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Sticky Learning Lunch 48: Increase Your Category Opportunities
Today’s topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 6.
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:
Good afternoon, sticky learning lunches. Just making sure we’ve got screen share on there. Welcome to today’s session. Yes, I’m not wearing a white shirt, it’s Thursday. Just gonna give it a few seconds while we wait for the last people to arrive in the room. If anyone’s got any opinions about the shirt today, I’m more than happy to hear them. What do you think, on a scale of one to 10, one terrible, 10, phenomenal, happy. Let’s go with the ratings on that. Just while we’re waiting for everyone else to turn up.
Colin:
I say that it’s certainly better than the sound and I’m, uh, supporting today.
Nathan Simmonds:
8.5. Thank you, Colin. I’ll, I’ll take that and run with it.
Colin:
Nine for me. Thanks Colin.
Nathan Simmonds:
Yeah, finally.
Nathan Simmonds:
So let’s make sure we’re setting everyone up for success. First things first, as always, let’s get the mobile phones up. Let’s get the little airplane lit. Zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention. Also, making sure we’ve got a drink. Let’s make sure we’re staying hydrated. We’re in the thirties here in the south is getting warm. Let’s make sure we’re looking after ourselves. Keep, keep ourselves hydrated and keep the brain lubricated.
Nathan Simmonds:
Also, fresh sheet, fresh thinking. Get yourself a blank page. Make sure that top of that you’ve written, keep us and these are the things you want to remember and remind yourself about when you reread them so you can reignite that thinking and really make this learning stick. It’s the end of the week for us in the sticky learning. Before we go any further, and before we go into the introductions and get the session rolling as well, if you have not signed up for Monday session, which is the last one of the 73% funnel, now is the time to do that.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’ll get a link into the chat box so you can click through there and sign up for Monday’s session. We’ve also got Tuesday’s session. We’re gonna move into the leadership coaching model, evoc, which I’ve designed. It’s all gonna be about self-evaluation and getting really deep on who you are, what you bring, and how you develop yourself as a leader as we move through the course of next week as well. So if you haven’t already signed up, now is the time to do that.
Nathan Simmonds:
We are on, let’s do this. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, home of Sticky Learning, and we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Idea of these sessions is to give you a 20 minute, 20 to 30 minute micro learner. It’s gonna help you be the best version of you in what you do right now, and also preparing you to go back to the brave new world, that whatever that might be as we move into the future. What are we covering today, Andy? Do
Colin:
A Okay. Nathan. Today we are covering, landing those opportunities in store. So it builds this funnel continually does by targets, shoppers, our stores, our insights and recommendations, selling it through to landing it. So it today’s about landing it, it’s about that, uh, last hundred yards, ensuring that all that time and effort and analysis we’ve put in actually hits the shelves. It hits the shelves, right? Um, so for meLearning opportunities in store, why the funnel flows is largely about preparation.
Colin:
Um, what we’re trying to ensure happens is that those recommendations that you make to the buyers that you’ve sold to the buyers don’t just look good on paper, that they actually can work in store and then giving them, uh, sustainability for the future. So getting into this one, um, there broadly, two groups of people that work for supermarkets, those that work in offices and those that work in stores.
Colin:
Yes, of course, there’s some other areas, but broadly speaking, those two groups of people, this is really about bridging that gap between those particular areas. Um, talks about, it’s the last 100 yards. Um, it’s a difference between ideas generated and where they are implemented. So I’m gonna start with a quick story. Um, one of my colleagues may be in this afternoon, this story is actually, um, uh, about him so many years ago, and he’d probably tell us it was about 20.
Colin:
I think the reality was it was probably maybe 30 or 40 years ago. Um, he was an up and coming, uh, frozen foods buyer, and that buying department at, uh, this particular supermarket was trying everything to drive sales. They would draft in suppliers, they would go through all the analysis, through all the skew level, store level by week analysis. And it was all with a view to try and getting availability sorted, uh, in, in frozen foods.
Colin:
Hundreds of spreadsheets, lots of analysis hours spent on it. Nothing was improving. So my colleague himself decided, you know what? Maybe I need to get out to stores. So he did out of his desk, off to stores, and he spent some time working in stores, spent a few days observing what colleagues are doing. He spent a few days helping colleagues in store, putting stuff into the shelf. A couple of weeks later, he pulled and gathered the guy buying team back together.
