Category Management Skills Training Course

“MBM literally ‘lit the touch paper’ & helped accelerate these incredible individuals into an unrivalled team of category leaders.(Read full testimonial below).

What?

Get off of the ‘Powerpoint Treadmill’ and instead learn how to identify, sell, and land more category opportunities.

Our Category Management Training course covers a model and process, for effective day-to-day Category Management in today’s world – The ‘73% Funnel’. This course provides the Learners with new ways of working, fresh thinking, and practical tools & techniques.

Our Category Management course will increase the number opportunities they identify. Plus, increase their ability to get buyers to say yes to their recommendation, and also improve the implementation of those identified & landed category opportunities.

Purple category management milk carton for MBM Category Management course

Learning Objectives

By the end of this Category Management training course, the Learner will be able to:

  • Understand what is Category Management and the Category Management Process.
  • Know how to identify and agree with S.M.A.R.T. category targets.
  • Understand their shopper, their preparer, and their eater much better. To ensure that all are at the heart of their Category decisions.
  • Know their supermarkets, to make sure they can align their Category recommendations to their needs.
  • Turn analysis into opportunities, with more ways to interpret quantitative and qualitative data.
  • Sell the opportunities more effectively, with better ways to engage the buyer.
  • Land more opportunities in-store, and for longer through a better understanding of store operations.
  • Know how to evaluate and improve each project, to make the next category opportunity more successful.

5-Star Reviews for Category Management Training

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Liam Murphy, Marketing Assistant, Hilton Foods UK.

“As a relative newcomer to category management, the course delivers massively on providing the key framework around the role of category management within a successful retail focussed business. The content and the way the course was delivered, has given me a better, structured view on my role going forward and helped me plan what needs to be done to grow our influence as a department within our business.”

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Tony Walsh, Category Controller, Florette

“MBM really helped us to pinpoint the areas of category understanding that offered us the greatest opportunities and then transformed how we talk about Category across our business.  More importantly the flexibility of their approach means the project is tailored precisely to your objectives and MBM will keep you on track throughout. Most importantly their retail experience helped us distill a complicated and broad project into simple, meaningful and actionable pieces which buyers understood and welcomed. Project Clear was hard work, great fun and genuinely business transformational”.

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Melinda Munds, Head of Insights, Oscar Mayer

“Having hand-picked a team of bright young things, with a breadth of talent & a hunger for growth, MBM literally ‘lit the touch paper’ & helped accelerate these incredible individuals into an unrivalled team of category leaders. Training styles that engage & stick, sharing pertinent tools for 2021 and beyond, injected with true empathy that only raw experience brings, plus one-to-one coaching for those seeking to venture into new fields, these guys not only had our backs but provided some great memories along the way. It’s been a blast, we thank-you Andy Palmer and Darren Smith!”.

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David Flynn, MD, Fyffes UK

“We brought-in MBM to help us win more business. Over the 6 months we worked with MBM we found them to bring new insight to our category, fundamentally change our approach to dealing with UK supermarkets and they surprised me in how much value they could add. Sadly, we did not win the business. Though, what did happen, was what MBM did bring to us – They had enabled us to not only win back our business a year later, but to also go on to win a lot more business. I would highly recommend using them if you are open to approaching UK supermarkets differently and want more business”.

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Why?

Our memory weakens over time. 85% of what learners learn in a training course is forgotten within the first 30 days.

Most people attend training courses and have a great day. The problem is that they do nothing differently afterwards. A person invests 8 hours of their time, a company invests money in that person, and the result is, well, nothing. No behavioural change for the learners. Learning that sticks changes that.

Read more about Sticky Learning, and how we incorporate this into every training course we do on our About Sticky Learning page.

Purple graph titled The Forgetting Curve
The forgetting curve shows how people forget things the more time passes
Purple graph titled The Forgetting Curve with axis labelled Number of Days and Retention
Screenshot of Darren Smith from a video
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How?

The best piece of learning we all did was to drive. This is because driving lessons are based on spaced repetition. Do a lesson, stop & reflect, do another lesson, and so on. Our training programme is based on blended learning/70:20:10. A combination of traditional face-to-face training days, plus virtual classrooms, one-to-one coaching and Sticky Pieces (Homework) to embed the learning. All aimed to change the behaviours of the Learners.

Course Point of Difference

Achieving Real Behavioural Change with ‘Sticky Learning ®’

Sticky Learning ® is our own unique learning method. Developed over the last 20+ years. Most Learners attend 1-day training courses and do nothing afterwards. HR Managers & L&D Managers told us that this was unacceptable.

Sticky Learning ® helps Learners to Realise more of what they have learnt. To help them to Recall more of what they have learnt. Plus, Retain more of what they have learnt. The 3 R’s.

Sticky Learning ® enables us to proudly guarantee that if a Learner is not still using their new skill 5 months later, we will give you your money back. This is our money-back guarantee.

Measuring Your ROI

We evaluate your Presentation Skills Training on 5 levels, see below, and summarise these into a pack called the ‘Chain of Evidence’.

  • Level 1: Reaction (Feel) – What were the learners’ first impressions of the learning?
  • Level 2: Learning (Know) – How much did the learners learn?
  • Level 3: Behaviour (Do) – To what extent has the learning been used?
  • Level 4: Results (Numbers) –  How did the behaviour affect the results?
  • Level 5: Sponsor (Align) – What ‘observable change in performance’ has been achieved?

You can find out more about measuring your ROI in ‘About Us‘.

Who?

If it’s your first time on the MBM website, you might be wondering, who? Who is behind the business? Who will run the training courses?

Darren A. Smith is the Founder and CEO of MBM, and the one behind Sticky Learning. He has over 20 years’ experience in people development and his passion is helping people to become the very best versions of themseleves. Darren and his team of experienced trainers have been running MBM training courses since it’s launch in 2002, and pride themselves in learners still using their knowledge months after.

Headshot of Darren A. Smith from Making Business Matter MBM
Male holding a telephone icon for MBM contact

Not sure if this right for you?

Learners tell us that they are either lost in the data, on the PowerPoint treadmill churning out the same old decks or that they just can’t get people to engage when they present. Use this course as an opportunity to become the very best version of your Category Manager self. Take a step back, identify what you are trying to achieve and we’ll ensure that you become it.

Contact Us

For more information on the course, contact us in one of the following ways:

  1. Fill in our Contact Us form.
  2. Call us on 0333 247 2012
  3. Email helpme@makingbusinessmatter.co.uk