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Predicting sales is both an art and a science. Balancing between excess inventory and out-of-stocks can be a struggle in ordinary times for any brand. Simple mistakes can be extremely costly. This begins with effective goal setting

Let's roll up our sleeves and get started. Welcome. Earlier today, I completed the Trademarketing Goals setting You Can't Hit A Target You Don't Aim For free webinar.

This is part of the free webinar series that I started doing after Expo West was closed. The reason I started doing this is because I want to give you the strategies that you need to scale and grow your brand. I want to give you the strategies that you need to help you get more runway out of your available resources.

I want to be able to help you compete head-to-head, toe-to-toe with the big brands. And the best way to do that is by giving you or teaching you how to leverage the resources at your hand to be able to compete more effectively. So what I mean by that is that when you're thinking about your trademarketing, how do you set goals that you can reach, realistic goals that are going to help you achieve and even exceed your objectives?

How do you plan and forecast around that? Today's podcast episode is actually the live recording from that free webinar. I hope you enjoy it

I hope you enjoy this. Okay. Good morning.

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for attending today. We really appreciate your being here.

This series is something that I started doing if you haven't attended any of them yet, because when Expo West was canceled, I wanted to find a way to give back, a way to raise the bar in the industry. And the best way I think I can do that is by helping to give you the strategies that you need to grow, compete, and thrive. And what's really great about this is, and where I'm going with this, is that a lot of other people have taken notice or been paying attention.

So why are we doing this? Well, 80% of natural brands failed in the first year, and I'm committed to change that. You need to remember that retail is not a marathon.

It's a sprint. Retail is a marathon, not a sprint, excuse me. And you need to plan for sustainable growth.

And that's part of what this series is about. So a little bit about me if you don't know. My name is Dan Lohman.

I've had the privilege of working with small brands, emerging brands, all the way up to multibillion-dollar brands. I am classically trained in category management. And I'm using those strategies, the strategies that the big brands rely on, to help natural brands out in this channel.

I'm the first person certified at the highest level of category management proficiency. And you can see on this slide what that entails. And so the reason I share this is I've had the privilege of digging into trademarking and becoming a true expert on the subject.

And that expertise has guided me to help my clients, including back even when I worked for Kimberly Clark and Unilever, to reduce the amount of wasted money they spend on trade spending, which gives you more runway. We'll get to that in a minute, but that's what we're here for. So when I talked about resources, my website is dedicated to be a resource to help you and other brands out, no matter what channel, no matter what category, no matter what the economic situation is.

So what is trade marketing? Let's start there. Trade marketing is everything that's required to get your product onto a store shelf and into the hands of a shopper.

Now, some people think of trade marketing as just your promotional spend. And a lot of times, it really is. But you also want to think about what are the other things that you're spending to get your product on a shelf.

And the reason this matters is because a lot of the things that you're doing are not helping to drive the business forward, not even your retailer's business forward. So we want to help you identify strategies to get more bandwidth, to get more run with from your available resources. So why are we here today?

We're here today because 25% of a brand's retail budget or their promotional budget is tied to your trade spending. And yet 70 to 90% of those dollars are wasted or ineffective. And we'll talk more about that as we go on.

I put together this short video to frame why this matters. So here we go. 25% of your brand's gross sales are tied to your trade marketing, and yet over 70% of your promotional spending is wasted or ineffective.

Trade marketing includes everything you're required to get your product on store shelves and into the hands of shoppers, including online. Retailers demand promotions and shoppers expect them. Maximizing your trade marketing ROI means more runway for sales growth, fuel for more innovation, and more.

Managing promotions is challenging. Even big brands struggle with this, but you don't have their deep pockets. Your survival depends on you getting this right.

You're tired of feeling like an ATM machine and wish you could scale faster. You know in your heart that the tired strategies everyone else uses won't help you stand out on a crowded shelf. The light bulb goes on.

So with that said, the goal here is to convert you or have you, instead of being looked at as another brand or another package on a retailer's shelf, we want to help you become a valued restorer to those retailers. And when you can do that effectively, then that's when they start looking to you with incremental opportunities to help grow sales within their store by leveraging the strength of the unique consumer that buys your product. So why is this important?

I put this slide together, and I think this is extremely... This really paints a good picture. So let's say that if you're a million-dollar brand, and 25% of your trade spending equals $250,000, if you waste 70% of that, and when I say wasted, out of stocks, not having the promotion set forward in terms of not having it executed properly, running out of product, making and having too much product in the distribution center, in the store when you're running the promotion, all the inefficiencies, having a demo set up, but not having the signs on the shelf.

