Getting your product into supermarkets is not about luck and it’s not about hard work… its about understanding who you are selling to. (Most FMCG brands get this wrong).
The brand I started has sold over £50m through UK supermarkets.
With no corporate FMCG training I built Pooch & Mutt from scratch. Within a year of launching I got products listed in Pets at Home, the UK’s largest pet chain. I went on to get listings in Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons.
Were all these great successes? No
Were all these accounts more successful when I brought in a team that knew what they were doing? Yes… but you can’t afford the team until you get the sales, and you need the listings for that.
A few days ago I was helping someone with a pitch to a supermarket buyer. They were asking me what they should say about their product, which USP to focus on, how they can take on the incumbent in the category.
I told them that they were looking at it the wrong way around. You need to think about the buyer, more than your product. Here are the 7 tips I gave them:
- Your job is not to sell your product. Your job is to make the buyer’s life easier. They don’t really care about your product. They have a list of goals given to them by their boss (most likely around rates of sale, income per shelf facing, margin etc… but it could be something else). You need to explain how your product helps them achieve what they need to achieve.
- Your buyer will probably have 4 or 5 main goals. Your product will never be able to help them achieve all 5. Pick the 2 that you can help them achieve better than your competition and focus on them.
- Shelf space is finite. You have to know who you are going to replace and why. The person I was speaking to said that they wanted to replace the biggest brand in the category, because that brand had sold to a major multi national, and the retailer now didn’t have an independent British brand. I pointed out that from the buyer’s perspective, they now had access to that multi national’s promo budget through that brand, and it’s very very unlikely that they will give that up for a punt on a less known brand with lower budgets.
- There are 2 types only buyer; ones that love brand/products and ones that love numbers. Ideally find out which kind you are pitching to. If you can have 2 people pitching, one who does the romance and one who does the numbers. Make sure you are fluid enough in your pitch to adapt who speaks and what they speak about as you go. If you are the numbers person, be very good at your numbers.
- Buyers are human too. If you get in, you are going to be working closely with them, hopefully for a very long time. Act like someone who will be nice to work with, have fun, make their job more fun, make it so they look forward to catching up with you. Let them have some input on NPD, colours, plans etc. If they feel more involved in the brand then they will back you internally… especially when things don’t work out perfectly.
- Concede according to plan. In every negotiation people on each side need to feel like they’ve won (someone could teach this to Donald Trump!). The best way to approach this is to go in to the meeting knowing what you are willing to give away, and ideally making it feel like a really big sacrifice for you and a win for the buyer. The best example is when you give Supermarket A exclusivity on a product for 6 months. They feel like they’ve got a win, even though you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting another supermarket listing in that time.
- Know your stuff. When we got our first listing in Waitrose they were about asking things like predicted ROS and promo planning. I had to call a friend to find out what these meant. Then I had to get help from great people like Phil Banfield and James Averdick to teach us how to work on these. In a perfect world you should know all this ahead of time.
