#38: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Retail (Part 2 of 3)

Alison Smith: [0:46]

Welcome to the second episode of our three part miniseries. Lessons Learned from Successful Seven Figure CPG Brands. We’re joined by Alli Ball, creator of Retail Ready, and Adam Pollack of Rodeo CPG to talk about everything operations, retail and digital marketing for your CPG brand. Today’s episode is all about retail led by Alli Ball. She’s going to share her golden rule for trying to get on retail shelves, what you need to remember when approaching buyers, and the common mistakes you should avoid when trying to increase velocity. Let’s get into today’s episode.

Alli Ball: [1:26]

I am Alli. I’m the founder and CEO of Food Biz Wiz. We help emerging CPG brands understand how to get on the retail shelves and how to have high sales once you’re there. We do that all through our signature program, Retail Ready.

So today we’re going to talk about retail. And this is kind of a funny episode for me because I’m welcoming in Karin, Alison and Adam to ask me questions about retail originally on the Food Biz Wiz podcast. So I’m kind of excited and maybe a little bit nervous to see how this plays out.

So, from a high level, I want to talk to you guys about getting on the shelf, verse getting off the shelf and into shopper’s Baskets. In last week’s episode, Adam, you talked about how operations and sales are really, really connected here. And I’m so glad that we kicked things off with that because I think without really dialing in our operations, without really understanding what we’re making and how we’re producing it and how we’re working with our co-packers and partners, we’re just winging it when it comes to sales.

So again, this is a cry for you guys to go back and listen to episode number one of our series if you haven’t done that. So let’s start by getting on the shelf. Are you guys ready to talk about that with me?

Adam Pollack: [2:48]

Yes.

Alli Ball: [2:49]

Okay. So often I see brands say that getting on the shelf is their end goal. So we hear things, if I can only get into Whole Foods or if I can only get into Erewhon, I’m going to be good. And then momentum will build and sales will come. And when I was thinking about prepping for this episode, I really thought about our savvy seven figure Retail Ready brands who know that getting on the shelf is the first step. And it’s not even an easy step at that, especially now. But once you do, you have this whole other set of business challenges that start to come up.

Adam Pollack: [3:28]

Alli, my question to you is then, you’ve probably heard thousands, maybe millions or trillions even, of brand pitches at this point from your time as a grocery buyer. What do you wish that brands knew about how buyers wanted to be contacted and sold to? What do brands screw up all the time when they were reaching out to buyers?

Alli Ball: [3:49]

Yeah, this is a really great question, and I wonder how many brands I had pitched to me. So I’ll say when I was a grocery buyer, I would get about three dozen samples, three dozen brands dropping off their samples every single week at my office or with the cashiers or things like that. And that’s week in and week out. So, I mean just hundreds and hundreds of brands every quarter trying to get their products on our shelves.

So with that, my number one rule, my golden rule is don’t drop by. And I wish that brands knew that at the end of the day, your relationship with your retail partner is based off mutual trust and mutual understanding. I mean, Adam, it’s really similar to what you were talking about in last week’s episode with your co-packers and your 3PL’s and things like that.

So, so often brands see buyers or category managers as gatekeepers to their success. And I hear that brands can get ahold of buyers, and so they just start swinging by retail stores, especially independent retailers and small chains, and they try to meet with the buyer in person. They feel like there’s no other way to get ahold of a buyer than to just swing by.

And here’s what I wish everyone knew. Buyers hate that. I mean, if you think about it, think about being in the middle of your work day, maybe being in the middle of a production shift, or Alison, your heads down in the campaign manager and really in it, and someone just knocks on your door and is like, “Oh, hey, can I just have a little bit of your time? Let me try to sell you something.”

And I used to hide in the walk-in when brands would swing by Bi-Rite and I would literally do everything that I could do to avoid them. So, I always like to remind that. First off, don’t swing by, don’t blind ship your samples without making contact with those buyers or with those category managers before you… Don’t blind ship those samples before you’ve made that initial contact, because they don’t like to be interrupted and they don’t like to be blindsided.