But more importantly, some of the other things that a lot of people don't think about, for example, if I was going to buy your product, and I walk into the store, and you've got it on promotion, I was going to buy it already, well, that's good for me, but that's not an efficient spend of your trade marketing dollars. There are better ways to do that, and I cover that more in other sessions, the podcast, etc. And by the way, I'm putting together a course, TRADE MARKETING ESSENTIALS, where I'm going to cover everything soup to nuts, really digging into this.

If you want to know more about that on my website, on the courses page, you can take a look at what's in there. But the reason we're having this conversation, going back to this example, so let's say $175,000 is wasted and ineffective. If I can help you get a 10% improvement, that's $17,500 that you can put back and that you can use for something else.

So what would you use those dollars for? Remember that every slight improvement means more runway for sales growth, higher brand evaluations, better terms when negotiating with investors. Imagine, for example, when you think about when you watch Shark Tank, being able to look at the sharks right in the eyes and say, you know, my brand is worth more than that.

I need you to take less equity, give me more money, however that works out. But that gives you that confidence to be able to have that conversation. It gives you fuel for new innovation, and it allows you to support more mission-based causes.

And this is what we're focused on. And by the way, one of the things that I'm going to be talking about throughout this are creative strategies to help you leverage the strength of the customer that buys your product within retail. So why did this matter again?

Well, because these savings will compound year after year. And as you get better at this, you're going to save even more money. And as you get better at that, and as you continue to compound those key learnings, that's where you're able to compete head-to-head, toe-to-toe with the big brands.

And then, of course, a talented category management expert can help amplify your results and help you explode sales. If you've got questions about how that works again, reach out to me or listen to the podcast.

According to Nielsen, offering the right trade promotion to the right targeted customer can more than 13x your ROI. This is why this matters. If you can make sure that every trade dollar you spend is spent as efficiently as possible, then that's how you stand out on a crowded shelf.

This is what's going to help you succeed, no matter what the situation is economically, etc. So the first webinar that I did, and I highly recommend you go back and check this out, was Trademarking Strategies that Grow Sales and Profits. And I put this one on my YouTube channel.

So you can't hit a marketing goal if you don't know what you're aiming for.

And so what is goal setting? Is it overrated? Well, a lot of people play lip service to this.

And what I mean by that is they don't take the time to dig in to really think about what it is that they're trying to achieve. What goals are important? What is the end result that you're hoping for?

So most brands do not make the priorities as I was hinting to. And the reason this matters is a lot of brands are reactive instead of proactive. So, for example, let's say that all of a sudden you've got a supplier issue or you've got a retailer that says, hey, I've got an incremental opportunity.

Can you take advantage of that? If you're always proactive, then most likely not. If you're proactive, then you've built in a little bit of cushion to be able to handle or weather some of those things.

So how often should your goals be revisited? Honestly, all the time on a regular basis. Set up a plan so that you're going to be revisiting your goals on a regular basis, minimum each quarter.

I would even do it as much as one every month, maybe even every week, depending on how specific your goals are. And we'll get to that in a moment. But the more specific your goals are, the more you should focus on how do you reach those goals?

Where are you at in terms of reaching those goals, et cetera? Small incremental improvements can compound. I mentioned that before.

Think about it. When you're learning how to ride a bike or drive a car, when you first start out, for example, driving a car, everything seems really scary. But now you're able to drive a car and have a conversation, et cetera.

Same thing with goal setting. As you begin to do this and you begin to get better at this and with your trademarking, et cetera, then you're going to learn what things work and what things don't work. And you're going to learn the difference in how you can fix the things that may be worked, but you can tweak a little bit better and get better results out of.

So how often should your trademarking goal be a priority all the time? This needs to be baked into your marketing plan, into your business plan, into everything that you do. And this needs to be clearly communicated throughout your entire organization.

So how does this simple strategy can help you arise above your competition? Honestly, this is the best part. Your competition is not doing this.

So anything that you can do over and above them a little bit better than they do, this is going to help you stand out. This is going to give that competitive edge that your competition isn't going to be leveraging. And as a result, this again is how you become a trusted valued resource to your retail partners.

So simple strategies like this can give you significant and sustainable competitive advantage. This is exactly what I've been talking about. And again, the reason this matters is because if you do a little bit better than everyone else, this is how you stand out.

There's a story, and I know I'm going to butcher it, but that I love that really paints a good picture about this. I'm not a horse racing fan, so I apologize, but there was a horse that many, many years ago did like a hundred thousand times, but raised a hundred thousand times more in terms of winnings. And yet the horse wasn't a hundred thousand times faster.

The horse was only a nose faster. And the point was that at every race that the horse won, it won by a little bit, just a little bit every single time. But their incremental winnings over time equated to many, many, many times the horse that came in second place.

My point is this. The better that you can do, or each and every time that you get up to bat, each and every time you put together a promotion, this is how you start getting those incremental and those, this is how you start compounding your ability to explode your sales. So goal setting 101, what is the goal and why does it matter?

