. Can you post a link where the podcast is? Is that possible, Dan?

Dan: Yeah. We can put it on the podcast show notes and on the podcast webpage.

Yuval: Yeah.

Dan: The point being is that there's such great content there. We certainly don't want to throw that away, want to be able to make it useful for people down the road. To your point, yeah, we want to make this a win-win for everyone. We can certainly work out the details and so I hit you guys with something we weren't planning to talk about, but the point is this is great content. Every brand needs to be absorbing this and leveraging this, and you go to market strategy.

Thank you for sharing all that. Let's talk a little bit about one of the resources that you made available to anyone who attended the webinar series, your Blueprint. I think it's a great strategic tool. You made it for you which I think is even better. Talk about the Blueprint. What is it? Why does it matter? How's it going to help brands? Chris, you want to start first?

Chris: I can. What is Blueprint? We created a pocket, full briefcase of full stuff called the Promomash TBM Blueprint. What's it about? Basically, it's for anybody who is either starting out a program for the first time or they've been wanting to, they've needed to and haven't been able to get around to it. It's just it's not in their wheelhouse or they just haven't had enough time to put all the things together, or even if you've got a medium-size company or even a large company and you've been running it but you've been running it really inefficiently.

You're like, "Okay. I need to hit the reset button. How do I go about this?" We take you from start to finish of what is it, why are we doing it, where should we do it, how and help people with a lot of mindsets, and strategy, and then of execution. There's a lot of information to be managed, the people that we managed gathering, analyzing, et cetera. We've given you as much as we can a head start on the whole thing.

We've taken a lot of our experience whether Yuval's direct experience or experience with dealing 100 of clients and say, "Okay. Let's boil this down." We created forms, we've created spreadsheets that reflect some of the workflows that we manage in the more automated way in our full platform. We put it all together in a package. There's a workbook full of Excel sheets that capture all the information, analyze. We've got forms that are examples of how to run your applications process. What's the third aspect of it, Yuval, that I'm missing we got about the applications?

Yuval: Yup, yup, the applications, you have the forms, you have the spreadsheets, and you have the instructions.

Chris: Yeah. Okay, that's it. Yeah, that's it. Then so that's a full discussion of what, why, how and step by step instruction to follow, because it's a lot and you don't want to just sit there and read all day long. You get it. You dive into the spreadsheet and go, "Gosh. How do I take full advantage of this?" After a week of using it, now you're ready for a little video tutorial and we'll be feeding you those as well. Often, your target is, like I said before, we're here to help the market get better.

At a certain point, a market needs extra help and tools. Hopefully, we provided enough help that you come to us when you're ready for that and you're going to get help somewhere, then we'll be able to help you out there as well.

Dan: Great. Thanks for sharing that. Yuval, I'm going to put you on the spot now. As a brand owner, how will this have changed your life? How will this matter? Now, Chris has talked about it. How do you use this to grow sales and all that other stuff?

Yuval: Yeah. We're just about to say I've been waiting for three years to create this Blueprint since we started the company. I have to say that when I was a brand trying to figure it out on my own, I didn't have anybody to help him. Trying to find it on Google is really difficult. There's so many different things and so many different things out there, but no one really has the solutions or the answers for a brand that's just trying to figure it out.

I didn't have the right spreadsheets. I didn't have the right questions to ask. I made it all up, myself. Through all these years of learning and obviously now, when Promomash has been working with hundreds and hundreds of clients, we really know best practices. We really know what it takes to build and operate a fantastic trade program. The whole purpose of creating and putting this Blueprint out, because it was a labor of love there was a lot of time that was spent in putting this information out there, was really to help the brand.

It's really to help the founders and the brand managers out there not have to guess. We gave them everything step by step pretty much laid out. Now they can tailor it and they can ... You don't utilize it with their specific needs, but at least, you have Blueprint. You have the beginnings of a really great program to be had. Now, obviously, if you're going to start scaling and you're going to start really building up your program, spreadsheets are going to be difficult.

