Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 3

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Sticky Learning Lunch 46: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today’s topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 3.

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 Monday. Welcome to Sticky Learning Lunches. And welcome to the first day of the week. We are gonna be diving back into the category Management funnel with Andy Palmer and myself, Nathan Simmons. We’re just gonna give it 30 seconds while we wait for the last people to arrive in the room. And then we are gonna crack on with part three of this funnel. Let’s just give us a moment to make sure everyone’s here. Let’s get everyone set up for success right now.

Nathan Simmonds:

First of all, before we get into introductions and, and the recaps, mobile phones, let’s make sure they’re on flight mode. Let’s zero out the distraction and get a hundred percent attention what it is we’re doing right here in this investment in ourselves and the businesses that we love and work in. Secondly, making sure that we’ve got our hydration in place, making sure we’re staying hydrated, keeping the brain lubricated and making sure that we’re just looking after ourselves.

Nathan Simmonds:

Temperature space, we’re going up here. Again, let’s make sure we’re looking after ourselves physically so we can increase what we’re doing mentally. Third part to this then is fresh page, fresh thinking. We’re gonna be covering some new ideas that potentially you haven’t seen before that may be there to support you, invigorating what it is you do inside your business. And this page is gonna be those things that you want to remember.

Nathan Simmonds:

So whether it’s things that Andy says, or questions that I ask, or questions or ideas that we share with each other in this group, that we wanna take a note of that so that we can go back and remind ourselves and remember what it is by rereading these ideas. That just helps take our thinking up another level and keeps that learning sticky, which is the whole idea of MBM Ready for this. Andy?

 

Category management funnel process for Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed P3
7 Simple Ways To Understand The Category Management Process

 

Andy Palmer:

Ready? Nathan?

Nathan Simmonds:

Good. So, welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM. Also joined by Andy Palmer, expert in category management, who’s gonna be delivering part three of today’s session. We are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry, MBM making business Matter, and it’s all about making that learning stick. As I said earlier, Andy, day three, all yours. Where are we going to next?

Andy Palmer:

Thank you, Nathan. Roy, as you said, we’re gonna go stage three, which is getting into the crux of understanding our supermarket or our channel or whatever route to market that we’ve got. So, brief recap on what we covered at the back end of last week came in at the top of the funnel talking about agreeing targets, where we looked at this stuff around here, way of purchase frequency of purchase penetration, selecting a target that you can focus all your efforts and resources and time into achieving.

Andy Palmer:

From there, we then came down into Thursday and we talked about understanding your shopper, exploded that apart and started talking about shopper preparers and eaters. Those three very distinct group with a nice overlap. And again, more better understanding how we can use things like pen portraits or purchases and hierarchies to get into the crux of what their motivations are, what their barriers are.

Andy Palmer:

Today we’re continuing down, and stage three, we are looking at knowing your supermarket or knowing your channel depending upon the market you’re in. So this, this one kind of on face values, pretty almost self-explanatory. The bit, I wanna just try and take thinking a little bit further, that actually if you’ve got if you’ve got an alignment of the recommendations that you want to make and you’re not getting them over the line it’s about making sure that you understand your, your supermarket as well as you can.

Andy Palmer:

That you are then making recommendations that are aligned with their thinking, and that’s in line with the buyers KPIs to, to ensure that you’re just setting yourself up for success. We’ve seen it so many times that we’ve seen suppliers going in and they’re making recommendations that suit their business. Sometimes they suits the the customer shopper, the pair of the eater, but what they’re not doing is fitting perfectly with that corporate requirement or that need that the buyer has and the buyer.

Andy Palmer:

When we’re talking about the buyer, we’re talking about the person sat in the retailer’s head office making the decision responsible for these purchasing decisions. So all the recommendations we want to, we wanna make sure they’re absolutely aligned with what their need. Now what in reality does that look like? It looks like you guys more better understanding their needs, so the needs of the buyer. And we can come at that from their personal point of view by understanding what their targets and their goals are for their categories that they own. And at the same time, more better understanding the corporate requirements.