Goals need to be smart. They need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Goals need to be proactive, not reactive.

I've talked about that. Too many people don't take the time to do goal setting. Too many people don't take the time to think about what they want and what matters and why it's important.

You need to be thoughtful. So what does a realistic goal look like? If you want to make a million dollars and don't ask somebody that makes $30,000 a year, you want to make sure that you're getting the advice from the people that can help you grow and scale.

That's why we're here today. You want to dream big. A lot of people limit their goals because they don't think that they're capable of hitting them.

There are a lot of great resources in this industry. A lot of people willing and anxious and eager to help you grow and thrive. So reach out to those people.

Ask them how you can help achieve those goals. And then think about all the other things that you want to accomplish within your goal setting. You want to grow and scale your company to be able to sell it in 10 years.

You want to turn this into a legacy brand that you can pass on to your family. What are some of the other things that you want to do? You want to do more good.

Bake those into your goal strategies, in your goal setting, and then make that part of your objective and then revisit on a regular basis. I love this analogy. If you think about a plane that goes from Hawaii to San Diego or LA, that plane is off course about 90 some percent of the time, constantly needing adjustments.

The captain of the plane is not going to get on the loudspeaker and say, hey, we're off course again. You know they are. And the reason they are is because the wind pushes them around, buffets them around, et cetera.

So goal setting requires commitment. Goal setting requires you to, on a regular basis, continue to look at whether or not you're heading toward your goal properly and whether or not you're going to overshoot it or you're going to achieve it, et cetera. So if you don't do this, in this example here, instead of the plane landing in LA, the plane might land in Baja or someplace else.

And so you want to make sure that you're committed to this and that you're constantly focused on helping to make sure that you're on the right path. With that in mind, you want to have a purpose. So what is the purpose of your goal?

You want to state everything clearly. And do this in writing. Don't just do this in your head.

State everything clearly. What are your goals? What do you want to try to achieve?

I'm going to be your sherpa for this. That's what these courses are about, these webinars, and that's what all the courses, the podcasts, et cetera. I'm going to help you, help guide you to reach the top of the mountain.

And by the way, as a part of that, you want to invite your teams to participate in this with you. You want to begin with the end in mind. You want to be thinking about what are you trying to achieve in terms of your long-term success, just like the plain example.

Pro tip, focus on the market basket and work backwards. The market basket is the sum total of the dollars, of the products and the dollars that people have in their basket as they check out of the store. Why does this matter?

Because customers don't go into the store to buy only your product. They buy a lot of other products as well. So identify what those products are that are in the market basket.

Understand how the consumer shops. And as you understand how the consumer shop, then put that into your goal strategy. So why does this matter in terms of trade marketing?

Because your trade marketing dollars are impacted by the other brands the retailer sells. So for example, if I walk into a store and I was going to buy butter, but I can't buy any bread and I was going to make toast, well, I'll probably walk out of the store. I know that's kind of a flip it example, but the point is you want to make sure that the retailer has all the right products in the store, in distribution that your customers want to buy.

So this is where you help guide them to drive sales by helping them leverage the strength of your customer. This is where you improve the customer journey. This is how you convert an occasional customer into loyal evangelist.

So to gain a competitive edge, this is one of the free mini courses, you need to have a business plan. And your business plan, in my opinion, should be so robust that someone else could come in and run your plan or execute your plan on your behalf in your absence without a problem. And in terms of thinking about that's why, again, we want to talk about keep talking about why you want to be proactive and not reactive.

And the difference for this, again, is this helps set you up for success. If you're not available to answer those questions, if there's a fire or something's a fire, meaning there's a problem or something didn't work out right, well, other people easily be able to address those situations on their own. And by empowering the people around you, not only is that going to get them more engaged in what you're doing, but it's going to help you succeed in the long run.

The benefits of a proactive planning strategy, as I keep mentioning, is this helps you prepare for any of those unforeseen things. And it also puts you in a position where you can take advantage of opportunities. So don't take this for granted in terms of your promotional strategy.

When you're thinking about your promotional strategy, it's not a matter of here's what I want to do tomorrow, the next day, etc. Necessarily, you want to also think about what is the goal that I want to achieve. For example, and I'll show you a better example of this in a minute.

But if you're putting together promotion, how does that align with the retailer? How does that align with other objectives, other brands that complement yours, etc.? Don't farm this out.

I think this is the biggest mistake that any brand makes. And that's why we're here today. So a lot of brands will farm this out to their broker, to their distributor, to someone else other than you.

The simple reality is that they rely on cookie cutter strategies that give them the efficiency to be able to do this on a larger scale. Bottom line is, the same strategy that they use to sell motor oil is not going to help you differentiate your organic baby food. You need to own this.

And you need to be able to make sure that you can do this in house. Again, brands need to own their own strategy. You need to commit to being a trade marketing expert, or at least understanding the basics.