Obviously, we can help outside of that. Until then, we have clients or prospects calling us all the time. They're not just ready. We didn't have anything to offer them. Now we have something to offer those. We're not yet ready for a platform but really want to start off on the right foot, because I just don't want them to make mistakes. If you make a mistake in the beginning, it's really hard to change course when you have a program running inefficiently. You then go ahead and change it.

If you ever change a CRM, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not easy once you have data to start shifting at new directions. That's-

Dan: It is currently important. To frame this, coming from big CPG express, Campbell and Clark, Unilever, et cetera, when you go out there and you start talking to organizations that do trade marketing, they're going to talk to you so far beyond what you're thinking about, your concerns today. What I mean by that is that they're going to assume that you just going to whip 30,000, 50,000, 100,000, whatever dollars out of your wallet to buy a product that's not going to help you because you're not there yet.

More importantly, they don't understand the world that we are talking about, the world that we're playing in. The point is this. Like you said, if you don't do it right today, pay me now pay me later, that's going to give you more runway. It's going to help you grow, all that other stuff. It's so critically important like you said that brands have that strong foundation. One of the things that I've had the privilege of doing is many, many years ago with Campbell and Clark is really digging into this.

I would make sure category management includes trade marketing. That's why we're talking. I had the opportunity to understand trade marketing and built tools for Campbell and Clark, and Unilever, some of which I'm told they're still in use today. The point is being able to get down to the contribution of a promotion at the item level. What does that mean? When you think about how much you spend on promotion, how much did you grow sales?

How does that continue to grow sales after the event's over, okay? That's so critically important. Most brands or even big brands struggle with that.

Chris: Yeah.

Dan: Then let's go one step further. Contribution, how much profit are you bringing back to the brand? Most promotions ... Actually, let me back up. Over 25% of your total gross sales are typically trade promotion. Seventy to 90% of those dollars are wasted. What does that mean? A trade promotion includes everything to get your product into the hands of the shopper. The trade promotion, the goal to trade promotion is to introduce your product to a new consumer.

Rinse and repeat strategies, the buy the shelf space, I mean not shelf space but continue to promote, promote, promote without getting a thing back, does little or nothing to grow your brand. That's what we're getting at. Anyhow, Campbell and Clark, I had the privilege of really digging into this and understanding the consumer dynamics, and how all the number, or like everything works together, we bought a lot of tools, et cetera.

What I've learned is that the programs that are out there that are designed for the big CPG companies that are way too expensive for any little companies to talk to even consider, not only do they talk faster or ignore, or whatever ... or the customers, we're talking about the smaller brands. When I say smaller brands, by the way, I'm saying say 500 million and smaller, so small brands, okay and not just pre-revenue.

Any of those brands in that space which is just about every brand in the natural category, natural universe, so anyhow, the point being is that having tools and resources to help these brands get to that point, that's the end goal. What you guys have done is you've isolated one key component that all the other big tools ignore. That is in-store execution. If I'm a big brand, we've got the information about forecasting and planning, et cetera, et cetera, across a bunch of mainstream but it overlooks boots on the ground. It overlooks what happens on the shelf.

Chris: Absolutely, yup.

Dan: That's where you guys come in.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan: Can you talk a little bit about that? How does your tool work? Why does it matter? Then how did you get to the point where you decided, "This is a problem we're going to solve"?

Chris: I'd love to jump in there. I know Yuval will hit out of the park after that. Here's what I would like to be able to say. If it was the first thing to describe what we do, I'd say it but it would be out of context. Now with what you just said, here it is. You need to do all that granular analysis of your product line. It's first being a category manager, somebody sitting back at the mother ship and saying, "Okay. I'm going to move this chess piece here and that chess piece there."

You're doing that once a year or once a quarter and you're making big strategic decisions. Yeah, they do affect how the product line evolves and the profitability picture and all that. At least for brick and mortar, okay, people are going into a store that's managed by people. There are people scouring around. There might be a brand of an asset who is actually trying to talk to somebody or not, they're not there.

The bottom line for that environment, if people are going to do a great job or they're going to do not a great job, and your results are going to be great or they're going to be not so great. What's the difference? The difference is the people. Of course, you can't just like the toss, sprinkle people over the whole thing. You got to manage them. The better that you can manage your people with technology, enable them the better you're going to do, the more competitive you're going to be.