Adam Pollack: [6:02]

Yeah. I have one follow up question there. So, how should a brand go about establishing trust and building a relationship? What are some good things they can do to… And I know that takes time and I think everyone wants a silver bullet. They want that to happen yesterday. But assuming this takes a while, several months to a year, whatever, what are some actionable first things someone can do to get going in that direction?

Alli Ball: [6:24]

Yeah, so we’ll talk about sales pitches in a second, but I think the first thing is really understanding that at the end of the day, you and that retail account or that wholesale account, you both want the same thing. You both want high sales. You want high sales for your product and that store wants high sales in your category. And so once you realize that you both have the same goal, you can approach that relationship with empathy and mutual understanding rather than thinking that that buyer is, like I said, the gatekeeper to your success.

So Adam, we often advise that it is as simple as picking up the phone and making a connection over the phone rather than swinging by or cold emailing or putting your products on RangeMe and hoping that buyer swings by your listed page.

So we always say pick up the phone and be a real person. Easier said than done though. I mean, we find in Retail Ready that people are very hesitant to pick up the phone. And then there’s of course all the complications of who do you know you are calling? How do you get their phone number? What if they’re Regional Manager or working in some corporate office and you can’t get ahold of them on the phone? We have all of these different ways of getting ahold of buyers, but I think, Adam, to your question, it’s really about understanding that they are real people and think about how you as a real person want to be treated as well.

Adam Pollack: [7:56]

Makes sense. Yep.

Alison Smith: [7:59]

Yeah, I love that you’re basically saying, don’t be creepy.

Alli Ball: [8:03]

Yes. Exactly.

Alison Smith: [8;05]

Don’t be a creep. But I mean, cold calling is terrifying. I mean, that is a really scary thing to do to call someone and potentially get rejected or get rejected multiple times. So you’re saying the sales pitch is what people need to focus on to improve that sales pitch. Is that right?

Alli Ball: [8:26]

Yeah, well, if that’s your goal. And we talked a little bit about this in Adam’s episode last week, but we need to realize that getting more retail accounts isn’t going to magically solve all your problems here. There’s no one size fits all where we want to say, get in more doors and your business will grow, right? One of the things we teach inside of Retail Ready is the idea that at the end of the day, your velocity is more important than the amount of doors that you’re in.

We want to make sure that you are selling in the accounts that you’re in and if you’re not selling in the accounts that you’re in, don’t start going and pursuing new accounts. Don’t start fixing a problem, a different problem. So Alison, back to your question about the sales pitch though. You’re right. It is really scary to pick up the phone and try to sell your product to someone. That is scary. But here’s the thing, it is so easy to ignore a sales email and it’s so easy to ignore a product that’s submitted during an online form through a category review. We find that the people who pick up the phone, the brands who pick up the phone, are the ones who have more success creating that human connection with their potential retail partners.

And so this is something we practice a lot in Retail Ready. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do. It’s usually terrifying for our students, but I put on my old buyer role and I pretend I’m the buyer again, and they themselves are trying to pitch their product to me. And I give them every no in the book. And we really role play to try to make it boost their confidence before we set them out to go and do this.

But I think, Alison, one of the most important things is recognizing why buyers bring in products in the first place. And once you know that, you can craft a pitch that’s much more effective. So it’s important to recognize that buyers bring in products to enhance sales or margin, something around financial goals in your particular category. So, if your product doesn’t come in and increase sales or increase margin, it’s officially not worth it for that buyer to spend all the time and the energy and the labor and all of their team’s energy to bring in your product line. Especially right now as we’re seeing so many staff shortages and operational challenges at the store level as well.

So we want to make sure that we are crafting pitches that are based off that understanding that buyers want, buyers need your product to sell and they need to trust that your product’s going to do that. So, if you are crafting a pitch that is based around the idea that your product is delicious or values driven or sustainable or female founded or any of these things, that misses the mark with that wholesale buyer. I mean, sure, it’s great for your marketing messages and like Alison and Karin, we potentially can talk about this on the next episode. That’s great for marketing, but that category buyer doesn’t actually care about the taste and the values and the story behind your product.