Colin:
What he then did was placed 50 pairs of gloves down on the table and said, there’s our issue. It doesn’t matter how much analysis we do, it doesn’t matter how much, uh, how many recommendations we come up with. It’s about this. And everyone kind of went, what do you mean it’s about gloves? What then went on to explain was that the insight he got from working in the stores, but frozen food was cold.
Colin:
And so because frozen food was cold, everyone in store avoided filling or replenishing that particular part of the store. By providing gloves to the stores right across the estate, they were able to increase availability. So they made it just in that little bit easier for people to go, do you know what? We pick up those cold cardboard boxes, open it, put it on the shelf, just make life a little bit easier. The point of that really about closing the gap between what we see behind our screens and within our spreadsheets and bits of paper to what actually happens in true reality.
Colin:
So finding your gloves is the kind of, or the equivalent of, is my real challenge to use for this afternoon. Find those gloves, close that gap between the analysis that you do and the opportunities that you are recommending. Making sense, Nathan?
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And it’s the real life stuff and what you see on your computer screen and from where you are sitting is completely different to the reality inside a store. Now you are in, and geographically you may be twenty, thirty, a hundred and fifty miles away from that location. So you have no idea actually what’s going on in the head of the individuals that are supporting you. Make those opportunities land. You have to be there.
Colin:
Yeah, I, um, gonna share another little model. Why not? Um, we, we looked at the staircase the other day. This is another staircase I seem to like staircases and, uh, three letters or, uh, acronyms this week. This is, um, effectively the, the staircase of learning. Some of you may well be familiar with it, but I actually think it works really well for, for this particular topic as well. It draws up, got these two areas. There. Not a big fan of this work, but it makes sense. Unconscious incompetence. It’s the things that we don’t know.
Colin:
And this is typically what can typically be the area that some category managers tend to reside in. They don’t know what they don’t know. Sometimes getting out to stalk and, uh, can help that. I often think about this as, uh, my 8-year-old, she doesn’t know, she can’t drive. She sees Daddy get in the car, do some stuff like this, do some stuff like this, move his hands in the car, get to be, she has no idea.
Colin:
She couldn’t jump in that seat. Over time, we move them into conscious incompetency, start to become aware of the things that you both can’t do. Sometimes it’s getting out to store and going, you know what? Hadn’t appreciated that loves example. It’s a great place to start. So for me, this was my son, uh, probably a few years ago when he started asking these questions, he was getting slightly closer to taking that first, uh, driving lesson and he started asking, put your feet up.
Colin:
You going there? What’s that bum for? What’s that lever do? How are you getting in the car to do that fee? And he moved from, I don’t know, I can’t do it through to my God, I know I can’t actually do that. I’m gonna need some lessons. Absolutely. He then starts taking some lessons and he moves into conscious competence. He’s now aware he can do it over time.
Colin:
And to ask anyone in the room who’s done a drive recently and to ask you how many gear changes you make providing you’ve got a manual car, you’re not gonna know because you’re doing that stuff unconsciously. So you then move into unconscious competence and it’s about taking our cashflow managers ourselves on this journey through, dunno what I don’t know. Now I know what I dunno through to now I can do it. And then finally making this stuff just automatic so we’re not just sitting behind spreadsheets.
Colin:
We’re spending some time in store and we’re now unconsciously competent on that new level of knowledge that we’ve got. Um, yeah, there’s a little bit of recycling that typically happens up here. Um, I guess sticking with our driving allergy, it’s maybe moving from a manual car, automatic or vice versa. We have a little bit of relearning. That’s cool. That’s a part of continuous improvement. The important thing is to move that way up. , Nathan, making sense? Thoughts on that?
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. No, it is something that I teach, we teach us that you learn because when you go through the full stages of learning, depending what you know, title this was given, uh, when you, when you’ve learned it is it’s easy for us to go consciously competent, unconsciously competent, and then we just sit, sit there doing this kind certain things which almost have a level of security and certainty to them. And actually it’s getting away from your desk and going, doing the things that aren’t common and going back and acknowledging, well, actually I am consciously incompetent.