I don't know the exact number for you, but I can tell you this. At least, half of the profitability picture, most of which that that 70% to 90% that you said was wasted, that's half of the potential profitability of the entire activity. If you get the people part right and you know how to on a granular level dial into people, wow, you are looking at an industry that gets by on single-digit margins. This is a game-changer. It means the difference between barely eking by hardscrabble existence to, "Hey. I got an exciting fat can on my hands."

Dan: Yuval, you want to chime in?

Yuval: Yeah. I think this comes from real-world experience I think for me. When I was running the brand, I noticed the pattern. When I had better brand ambassadors and better reps, I saw better results at the store. When I didn't, I was discontinued. It wasn't even like I was doing poorly, I got discontinued. The difference between a great sales rep and a great brand ambassador with a great story was ... and the difference between not having one.

That's a big problem for anyone, right? We're not even talking about margins now. We're talking about either you're successful or you're not. Why is it important? Because people build relationships. When you're going in as a brand ambassador and you're presenting the brand as you should, who you're talking to? You're not just talking to your customers. You're talking to the staff at the store.

Guess what happens when a great brand ambassador is very personable, speaks with store staff. When they leave, who do you think the store staff recommends when customers come to them and ask for recommendations? Of course, you, all but the sales rep. If a sales rep is personable, they understand your story, and they're speaking with the buyers, and they get them to like the story and get behind them, of course, it's all about relationships, you're going to get the best promos.

A retailer is not going to give every brand on the shelf, the same month of a promo. You're going to select one or two out of the month or out of the quarter that they are going to allow a discount and TPR and callout. If you're not there in front of them, if you don't have great reps with great relationships, those buyers are going to go with your competitors. They won't go with you. There's no connection. There's no relationship.

As you know, I know this is said very often. It's not what you know, it's who you know. It's really true in a lot of ways. I think once you build great relationships when you play the story, that's what makes all the difference in the world, which is why when we started creating Promomash, it was for the reason to manage the people on the field. That's right because that's what made the most difference.

Every time I just look at numbers and spreadsheets, I didn't get the lift. It was just, "Okay," so I understand maybe why I wasn't doing well. If I can address the real issue, it's like putting a band-aid but you're not really curing the wound. That's what we wanted to do is we wanted to get the wound cured and then we can figure it out.

Chris: Where we are in the market today, where the market has evolved to, it's not as simple as just, "Okay, go out and take a golfing." That's no longer acceptable either. It's not that relationship. It's not just that they like you or not. They got to like you. You got to be bringing value to the relationship. You do that through technology and information as well. Things that you can tell that retail person that you're dealing with, that is going to help them in their job, and to remain relevant to them in a very competitive environment and to help further not only your interest but theirs as well, if you can provide that information and come and smile and be educational and help with the shoppers, that's a formula for a friendship right there.

Dan: Let me add some more context, that I mentioned in the third part of the webinar series today that I used to manage the demo stuff at Price Club which is now Costco. In just doing normal demos, we would have to say 150% lift, which isn't a lot. I found that there were a lot of out of stocks, et cetera. When I took over that position, I started really focusing on like you said, the five pillars, Yuval, and making sure we were executing properly.

A properly executed promotion with a demo, I was getting sometimes a thousand, even a thousand percent lift, higher than that. The point is this. By executing properly, in other words, if you're going to do so, why not do it right the first time? Because I was able to execute at such a high level, those brands were able to continue to grow sales beyond the event were like a trade promotion et cetera.

It's a TBM, price reduction, those just typically can give you a quick lift sort of a sugar high and then you had a crash. The point being is that this is how you gain runway. A story I have never shared with you guys and I think is really relevant, here's why this matters. Many, many years ago, I worked for Spins. I'm the one who created the distribution tracker. I'm the one who got them to start selling store level, retailer data. That was the tool that got them to do that.

The origin of that tool was I was working with a retailer, helping the retailer with brand promotion. The story is that a brand was promoting their product and they didn't have their product in all of the stores of the retailers, every store that retailer had. One, they had a demo program and they had a huge, huge, huge discount. It was a really hot sale. It's a great deal, right? The brand is promoting your product and the retailer doesn't have distribution.