What are the things that you need to be paying attention to so that when you hire someone to manage this for you or to do this job for you, you have at least some understanding of what the goals are, the objectives are, what's possible. And by the way, I talk about some of the major successes I've had in this industry are different webinar series, different podcast episodes. You definitely want to check those out.

You want to make this a priority and again, check it often. You want to leverage your partners to gain a competitive advantage. So one of the examples that I gave in a store, I mean, in a recent webinar, is food stirrers sells organic baby food.

And excuse me, food stirrers sells baked mixes. And then once upon a farm sells baby food. And if you put the two together, you wouldn't think of those as being a likely pairing.

However, if you think about it creatively, think about how the parents of a new baby, of a new child, are so invested in that child that they overlook or not overlook, but they're not giving attention to the other children in their household. And so by pairing those two different brands together, food stirrers, for example, then those parents can develop recipes or make recipes or bake things with their younger children that aren't, you know, not the other children. And the point is that's how you build those memories.

And so think about creative pairings that you can have within your business, within your category, within the market basket. So that's why that matters. One of the things that you should do is go back and watch this webinar as well.

How do you future-proof your stores at uncertain times? Now, the idea behind this particular webinar was how do you become a value-added resource to your retail partner? On the other side of the equation, how should a retailer leverage you to help grow sales?

And the reason this matters is because a lot of times, I used to be a retailer too, brands come to a retailer and say, here's what I need from you, here's what I need you to do for me, the brand. Don't do that. Don't be one of those brands that has their hand up all the time saying, you need to pay attention to me.

Instead, what can you do for the retailer? How can you help the retailer achieve their objectives? By doing that, savvy retailers will reward you with incremental opportunities.

So you definitely want to check out this webinar. Again, it was free. Remember, the shopper journey has changed, and that's why this matters.

That's why that webinar was so important, because you need to be thinking about what does the shopper journey look like today? Shoppers have literally unlimited choices as to where they spend their hard-earned money. How do you help that retailer remain relevant?

And when I say relevant, how do you keep those customers coming back into the store where they can buy your products? How do you help your retail partners remain relevant against other competitive threats in the market and online? This is what retailers really want.

They don't need the same tired information they get from every other brand. They need your help in helping them stand out in the market. And this all begins with the customer.

Remember the Turnkey Sales Story Strategies course? If I tell you a story and you tell someone else and they tell someone else and so on, by the time the story comes back around to me, it's unrecognizable. Your message, your story, your strategies need to be consistent across your entire sales funnel, told with the same passion and enthusiasm as by the founder originally.

That is how you leverage these strategies. And this is something, by the way, even the big brands don't do. More importantly, this is the foundation every brand should be built on.

And when you're putting together your promotional strategies, how do you leverage those consistently with your internal teams and your external sales teams, including your broker? That's where a lot of brands fall down. So doing this and doing this well is going to help you compete effectively.

So what is a promotional agreement? This is where this begins. A promotional agreement is a contract.

A promotional agreement should say, this is what I'm going to do in terms of, I'm going to have a promotion in this state. This is when you can bring in the product, etc. You need to be very specific.

You need to be very clear in terms of what are the objectives, what are the goals of the promotion. You want to make sure that the retailer understands exactly when the off-invoice is available and when they should bring the product in, and tell them specifically exactly how much incremental product they need to have on hand to avoid out-of-stocks. Remember, your product has your brand name on it.

So help the retailer make sure that they look good. Make sure that your product is well represented throughout every promotion that you have. So leverage the promotional agreement to make sure that everything is in place, on time, ready to go for the promotion, and make sure that this is customized for every single retailer.

Promotional schedule. As I mentioned earlier, you need to make sure that you have a very clear promotional schedule. I would lay this out as many months in advance as you possibly can.

When I started working for big CPG companies, like smaller companies in many cases, we would think about our promotional strategy a quarter out. Now the bigger companies are thinking about it a year, two years out, and you should too. And again, the reason this matters is you can start thinking strategically, how do I want to develop my promotional plans to maximize each and every opportunity?

So here's an example of something that every brand should be doing. On the top row, I've identified what the retailer's promotional schedule is. And then below that, you can see the different brands in my portfolio.

FAnd I've created promotional strategies that augment or support or help amplify what the retailer is doing. And by doing that, I'm piggybacking on what they're doing automatically. The retailers love that because obviously it helps them grow sales, etc.

But more importantly, it helps me make sure that I'm getting the most out of my promotions. And the more I can more effectively, I can manage my promotions, then the more effectively I can help support the retailer. So we're talking about goal setting.

This is the example that I want you to be thinking about. What are your goals? What are your objectives?

How do you overlay your goals on top of what the retailer is doing? And by putting those two different pieces together by aligning your objectives, this is how you can get more out of your trade marketing ROI. This is another course, another one of the webinars that I had that I talked about this more in depth.