Nathan Simmonds:
I now know what I don’t know. And enjoying that process of discomfort that comes with that, you know, and, you know, admitting that you don’t know it, that feels uncomfortable, you feel stupid, you feel confused. But actually confusion is a, is a chemical reaction happening in your brain, which happens when you are consciously incompetent. So in order to go up that competency ladder to improve your learning, you have to go through that experience. And that means going into a store, speaking to a new store manager, speaking to the people that are handling your goods, speaking to the customers. And if that’s not normal for you, get used to it because that’s the stuff that’s gonna move this for you.
Colin:
Absolutely. And that leads perfectly onto my suggestion. I think it’s exactly doing that. Speak to your buyer, speak to your, uh, local supermarket, uh, store manager. You sometimes need to get permission to do that. You can’t just rock up in store and start speaking to colleagues or customers. Get that permission appropriately. And then coming back to where we were the other day, I’m talking about hippos or hypotheses before you go in, consider yourself some, start those with, I believe, I believe that I can drive more sales by better understanding the store ordering system. Or I believe I can learn three pieces of new product development by replenishing my category for half a day.
Colin:
I believe I can learn some stuff about my category by replenishing another category in the store. And, and the list goes on, considering around how does the store manage waste? How do they manage arrivals? How do they take those arrivals to restocking? What can we do to help visibility in new products or stores? Uh, locate certain products. There’s a whole host massive list. So the ones that are right and relevant for you, start with, I believe that, and then go in stores and start proving or disproven them. I think it’s super powerful and will just help ensure that the opportunity that you make are great on paper or land in store are there for, uh, the foreseeable future driving sales and profit.
Nathan Simmonds:
Excellent, excellent. So where does this take us to next then once we start getting into the superstores and we’re looking at some of these things? Rightly so, I’m, uh, very much kind of a, a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy. So I’m, I’m glad you highlighted there to go and get permissions to go and have these conversations ’cause I would’ve already been doing them. Um, so where do, where does an individual go from there kind of to move these hypotheses and take themselves into the next steps?
Colin:
I think that’s it. These learning opportunities largely about preparation. We’ve made the recommendation people bought into it. That’s just some of this stuff. And I said, this funnel isn’t about start, start, start stop . There’s this kind of Venn diagram type overlap. Some of this stuff needs to happen first. You don’t wanna make a recommendation that ultimately is just gonna fall over the day after launch. So part of this stuff maybe happen further up the funnel as you’re developing products and developing recommendations.
Colin:
Moreover, it has, with everything around category management for states, a business as usual thing, not something you dip into once every few months, should be out there ing stores on a daily and weekly, less daily, but maybe a weekly basis. And actually the reality is we’re doing that when we’re doing our normal weekly shots, although slightly caveated with, uh, our, our current new situation. Keeping yourself living and breathing, keeping yourself close to your categories, challenging yourself, withstanding other categories. Just a great source of, uh, one opportunity identification, but two, ensuring that, uh, what you are, uh, what you’re suggesting is landing.
Colin:
Another thought, Nathan, um, you mentioned about, um, going out into superstores and, and visiting those stores there. So, um, gonna go off on a slight tangent. This was nicely prompted by the question from, uh, Fiona the other day. I’m not sure if she’s here today. If she’s then, uh, thank you for this. We, we had a conversation about this earlier today. Um, her challenge to me was, okay, how do we manage various different channels that exist? ’cause actually tend to be our efforts.
Colin:
Put into your point, Nathan are big superstores are hyper stores and what have you. Yeah, each retailer has various different channels, right? From its small local convenience channels to its online channel to its soup stores, , mega stores, however they choose to clarify it. The challenge again, could be a way or so. Another way of looking at it could be, I’m gonna introduce, so I think the majority being familiar with KPIs, key performance indicators are targets.
Colin:
Typically, I see this and this going in hand in hand, I’ll agree target is our kpi, what we’re aiming to achieve. So if we have a KPI for our category, we could then have various KR eight, typically one here, multiple here. The KRA key result area, let me explain this in the same way I did with, uh, the conversation with Fiona earlier was around key result areas. Um, I’m gonna pick a sport, I’m gonna pick, uh, football, but it could be any sports.