Alison Smith: [11:47]

So, question…

Alli Ball: [11:48]

Yeah.

 

Alison Smith: [11:48]

Love it, first of all.

Alli Ball: [11:49]

I know. I’m sighing because it’s… People get really sad when I say this, right? They’re like-

Alison Smith: [11:54]

And it really is the opposite, it should, be when you’re talking to consumers versus buyers. But my question is, if you are a brand new brand and you don’t have that existing data to pitch these sales numbers, how are you doing that? How are you gaining the forecasting information? Where should people be looking? Help us out here.

Alli Ball: [12:17]

Oh, that’s such a great question, and Adam, I’m sure that you guys do this as well, but there are ways that you can get data for your category that you can present to those retail buyers that isn’t historic data for your own brand. So, if you’re just getting going, it’s normal that you wouldn’t have sales history. We always say this, every single brand starts at zero. Chobani started with zero wholesale accounts at some point. And so it’s important to realize that at some point you won’t have that data, so you need to figure out where else you can get it. And if you don’t have it for your own brand, you can use it from your category as a whole. You can pull from things like SPINS or Nielsen data. I mean, oftentimes you have to purchase it, but there are also free places to get data like this.

So you can present it for your category, you can present it for ingredients that you’re using that’s trending. You can present it, let’s say you are a female owned business, you can talk about how female owned cereal companies are on the rise year over year or something like that. We can always craft a story with the data. We just need to be willing to put on our detective hats and be a little bit witty on how we use the data.

Adam Pollack: [13:37]

Yeah, I think that’s so important, is there’s a couple things in there. One, it’s not… No one cares about what you do. They care about what you can do for them or why. So all the things you mention, all the things that most brands mention around being low sugar or keto or delicious, that’s what, that’s not a why. That doesn’t help the buyers. That’s super, super important.

And then, yeah, remember, you tell your own data story. So, I looked at a deck from a new brand who has very limited retail exposure but has phenomenal customer reviews.

Alli Ball: [14:10]

Yes.

Adam Pollack: [14:10]

It had some other really, really interesting unique data points that it’s not, “Here’s our sell through at competitor retailers. It’s, “This is really cool stuff that’s interesting. You probably don’t have this.” And so there’s always a way to tell the story the way you want to tell it. And especially for brands that are launching direct to consumer, I find, and I’m sure in my team you can tell me I’m either right or wrong here, when it comes to social proof, the very raw text messages, tweets, screenshots of emails, all that stuff that looks very unadultered is always the stuff that plays really, really well.

So when I see a deck that’s got pretty testimonials in it and I don’t really trust it anymore, but when I see a deck that’s got like a hundred screen grabs of texts from people saying, “This changed my life.” That’s the sort of thing that in lieu of having sell through data, you could show to a buyer and they’d be pretty excited about it, I think.

So I guess switching gears a little bit, my question was going to be around, so you’ve been hammering a buyer for many, many months and they won’t respond to you or you had a great interaction, the more frustrating situation, you had a great interaction with one and it seemed like a sure thing and then they’ve vanished off the face of the earth. What do you do in that instance? What’s the right way to handle that?

Alli Ball: [15:21]

Yeah. Adam, I hear this so often. So often brands say to me like, “Okay, Alli, I’m trying, I’m trying and I’m still not getting any traction.” And I’ll say, “I am one of the most organized people that you will ever meet and it would still take me months and months and months to bring in new product lines.” There’s so many things that buyers need to do behind the scenes that vendors don’t realize. So often, and I’m sure you see this too, Adam, that brands will reach out once, they’ll reach out twice maybe, and then they just let that relationship fizzle out because they don’t want to be annoying to that buyer.

So my advice here is to be the squeaky wheel and understand that it does take months, sometimes even a year, over a year to get your product on the retail shelf. And if you are that squeaky wheel, if you are popping into that buyer’s inbox, if you are shooting them a DM, if you are connecting with them at a show, you will have much more success when it comes time to review your category again. And you are top of mind for them.