The customers are getting upset because they can't find the product. The customer calls the distributor ... and I mean calls the retailer because they're upset. The retailer calls the distributor and says, "I need more product because there's so many out of stocks," right? Stores didn't have it. The stores that did have it was out of stock. Not only is this a colossal failure for the retailer in terms of execution.

The brand lost a lot of money, et cetera, a lot and lot had lost their credibility. In addition to that to going a step further, because the particular retailer managed to get the distributor give them all their product when that same brand ran the same promotion at different retailers in the market, they had nothing to sell. The point is this. If you don't do this right, it's going to cost you not only a bad press, bad whatever your brand is the representation of yourself.

When a customer, any customer walks into the store and says, "You've got an out of stock," they're not going to blame your broker, they're not going to blame the distributor and not going to blame the retailer, it's your fault. Helping your brands adjust to this and understand this and know when they have the product ... Anyhow, to finish the story, the tool that I use to qualify or quantify the value of fixing that problem is, was the original the origin of the distribution tracker?

The point being is this. If you don't know your numbers like you've all said, if you don't know your numbers, you can't measure them and you spend all your time bogged down in trying to manage your spreadsheets, then how do you identify what the opportunities are to grow your brand? That's what this is all about. Your thoughts?

Yuval: I think that the reality is it's not just the tools. It's accountability. Because you're right, reputation is so important. When a brand ambassador doesn't show up to the store which happens a lot, okay? More often do you think, guess who they blame? They don't blame the brand ambassador. They blame you or even sometimes, your broker who promised to support. Brokers usually go in to negotiate a good deal and a good promo and promise that the brand will support the store x number of times over a period.

If that doesn't happen or your brand ambassador comes in and he's late, that is a huge problem. By using, by having tools that like GPS tracker and then understanding reporting, and really holding everybody accountable, that gives you the edge because you'd ... I didn't know how many times a brand ambassador didn't even show up at a store unless the store called me. Sometimes, they didn't and it just, it looked bad.

It's the same thing with brokers. I had so many brokers negotiating bad deals that I didn't approve because they didn't have the tools to hold them accountable for it. I think that's really a big thing. It's your reputation, and you got to make sure that people are trained well and they're coming in doing their job. If you don't hold them accountable, you got you some issues.

Chris: I had a really funny realization just the other day. Have you ever heard of the funny story about the guys who are tunneling, tunneling, tunneling, and they finally breakthrough back to the surface and they find that they're in jail, they've just broken into jail? Bringing a brand to the market, it's like that in the sense ... this was my funny realization ... trade promotion which is our shows and profession, is really a matter of life or death for brands. Let me tell you why.

Number one, because you don't have a choice. If you don't do trade promotion, you're dead, okay? Here's where it gets really bad. If you do it badly, you're dead. You only have the choice of doing it and doing it well if you want to make it, because, Dan just gave an example of you do it badly, it damages your reputation. Let's put it more bluntly. If you put a product on offer, you put up a TPR, okay and that customer was going to buy your product anyway, you just gave them 25%, 30% off of what, of a really, really competitive existence already.

For what? They were going to buy it anyway. If you don't really manage it well and don't drive so much more business and know that you're getting a lifetime of purchases at retail with MSRP then you shot yourself in the foot. The same thing with your ambassadors, you put just anyone, we like to joke, Mable with a table, no training, no representation of your brand as what your brand is, you shot yourself in the foot because you said that you had to spend that 150, $200 to put that person in the store for what, to represent you badly?

If you're going to do it, do it well. Then you can actually make a profit and you can measure it.

Dan: One of the other things that we haven't talked about that goes along the same line when you're talking about doing it well ... Let's be honest. Retailers and distributors, broker, sellers, they're going to ask you to promote 24/7 if they could. They're constantly looking for you to spend money in their store in terms of that being a profit center, which is unfortunate. The reality is this. If you've got a great story to tell the retailer, "I did this promotion. Here's how I did it. Here's how I executed it."

