151 Full Circle Sustainability - Sales Success Customer First Strategies, Mike Forbes With Alter Eco
Nov 6, 2019
Knowing your numbers & having a solid strategy to manage your trade marketing will level the playing field & give you a sustainable competitive advantage. It begins with customer first strategies that align your brands values with shoppers through story.
This episode's FREE downloadable guide
Trade marketing includes everything required to promote your brand. It's your growth engine and the largest item on your P&L. Most trade spending is wasted. Every brand seeks to maximize their promotional ROI. There is a better way to grow sales & profits.
CLICK HERE TO GAIN INSTANT ACCESS TO MY TRADE MARKETING ESSENTIALS COURSE
Welcome, there's a hard way and an easy way to do just about anything. There's a right way and there's a wrong way to run your business. Today's story is about a brand that leverages the strategies that they learned in big CPG to help them reduce their spending and help them compete at the highest levels. Knowledge truly is power, especially in this industry where everything is negotiable. This is where knowing how to go beyond a canned top line report and being able to help understand what the insights are telling you, let alone finding the insights, especially in the natural channel where they're so difficult to come by.
This is why this topic is so critically important and this is something that every brand needs to be proficient at. This can literally determine how long your brand will be around, a week, a month, a decade, or longer. My point is this, the more you know about the nuts and bolts of your business, what kind of promotions actually drive sales, and what kind of promotions are just a waste of time and money? Knowing this and knowing how to work with a retailer to help drive sustainable sales for that retailer by leveraging the strength of your brand, that's what every retailer wants. They want to know that if they put your product on their shelves, they want to know that you're going to help them increase shopper traffic, give them a reasonable profit in the category, and help them compete more effectively in their market. As a result, some retailers, savvy retailers might even give you insights into things that other brands would have to pay a lot of money for.
For example, what's in their customer's shopping basket at the end of the trip? You're going to hear a strategy today about how a brand leverages their relationship with retailers and how they leverage their understanding of their promotional spending and their merchandising and all the key things that you need to be paying attention to work with retailers. As a result, and because of their understanding of their business and their category, retailers look to them for expertise that other brands aren't providing to them. The point is this, the more you can help your retail partners the more they're going to want to bend over backward to help support your brand, to give you incremental opportunities that they charge other brands. That's what today's story is about.
Why does this matter? If you think about your trade spending, your trade spending is everything that it's required to get your product in the hands of a shopper. Generically speaking, 25% of most companies gross sales is directed to their trade spending, and yet 70% to 90% of your trade spending's wasted. This is why this is so critically important. You need to be able to leverage the strategies that we talk about on today's podcast to help grow your brand, especially in natural where the resources, the insights aren't as available as they are in mainstream. More about that and these strategies in a minute.
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