Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sticky Learning Lunch 44: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today’s topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 1.

73% of your Category Opportunities Never Make it to Store.

You will learn: – Each of the 7 parts of the MBM Category Management Funnel. – How each part is essential to creating an effective Category Management approach. – Various tools and techniques to support each stage of the process.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today’s learning. This is going to be slightly different. As I said before. This is gonna be a super niche presentation series, talking about category management. We’re just gonna give it a few more seconds while we’re waiting for the last attendees to arrive in the room. It’s gonna give that a moment. Welcome, Colin. Good to see you. Thanks for being here. Darren, thank you for being here. It’s appreciated, FAAB, and good to see you again. Jim, I think this is your first time attendee to these sessions.

Nathan Simmonds:

Thanks very much for being here. Really appreciated, Tim, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you very much. Let’s get you guys set up for success initially. So as always, what I wanna make sure we’re covering is getting our mobile phones. Let’s get the mobile phones, get the little airplane lit up. Let’s zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention on what we are doing here today.

Nathan Simmonds:

Also, making sure you’re hydrated, so making sure you’ve got a drink available. Herbal teas for me today. Let’s keep ourselves, you know, keep ourselves hydrated so we can keep our brains lubricated. And also making sure that we’ve got a fresh page for fresh thinking. So we want a nice blank page. And at the top of that, we wanna write keepers. We also wanna write in there the 73% funnel, which is what we’re gonna be covering today as we talk about category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

And Andy’s gonna be covering more of that in just a second. Top of that page, keep us, these are the things you wanna remember. These are the things that you want to be reminded of. And these are the things when you reread it, it reignites that think, and it makes the learning stick, which is what we are here to do now. That’s what MBM is all about. So let’s see who’s got coming in, right?

Nathan Simmonds:

Let’s get into this. I’ve got my notepad and my pen ready. I’ve got a series of questions to be firing into Andy as we go through this. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with myself, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM. I’m joined today by Andy Palmer, resident expert on category management. And the idea of these training sessions is to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do.

Nathan Simmonds:

And whether that’s whether you are when you are at home or returning to work, or preparing to return to work, it’s about pushing this thinking. It’s about helping you take your business to the next level. And as we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the UK grocery and manufacturing industry, it’s right that we talk about category management. Andy, this next seven sessions, they’re all yours and you’re gonna take us through this, please, you know, take over and let’s see what category management is all about and how it can help these people.

 

Andy Palmer:

Lovely, thank you Nathan. Welcome everybody. I’m super excited to be sharing this content with you. Over the coming days, we’re gonna take you through our seven step category management process session each day, looking at each different stage of the funnel, bringing it to life now to manage expectations. I guess we’re only gonna be scratching the surface but hopefully leaving you hungry to want to reach out to us afterwards and learn more. Learn how we can support you with category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

So starting with that, what is category management? It’s one of these topics that’s been wrapped up quite heavily and shrouded in a dark mist of jargon and complicated terminology. In essence, it’s about helping you as a business to be able to identify more opportunities, sell opportunities, and land those opportunities in store. The crux of category management is really about suppliers working in partnership with retailers and making sure the consumers, the shoppers needs are at the heart of any decisions that are made.

Andy Palmer:

So whereas we see our account managers taking care of certain slice of the pie, we have our category managers that are there to take care of the whole pie. So as category management has, has developed over the years where it’s first started in its inception back in the 1990s for me this is really now about a business as usual principle. Not something that’s dipped into once every six months where people lock themself in dark war rooms and generate 1,000,001 different spreadsheets.

Andy Palmer:

It’s actually about a very simple structured approach that we’re gonna come to but helping you be able to identify more opportunities. So we’re gonna talk you through our funnel. We’re largely gonna do a brief introduction to the funnel in a moment and then help you understand what each of those different areas look like. So it’s about agreeing catch free targets at the top.

Andy Palmer:

We’re gonna talk about that a little bit more today about keeping the shopper at the heart of our decisions. We’re getting to that a little bit more tomorrow then around understanding and knowing the channels that you’re in. So what supermarket or particular retailer that you’re focusing your efforts. Then getting into the good stuff, getting into identifying opportunities. They’re gonna come from lots of different areas with capture management.

Andy Palmer:

It’s very, very data-driven. So often we can get lost in that and we’re gonna help you to not get lost in that. But around identifying the opportunities, then it’s about selling those opportunities effectively, landing those opportunities in store and then coming back around our funnel evaluating, improving, ensure that you’ve got this consistency and we’ve got the cycle going on now to manage expectations. And just like caveat why these funnel stages literally build on each other, it’s a bit more like think about it as a Venn diagram.