In other words, Yuval, you're talking about the piece of being able to analyze, et cetera, if you could share that story to a retailer. Then what you're getting at, Chris, if you can help the retailer understand that, "If this promotion makes sense for me, I can go well all in on this one and do more than you're asking for this one. That means that I can do every other promotion that you want me to do that hasn't moved the needle." You're going to move the needle.

The point being is this. Life's about choices. If you can choose the best promotions to drive sustainable sales-wise, then that's going to help you grow your brand more. The cool thing is it's going to help you help the retailer drive more sustainable sales in the market. That's here.

Chris: All so true.

Yuval: It's also understanding the other side, right? The retailer, the buyer has a job. They have a family to feed. They care about staying employed. They have a shelf. They need to manage a shelf that's already full. If your brand coming in and asking for shelf space or wanting to add more product onto the shelf, something's got to go off the shelf, and so the buyer needs to make a decision, "Is your product and your support going to produce more revenue for me so not only do I keep my job but I can look good in front of my boss?"

It's a two-way street. We always talk about brands and retailers very separate, but they need each other. The retailer needs the brands and they want better brands so they can sell more at the store level. If you can show them that you have something to offer, they're going to look at you very differently than if you come in and not. For instance, we had skincare. Do you know that if we wanted to get into Sephora for instance, you can go into Sephora and you can say to the buyer, "I have a $10 million budget for advertising, that's what I'm going to do"?

That buyer will take you seriously. You don't need that $10 million budget. If you get on home shopping network and you could tell the buyer that there are 90 million people that, "I build your product," they'll take you in without a budget. The reality is you just have to show the buyer how you can make them successful. If you can do that, that's a relationship. It's a win-win. You never want to be ... If we look at Promomash, we never want to win-lose. We always want win-win.

If a client comes in, we want them to win and us to win, not one to lose. I think the same concept with a retailer and a brand. It's got to be a win-win. I think that's where you got to focus.

Dan: The three things I talked to you about, what do retailers really want? Used to be a grocer and want more traffic in their store. They don't want a reasonable profit and they want a competitive advantage. That's it. It's that simple. By the way, leveraging these things, strategies, I was able to get a national retailer back when I worked for Unilever, to lower their menu fees. There're a lot of other advantages.

It's about like you said, having a partnership with that retailer, helping a retailer compete more effectively, helping that retailer remain relevant against all their competitive threats and the online threats and market threats. The point is this. This is critically important. Like you said it, Chris, that if you either do this right and that you're at the parallel or whatever of the investors that are putting money into your business, or grow your business, and then at that point, you have choices.

You can decide to sell it if you want, you can decide to grow it, you can turn it over to your kids, whatever is a legacy, but that opens a door for a lot of different things. More importantly, if you can add value to your retailer and help your retailer succeed, and they're going to bend over backward to help you. The secret to my sole success throughout my entire career is by providing so much value to the retailer.

They gave me incremental promotions, they gave me their own data, they gave me opportunities to do things that they would've charged other brands or wouldn't have even given to other brands. The point is this. As a result, I was able to get tremendous growth. For example, we are working with one retailer, whereas with Campbell and Clark, and we get double-digit growth in every category, every quarter.

I'm not talking about 10%, 11%. I'm talking 50%, 80%, 30%, huge, huge numbers quarter after quarter after quarter. The point is this. You do this well, not only is this going to give you more runway but it's going to help you get things from the retailer and opportunities from the retailer that others don't, wouldn't be able to get. Your thoughts?

Yuval: Get going, try it as a strategy, and do it one place and you'll learn things that will help you to ... you're going to make it systematic, you're going to nationwide if you're going to hit all the big hits, the big chains. You're going to have to get good at this. You're going to have to get systematic about it. The relationship thing still holds. How do you have a really tight relationship with 25 people or 200 people?

You don't do it by accident. You do it by design. You do it by the system. You've got to be that personable value-adding person at your core. Try at one place, get good at it, get the sugar rush now. It's the real rush of adding value to a partner's activities. When they show you their appreciation, you're going to go, "Okay, what did I do just now? How can I deploy this out to my field team and teach them to do it?"

