Sell to Retailers – Sales Professionals Always Do This
In this short video, I discuss how retail sales professionals (Manufacturer’s Reps) always do this one thing when they sell to retailers…
Can you guess what it is?
They focus on their sales distribution plan! They decide what’s the quickest return on investment (ROI) for the product they are representing.
The video explains this further! I hope it helps!
To Your Success,
Karen Waksman
Retail MBA
P.S. If you found this video helpful, please comment below! I would love to hear from you :-). And if you’d like to sell to retailers yourself, check out our Retail MBA program!
Transcript for this Video Here:
Sell to Retailers – A really common question that people ask me all the time is, as a retail sales professional, what do you do first, when you’re trying to sell to retailers? Do you have any suggestions there? I just kind of want to understand the industry in general. And I think it’s really important that people get from my perspective as a manufacturer trip, what I think about when I take on a new product. So the main thing that I’m going to do is someone brings me a product, I’m going to look at it and then I’m going to start figuring out what’s the biggest return on investment for me in terms of time? So where’s this product going to fit, right? Is it going to be for the big box stores? Is it going to be for the online retailers?
Is it going to be for catalog business? Is it going to be for as seen on TV? They’re all essentially all going to the same place. They’re all going to the retailers, but I’m trying to figure out where the biggest return on investment is for me as a manufacturer trip. So most of the time I will always focus on the big box stores. Because in the big box retail chains, there’s one buyer who buys products for say thousands of stores. And I like that because that’ll be really efficient for me. So I’m going to think about that option always as one of my main options, because I know that that’s where a big return on investment is. If one buyer pops, then I got the whole slew of them, but sometimes I have a product that’s really awesome for online, so there’s obviously a ton of online retailers that you can sell to.
And how do I know if a product’s great for online? Well, one of the things to think about is if your product looks great in pictures. Simple as that. People ultimately don’t even think about that concept. I took on a project where we put it on an online store. It was horrible because the thing looked stupid online, but if you touch it and you feel it, then you want that product. So sometimes products differ in terms of what it’s meant for. And so those are the things that sales professionals look for. They’re looking for the biggest return on investment.
If the product is awesome in photos and all sorts of things, they might consider maybe online retailers or catalogs or some other options and stuff, but if it’s actually a product that physically needs to be touched, they’ll probably put it into stores, hopefully the bigger ones, because it’ll be the biggest return on investment. So that’s one of many things that a retail sales professional thinks about when they’re going and taking on a new product. So I hope that helps.