Andy Palmer:

They’ve got to overlap. You are gonna do some level of recycling back through different areas. It’s not that chunk start, stop, start, stop all the way through. So we’ve got this process, we’re gonna bring it to life a little bit more today. Hopefully that then generates some questions for, for you. Once we’ve got those questions, we’ll be able to bring it to life. So we’ll spend about the next 10, 15 minutes some questions to Nathan, to me some questions from you guys as well. And we’ll see if we can bring this topic a little bit more to life and hopefully help you realize how you can identify, sell, and land some more opportunities.

Nathan Simmonds:

And for me, Andy was talking about the questions. If you do have questions, you’ve got the question box, please get them in there. I’m watching this to, for Andy to support in this conversation. If anything comes up and you want to go deeper into that, let’s bring that up. And if it’s appropriate to answer it here and now, we will do. If not, we can take that offline and we’ll get in contact with you separately to help support that.

Nathan Simmonds:

The other thing that Sarah so lovingly reminded me of is if you are looking at the screen with the cameras on at the moment, I’m gonna drop off that screen and sit in the background and watch what’s going on. But there’s a gray bar in the middle there. If you wanna make the webcams bigger, click and hold on that gray bar, pull it down and you can make the presentation just that little bit smaller so you can see more of what’s going on in the whiteboard. Okay, as I say, any questions, get ’em in the question box and I’ll be paying attention in the background. Thanks very much.

Andy Palmer:

Great stuff. Thank you Nathan. Okay, so we’re talking about our funnel here and we’ve got these seven steps that I’ve briefly covered. As I said, we’re gonna work through each of those different areas over the next seven days. We’re gonna start today with agreeing category opportunities. So more often than not we work with clients and they’re busy doing category management in a way that they’ve already done it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Recently we started working with a client and they said, yeah, we’ve got all this data, we’ve got all this information, we’re at the beck and call of the buyer. And I said to them, okay, great. So what are you looking to achieve with your category? And they said well, whatever the buyer tells us to do, we will do it. Whatever opportunities pop up, we will make them happen.

Andy Palmer:

And if we spot some along the way ourselves, we’ll get those landed as well. And that’s fine. That’s not necessary the wrong way. Where we try to steer them to was actually, if they have a single absolute clarified target, all of the efforts are then focused on achieving that. And it’s not the scatter on approach to, they seem to be working towards its far more sniper rifle. It, it’s there, we’ve got our category target or we’re gonna go after that.

Andy Palmer:

That then means all the time and the resources and the efforts they put in are focused on achieving one thing. And that doesn’t mean to say that category target can’t change. And it will of course adapt and develop. But actually once you’ve got that category target, it then allows a far more joined up approach to, to take place and not just becoming kind of quite reactive.

Andy Palmer:

As I mentioned earlier, category management, very, very data driven. It’s often the case that we can get sucked into this black hole of data stuck on what we call as the PowerPoint treadmill of churning out presentation after presentation category review after category review. And it’s all just information give as opposed to leading and working towards achieving something that’s that’s being predefined. So we wanna spend today looking at agreeing category targets.

Andy Palmer:

I’ve got a couple of things that I’ll share with you, of course. It’s a very big topic. But actually if you’ve got a couple of things you can take away today that’s kind of gets you thinking a little bit differently, then jobs are good. So the first thing I wanna share with you and, and again, I mentioned that category management is often shrouded in jogging and various different acronyms and, and, and complicated language.

Andy Palmer:

I’m gonna do that now, which kind of almost makes me sound a little bit critical. But actually let’s try and keep it in simple plain language. Here’s an opportunity that you could take to develop your own category target. So we call this WAP or pen. Effectively it’s way to purchase frequency of purchase or penetration. Now to bring that into that true kind of simple language way of purchase is how much people are spending on the products they’re buying.

Andy Palmer:

It’s that difference between getting ’em to buy 99 p of pack of tomatoes or trying to trade, trade them up to a one pound 49 pack of tomatoes and we can increase their weight of purchase or we could go after their frequency. How often they’re buying, are they buying once a month, twice a month, once a year, five times a year? And again, we can start to increase their frequency of purchase or penetration.