How do you plan and forecast for sales in uncertain times? Planning and forecasting is one of the most difficult things for every brand, especially smaller brands. And in this free webinar, I talked about a lot of the different strategies.

So we're talking about promotions. When you're going to have your promotion, how you're going to have it, how much product you need to have in stock, etc. This is where this comes in.

And the reason this matters is because you want to make sure that you don't have out of stocks. I know I say that a lot. Out of stocks are death to a brand.

They can derail and even bankrupt you. You do not want to go down that path. And I share some stories on the podcast, etc.

or real life stories where a brand might have out of stocks. Now, they've worked hard to get their product in distribution within a retailer, but they haven't worked hard to keep that product on the shelf. You never get a second chance to disappoint a customer.

Remember that. And again, you want to maximize yourselves in profits. Make your assortment and your promotional strategy a top priority.

25% of your gross sales are tied to this. You've got to own this. Don't farm it out.

And you want to put your brand to work on your behalf. And what I mean by that is if you're leveraging these strategies and you're building that brand recognition, then your brand's going to start actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you and help you succeed. Today's competitive environment demands advanced strategies overlooked.

As I mentioned before, a lot of people pay lip service to this. This is what we did yesterday. This is what we did last year.

This is what we're going to do again. By the way, big brands do this too. And I remember when I was competing against other big brands, P&G, Frito, et cetera, this is a strategy that they use.

Same promotion every year. Same exact formula in terms of recipe, what they're going to promote, how deep their discounts are, et cetera. If you know what your competitor is doing, then you can take advantage of that and put together promotions that augment what they're doing.

So you're not trying to promote at the same time. And I share some examples of some of the strategies that I've used, again, on the podcast webinar and on the YouTube channel. So you want to check those out.

Now, true category management versus traditional category management. Category management is a term that a lot of brands kind of use neblously. I coined the term true category management because I want to get back to the basics.

In other words, instead of just handing a retailer a canned report and say, look, I printed this out on my own, are you impressed? I want you to learn the strategies necessary to be able to tell the story that retailers need to hear about what's actually driving sales within your brand, within the data that you're looking at. And that's the focus of everything I talked about.

So don't commoditize the products and your shoppers. And a lot of the, actually all the solution providers, et cetera, when I say commoditize, this is what they do. In other words, we're all female.

I mean, we're all, you know, natural customers are all the same or mainstream customers are all the same. So when I was in this, started in this industry, it was female, had a household, 2.3 kids, et cetera. You want to go beyond that.

You want to know how your customer uses their product. When they buy your product, how do they take them, share it with their friends, with their family, et cetera. The more you know about your customer, the better and more tailored your trade promotional strategy is going to be.

So you've seen these reports, your typical ranking reports. And by the way, for full disclosure, I used to build these for retailers. The canned reports that you sometimes use are required to use at retailers.

I built those for years for a lot of the national retailers. Now, that's a great starting place, and they do that because it's efficient for them. It's easier for them to use something that's consistent.

However, this is the starting place. This is not the ending place. If you've seen the distribution tracker by Spent, I'm the one who created that.

I did that to try to convince them to start selling retail and store level data, which they didn't want to do. But the point behind that, the reason that matters, is giving you line of sight to what is going on on its shelf gives you that edge that you can leverage when you're putting together your promotional strategies. So I talk a lot about canned reports throughout the podcast, etc.

And remember, they're a good starting place. They're great for beginning that conversation, but they are not enough. You want to go beyond that.

So when I talk about a better way, I talk about strategies specifically. How do you understand what the data is telling you? And one of the ways you do that is you become an expert in understanding the data.

And I know there's a lot more to it than that. But as you listen to the podcast, as you take the courses, as you attend these webinars, hopefully I'm teaching you skills and strategies that others aren't looking at. And these are the strategies, these are the skills that you need to be successful.

So when I talk about, for example, here in contribution, in every podcast episode on the page, there's a link to the feature article I wrote for the 2016 Category Management Handbook. And I talk about it a lot in the webinars, et cetera. I'm not going to actually show that slide today, but you definitely want to check that out.

But the point is this. Natural products are driving sustainable sales across every category. Now, you've heard that a little bit, but I was able to prove it.

It's even more so when you dig into plant-based, gluten-free, et cetera. In other words, retailers need your products on their shelves a lot more than they need some of the big brands. And in addition to that, conversely, you can buy volume.

And so when you keep hearing people talk about how velocity is something that matters, nothing could be further from the truth. Big brands have the ability to buy velocity because they have deeper products. Deeper pockets.

So because of that, they're able to artificially prop up their sales. You instead want to focus on that unique consumer that buys your product that will pay a premium for the quality that you deliver. So you need to understand why what happened happened.