Colin:
Um, each ment team will have a KPI, let’s imagine it’s winning league. They wanna have various kras that sit below that. So for the goalkeeper, it could be clean sheets, which is, uh, not letting any goals in the net. The defenders, it could be balls cleared out of the, the box, out the dangers zone near their own goal. The midfielders, it could be, uh, passes, completed up to the strikers at front.
Colin:
And for strikers at the front, it could be gold stored. Those are the kras are the key result areas that we’re all link into achieving our KPI. We could come at it a different way from a channel perspective and actually our different channels could be our individual kras. What do we want our soups stores to achieve? What do we want our online presence to achieve? And what do we want our small local convenience stores? Why the opportunity size may be very, very different.
Colin:
Big opportunities may sit in a superstore. Small opportunity, convenience. They all play their part, in which case they all then need to be maybe one of a better word, held accountable for achieving the overall KPI. When you’re in stores, it’s not just about visiting the hype stores big stores, it could be about visiting some of the smaller, more local convenience stores, which could then send us on a whole other journey to go visit our local, um, produce roers butchers, smaller stores independent, just to get a talk of what those guys are doing to allow us to then take inspiration and see if we can apply that to, to, to a wider format.
Colin:
We’ll pause there for a second. KPIs, kras Nathan is my, uh, temperature check. Does that make any sense?
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And I think, you know, the key thing that we’ve seen in businesses is not having too many KPIs. There is, it is maximum kind of three. And you will find that a lot of your kras, kras and other KPIs will actually fall into those kind of three columns anyway. But if you don’t, if you know, if you’re not focusing up here, these are the, the increment, the, the buttons and levers that you can pull and push that cause that KPI to be here. Um, so just making sure you’ve got the right numbers in the right places so you can take the right action and not just confuse yourself.
Colin:
I agree. It comes back to kind of day one we were talking about that stuff there. Ideally it’s one target up here. Achieve that, move on to another. Think if you’ve got multiple targets up here and for any, any business multiple targets becomes confusing because the effort you put in becomes diluted one crystal clear, smart target and then know the component parts that make up to achieving that. We can put time, effort, and resourcing into the right places. If we’re thinking our biggest opportunities could be in our convenience stores, at least we then know that and we’re not wasting our time over, over again.
Nathan Simmonds:
Agreed. And I think about where I’m locally, I can walk down the road less than 10 minutes and I’ve got a, in an independent Green Grocers, I’ve got Tesco’s Express, I’ve got co-op, I’ve got Aldi, I’ve got one of the small satellite branches I Aldi just out the road. And it is just about getting that viewpoint where I can get a cross section of outlets within the space of 60 minutes. I can see exactly what all those categories are doing for me
Colin:
And it feels like I’m up two time away from my desks, away from my inbox. But yet trying it, you can surprise exactly how much insight you drawn from it. Um, there’s a brilliant story, um, that, I dunno the uh, the original route or the sorter. What I do know was that uh, McDonald’s considered once um, selling pizzas through their, their restaurants and one of the suppliers was lucky enough to be the pizza supplier. But one of the recommendations, sorry, one of the requirements from McDonald’s was the MD of the company had to go and work in one of the restaurants.
Colin:
Julie obliged very Chuck, he got the contract to supply them, uh, uh, pizzas. It was a trial for McDonald’s as whether that could be a route that they may, uh, branch into and the MD’s in store and he is bringing pizza, pizza. Can I go and do a spell at the drive free? Yeah. No problems. And there he pizza has come through loving life today, gets his pizza box and realized they couldn’t get it through the drive through window, couldn’t get it through.