You might need some tools and stuff, which we've given in in your free packet here, that we'll help you to do that. Where it's at is figure out how to have that relationship that you described at the very beginning of this, Dan. The relationship is based on people bringing value to the thing, for each other. You better be pretty systematic about it in today's competitive environment.

Now, I'll tell you this. You managed to shark me. The difference between Mr. Wonderful taking 90% of your company versus giving you a $20 million valuation is factored in on how well you know your numbers, how much of a process do you have that's scalable, what market share can you capture, and how well you operate, and ... or on how and efficient in your business. That's why we have experts like you around and tools like ours around to help brands accomplish such things.

Chris and I went to a talk yesterday about marketing. It was a fascinating discussion. The guy basically said there are some marketing tried and truths, got to do it. Marketing is situational to your position and to your company. Just because blogging is effective, it doesn't mean blogging for your company is effective. It just means that's effective, you have to figure out what's more effective than not but there are certain things that are tried and true.

If I was a starting brand, as an example, I'm going to give everybody who's starting out of tip right now. If I am starting out as a brand and I then raise $10 million, here's what I would do. I wouldn't try to even go on a regional or a national distribution plan. I wouldn't do it. What I would do is I would look locally and support as much as you can with limited resources you have, that local sector, and help people really understand and know your product until you have the relationships with your retailers and customers.

Once you do that and prove the model, then you can take that model into proof to the next retailer, to the next region and grow that business and scale it in a way that's scalable, that you can do it without running out of resources. What I did as a brand which really screwed me is that I had no money and I went national. I had about two months of support, supporting the national efforts. Then I was like, "What's going on? I can't deal with this." Then we had to scale down especially since we started in the most optimal time, 2007, 2008, which was a fantastic time to start a luxury business.

Chris: Kids, don't try this at home.

Yuval: Please, don't try this at home. The reality is if I had to do it over again, I would do it this way, make sure that the marketing efforts that you are deploying fit your business model in finances and resources, and get the right tools and find the right people who can help you navigate that journey. Don't try to do it yourself and try to figure it out, because it's going to be a very treacherous road. Find experts. Let them help you and you're going to be just fine. Get a good story. You got to have a good story.

Chris: I'll take it a step further than that and say, guys, if you're starting out, Yuval is giving you sage advice. Let me say it this way. If in your own backyard, if in your local market, if people aren't really excited if the stuff isn't flying off the shelf and if you're not profitable, don't scale whatever you do because you're going to take a little unprofitable thing and make it a big unprofitable thing. That won't be as attractive to an investor is something that all you're doing is leveraging capital and just postponing profit as opposed to trying to figure out how to make a profit.

Yuval: Again, think about this, right? How attractive is it to a brand we just launched? Maybe they have million or less in the bank, who just raise a little bit with friends and family. They have a great product. You walk into a Whole Foods and they say, "I'm going to give you a national distribution across the nation, every region, all 11,400 plus stores and you get a big check initially, $100,000 pre-order," right?

They even wave the slotting fees. Let's say they come in and said, "I love you so much. You can come in. I'm just going to give you a big $100,000 check for pre-order." How enticing is that? Problem is with that little cash in the bank, you're dead because you have to support a national distribution over a prolonged period of time. That is a tremendous cost. What you're trying to do is you're trying to do it right for your situation.

Don't get mesmerized by that national, international deal because it might, if you're not careful, destroy you. Getting on the shelf is not the end of the game. It's just the beginning. Then the real work begins and that's selling off the shelf. That's the hard part. That's why you need experts and tools in order to help you get there.

Dan: Actually, one of the podcast episodes that I did recently with Bubba's Fine Foods, he was profitable year one and two, and you got to listen to the podcast episode obviously. Year three, he was told to hire a master broker, just about put him out of business because he couldn't support it as you said. Then he went back to just folks on local, absolutely. By the way, the things that we're talking about it because we don't have all day to continue to talk about this even though we'd love to, these are things that we talked about throughout the webinar series.

We talked about tactics, strategies, we gave you podcast episodes to listen to, we gave you other tools and resources, to everyone that's listening, make the most of this. The point is this. It's like you said, Chris, this can determine how long you're going to be around, a month, a year, a decade or longer. Doing this well is so critical to your success. I'm often struck by the fact that we spent so much money. We had spent so much money trying to design packaging and stuff like that.