And this is what my boss taught me when I was working at Kimberly-Clark. In other words, why did something happen? What caused the chain of the cause and effect?

And in this example, here I want you to think about what are the things that caused the sales increase? Was it a dip in price? Was it a promotion?

Was it a TPR? Was it a feature? Was it a display

We'll get more into that later. But when you're talking about promotional causals, you need to understand which promotional causal, meaning what did you do and how did it impact sales? What promotional causals impacted your sales across every category, across every channel, across every promotion, et cetera?

And then more importantly, you want to think about how that impacted the market. So in other words, what did you do in the account? How did that impact the category?

And then how did that impact your sales in the market? And these are some of the things you need to be thinking about. So as you're putting together your trade marketing strategies, you want to think about not only how do you raise the bar in your brand, but the category and the retailer and in the market.

And of course, I put this example in here for seasonality. And this all gets back to you need to know your numbers. You need to understand how your promotional strategies, how your promotional, what you're doing impacts your promotions.

And by understanding this, you now have the tools necessary that you can plan and adjust your goals effectively to reach your target objective. And you want to roll your trade marketing up into a single unified brand strategy. I've touched on this quite a bit.

You want to make sure that it's unified across your entire sales funnel. Retail execution is the cornerstone of any retail strategy. And this, unfortunately, is where a lot of brands fail.

In other words, they've got a promotion. It's ready to go. But for some reason, somebody, somewhere, something didn't happen the way it was supposed to.

And that costs you money. And it's a bad reflection on your brand. These are strategies that I want you to start...

Things are things that I want you to start thinking about. So when we talk about retail execution, think about all those possible pitfalls, all those possible issues. Any possible snag and put it into a scorecard.

Scorecard is a great project management tool. And as you can see on this example, when you're talking about a scorecard, think about the things that you need to do as a brand. What things do you need to have in place?

When does the deck need to be completed by category management or whoever does it? When does the retailer need to be notified about the promotion? When do you need to make sure you have the right amount of product in the store?

When do you need in the back room? When do you need to make sure the signs go up? Think about all the things that go into a promotion, to a successful promotion, and put these into a retail scorecard.

And this is how it helps you keep our track. Remember back at the plane example? This is how the pilot makes sure that they're going from point A to point B and that they're going to reach their objective.

These small little tweaks help you keep focused. Remember, retailers want insights, fact-based insights, from the perspective of the consumer. Think about, as you're helping the retailer out, what are the things that they need to know that they're not getting from your competition?

Highlight those things in your trade marketing objectives, so that when you work with a retailer, the goal is to get them to say yes to each and everything you put out there. A lot of times, the retailers might say, no, I don't want this, or they might come to you and say, I need you to do five promotions this year. You need to be able to look in the eye and say, you know what, I can't do five, but I'll tell you what, I can do three at a deeper level.

And here are the other things I'm going to do to help make those promotions a success. That's why this matters. That's why we're having these conversations.

And then more importantly, leverage your trade management with your retail partners. I mentioned a couple of times, I'm working on the course, Trade Marketing Essentials. You can learn more about that on my website.

The reason that this matters, the reason I put this in here, is because if you can help leverage your trade marketing strategy with retailers, again, that's going to not only give you more runway, it's going to help you grow and scale your brand. And in addition to that, the success stories that you get from one retailer, you can leverage with other retailers. The success stories that you get from one retailer, you can leverage with a retailer when you're trying to get incremental distribution.

Imagine walking into a retailer and being able to say, here's my new product, here's where it needs to go on the shelf, here's how I'm going to promote it, et cetera, and having the retailer say yes to H and everything that you're suggesting. That's the goal. That's what we're after.

So on this free webinar, you want to go back and check it out, top five strategies to dramatically reduce deductions and save money. One of the biggest wastes in trade spending are deductions. Some of them are invalid.

And if you have these strategies in place, your goal-setting strategies, the scorecard and whatnot, now you can go back and you can defend those promotions. And you can go back to the distributor, to whomever, the retailer, and say, here's what we agreed upon, here's what actually took place. And you can fight those claims or fight those claims, sometimes maybe isn't the best term, but you can help identify what's valid and what's not valid.

And I share an example in this webinar, I believe, where I talked about how I was able to turn the tables on a retailer and help the retailer understand that their deductions were costing me so much money as a brand that it made it difficult to compete within their stores. And so what I was able to do was I was able to get them to lower their menu fees for us. And that allowed us to do more to help them grow sales in their category.

And these are advanced strategies that I hope to be able to teach you someday. So why does this matter? It matters because increased distribution and preferential merchandising.

Again, if you become a value added resource to your retailer, then they're going to bend over backwards, savvy retailers are going to bend over backwards to help you help them grow sales in their category. It means efficient trade spending. So we're going to give you some of those dollars back that you can invest in other key areas of your business.