Andy Palmer:

Again, brilliant balance, very simple language is how many, how many shoppers have we got buying this? What’s the percentage of our customer base? Or what’s the percentage of the population who are buying this? So whether it’s way to purchase, how much they’re buying, how much they’re spending, how often they’re buying, or how many shoppers we’ve got, we could pick one of these particular areas and then target all of our efforts towards it.

Andy Palmer:

If it is penetration we wanna attract more shoppers, we maybe wanna attract some lap shoppers. Once we know that and we’ve run the data and we’ve gone brilliant, you know, we’ve got 10% less shoppers than we did this time last year, we can then figure out what we do. It could be some work around promotional planning, it could be some work around range architecture, could be some work around availability, but at least we’re focused on achieving something.

Andy Palmer:

So my suggestion would be typically pick one of those areas only one and then work towards it. I say only one because something like frequency and penetration kind of go hand in hand. It’s a bit like a seesaw is penetration goes up and we attract more shoppers, our frequency tends to go down. And that’s because we attract those new shoppers, but they’re not core shoppers yet. Likewise, if we increase frequency penetration tends to go down and there’s that trade off.

Andy Palmer:

So don’t think you can do all of those at the same time. Pick one and then maybe you do one, then the next and the next and maybe recycle and kind of rework that process through. I’m hoping that’s making sense. Nathan, I’m sure is gonna chip in at any point and tell me to we’ve got a question if you’ve got it or you build on that.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah, the question is, how important is it then to be focusing on one of those elements? And when you do focus it, you go through the funnel with that one element first and then look at a different one to then run it through the funnel again?

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. So if for example, I was gonna pick any one of those three, so I’m gonna pick penetration, I would pick penetration as my category targets. I would look at the data and figure out what is penetration now, what do I want to get it to. From there, I can then calculate that size of the price so I know it’s worth a million pounds. And of course I’m gonna wanna set myself a a smart target. I’m gonna wanna set myself a timescale if I wanna achieve it. So I go, I wanna increase penetration by three percentage points, 3% new customers and I wanna achieve that by November, 2018, 2018.

Andy Palmer:

Gosh, I wish 2021. And that’s worth an additional 2 million pounds in sales. So once I’ve got my target, as I then more better understand the shopper, more, better align my recommendations to the supermarket, look for those opportunities, sell land, et cetera, then I’ve got absolute focus on where I’m going. Once I’ve achieved it, absolutely I can then pick one of the others or I can pick the same one again and go harder at it. Again, it’s just about focusing my time, my resources and the effort into the right place.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I’m wondering, as you’re saying that kind of from a coaching point of view, is there an opportunity to run all three of them at the same time with maybe individuals in your team? So you’ve got your people, three different people in your team trained on category management, one can take penetration, one can take weight, one can take frequency and run them all at the same time, or, or does it need to be concentrated on that one element? First of all,

Andy Palmer:

I, I’d pick one element because of the, you know, the potential trade off that you’ve got or the conflict you’ve got going on between ’em. So if you’ve got one person running off over there, let’s get some more customers. You’ve got another person running off over there, let’s get them buying more often. You’ve got another person running off over there. Let’s get them spending more. They’re potentially just gonna be trading off against each other, actually get all the people in the business focusing on the same thing to achieve it.

Andy Palmer:

And I mentioned that example earlier that if we push penetration and we get more shoppers, frequency is gonna go down. So person A is gonna win, but person B is not. And it’s not about that. It’s about what’s right for the category. So we’ve gotta analyze the data, find out where the true category opportunities exist, and then all of the team, all of my team focusing on delivering that

Nathan Simmonds:

Good. So why is it important then to get this stage of the funnel? Right?

Andy Palmer:

I think as with anything, if we haven’t got targets, we haven’t got goals, we haven’t got those visions, then we’re just running around. We never know when we’ve actually got there. And if we’d actually get there, we did, we get there by luck. So having that target just focuses the effort keeps us kind of on that smart that smart track to success.

Nathan Simmonds:

Colin’s come in here as you know, I guess we have to be mindful of the con of confusing the buyer. Absolutely. And it’s same with goal setting and setting targets. Know vague goals lead to vague results. So if we’re not clear at the beginning of the funnel where where we’re going as a business and where we’re going as an organization, the consumer isn’t gonna know all, you know, let alone the buyer or the consumer isn’t gonna actually know what we’re actually trying to achieve with that.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. again, coming into this terminology thing, are we talking about the buyer’s? The person sat at the retailer’s head office or we’re talking about the buyer, actually a person who’s pushing the shopping trolley, carrying the basket, and, and, and equally those I notes the shopper, it’s us as a supplier, it’s the retailer all working in absolute partnership. ’cause You’re right, that’s right. We don’t wanna be confusing the shopper install. We want to be in our chosen supermarket, for example. We’ve only got split seconds, but each individual fixer to make our shopping decision.