Andy Palmer:

So we look at corporate social responsibility. We can look at the retailer’s overall vision or overall strategy. That way when we’re then coming down, we’re making our recommendations to absolutely fit with what works for them. Soon as before where a supplier was trying to drive they’re trying to drive spend into the category, they’re trying to trade people up and move them up through various tiers trying to expand weight of purchase, weight of consumption, and all the recommendations were aligned to achieving that.

Andy Palmer:

That was their target. The challenge that they had was that the supermarket was trying to really push through a period of value for money. They were trying to almost kind of position themself in the market that they had good value for money and actually how they were trying to set up and manage their, their particular area was looking to achieve those things. So in one hand, we’ve got, let’s drive value for money. In the other hand, we’ve got the supply trying to drive spend.

Andy Palmer:

And as you can imagine, there was a conflict as the suppliers were coming in or the supplier was coming in and making their presentations and their recommendations. It was, no, no, doesn’t work, not gonna work for us right now. Maybe one for the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You may have experienced these kind of, these pushbacks and these challenges.

Andy Palmer:

You can more, I guess more get yourself set nicely by making sure that you know what the buyer’s requirements are, what the retailer’s requirements are. Once you’ve got that, then you are, you are, you’re making recommendations that just align perfectly with the with their category their category requirements. How can you do that? It’s reasonably straightforward. This isn’t a massive, complicated part of the funnel.

Andy Palmer:

You go that saying that you’re gonna be attending conferences, whether that’s one’s run by the, the retailer or run by someone like the IGD who do some superb conferences each year to get really into the importance of that particular retailer strategy. You could do something very, very pragmatic and set up something like Google Alerts where every day or every week you could dictate this yourself. Every day or every week you would get an alert come through to your inbox giving you the most up-to-date relevant news that’s coming outta them.

Andy Palmer:

So is they’re issuing press releases and they’re making statements in the in the media to the city or what have you. You can ensure you are at the absolute forefront of that. Likewise, in the UK we’ve got something called Cam City where we get key account management news. It’s created from various different data sources. And again, you can have something like that delivered to your inbox. So you are absolutely at the forefront of knowing what’s going on out there. Again, what’s going on out there? It’s down to you as well. Can you get out to store more often? Can you challenge your colleagues to become the eyes and the ears on the high street so you can see what’s going on.

Andy Palmer:

See what’s happening in other categories, and get a feel for the things that are moving for you to then say, actually that’s gonna work with us. And then it’s about those discussions with the buyer around, here’s what we’re suggesting, here’s what we’re suggesting it, here’s the background data to back it up and we know it’s aligned to your strategy. ’cause We’re listening. Once you’ve got that, your credibility goes through the roof, the buyer knows you are there and you, you’ve aligned yourself nicely with their requirements. So Nathan, is that making sense so far? I’m just kind of appreciate scratching the surface as as ever with our half hour that we have.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah, for me it is making absolute sense. I guess the key thing to take it into, and I’m already coming up with some ideas and concepts in my head, but now have you got any examples of where this understanding has had a significant impact on a change when delivering to a supermarket?

Andy Palmer:

Yeah. something I’m get into. So yes is the, the short answer, the slightly longer answer is something I’m really looking forward to covering on Thursday when we get into understanding credibility, and it’s those suppliers that are going in with that stuff in their head and able to articulate it, that they understand the shopper, they understand the supermarket, the credibility’s absolutely through the roof and the buyer’s going, you know what? You’re the guys I’m gonna listen to, so I’m gonna sort of fudge it and say, yes, I’ve got a brilliant example. Let’s talk about it more in the next couple of days because it’s just gonna be the most appropriate time to to expand on that. It’s all gonna be about credibility.

Nathan Simmonds:

Amazing. And the thing is, it links back to some of those conversations that I’ve been having around negotiation skills. Coming back to some of the sales stuff that we looked at with Jeff Birch in previous sessions as well, is you don’t need to have lots of data, you don’t need to have lots of information. You maybe need to have two or three of the really high level things and understand what’s important to the person that you are talking to when you’re going in to have that conversation.