So Adam, I advise, depending on the relationship, and there is some nuance here, but email every two weeks, every three weeks, give them a new press hit, give them a new category information, give them a time sensitive seasonal introductory offer. Give them any reason to pay attention to your brand again. So really being the squeaky wheel is important here. And realizing that until that buyer gives you a hard no, please stop contacting me, you have my full permission to keep showing up in their inbox. So, that’s number one.

Yes, go ahead.

Karin Samelson: [17:13]

That’s super, super great advice too to deliver something of value. Don’t just be like, “Hey, reminder just coming to the top of your inbox to check in on where we are.” It’s like, no, deliver something of value to them to make them want to bring you on shelf.

Alli Ball: [17:33]

Totally. It goes back to that trust factor, Karin, right? That idea that give them another reason to trust that you’re going to sell through on their shelves. So, let’s talk about selling off shelves. All right, so every product, I promise that this was going to be two parts on the podcast here. So you get on the shelf, okay, wonderful. But then every product has to perform its job on the shelf and it is, I’m going to talk directly to our listeners here. It is your responsibility to make that happen. So, I like to think about shelf space as real estate and you are renting this space from the retailer. You’ve got to be a really great tenant in order for them to keep you around. So you have to be the person who’s responsible for increasing velocity, hitting your sales goals and succeeding in those wholesale accounts. And so it comes with a shock sometimes to the brands that we work with, that it’s not the store’s responsibility to sell your product, it’s not the category manager’s responsibility to sell your product. It’s not anyone’s responsibility except for you as the brand. So, maybe we should talk about some of the things that brands need to do to make that happen.

Karin Samelson: [18:46]

Yeah, let’s do it. So if you’re trying to get off the shelf, you’re doing everything you think is right, but it’s just not happening, where should a brand start with trying to get those sales?

Alli Ball: [19:00]

Yeah, so it is, it’s actually so similar to what Adam was saying, I know I keep referring to this, but in our episode last week, this idea that it starts with a plan. And I know that that seems like I’m oversimplifying it, but so often we see brands that are just winging it here. And I see, I look over, and if you guys are listening, you’re probably not watching this recording, but literally everyone’s nodding their heads like Adam, I’m sure you see it with your Rodeo clients. Karin and Alison, I’m sure you see brands who are just winging it.

So I would invite our listeners, if you feel like you’re just throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks, it is time to pare down and make sure that you have a plan in place. So, we start to think about it when considering what your plan’s going to be, we take into account a few things such as your own skill set and your strengths around marketing, whether you can DIY it yourself internally, or if you need to hire it out. We think about your own capacity as a founder. Are you a sole founder or do you have a team? We think about how much cash you have on hand. Again, Adam touched on that last week. If you’re bootstrapping your brand or if you have investment to back yourself up on shelf.

So first we think about what are your capabilities and what are your capacities as a founder and as a brand? And then we use something that we call the reorder checklist inside of Retail Ready. And we make sure that your plan is documented and replicable for each new account that you bring on. Of course we tweak it for each new account, but we want to make sure that you understand how you are communicating to every person along the supply chain, your co-packers, your 3PLs, your distributors, your brokers and your retail partners, your marketing team, if they’re external or internal, frankly, making sure that you can communicate that plan to every person along the chain so that everyone knows their piece in executing it and that you do it to every single new account. So often the mistake I see here is that you land a new account and then you have no plan for selling through. And so it simply comes back to creating a plan, documenting it, and trialing it with each new account.

Adam Pollack: [21:24]

Yeah, I love that. We talk a lot about creating a business case. So especially in the early days, if you’re in your first few retailers, all that’s learning and you’re trying to figure out like, “Okay, it’s going to take me this long to open the account, it’s going to cost this much amount of money and demos and promotions and stuff to get things to move. I’m going to have to be in once every week to make it happen.” And then after you do 20 of those, you’ve hopefully got to document and you’ve got a very viable plan around, it takes me X amount of dollars and X amount of time to break even on a retailer. So if I think that’s going to happen for this one, great, let’s do it. And if not, nope, not the right retailer for me.