Andy Palmer:

We know those categories out there that are particularly complicated to shop and we know there’s ones that have just got it right and it’s easy, but it’s easy because a lot of time and effort was put into it to get the fixture laid out correctly. Promotional strategy, right? The packaging, the merchandising, the whole lot that that’s all been considered. So you’ll think about those categories in store and you go, oh, I’ve gotta go over to category XI, it’s just a bit horrible over there. Versus, oh, I’m gonna go and have a look at that category because I purchase it. I know what I’m gonna find, I know what I’m gonna want, I know how to find it and I know the pricing is gonna be where my expectations are.

Nathan Simmonds:

Nice. And is there a running order to these, is one of them more important than the other? And should we be starting a weight and then going into frequency or is it just whatever’s needed at that point in time?

Andy Palmer:

Typically you’d always go, oh, we want to attract more shoppers. ’cause More shoppers, more people buying. We can convert more people to be picking up our products. But the reality is, until we’ve got into the data and figured out what the opportunity size actually is we don’t know. Category management’s not about gout feel and intuition. It is about a very data led discipline that says, actually the data’s telling me it’s penetration. We’ve got less shoppers. Frequencies are, and we, we can get into all of that information. We know through all the different data sources that exist out there. Put all that information in and then and figuring out what the right ones to go after is

Nathan Simmonds:

Good. And where have you seen this done really well?

Andy Palmer:

We worked with hundreds of clients over the last, I’ve been doing training on this particular topic topic for the last 20 years. Prior to that I was a category manager. I’ve seen it done very well in certain areas and very badly in, in probably an equal amount. That’s changed now because there’s people we work with are now working farmers smarter. Getting this stage absolutely right is key. I could pick a number of different categories that we’ve worked with.

Andy Palmer:

Maybe that’s not necessarily appropriate to share with you right now. Those, those people that have just, or those companies that have just got it right. And you can probably consider your own shopping experiences when you are in store. Sorry, if you’re having a good shopping experience in a good category, it’s ’cause they have good category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

So thinking about that now is how does this funnel then vary to other category management models?

Andy Palmer:

Yeah, so there, there of course there are a number of models out there that be developed over the time. The original category management model was developed by a company called TBG, the partnering group an American consultancy that came over to the UK back in the 1990s. Their process, the eight step process still works well. But it was set for a different age. It was set for where teams of people would go and lock themselves in dark rooms for three to six months at a time, complete 1,000,001, literally 1,000,001 different templates and come out and then start implementing it.

Andy Palmer:

For me the process still works well, albeit it means streamlining. Hence why we think this model works nicely because it’s about business as usual. It’s about this constant, you know, focus on the consumer, not just locking ourself away every six months and coming out with a category review. So yeah, loads of models out there, not my place to start damning them. We think, we think and approve that this model’s fit for today’s markets.

Nathan Simmonds:

And I think the, the benefit of this model is it’s a very fast reflective model. So even if you’re starting at the top in a category inside your business, you walk into an aisle, you look at what your product’s doing, you have this as a framework that you can quickly filter through by looking at what you’re actually doing and go back to the drawing board that the moment you get back in the car, sit with your team and then start having that conversation as you go back through these seven steps again.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. And it is about that, that joined up approach where, you know, we’ve got absolute focus on working out what this category needs to make it more successful to make the shopping experience more enjoyable, to ensure that it remains profitable. You know, we are looking to drive revenue and turnover through categories that has to be profitable. And yet at the same time we want to make sure of course, that the, the shopper, the purchase of the buyer’s decisions and experiences is a positive one. This one’s slightly a a contentious thought. Let me, let me see if I can draw this up. So typically you have that’s not an egg, it’s gonna be a pie chart in a bit, but typically you have a category within the category there’s a number of products that sit within it.

Andy Palmer:

Within most businesses they will then have an account manager and, and that particular business will supply a certain proportion of the products to that particular category. It’s very rare that a category has one one supplier supply. Everything does happen. Most categories have a number of suppliers working in and they have a different proportion of the business with some overlap and some dual supplies own products.