Nathan Simmonds:

And okay, I’ve got these points of reference for the buyer for the supermarket. I’ve got these points of reference for the shopper, the preparer and the eater, and I’m starting to fall in love with what’s important and the, the, the problems for each of those individuals. And I’m creating an opportunity or a product based on that that solves all the issues for all these people.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. I’m gonna send a little bit of my content for, for later in the week, but it just feels really now appropriate to drop this one in. We’ve all done it. And I know I used to, and I still see a lot of suppliers doing it now, where they, they’re rolling in with their PowerPoint decks and they’ve got 120 slides with 50 or 60 recommendations. They’ve worked hard, they’ve lovingly crafted and created all of this stuff. What they’re ultimately trying to do is get the buyer’s take on just some of those 50 or 60 great things that they’ve got.

Andy Palmer:

Whereas actually, maybe sometimes less and absolutely true, less is absolutely more. They go in with seven killer recommendations with all the supporting information, they are far more likely to get some of that stuff over the line. Then an absolute massive stuff.

Andy Palmer:

And especially when you’re going in and you’re going, oh, we’ve got an hour to present this. We’ve got 120 slides. The reality is you’ve got 45 minutes max wires running late, gotta get off to the next meeting. You’re doing the niceties, the top and tail stuff at the beginning of the meeting. You may have 30 minutes to present 30 minutes, that’s a maximum of 10 slides. You’ve gotta work on a maximum of three to four minutes per slide. Suddenly you’ve gotta get 10 slides and they’ve gotta be absolute killer ones.

Andy Palmer:

So to that point I’m gonna share this one with you because it’s a really powerful way of presenting your recommendations. So simple three columns. You headline these observation, insight, recommendation. So what you’re doing here really nicely is telling them what the observation is. You, you’ve got your charts, your tables, you’ve got your supporting evidence.

Andy Palmer:

Throws my head’s just kind of nicely in the way there. You’ve got your charts and your tables and your graphs. That’s where you’re gonna get your observational stuff. Market shares doing this, market shares doing that. Penetration’s up, penetration’s down the pure observation stuff. Then we come into the insight, the insight based off the previous observation, the reason why penetration is up, the reason why market share is down our observation, we’ve got our insights that we’re then drawing from that.

Andy Palmer:

And then we’ve got our recommendation that we’re making off the back of our insight and our recommendation is we suggest three new promotions that are gonna drive X amount of additional sales to achieve our, so putting under the heading of observation, insight, and recommendation can just allow the audience, whoever that person is or group of people is to quite clearly and quickly see the stages that you are taking the process that you went through right through to, Hey, I got the recommendation because I’ve got the backup behind it. Does that make sense?

Nathan Simmonds:

Absolutely does. And like you say, you’ve got a very small amount of time to have this conversation. So you put your, your background research needs to be really on point, and I don’t think people do this enough. It’s whether you’re going for a job interview you are having, you know, you’ve been introduced to someone, or you’re going into see a perspective buyer is spending the appropriate amount of time to actually go and find out about that individual, to find out about that organization and go, this is what’s important to these people.

Nathan Simmonds:

These are the things, these are the solutions, the elements that are coming out of that. Okay, let’s align those things and get as close to the mark as possible to make sure we’re triggering the right reactions and responses.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. We’ve gotta get in the buyer’s head, both the buyer sat in their head office and what often people refer to as the buyer, which is us shop and trolleys and baskets. Get into their heads, get into their hearts, understand what their motivations are, understand what their barriers are, then we can look to break down those barriers, capitalize on those motivations and do some really smart stuff off the back of it.

Andy Palmer:

It’s about taking all those various data sources, mention conferences, mention Google alerts, uses press releases. There’s a whole host of appropriate information, almost too much information out there. We’re gonna pick the right ones and use them really, really well.

Nathan Simmonds:

I’ve not really thought about Google alerts and how they work or how they operate, I guess in this world of SEO and what we are doing headline, how do they work? What do they do for us?

Andy Palmer:

Sure. So Google, as we know knows everything. It’s the all-knowing answer to pretty much all of our questions all the time. One of the services that Google offers and for free is something called Google Alerts. Just literally Google that. Google alerts use that to monitor the web for you. So you can put in various different catch points here. I could put in Tesco‘s or Sainsbury’s or SPA or who, whoever that may be. Woolworths doesn’t really matter. You put those in.