Colin:
And it was one of those moments that you would never have got there that this box was a tip. It, I’m gonna get it through my window, get it through your car window. One of those moments going, why didn’t you know this before that then allowed them to uh, maybe change some up. Consider some box has been pointment. That one insight would never have come or maybe have come fastly late down the uh, down the, down the route of launch of that area. Not sure. Maybe that’s the reason why they don’t sell, uh, pizzas. Now let’s stick to our big
Nathan Simmonds:
That’s good. That’s what’s of time now. Okay, we’re hitting 18 minutes past one. Good. So we looked at KPIs, we’ve looked at Kros, we’ve looked at where we are and kind getting to that point of landing those opportunities and getting ready to cycle that up. The one thing I wanted to touch on in just a few minutes, I’ve got it in front of me is that stretch sheet. And because I feel like we’re getting to that point where we’ve looked at what the target is, we’ve gone through this process and we’re starting to get that a point where we can actually kind of push the boundaries of what we’re doing. So I think it’s appropriate to talk about that.
Colin:
Alright, let’s, let’s get it up. So yeah, so this is some content that um, we’ve got some time to share. It was something that we were looking to do yesterday, so I’m glad Nathan brought this back to life. So this is a template we can share with you if you’d like a copy like and subscribe in the box so to speak. Drop your name and email and my email it over to you. Um, it’s about again, preparation and we know the importance of this. The reasonably simple templates fill out situation.
Colin:
This is about what you are looking to about who’s gonna be there at your meeting. It’s about sitting yourself up for, uh, success initially. We can fill out those boxes and we’ve got clarity on what we’re looking to. We can then move into the time that we’ve got. So our time could be how long we’ve got to present, how long we need to prepare for.
Colin:
I give some time around q and a here. Um, I think I mentioned it the other day working on that rule of thumb of three to four minutes per slide. And we’ve got every half an hour percent, we’re only talking about putting together maximum 10 killer slides. Not the usual 20, 50 60 that we’ve historically gone in with. The next area is about the result. It’s about the result. We want to get more in the long term. We know that you don’t go in and have one meeting and get everything you want a job to do.
Colin:
This is about achieving and I’m saying your end in mind. You’ll have a number of meetings all looking to achieve the same thing and having that absolute end in mind. And as Stevie Coy says, uh, those are fans of seven habits of highly affected people. Everything’s created twice, once in a mental second.
Colin:
You understand ending mind is everything you do then works achieving that second part or the next part. E expectations. Expectations for that individual meeting. What’s gonna be desirable? What’s gonna be ideal? What do you wanna get out at the end of that meeting? If you’re going in there with your expectations that the buyer’s gonna go, yep, let’s sign that off now. I love the price. I don’t need any further information. Yep, that’s highly profitable for you, not so much for me.
Colin:
Let’s do it. You know, realistically that’s not gonna happen. There’s gonna be some further negotiation. There’s gonna be some further explanation. You can at least set out what you think your own manageable expectations are. Making sense not from Nathan. Brilliant. Okay, next thing is three key things. What are your three bumper stickers? What are the three things that you want to have the buyer remember?
Colin:
And it could be that the you what those guys have got handle on promotions, that’s gonna generate me another a hundred million. Those guys have got three awesome products that we’re gonna launch in the next three months. That’s rock and roll. It’s again, having clarity on what the big important things are that the buyer’s gonna take away as opposed to that. Talked about it again the other day. Having that list of 40 or 50 recommendations, all of which are never gonna happen.
Colin:
It’s going with three killer things that are on must have. The next part is the character. Who are you and always be yourself, but who and how are you gonna present yourself? Um, good clarity on what that looks like beforehand. Um, what I mean by that, it’s coming back to sort of the Herman stuff we um, we talked about yesterday.
Colin:
Um, how are you gonna tailor how you communicate, how you present, uh, how you interact by being more mindful of the audience. For example, my default probably would be to stand here and talk quite monotone and be a bit dull. I don’t really fun to make eye contact with any of it. You don’t really like it. We know we’re running a webinar. It’s online. We’ve got a bit bit animated. Bring it to life. Make you guys feel as enthusiastic as we are.
Colin:
So in which case bring in that enthusiasm hopefully, um, leads through to you guys and you guys get as passionate as we are about capital management. So it’s about your character. Last one. Then last one is about how. So this is really about how you are going to present. Our default of course is PowerPoint. We go in, open up our laptops, I’ll get our hard packs out.
Colin:
Actually can we do some stuff differently? Can we have various different levels of um, uh, various different formats? Can we do some stuff on boards or can we go in with just a single one pager or can we go in with nothing and just actually talk and ask questions and interact and then summarize at the end. There’s challenges about how you present differently to differentiate yourself from all your competitors that are still going in with their PowerPoints. Sometimes just going in with a couple of, uh, let’s say a two phone boards can really bring stuff to life and just help the buyer go, oh goodness.