You're going to maximize promotions. So you know exactly what you're going to do and what you can expect from a promotion. If you know that you reduce your price by 10%, you have an in-cap, et cetera, and you're going to expect a 50% lift, 50% increase in sales, you know exactly how much product to have in the back room of the store so that you can help the retailer be successful so you don't have out of stocks.

And by the way, there's a lot more to that. So reach out to me if you've got additional questions. Check out the other content.

This converts you from being another package on a retailer shelf to being a category leader, and this can help you get higher sales and profits. And the best part about this is this is how you convert occasional customers into loyal shoppers. So with that, do you have any questions for me?

If you could type them in the chat, that would be great. Okay, I've got a couple here. So Rick wants to know, where do we begin with our goal setting?

Great question, Rick. I appreciate your asking. So in terms of beginning with your goal setting, think about what your brand represents.

What do you want for your brand? Where do you want, what's your, think about the illustration back with the plane flying from Hawaii to LA. Where do you want your brand to be in 5 years, in 10 years, 1 year, etc.

And what do you have to do to get there? If you want your brand to double in sales in 10 years or to get into 50% more doors, etc. What do you have to do to achieve that?

And then break that in into bite size chunks. And then to put that into your goal setting strategy. And then remember, bake that into your go to market strategy as well.

I hope that helps. Reach out to me if you've got other.

So Steve asked, what are the best practices? Okay, the best practices, honestly, is whatever works for you. Put everything in writing.

That's first. So put everything in writing so you can measure it. And the reason you want to be able to measure it is what gets measured gets done.

Think about the scorecard example. If I've got a scorecard and identified everything I needed to have in place to be able to support the promotion, now I can go back to that scorecard and I can see, did we do this properly? Did this person execute the way they needed to and the date that they needed to?

What can we do to make it better? And so best practices include going back and reevaluating everything to make sure that you're hitting the mark, making sure that you're covering all your bases. I hope that helps.

And by the way, I cover this more in the scorecarding module in the course and the trademark essentials course and the broker management course as well. So how do big brands set goals and what's different? Now, this is a really good question.

Ironically, big brands tend to silo things. In other words, they don't think about how strategies affect everything across the entire brand because they're so big. Think about, you know, my boss used to always give me the example, think of what it takes to change the direction on an oil tanker in the ocean.

It takes a lot of work. Think of us as being a speedboat. And so what I'm getting at here is when you think about your goal setting, you want to think about how do your goals align with every single department, everyone in the company, and you want to be able to be nimble and quick and be able to be proactive, but being able to react to unique opportunities.

So the larger brands, to answer your question, sometimes they form committees, et cetera, to be able to decide how we're going to do something. There's a lot of extra steps in there, and honestly, those steps make it inefficient for them to be able to react to new and unique opportunities. And I've seen this a lot as I've worked with big brands.

As a small brand, again, if you're proactive and you have that additional product, you've got the ability to the additional bandwidth to take on a promotion at the last minute, this is how you stand out with that retail. This has become more than just another package or a show. So by being able to have a planning strategy, having a planning program, a goal setting program that goes across all different categories, all different functions within your business, that's going to help you compete against the big brands, because remember, that's their Achilles heel.

I hope that helped. Thanks, Steve. And so Sue asked, will there be a recording of this webinar?

And yes, there will be a recording. And so what I'm doing is, initially, I know I said that I wasn't going to make all these webinars, recordings available. These webinars, a lot of them, are snippets of the Trademarking Essentials course that I'm in the process of building.

And like I said, that course is going to be super nuts, everything you need to know about trademarking. That particular course, I'm building it as we're going through this, and I'm building it with the help of a few brands. I'm getting ready to launch a beta program.

And in the beta program, you're getting full access to the course, et cetera. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but these webinars are part of that, snippets of that. And so I originally wasn't going to make them available, and I had a lot of people reach out to me, and I decided, you know what, there is great content here, and so yes, please leverage these resources to help you grow and thrive.

Please share these resources. Help me rise the bar in our industry. Help me make a bigger impact.

Remember, we all rise together. Another question about the ECRM webinar that's coming up. Yes, you definitely want to attend it.

So what they're asking is, are you going to talk about creative strategies to help brands get in front of retailers? And that was asked by Tom. Tom, thank you for the question.

Yes. So let me frame it this way. When I started in retail many, many years ago, I actually worked for a brand.

We had trade shows. And trade shows were the way that we sold our product, the way we got in front of retailers. And that's how we did things.

Well, there are a lot of inefficiencies to trade shows. They're expensive. They take up a lot of time.

And because of the way they're structured, you don't necessarily get that one-on-one face time with the retailer. So they're great for networking. They're great for building community.