Andy Palmer:

You then set the frequency size there. I want to get an alert at 11 o’clock every weekday as that news is hitting the world. Google grabs it for you, puts it into a succinct email, various links and, and delivers straight to your inbox. So you may choose to get it delivered weekly, or you may choose to get it delivered monthly or you may choose to get it delivered daily, but it’s just a fantastic source of knowledge of things that you want.

Andy Palmer:

So I’ve got a bunch set up for the key clients that I work with. I wanna work and understand my client’s needs and what they’ve got going on. So as they’re making press releases, I wanna be aware of that. So when I’m on the phone to them, I can talk intelligently about them. Likewise, similar alerts set up for the major multiples in the UK so I can be stay abreast of what’s going on with, with those guys. And especially in an ever-changing world right now.

Andy Palmer:

It’s absolutely important to be on the forefront of that. So as we’re making our recommendations, they’re aligned with what they’ve got going on, their challenges and, and their depositions. So simply. But Google, Google alerts and it’ll take you through a very simple setup stage to, to get that all you need kind of a Google account just to, to make that happen.

Nathan Simmonds:

Nice. And I guess if you are working with individual clients depending where you are kind of in the grocery manufacturing industries, you are gonna have a certain handful of key clients and understanding what’s important to them. And actually, if you do get a press release or there’s a news update about share prices or about a situation that’s going on, it lets you know, okay, actually you can contact that person and say, I’ve just seen this.

Nathan Simmonds:

Okay, what support can we give you to support them? And vice versa. Actually, if you see there’s something detrimental happening here that you can already report that information into your managers and into your leaders and say, look, I’m aware of this. I dunno what this looks like. You may want to come have a conversation with said, so-and-so’s you know regional director or whatever.

Andy Palmer:

So absolutely, and it is just that, and it’s about having those intelligent conversations. The buyer is not and hasn’t got the time to volunteer all that information to use. It becomes about really appropriate understanding what’s going on and then appropriate questioning and discussion to help you work in partnership with them to achieve what’s right for the category.

Nathan Simmonds:

Absolutely. And then it’s about incorporating, you know, looking at the promotions that are gonna fit to that category and then doing the leg one of the, the mental legwork. So actually I’m, I’m saying that ’cause my brain’s going in this direction is, is often easier when you are talking to someone that is a buyer, that is a client of some respect. It’s the product provider and the service provider’s responsibility to take as much of the legwork out of that as possible for the individual just to say yes, it’s the same with the job interview.

Nathan Simmonds:

I go there and what my job is, is to give ev give that individual all the relevant information which goes Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, I’ve got a job here. Oh, it’s yours. Yes, there you go. And it’s the same when you’re selling a product or a service, is we’re taking all of that legwork out of it and making it easier for them to go. That promotion’s really interesting to us. It’s really interesting to our customers. Please put it here at the front of the shop.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. And so often we see it, we the fantastic suppliers with fantastic products and they sit there and say, Andy, do you know what? As soon as the buyer tells us what directions to take our products in this category forward, we will make it happen. I wanna mentioned this the other day. The reality is they want you to tell them what direction you need to be taking it. And picking up on promotions.

Andy Palmer:

As you mentioned there, promotions are such a key area to driving any category if used appropriately. Now they’re not a blunt tool just to drive volume, although it’s often used that way to clear excess stock or excess flushes in fresh products. It should be there to achieve something more strategic. Something that again, I could probably spend the next two or three hours on and I appreciate we’ve probably got about another 10, 15 minutes left.

Andy Palmer:

But actually if we get our, we call it of wrap range availability and promotion’s, right where, you know what, that’s where 80% of our opportunity is gonna come from. Let, let me share this see if it resonates with you. So when we’re talking about promotional planning, we need to have a plan that we can articulate the strategy behind it. It’s not about running the same promotions that we ran this time last year just because we’re worried about seeing a dip in market share and we don’t wanna experience that year on year position. It’s about having, I don’t like using the work because I think it’s overly used, but it’s about having a strategy for your promotion.

Andy Palmer:

What’s it going to achieve? That comes back to our target. Once we’ve got our target, we can align things like our promotional plans to, to achieve it. So this is called the promotional staircase. I’ve just come up with the name. Where you want to get to is an increase in the amount of buyers you’ve got in your category. You want to appropriately move them up this staircase. So you take the current amount of buyers and you want to end up with more buys as an example. How are you gonna do that? You’ve got a number of options here. Here’s three absolutely key ones. And and this is a tried and trusted tried and tested method.