Colin:
I haven’t gotta sit through another PowerPoint presentation. Or maybe for right now I haven’t gotta sit through another zoom meeting of three hours of slides. It’s about considering all that stuff different. This template allows you to stretch your thinking, it allows you to do that preparation and all with you to setting yourself up for success. Okay, as usual, you’re going at a fair pace. Nathan, there’s my, again, my temperature check.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s good and it leads me in two ways. ’cause you know, yesterday I was watching a webinar about how to land a TED talk. So it’s something that I’m really inspired to do is actually get myself on a TED stage and, and talk about some of the things I’m passionate about. And the, the man that was leading it turned around and said, you know, the idea is one thing, but if you haven’t got the energy behind it to actually push that idea through, no organizer of a TED event is gonna batten.
Nathan Simmonds:
Either they’re just gonna tick, you know, cross you off and they’re not gonna move it forward. Doesn’t matter how good the idea is. And he was saying that the head of the world, the CEO of the world food, um, fund or food bank or whatever it, a food world food bank had applied 49 times before he actually got accepted to do a TED talk.
Nathan Simmonds:
And this guy’s charismatic and talking to huge audiences about great ideas, but there isn’t there, you know, it just wasn’t the right idea for those people. So it takes time to do these and you’ve got to come with that energy to land it. Second direction it takes me though is then looking at the magic pill from negotiation. Um, so I’m, I’m, I’m aware I’m sharing the screen at the moment, but again, it’s just talking about who you are bringing to that conversation, how you are positioning yourself and to stop doing that. The, the amount of importance, you know, what energy, what characters, what demeanor do you want to bring to that conversation to support the dialogue that you are creating.
Colin:
Absolutely. I think I refer to this as um, my monkey in the cage and bear with me on this one a little bit. Um, story, uh, Victor Cayenne, when he first started in his early career was selling toothpaste. Um, and he went into, or he was invited in to go and sell his toothpaste along with a number of other suppliers. And um, he went, I got good toothpaste. They’ve got good toothpaste, they’ve got good prices, they’ve got good prices. And he realized he had nothing that really differentiated himself from his competitors.
Colin:
And that is the reality for all of us as suppliers or suppliers we work with. They’re all absolutely brilliant with absolutely brilliant people. I’m sure their prices are all awesomely competitive, but what is that point of difference? So Victor decided to differentiate himself and story goes that he went in with a cage with a monkey in it and halfway through the meeting the cage is open, the monkey’s out paper’s flying absolutely everywhere.
Colin:
It’s all a bit chaotic. Um, this is Presentation Monkey back in the cage, coffee roads couple weeks later, here’s the phone call. Congratulations, we’d like to award you the contract. Thank fantastic. That’s great news. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Um, well I’ve got you. Uh, just ask for a bit of feedback. What made you award me the contract? Simple answer was you were more memorable than your competitors. Exactly.
Colin:
That may well be a little bit of poetic license in that story. Um, and why wouldn’t suggest any kind of page taken into any kind of meeting with any supermarket. It is about considering what your metaphoric monkey in the cage is, um, in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors to stand out and importantly, still maintaining your, uh, your credibility.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And whether you love him or hate him. Bill Gates at a very similar thing in his Ted Talk when he opened the jar on the mosquitoes when he was talking about um, malaria, it made people think and it got people responding. Whether there was mosquitoes in that jar or not, who knows? Doesn’t matter. Uh, that is you are hitting certain psychological hot cognitions, which then trigger certain different responses and reactions is understanding what those, those hot cognitions are that put you in front of those people again and again and again.
Nathan Simmonds:
Conscious time crock. It is 1 27. I hope this is useful. Everyone, everyone who’s here is attended. Thank you very much for being here. So very appreciative. What has been useful from this week’s Sticky learning lunches for you. We’d love to know right now. So this is an open question to the holy audience, what has been useful for you today and from this week?
