One of the biggest frustrations among shopper marketers, trade marketers and brand teams is that retailers often say ‘no’ to our brilliant plans. I’m sure many of you have been there. Even more frustrating is when you’ve worked hard to build a powerful shopper-based retail sales proposition which explains your initiative and why it is hugely valuable to the retailer. And they still say ‘no’. What’s up with that? In this article I’m going to explain the big reason why retailers say ‘no’ to high value proposals, and what you need to do about it.
A powerful retail sales propositions is key but…
As detailed previously, a powerful retail sales proposition is essential if you are going to get retail buy-in to your initiative. Retailers are businesses after all. And retail buyers have KPIs, just like you. So if you’re initiative doesn’t help the retailer hit its business goals, then why on earth should they be interested? More personally, if your plan doesn’t help the buyer achieve their goals, why would they make the effort either? (If you want to understand what you need to know about your retail customers, and take our free test to see if you know them well enough – check out this link now
Unfortunately, that isn’t enough. We can build a clearly structured proposition. We can ‘shopperize’ the presentation appropriately. But still retailers often say no. Why is that?
Why retailers say no to high value retail sales propositions
There can be many reasons, of course. Maybe the retailer has certain strategies that they are focusing on, and your initiative doesn’t align with their priorities. Maybe there is an edict from corporate marketing that the buyer must follow. Maybe there are specific instructions from their boss. Maybe there are other issues in your relationship. Maybe they have made commitments to a competitor. All these (and more) are possible. But in my experience, there is one major reason why retailers don’t want to support our brilliant, shopper-centric, high value initiatives.
The biggest reason why retailers say no to high value retail sales propositions
It’s too difficult.
And by that, I’m not inferring that retailers are lazy and just want an easy life! And I’m not suggesting that retailers only do things which are easy. But there is a value equation at work. A retailer isn’t just asking ‘is this valuable?’. They are thinking ‘is this worth the effort?’
We all make decisions in this way to some extent. In an ideal world, we’d always do the most valuable thing, but we have time constraints, and so, as human beings, we tend to favor easy things over valuable things.
You can think of this like a matrix (see above). We’d all logically prioritize actions in the top-right corner of this quadrant right? High value, and easy. But most things in life don’t lie there. They tend to lie in the top-left corner (high value but difficult) or in the bottom right corner (low value and easy). In an ideal world we’d prioritize valuable over easy (top left quadrant). But the data I have doesn’t lie. People tend to prefer easy things. And that is true for retail buyers, arguably even more than anyone else. So the real prioritization matrix actually looks more like the version below:
Everyone does this to some extent. And I see it a LOT in retail conversations. Perhaps this is because of the retail mindset. Retail businesses are complex. Hundreds if not thousands of stores. Tens of thousands of products. Loads of people. It’s complicated. Little wonder that retailers would want to try and keep things simple.
So retailers tend to prioritize simple things, sometimes at the expense of something of high value. So if that is happening, what can supplier teams do about it?
Turning No to Yes for a high value retail sales proposition
Step One – Look at things from the retail point of view
The first, over-arching approach is to make sure you look at your plan from a retailer’s point of view. If we are thinking about how valuable something is to us, or whether shopper’s might like it, that isn’t going to help at this stage. Only by looking through the eyes of the retail buyer can we really overcome this barrier.
Step two: Break your proposition into its component parts
If you’ve developed a shopper-based commercial proposition, then you will be confident that the entire plan delivers value to the retailer. But which elements of the plan are most valuable to the retailer? They won’t all deliver equal value. And which are most problematic? By breaking down the plan into its individual components, and using a matrix like the one shown above, we can rapidly identify which parts of the plan will be viewed positively by the retailer, and which less so. So we might take a new product launch activity and split it into a new listing (space on a shelf), a poster in the store window, sampling in the main aisle, etc. and so on.
Step Three – Identify the difficult elements of your plan
This analysis enables us to identify which elements of the plan might prove sticky. They will likely be towards the left of the matrix. We’ll also see that many parts of the plan are quite simple, and valuable, and so it shouldn’t be a problem to get retail support for those elements. So what do we do with the ‘problems’? There are two things we can do!
Step Four – Emphasize the value of the difficult elements
First things first, is there anything we can do to make sure it is clear to our retail customer that this element of the plan is really valuable. What can we do to ‘talk up’ this element of the plan, such that the retailer recognizes that the entire plan (and the total value of the proposition) to some extent depends on this element of activity.
Step Five – Identify ways of making the difficult elements easier
Secondly, consider if there are ways of making it easier for the retailer to implement those problematic elements of the activity. Can we adapt it to make it fit with their plans or strategies, perhaps? One client we worked with was hoping to execute a prize draw promotion. They smartly made the prizes in the draw all related to sustainability (the grand prize was an electric car) which tied in with the retailer’s own strategies. Suddenly the retailer was really supportive of a plan that they had originally rejected.
Case Study – the other retail buyer
Another client had their new launch plan rejected by a key retailer. The client was launching a beverage targeted at consumers buying breakfast to go in the store (it was a convenience store). The research we had conducted showed that breakfast shoppers didn’t visit the beverage aisle – so locating the product there wasn’t going to help with trial. What was needed, was to get the new beverage located, permanently, on the shelf with breakfast goods.
The problem? The beverage buyer has no leverage over that shelf. And the breakfast goods buyer would see no value in the product (just a loss of shelf space). So the buyer said no. Yet this was critical to driving trial of the new product (and driving consumption of the category and sales growth for the retailer. A classic high value/high difficulty problem!
Case Study – making difficult things easier for your retail customer
So what did we do?
Firstly, we made sure that the beverage buyer understood that the placement with breakfast goods was really valuable – it was key to bringing new users to the category. Then we turned our minds to the other buyer: the one who was responsible for breakfast. We developed a promotion plan that focused on breakfast (that was part of the plan anyway). Communication out of the store focused on breakfast goods and beverage as a combination. And an entire selling presentation was created for the breakfast goods buyer, explaining how the plan would drive traffic to the store, and increase their sales too. The result? The new beverage was located exactly where our client wanted it!
Step Six – Consider ways of replacing difficult elements
If there is no way to make the problematic parts of our plan easy for our customers, the last option is to seek to replace it with an alternative, that still delivers the value we are looking for, but is rather easier for the retailer to execute.
Learn how to turn ‘no’ into ‘yes’ for your retail sales propositions
If you and your team have important initiatives that need retail support, get in touch now. Check out our training programs too! We’ve helped hundreds of consumer goods companies around the globe develop better plans, better propositions and more effective sales presentations – I’m sure we can help you too.
One last thought, please don’t take the wrong message from this. Retailers will do difficult things. They just prefer easy things. But if you do have something really valuable to the retailer, but devilishly difficult to implement, it still might happen. Retailers will do difficult things if they are valuable enough. Don’t believe me? Think of the in-store bakery. Moving from having all of your bread sold in little packs, to literally baking the bread in the store is hardly the easy option. But retailers all around the world have done it. Why? Because it is extremely valuable!
Thank you, Mike! There are many young men and women preparing to enter the world of Sales/Marketing in colleges and universities that would find your real-world insights helpful in developing and expanding the principles of Marketing they are getting from the academics who staff the colleges and universities they are attending. The efficiencies/economies of Sales and Marketing going to the consumer and retailer operating as a single unit must continue into the future.