So, I think that’s so important because this stuff can be very copy pasteable, once you’ve done it a handful of times. But most brands kind of think about, “Oh, each retailer is unique.” And to a degree, but not 100% of the time, each time, maybe 10% of the time. So, that plan piece is so important. And where I was going to go next is just, okay, so you’ve got your plan, you’ve got your strategy in place, you’ve got marching orders, and it’s clear what you need to do, you’re on the shelf. What are some tactics that brands can use to execute on that strategy and to actually move product off the shelf?

Alli Ball: [22:37]

Yeah. So it totally depends on the channel and the account. And I hate to say that it depends, but that’s almost always my answer with brands inside of Retail Ready. It depends. There is no one size fits all strategy here. So it depends on the channel and the account. So if online, let’s say you are pursuing online wholesale accounts like the Thrive Markets of the world, you might start doing some paid ad campaigns, which we might talk about next week. You might build out your digital swipe files that you send to each new accounts that have your assets and how digital recipes and digital marketing collateral. You might lean heavily on connecting with your online audience to drive trial in that online retailer. You would likely roll out an introductory offer or some sort of promotional period right when you land that retailer. In normal terms, you would do a sale or a discount at the beginning. And if it’s a brick and mortar store, you might lean into geo-targeted ads driving traffic to that particular physical store.

You might invest in Instacart ads. You would create a plan for staff education, making sure that you turn all of those stockers and people who touch your product into mini sales people for your brand. If it’s a smaller store, you might create shelf talkers and make sure that they get hung up. You might do in-store promotion, you might run demos. There are many, many different ways that you can drive trial and drive repeat purchases. And I think so often we over complicate it here. We’re like, “I have no idea how I could possibly sell off the shelf.” But if you sit down and just bullet point out what are some of the ways that you can connect with the store and connect with your consumers. I think our listeners would be surprised at how much of it they already know that they can do.

Karin Samelson: [24:40]

Yeah, I think that’s so important to remember that connection is so vital in every stage. Like Adam, you were talking about it with your operations partners. Al, you’re talking about it with your retail partners. We obviously talk about it with your customers. So, I love to hear that advice from you. So where do you see most brands getting stuck when they do try and increase velocity?

Alli Ball: [25:09]

So we alluded to it last week, but the very first one is going too far, too fast, too wide. And so often we see brands, I’ll just give an example here. We have a brand on the East Coast inside of Retail Ready. And sure enough, Erewhon, our favorite retailer, reached out to them and said, “Hey, we’d love to carry your ice cream.” And they’re on the East Coast and they don’t have distribution on the West Coast. They don’t have a broker, they don’t have a 3PL on the west coast, they have nothing there. They are primarily focused on New England. And they said yes to Erewhon. They were like, “Oh yeah, hell yes, that this is a dream account for us. That’s the gold standard.” And they got on shelf or they got that first PO or whatever it was, and they realized that they had no understanding and no way of fulfilling those orders. You can’t just, I mean, you can just ship ice cream cross country with dry ice, but it’s going to be really freaking expensive and you’re going to lose money on every single delivery, every shipment that you make.

So often I see brands who get really excited about opening new accounts without realizing the impact that it’s going to have on their operations and on their sales teams. So I think that’s the biggest thing. We see people try to go too wide, too fast. I’d much rather see a brand really, really penetrate their own region and really drive sales in their own backyard before expanding.

So, that’s the first one. And then I’ll give one more is, we talked about this a little bit, but this idea of just winging it with each new account, whether you’re winging it in your sales pitches or you’re winging it once you’re on the shelf. And when I say that, it’s really thinking about, thinking that you have to recreate the wheel with each new account and not prioritizing creating systems and measuring the results that you’re getting from your systems. Just winging it is not the way to run a business. I actually have a quote around that. I know Adam shared a quote in our last episode, so I brought one to today. Can I share it as well?