Andy Palmer:

First place you would start would be by running what casters, traffic building promotions fit that into my bubble. They’re traffic building promotions. If you angle your head, you can read it, but they’re traffic building promotions. They’re promotions that you would initially run that you would look to attract new shoppers retract laps, shoppers. And it’s about reducing the risk from purchase. So this works particularly well from new product development, but it can also work on a more longer term viewpoint from kind of existing products.

Andy Palmer:

But ultimately we’re gonna run traffic building promotions. What traffic building promotions, Andy promotions that reduce the risk to purchase. So they’re typically on money off. Could be a save 50 p or a save a pound. Something that reduces the risk and encourages that trial or encourages that new purchase. You run a traffic building promotion and then appropriate and appropriate amount of time later you would then run something called a transaction building promotion.

Andy Palmer:

Transaction building. Transaction building will be looking to expand consumption, looking to expand the amount of spend on that particular product or, or product area. So this could be a two for a price promotion, two for five pound, two for 10 pound, three for 10 pounds, those kind of things. Typical kind of multi buy activity. Being careful not to overdo those ing shoppers. Get ’em spending more and then move them into rewarding loyalty. So this is about loyalty up here.

Andy Palmer:

And these type of promotions could be something that offers something for free, 33% off or 33% bigger pack, better value. What we’re doing is getting new shoppers, getting them to spend more and then rewarding their loyalty and then repeating this cycle. And the point of doing this and showing this to a buyer is because what you’re looking to do is demonstrate that you’ve got a process and a strategy behind your promotional planning.

Andy Palmer:

What we’re looking to do is increase penetration whilst maintaining frequency of spend. And we’re ultimately looking to attract more buyers by moving them through this process. One category that does this really, really well without mentioning any names, there’s a premium concentrator squash out there on the market. So you can buy your orange squash or your apple squash and you’re adding water to it. And there’s a couple of premium areas out there now.

Andy Palmer:

The premium areas are more liked by kids because of their very sticky, very, very sweet flavor. So when I’m pushing my trolley around and the kids are going, ah, dad, can you not buy us the the very basic orange juice? Can you buy us that one there please? And I look at it and go, oh, it’s an offer. Save a pound. I’m gonna grab a bottle of that.

Andy Palmer:

Come home. Dad’s a hero. Thanks for getting that juice. That’s great. A couple weeks later, I’m in the shop, suddenly that product’s on two for three quid. I’m gonna grab two of those, put them in my trolley, go home. Hey kids, two bottles this week, a few weeks later, 33% extra free. Well I’m getting something for free. I’m having that as well. Taking it home before I know it, I’m, this cycle is run and before I know it, it’s now become one of my s so my favorite favorites list, if I’m shopping online it’s in the back of my head saying it’s just the products I now buy and I don’t look at the products.

Andy Palmer:

Cause That is now just become something that I buy both on promotion and off promotion. They’ve managed to bring me into that category, get a much higher level brand awareness, generated the loyalty, but I just buy it, buy it all the time. Lemme pause for a second. Is that making sense, Nathan, to you? And maybe if others needs a kind of a another run of that

Nathan Simmonds:

It, it makes sense to me. And I mean we’re, I’m aware it’s 22 minutes past. I’ve got one more question that is coming up out of that. Any questions that are coming up? It got yes from Fiona. Thank you Fiona. Good to see you all in here by the way, Colin, Fiona fab. Fabian. Tim, great to see you Jim. Thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it. And if any questions are coming up farther into questions box and I’ll follow ’em into Andy as well. The question for me then is we now we’re starting to habitualize and I’m not sure that’s a word, but I’m gonna stick with it.

Nathan Simmonds:

No, we, we we’re creating that, we’re forming a habit of that product being part of our life as part of the the eater and the preparer’s life. And then it becomes the shopper’s life. Great. We’re, we’re kind of that graduated commitment that we’re getting from each of the three core elements of, of the household. What are the key barriers though, that are gonna then stop or, or barriers and motivations for the buyer? What, what are the things that are gonna stop them doing that

Andy Palmer:

Stop ’em from buying something they’ve always habitually brought or well,

Nathan Simmonds:

You know, potentially stop them from getting into that habit along that journey? We would take them from traffic into those next stages.