Nathan Simmonds:
And also what questions have you got for Andy? So fire those into the questions box. What’s been useful, what’s been valuable? What questions have you got right now? Let us know. And while we’re talking about that, just to let you know while we were talking, I went and found the article for the Negotiation Magic Pill. So that’s got some information there, just ideas that will help you to enter into negotiation conversations in a very different mindset to get you even better results.
Nathan Simmonds:
So that’s already there. Now while those questions are coming through, bear with me ’cause I am just going to pick up some extra bits here and get those into the chat box. As I said earlier, I did say make sure if you haven’t signed up for E to Monday’s session even, um, now is the time to go and have a look and get yourself registered for Monday and also for the leadership development sessions as well.
Nathan Simmonds:
Also, I’ve just dropped the link in there for the Catman category management coaching cards. So all the stuff that we’ve covered through this week and we’re gonna be rounding up on Monday, are all included there in the coaching cards as well. Huge, phenomenal value. We’ve got a multitude of decks now for asking the right questions in the right scenarios. These are the category management ones. They’re five Power for the pack, takes you through each stage of this funnel and helps you to ask the right questions of yourself.
Nathan Simmonds:
So if you haven’t got your pack, now is the time to go and do this. Um, always good to remember get into store and to understand the retailer and their objectives before creating pages of PowerPoint analysis. Absolutely agreed McKayla and as much as Andy loves his data and his analysis, you know, it is, it’s getting the fair and the right and the reasonable combination of those things, um, from this week. The power of and also awareness of challenge reality in my head.
Nathan Simmonds:
Tell me more, Colin, you know, have you picked up some more awareness of the challenges and realities that you have in your own head when it comes to regards to, to category management? Um, and how is this helping? How is this training course we’ve just delivered in this space helping you to push beyond those really, really important? And I’m gonna go and get one more link. Bear with me.
Colin:
Good multitasking there, Nathan.
Nathan Simmonds:
Terrible at it. Never gonna work.
Colin:
So I’m just standing here enjoying the heat of the room as the, uh, windows all shut. We’re just now,
Nathan Simmonds:
Well it’s scientifically proven that multitasking doesn’t exist meant that the difference between what’s in my head and the reality in the store. Absolutely Colin, the difference between what you think in your head and what is actually the reality out there are worlds apart. Um, and again, even if you go into the store with your own set of eyes, you’re still seeing it from what’s behind your own set of eyes and you’ve got your own biases of what you think is right and wrong in that store. And it’s super important that we’re actually getting a, a cross section and we’re triangulating our thinking.
Colin:
I think that’s super important. Um, and for me that’s where we kind of develop those hypotheses, but then need to be tested with a robust sample of the people. We’ve seen it so many times when supply goes in and it says to the buyer, look, we’ve got this new product, it’s absolutely terrific, you’re gonna love it. And the buyer goes like, yellow, yellow, not my favorite color. Not interested. It’s about saying actually in the most politest way, it’s not about whether you like yellow or not. All of our customers, all of your customers, 90% of we are said yellow is absolutely fantastic.
Colin:
Trying to head that stuff off. Firstly, don’t make it about individuals personal preferences. We we’ll have them neither right nor wrong. We’ve gotta make sure we’re persuading our buyers, suing the person who’s making that buying decision by backing it up all of the relevant and appropriate information to what our shoppers are saying and telling us that they actually want help.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And last but not least before we close off today, if you would like Andy to speak to you, to speak to your team, to speak to your account managers about category management, to increase the number of opportunities that you’ve got and getting them landed. I have just put the link in there for the virtual classrooms that will help you to start an initial conversation with Andy Palmer and help you to expand what it is you are doing and the slice of the pie that you’ve got in all directions.
Nathan Simmonds:
A getting a bigger slice, also getting a larger slice and I mean, kind of the, the expansion, not just the, the, the slice out of that pie as well. So super important. If you know someone that needs that support, now is the time to click on that link and start that conversation. Andy, thanks very much for today. Really appreciate it.
Colin:
That’s a pleasure. We’ll see you on uh Monday.
Nathan Simmonds:
On Monday and everyone else is watching now. Thanks very much for the day, really appreciate your time and we’ll see you on Monday as well. Have a lovely rest of the week and enjoy your weekend.