Andy Palmer:

Typically then what sits here is an account manager that’s taking care of the slice of the pie and that account manager has various opportunities over the year to grow the business. Could be through an increase in distribution of their particular products or it could be ’cause they were successful at winning some new business maybe through a tender or whatever other there it is. But typically we see that the account manager and gain or lose between five and 15% of the pipe on average.

Andy Palmer:

So they’re there within their business trying to grow their own business’s business. And then you’ve got the category managers. The category managers are not only responsible for this portion of the pipe, but they’re responsible for the entire pipe. Sometimes they supply those products, sometimes they’re competitors does. And the important bit is they’re trying to grow the pie and if they successfully grow that pie, the opportunity for their business is huge.

Andy Palmer:

And yes, of course they may benefit their competitors at the same time, but it’s a win-win the opportunities that exist here, but their own business will eclipse that increase that the account manager potentially gets. So it’s con it’s controversial because typically the power and the importance sits with the account managers. My challenge back to many suppliers is how much time and effort do we put into category management? Because if our category managers are doing their job well, the opportunities are significant.

Nathan Simmonds:

So there’s two kind of directions my brain goes near. There’s an opportunity here to support the development of category management thinking across multiple. So for example, Heinz bake beans or bait beans as a whole. If every category manager in the bait beans industry was actually working so that they could be expanding the opportunity for everybody, therefore everyone gets a bigger slice of the pie because the pie is expanding the other

Andy Palmer:

Part. Absolutely.

Nathan Simmonds:

I was gonna say, the other part of my thinking is then actually giving those account managers a certain amount of category management understanding so that they, when they’re in store and they’re looking at it, they can then be feeding that back into the business operation to help that, that meaningful dialogue that’s helping expanding the opportunities across the whole business, not just through the category manager.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. to, to the second point we’ve seen a lot of companies move into a more of a hybrid role where the category manager and the account manager, the lines are becoming blurred and they’re almost starting to become one and the same thing. Now of course they need to take care of their accounts, that’s what they’re being paid for. They also need to be there to identify, sell, and land opportunities for the entire category. Once you’ve got that going on, you’ve then got the buyer at the head office, whether it’s any of the major multiples, minor multiples or retailers. You are there then their best friend because you’re helping them achieve their overall target, not just taking care of your slice of the pie.

Andy Palmer:

So those lines have definitely got blurred. And to your point earlier about baked beans, how do we define the baked beans category? Is baked beans the category or does it sit in a wider category of canned foods, canned veg. It, it’s really important. Each category needs to be clearly defined as to where that where where that product or group of products sits. And that needs to come from the eyes of the shopper. It needs to have absolute clarity on how the shopper sees that particular area and then we then align our thinking towards it and get that target set up.

Nathan Simmonds:

Brilliant. I’m conscious of time. It’s already 24 minutes past one. So look for those that are in right now, and you know this again, we talk about this being a superbly niche area of grocery manufacturing business, what’s been useful so far? What are you taking away, what’s been of value? And just while those are coming in, and if you’ve got any questions, bring them into the chat box now, you know, bring them into the questions box and, and ask ’em so we can get into those. While I was thinking about that and we’re talking about maybe those account managers as well as the category and, and those, those job roles like you talk about the Venn diagram, but those overlapping, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna share a copy of the white paper.

Nathan Simmonds:

I think it’s the ultimate guy for category management. So there’s the white paper there that can be shared with your account managers free of charge. It’s, it’s a free resource. So where you are blurring those job descriptions to create more opportunities for your business, it gives them a focal point or a, a concept to be working with where they can start to understand this model and create those opportunities live in the moment when they’re in store and when they’re with their people.

Nathan Simmonds:

Good ultimate guides there. Also talking about, we touched very briefly on the smart targets as well. We started looking at that clarity of target. And sorry, so yeah, give us a quick idea of an example of how to calculate a category target and, and make it smart.

Andy Palmer:

Gosh, okay. I could probably spend about the next three or four hours on that one. So I’m gonna be very mindful, mindful time. There are loads of different ways of calculating the size of the price. You can come at it from a bunch of different ways. What I won’t do is kind of go down into too low level of detail and start talking about the various actual calculations that you can do.

Andy Palmer:

My suggestion would be if you’re unsure on how to or where to look for your category target is to start with hypothesis. Not necessarily starting with the data. So if you start with hypothesis that says, I believe my category has less shoppers than it did a year ago. I believe my availability is worse than it was six months ago. I believe there are better opportunities in new products or existing product development.