Alison Smith: [27:40]

Let’s hear it.

Alli Ball: [27;41]

Okay, cool. It’s my favorite. I’ve said it on the podcast before. So it is by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and he says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” And when I heard that, it just shot me in the heart. I was like, “Oh, he was talking to us here at Food Biz Wiz.” We are lovers of systems and yet we… Lovers of goals too. But yet we still have so much room for growth around the systems that get us to our goals, thinking that most of the founders that we work with, I’m sure all of you guys on this podcast with me can agree. Most of the founders that we work with have really similar goals. It’s to create sustainable, profitable businesses. But if we all have the same goal, that goal isn’t enough. We have to invest in the systems that are going to get us closer to those goals.

Alison Smith: [28:41]

Love it. Love a good system. And Alli, thank you so much for bringing the knowledge on this episode. I love how you’re tying things back to what Adam talked about last week because y’all were talking ops, retail, digital marketing, it all needs to work together to make everything work. So Alli, what’s an action task that you can leave listeners to do this week before they join us on the third and final episode on marketing?

Alli Ball: [29:12]

I’ve got two. So just like we split up this episode, getting on the shelf and then getting off the shelf, I’ll give two actions here. The first one for getting on the shelf is a freebie that we’ve got. It’s called our 100 Buyer Knows Cheat Sheet. And it is 100 different reasons that I used to say no to product lines when I would get sales pitches when I was a buyer. Plus some training on how to shift that no into a yes. So I’ll link that in our show notes. You can just find it at aliball.com/100. So I would say download that and work through it. It’s a really easy work through.

And then the second one is, I want our listeners to start thinking about creating their own reorder checklist. And that really is the outline of the plan, what you’re going to do with every single new wholesale account that you land to make sure that you are putting that system in place to get the reorder each time. How’s that sound?

Alison Smith: [30:10]

Oh, sounds great.

Alli Ball: [30:12]

So before I let you guys go, can you tell our listeners where they can find you? We will put all of this in the show notes as well. Adam, how about you go first?

Adam Pollack: [30:20]

Sure. Yeah, you can find us at rodeocpg.com and then we have some free tools at rodeocpg.io as well if you want to check those out. And then we’re on social media @rodecpg and my email is adam@rodeocpg.com.

Alli Ball: [30:37]

Awesome. All right, Karin and Alison, where can we find you guys?

Karin Samelson: [30:44]

You can find us@umaimarketing.com. Umai is U-M-A-I, and we have a free mini course that walks you through some digital marketing strategies to help grow your brand. And that’s umai marketing.com/minicourse and we’re also all over social. So @umaimarketing, come chat with us, hang with us, and you can email us at hello@umaimarketing.com and we hope to see ya. Somewhere over there.

Alli Ball: [31:18]

We didn’t do this last time, but I’m going to throw it out there to our listeners that if they are listening right now, I want you guys to snap a screenshot of this podcast episode and post it on your socials and tag all three of our businesses. We would love to give you a follow right back, and we would love to share it as well. So you guys, you know, can find me foodbizwiz.com or on socials @itsalliball.

All right, you guys. That’s it for episode two. Next week we’re going to come back and we’re going to give Karin and Alison the stage and we are going to talk about digital marketing, which I know is a big topic for all of you. All right, thanks for joining me you guys. Bye.

Karin Samelson: [31:58]

Thanks for joining us in our three part miniseries, Lessons Learned from Successful Seven Figure CPG brands where we’re covering everything, ops, retail, and digital marketing to help you build your own million dollar brand.

Join us next week as Alli Ball of Retail Ready and Adam Pollack of Rodeo CPG chat with us about digital marketing. As we explain our three pronged marketing strategy that will help you connect with your consumers and drive sales. We’ll meet you back here for next week’s episode.

Umai Social Circle is a CPG agency driven podcast based out of Austin, Texas. We’re excited to share more behind the scene insights, chats with industry leaders, and whatever else we learn along the way. Follow us on Instagram @Umaimarketing or check out our website, umaimarketing.com. Catch you back here soon.