#1 Thing Retail Buyers Want You to Know About Selling to Them
Hey everyone, this is Karen Waksman, founder of Retail MBA! Today I want to talk about the number one thing buyers want you to know about selling to their stores. So, if you have a great product that you think would be perfect for Walmart or Macy’s, Home Depot, corporate grocery stores, Bed Bath and Beyond, or whatever it is for you, this information is about how to sell products to stores and what the number one thing that buyers care about will support you in thinking through the process of using retail chains as a distribution strategy. If you want to get your products in these stores, these are very important pieces of information that you need in order to ensure success.
You are responsible for your product
So, what’s the number one thing that buyers care about or want you to know about when selling into their stores? It is that they are not responsible for your product — you are. So, what does that mean? Well, most people think that if they get a product into a retail chain like Bed Bath and Beyond or whatever, that they are good to go once they get a purchase order, and the buyers will manage everything and everybody will be happy. Well, that’s not really how it works with how to sell products to stores. What actually happens is the buyer will give you a shot and test out some of your products in their stores. At that point, they’ll see if the product sells. If it doesn’t, they’ll move on or if it does sell, they’re going to stay and they’re going to continue to work with you.
More specifically, they don’t want to deal with making sure that your product got there on time, that your packaging was correct, and that it didn’t get squished in delivery. Or if you put your product on a clip strip, which is one of those plastic strips that has a bunch of your products on it, that when it is delivered to stores that the product is placed in the correct way or not.
Buyers can get so busy that they’re not paying attention to your product and so forth. If you go to stores and you see that your product is placed in the wrong section of the store by accident, sometimes it does happen, the buyers are going to expect that you handle it. A lot of times they’re too busy or they don’t even respond or whatever. And it’s like you had that one shot to get that product in stores and so you just want to make sure that things are managed and so forth.
Keep Track of Your Product Sales
These retail chains have a lot of systems in place for you to review the products in real time to see whether or not the product sells or not. For that reason, they’re expecting that you’re looking at the systems, making sure that the product is selling. If it’s not selling, if something looks strange, they want you to be all over it, seeing what’s going on there. Ultimately if that product is not selling, you need to get into those stores to see what’s going on.
Now it might freak you out and some of you might say, “Oh, then I’m not going after retail chains.” I’m telling you this not to freak you out, but to help you think about the process of the buyer’s giving you a shot, and how this could be millions of dollars for you and your business. Keep this in the back of your mind, learn what you need to know in advance about how to sell products to stores so that when these things come up you’re not going to be freaked out. That’s just the point in sharing this stuff with you. It’s really just to support you and helping you and letting you know that all of this stuff is easy to learn and totally manageable. And it is a lot easier than you think, and you can avoid a lot of these headaches, a lot of these issues in advance before you even deal with retail chains.
Get Your Product in Retail Stores with My Help
If you want to learn exactly how to reach out to retail chains, what to say to them to get them to buy, how to ensure that this is taken care of, that your product will be managed correctly so the product sells and everything converts, then you definitely want to learn more! We do amazing events quarterly called Retail MBA Live. RetailMBALive.com is the website. And essentially it’s a one-day event, we power through exactly how to get your products in retail stores. We help you create your pitch, finesse the buyers to make sure that they’re interested in your product and ultimately buy from you.
We explain to you exactly what’s going to happen to you in stores, how to manage issues, expectations, how to make sure that you do all this stuff in a very affordable and cost-effective way. You can do this the hard way and get into the retail chains and go through all these nightmares or you can learn it in advance. Have somebody walk you through it and ultimately just zip through and how to sell products to stores and hopefully make as much money as physically possible. That’s why I do these things. By the way, when I host these live events I usually partner up with retail chains so that you can have product reviews and so forth. So, we’re really trying to help you in every way possible to make money with retail chains.
I hope this provided value for you. Please be on the lookout for the additional videos that we create on selling to retail chains. Thanks so much.
About the Author: Karen Waksman, Founder and CEO of Retail MBA, is an Entrepreneur Magazine, MSNBC and New York Times Company go to retail expert on the subject of selling to retailers! Karen has sold millions of units of products to the world’s largest retailers and has taught 1000’s of product companies across the country on the subject of selling to retailers at places such as CES (Consumer Electronics Show), US Patent Office, Stanford University, International Home and Housewares Show and so many other places. Her goal is to empower and inspire companies to transform their businesses by providing them all of the necessary information they need in order to become chain store vendors.