It's such a focus and you're so proud of it. I've often wondered, if you went to a branding expert, packaging expert and your packaging expert said, "You know what? You're doing it wrong. What you need to do instead is you need to use the same three colors as the number one brand in the category. You need to use the same font that they're using," you'd be insulted but yet, we're not putting the same energy and effort into our go-to-market strategy, which includes trade marketing. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or covered that you think we should cover, Yuval?

Yuval: I'm just going to say one more thing. This is after many years of experience, I can tell you one thing. There's something called the chain of pain, okay? What does that mean? It means that in trade promotions, you have three stakeholders at the company. You have your executives who care about obviously the ROI and the performance and the results. You have your managers who are mid-level managers who are responsible for obviously, performance and activity and reporting.

Then you have your managers who are managing the day today, the counting, the transactional activities, that the promos acceptance. When you have these three levels, executives might look down and say, "Why does the lowest level manager, low-level manager, right, need tools? I'm paying them anyway, right? Who cares? Let them spend extra time if they need to. That's what they do. That's why I hired them."

I think they don't understand is that it, the pain travels up. If the lower level manager can't operate effectively and they don't know which stores to demo or what promos to manage, and compare it to and actually leverage with call-ups and demos, then the middle-level manager can't really get the right reporting, can't really get the information up to the executive. At the executive level, now you're not able to plan, now you're not able to really understand how to move the needle.

There's a chain of pain going up and down because everybody's job is dependent on the others. You got to focus on all three. You can't just focus on one. Chris, I don't know if you want to add anything to that, but that'd be great.

Chris: I almost don't want to try and improve on it because it's a high point, but I would just say that the way I look at it when I'm really sitting on a rock and saying, "What is this wonderful industry we're in?" it's really it's a flow of products, it's a flow of money. Most importantly, the thing that really makes all happen is the flow of information. What Yuval just described is if that flow, the right information isn't going, the rest of the stuff grinds to a halt and just does ends up not making sense.

You got to be smart. Part of being smart is not inventing everything, yourself. Leverage the information and wisdom that we're giving you for free from Promomash and definitely, Dan, the podcast, his trainings. We partnered with Dan because we're so impressed with his material and his motivation. He offers a lot of stuff for free too. For you guys getting started, it turns out that hey, when you need free, free is there.

These two researchers are there. At least, take advantage of them. Then later on when you're in a much more voluminous, profitable position then you're going to need other stuff, and then we could talk again later.

Dan: I appreciate you saying that. Thank you for the compliments. Thank you for partnering with me on this. As a side note, I've got a lot of brands reaching out to me as me for strategies to help them manage their brokers more effectively. As you said, Yuval, it's all about that communication, it's all about getting, maximizing every opportunity, every selling opportunities, I'm a little bit off the subject but the point is this.

There are a lot of brands out there that are trying to solve this puzzle. I will share with you that when I roll up my sleeves and work with the big brands, they're struggling with that too. In fact, actually, I just did a webinar for the category management association. We're talking about Walmart and big, big, big brands and big retailers on this exact topic. They're looking for that content as well. Here's the takeaway is that if all the brands that are listening to this can take advantage of these strategies, leverage new strategies, it's going to help you grow, it's going to help you be more efficient, and it's going to help level the playing field to you and your most sophisticated competitor. Thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate your time. I look forward to our next conversation, our next partnership.

Chris: All right, sounds great. Thanks.

Yuval: Thank you, Dan, appreciate it.

Dan: I want to thank Yuval and Chris for coming on the podcast, for sponsoring the three-part webinar series of Mastering the Shelf. In addition to that, I also want to thank them for providing for you the TBM Blueprint, a Promomash guide for managing your trade promotion field program. This is an essential guide for any brand that wants to do trade promotions or in-store demos, right. This is the essential resource that every brand needs to have at the ready so that they can effective manage and maximize each and every selling opportunity through an in-store demo program.

I'll put a link to it and a link to get to the webinar series in the podcast show notes and on the podcast webpage. You can get there by going to brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session145. As always, thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Promomash https://promomash.com

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