Andy Palmer:

And I guess this is the danger of a category that comes sticking with the subject to promotions, right? The danger of a category coming promotionally led. So one brand’s promoting theirs and another brand’s promoting theirs that week later in their own label promoting. All we’re effectively doing is just moving sales around. So why this model on face values reasonably straightforward and easy to understand? More importantly, great to communicate the rationale behind your plan. It’s gotta have a much wider understanding of the total category. We can’t just promote in isolation ’cause all we’re doing is moving sales around.

Andy Palmer:

We’re not generating that brand loyalty and we’re just creating shoppers who will just jump around between promotions that that’s not good for them. And it’s, it is not good for the suppliers and the retailers that are out there. So we need to take a, let’s call it a holistic view to promotional planning, but it’s not done at skew or product level, it’s done its maybe category or subcategory level and it has an overall target and, and helps take shoppers on that, that journey. Does, does that start to answer your question?

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah, it does. And actually it got me thinking about with some of my history previously in the financial sector looking at banking, it’s exactly the same thing actually. When you’re looking at the products of a credit card or a mortgage or a savings account, you know, you find people jumping from one company’s net, especially in ISA season and it’s like, okay, where’s the best thing for my isa? Okay actually, is it to do with product loyalty and brand loyalty not really is to do with the best rates and you just find people jumping from one promotion to another.

Nathan Simmonds:

So as you’re saying it there, yes, you want credibility, no traffic, yes you want credibility. Yes, you want that loyalty. Well actually how do you make that brand and that product integral to that person’s lifestyle so it becomes a trusted brand. You know, it’s no like and trust element where actually I’ll go back and I will pay full price for that because it means something to me now.

Andy Palmer:

Yeah, absolutely. I think we saw this many, many years ago with shower gels as, as one example category where it was always being promoted really, really heavy. It was back in the days of buy one get one free and buy one get two free and all of that sort of craziness that was going on. We, we, we’d have bathroom cabinets full of shower gel ’cause we’d go in there and just, oh, this week I’m gonna buy that brand. Next week I’m gonna buy that brand next. I’m gonna buy that brand. So pretty much brand loyalty kinda almost disappeared by that particular category. Wine’s another category.

Andy Palmer:

We typically shop by the, the 12 by four Barkers, what’s on offer this week. But that’s not, it’s not a sustainable way of, of growing true category sales. We’ve gotta make sure we’re not over promoting that. If we are promoting there’s some rationale and thought behind it. And at the same time being mindful of our shoppers out there it’s, it’s us. We’re gonna look in our, our kitchen cupboards or our bathroom cupboards. Now we’re seeing those brands that we’re loyal loyal to and we’re also seeing those ones that we maybe dip in and out of depending upon the incentives they provide us to shop.

Nathan Simmonds:

Mm-Hmm, and just reminded me, my mom, when that first thing started happening, we had, we had about 27 bottles of Xanax shower gel or something in the bottom of the dirty washing bin and it’s just like, ’cause there was so many bottles you didn’t have anywhere to store it. But like I say, it’s not loyalty, you’re just doing it because it’s a pound off in a saving 25 pound over the course of six months or something ridiculous on your shower gel.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. And the shoppers we’re quite promiscuous, you know, we we’re happy to jump around. And yet at the same time we do know about, we do know the things that we like and love and we have a kind of a brand allegiance to just making sure we truly understand that individual category level, what that looks like what that, what that looks like.

Nathan Simmonds:

Brilliant. I’m gonna ask the question everyone, you know, what que what’s been useful from today’s session and what questions have you got for Randy and myself today while those questions are coming through. And if there isn’t any just say no, I’m quite no, we’re quite comfortable. Which you haven’t got any questions, say no, just so I know that we’re not waiting for anything to come through.

Nathan Simmonds:

There’s something else that Andy shared with me which I want to share with yourselves as well. And that’s looking at the promotional planner. And that’s probably wanted to give a, a clear lead to that. Andy, you wanna talk us through the promotional planner that you shared with me and I’ll share it on the screen.