Andy Palmer:

Develop all those hypotheses that you’ve got and then test them. Test them part with data, which would be the quantitative stuff or you may need to look at it from a more qualitative point of view. Visit some stores, get out there. Once you’ve got a better understanding of the, whether your hypotheses are right or wrong, they would then in turn start to generate various opportunities. You can then start to calculate size of those opportunities.

Andy Palmer:

That then allows you to then prioritize prioritize the time and the efforts. You’ve got it. Quick, quick one. Lemme see if this will work. Simple. Boston Matrix, we’re very familiar with those. If I’ve got big opportunities in terms of the value, not so much can I implement it now or is it gonna take me six years? I develop those hypotheses, prove them right or wrong and I can then start thinking that’s worth a lot and it’s gonna take a reasonable amount of time.

Andy Palmer:

That’s not worth as much, but I can get it done Now that’s worth a lot, but it’s gonna take me six years. You can start to plot your various opportunities. You then know that it’s these bigger, quicker to land opportunities the way you should be putting your time and effort. And you basically start to filter again, filter this stuff down to, to get you to a place of going, right? We are going after that opportunity there. We know it’s worth 2 million quid. And we know we’re gonna get it landed within 12 months. All of my time and efforts are gonna start to work towards achieving that. Appreciate going at pace.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then like you say, mapping those things out you go, it can be specific. How much is it worth? Is it measurable? Okay, how, how do we know if we’re getting there or we’re moving towards it? Is it achievable, is it relevant? Is it time bound? And all those elements to make it smart. Colin,

Andy Palmer:

Sorry, go on Nathan.

Nathan Simmonds:

I was gonna say, you know, Colin’s brought in a point here, you know, this that is about partnership, not pure competition. And that team, I think more internally when category management and sales, you know, account managers are getting together, that that’s about working together but also working across the industries and other SEC and, and other groups as well. And, and maybe having a bit more of a collaborative conversation about where the business is going.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely collaboration and partnership, not just between supplier and retailer and shopper, but actually, dare I say it, between different suppliers. Now I know this is possible ’cause this is my background. We used to have supply based meetings where we’d get five or six suppliers in the room and start to figure out how we would drive this category forward. Yes, of course there’s gonna be that natural and sometimes healthy competition to, to look after ourselves. But actually the bigger opportunities happen out here by growing this category. Not just stealing sales from product A into product B and vice versa. As we run these various different promotions or these various different pieces of activity.

Andy Palmer:

Once we can get this category joined up and everyone focused internally your own business, other businesses, if, if that’s appropriate then, then you’re on your way to success and you’ll see those categories that have gone on and made that stuff happen. Sometimes it’s led by the brands, sometimes it’s led by own label supplies. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest supplier or the smallest supply. If you’ve got the eyes and the ears and you understand the shopper and your approach is that of driving true categories, true category, sustainable growth, then you’re onto a winner.

Nathan Simmonds:

Amazing. And that leads to kind of almost the segues us into tomorrow’s session. And we’re gonna put the link in for tomorrow’s session for a sticky learning lunch. Tomorrow’s part two of the funnel is actually understanding your shopper. So we’re gonna get into that in more depth tomorrow. So calls to action from this conversation right now. One, if you haven’t registered for tomorrow’s session, this is relevant to you. Get registered for tomorrow’s session. The link is there. Two, if you want to share this information and support your business, your account managers and all those people, there is a free ultimate guide there to category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

So it’s there to support you and your team getting that understanding so they can help grow the opportunities. And you know, if more questions come up, please email them to us. Prepare, prepare them for us for tomorrow so that we can then, you know, bring that to life in what we’re doing and what we’re talking about. Understanding your shopper and giving you more information to improve your category manager. Hope this is useful. Thank you very much for the day, Andy. Massive appreciation for you being here to share that. Thank you.

Andy Palmer:

No, my pleasure Nathan. And I think it’s just to build on that point is hopefully you’re getting a sense of the passion I’ve got for this particular topic. And if there are those of you out there who wanna bounce ideas or thoughts or challenge me on some stuff, drop me an email, give me a call, reach out to us. We can make my details available. I’m happy to talk about stuff free where that takes us. I don’t mind the important things that we we have the conversation.

Nathan Simmonds:

We’ll start building that funnel for people. Everyone, thanks very much for your time today. Really appreciate and I look forward to seeing you at one o’clock tomorrow for another sticky Learning lunch. Thanks a lot.

Andy Palmer:

Thank you.

 

 

Take a Look at Our Podcasts.