They're great for seeing what trends are out there. But they're not always great for helping you get that one-on-one time, that selling opportunity. So a trade show, in its pure essence, is designed to help you sell your product.

You get it on a store shelf. But a lot of that's lost. So what ECRM does, which is really cool, is they have, think of it as speed dating, one-on-one, face-to-face short meetings with retailers, dedicated meetings, just you and the retailer, where you have an opportunity to meet with the retailer.

So instead of going to a trade show and hoping that you can trip the right retailer, I'm laughing, adjusting a little bit, but you kind of have to pretty much do that, instead of that, or hoping the right retailer comes to your booth, instead of that, and instead of spending a lot of money or jet fuel to fly around the country to go to trade shows, etc. They have these one-on-one sessions, and these are incredibly impactful, incredibly useful. Anyhow, I'm trying to think of the word I want to use, but those are very, very helpful.

So you definitely want to check those out. Now, what's neat about what they're launching here, this is something brand new, and they're going to share more of it on this free webinar, is now they've got a strategy to be able to do this virtually. And so you want to check it out.

You want to learn how you can leverage their platform to get in front of more retailers. Now, RangeMe is owned by eCRM, and RangeMe has a digital version of this, and they help make your products discoverable. You want to check out podcast episode 175.

There's a video with it too, the video interview with RangeMe, with Brandon, where we talk about RangeMe and their platform and how it works, etc. By the way, there's also a podcast episode with eCRM. So you want to go back, check it out.

I think it's 8 or 16 or something like that. But anyhow, so the RangeMe platform, imagine having, he makes the analogy that it's kind of like LinkedIn. So if I go to LinkedIn, I'm looking for an employee, or looking to learn more about a company I might work with, etc.

I have the opportunity to go in and learn a little bit about the people they hire. What are those people like? What's unique about those people?

I can get a little bit of a feel for the company culture. Well, in the RangeMe platform, I can see what your product is, learn a little bit about the customer that buys it, get the key information that I need to have as a retailer to be able to make a decision about having your product on the shelf. Now, one of the things I talk about on that podcast episode, we're going to be talking about on the webinar, are what are some of the creative strategies that you can leverage to help a retailer become discoverable to a retailer?

How can you create enough buzz around your product, et cetera, so that you can leverage what I would call the pull strategy? So the push strategy is where the strategy every brand uses today, where you whip out your checkbook and this is how you get in front of a retailer. It's your most important tool in your toolbox.

It's extremely efficient. It's extremely expensive. It's very inefficient.

And that's what every brand relies on. Back to the velocity story, back to the conversations that we had about velocity. And so what I want you to do is I want you to adopt what I call the poll strategy.

The poll strategy is where you build awareness about your brand within your community and then leverage that community to drive sales and retail. So imagine having a retailer find out about your brand through online, etc. And then they're curious and then they go to RangeMe to learn more about your brand.

And that's how you start building that relationship. So you definitely want to check it out. I see we're coming to the top of the hour.

Okay, I have attended Race ECRM, but I haven't had much real success there. The shows are over 100 brands training and shows.

There are numerous attempts. How do you break through these retails? Okay, you know what?

That's a great question. We're going to get more into that. You know what?

I'm going to save that question. So do me a favor, David, do me a favor. Make sure you attend that webinar.

I used to be the keynote speaker at a lot of their events. So one of the things I would certainly recommend, David, is again going back to the pull strategy. How do you get in front of the retailer before you have that meeting?

In other words, how do you build awareness around your brand? And the way you do that might be, and I talk about creative strategies around this, having your customer base, your loyal customers, go into that retailer and ask for your product. Maybe somehow getting on that retailer, on that, if you use LinkedIn to identify who your buyer is, and you connect with them on LinkedIn before you go into the meeting, and then you start developing that one-on-one relationship conversation, that would help you as well.

But anyhow, I'm just throwing out a couple of ideas, and that might help you navigate through that. But great question, I appreciate you sharing that. I'll make certain to include that specific question when I talk to the folks at RangeMe and ECRM.

In fact, I actually want to copy that right now.

Okay, so, oh, free webinar, thank you. Thanks, Janice. So that webinar is going to be, yes, May 8th, at the same time, same bad time, same bad channel, just kidding.

Any other questions? Oh, by yes, they're always on Friday mornings. So thank you for sharing.

Yeah, I'm trying to be very consistent. And by the way, like I said, if you've got questions I haven't answered, do me a favor, reach out to me, let me know what your questions are, and I'll do my best to incorporate them in this webinar series. And as I'm partnering with other brands and other people in the industry, you know, this is about units for you, and I'll do my best to make sure that we're addressing those.

So we're at the top of the hour. Any other questions? Make sure I copy that.

Okay, I don't see any other questions. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

And I look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks. This week's free downloadable guide is My Trade Marketing Essentials to Grow and Scale Your Brand.