Andy Palmer:

So I appreciate, I very briefly talked about transaction building and traffic building promotions and logs, promotions. So we, we’ve got a matrix that Nathan’s just gonna put up on screen in a moment. It’s not a definitive list and there’s some very old school promotion or mechanics in there, but it just can help for you some more better understand what kind of promotions sit under what particular area. Nate, can you shut that up on full screen for us?

Nathan Simmonds:

Bear with, I’ll get that done now. Hold on. Oh no, I get the wrong button. Bear with, there we go, there we go.

Andy Palmer:

So bunch columns, got our transaction build promotions, traffic build promotions, loyalty promotions, consumer protection. And, and there’s kind of some image enhancing type mechanics in there. You can look at those promotions are in there and as I said, not a definitive list, just more there as a concept more there for the example. So you see the difference between each. Once you’ve got them you can then select the type of mechanic or one that will fits with your particular area. And you can have have a rationale that sits behind it.

Andy Palmer:

So if anyone’s interested in seeing or getting a copy of that matrix just type matrix in the question box and we’ll get that sent over to you afterwards. But, but it’s there just to help provide that thought and that rationale behind the promotional planning as opposed to what typically happens is why are we doing that promotion next week, what we did last year. So we must do it again. It’s not right.

Nathan Simmonds:

Good, good, good, good. So I’ll just put that as you were saying that, I’ll just put a comment in there saying no, just let us know and we’ll send this out to you by email. Colin said yes, he’d like this so we’ll send this out to Colin. Fiona, good refresher or this is a comment from Fiona. No, good refresher. Thank you. Glad it’s hitting the mark and keeping your thinking going in the right direction. The idea is we wanna share ideas, concepts that are gonna help you get the best out of your category that are gonna help you. You know, it’s not even squeezing every ounce out of your business.

Nathan Simmonds:

It’s actually making your business more nutritious and new, more wholesome for every client that you’ve got coming in that’s just gonna help you take it into the next level. That’s the important thing. And with, you know, however many years that you’ve got Andy inside category management and the grocery sector combined with mine as well as the leadership development aspect to grow the business, this is the stuff that’s gonna move it forward and really and make it even more robust for the future. Absolutely. Yeah, agreed.

Nathan Simmonds:

I don’t think there’s any questions coming in. I’m just gonna come out of full screen and stop sharing there. Andy, great session for me. We’ve hit half past one on the nose everyone, thanks very much for being here Andy, thank you very much for your time today. Massive value. Look, the other parts I’m gonna say as always, I’m gonna put, we’re gonna get the links up in the, in the chat box in just a second. We have got the coaching card. So the next thing for me is the coach talk to you all about is the coaching cards, got the category management questions.

Nathan Simmonds:

So this takes you through the seven stages of the funnel. These are the questions that Andy asked himself and yourself when working in these spaces. And it will help you to be able to get a clearer view on what it is you are doing inside your category and with your products there available on the website.

Nathan Simmonds:

The link is in the chat box right now. Click on there, go and get your copy now it’s five pound huge value and it’s gonna massively help what you’re doing. The other thing, and I always forget to say this at the beginning now, I’m gonna put myself a post-it, note next to the camera Next time if you have not registered for tomorrow’s session, now is the time to do it. Second call to action from me to you. Get signed up for tomorrow’s session. Make sure you’re registered, make sure you’re getting a copy of that video as well. And the third thing, virtual classrooms.

Nathan Simmonds:

Now, if you are getting value out of these sessions and how they’re helping you and you know someone in your business that’s gonna benefit from this, if that’s as in a account manager or one of the category management team, whatever it is, have a look at the virtual classrooms, have a conversation with the team, get an appointment with Andy to talk about how we MBM Andy with these expertise can help you to grow your area of your, and diversify your business and get better results. Now is the time.

Nathan Simmonds:

Click that link, have a conversation with Andy and we can help you do that maybe next time. I’ll spread that out over the whole session rather than all at the end. But no, that sounds good. We got it. We got it every day to school day, right? Thanks very much everyone, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Appreciate it.

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