Suzi Wynne, Wynne Business: Building strong retailer relationships

Getting confirmation that your product will be included in a buyer’s retail range is only the start of your route into retail. Suzi Wynne from Wynne Business warns that the real work is actually yet to come!

Winning a listing and receiving validation from a buyer that you have a great product that they want in their range feels amazing. Fist pumping, star jumps, calls to colleagues, friends and family to celebrate!

It’s tough and very rewarding to achieve this and get to this stage of your route into retail. But once you have a listing, what’s more important is keeping it there and continuing to make it profitable.

At Wynne Business we work with food and drink business owners to launch and grow their products into retail. So, as well as the pitching we can help them scale-up and manage their retailer accounts.

It’s one of the topics that I will be covering during Two Zero’s new Route Into Retail programme, which is designed to help Lancashire’s thriving food and drink businesses to launch onto supermarket shelves.

The Working With Retailers session provides delegates with practical tips and advice for building strong retailer relationships and optimising sales.

Scaling up your business

The key aspects of scaling up to grow the sales of your products while making profit with retailers are:

• Sales: Pitching products to buyers to get them on the shelf.
• Marketing: Creating and driving consumers to buy from the retailer.
• Infrastructure: Having systems in place to get the products on shelf, on time and within compliance (quality and technical standards).

Working with retailers

The goal is to maximise the listings you have by building strong retailer relationships and optimising additional opportunities in the retail account.

We believe you can split this into five key areas:

• Account management – Joint business plans, managing the account profitably, working across departments and managing agreed KPI’s.
• Range reviews – the goal is to increase listings and/or distribution, review marketing ROI and put plans in place to grow the account.
• Negotiating terms – managing price increases and product changes.
• Marketing activity – planning and managing marketing tactics.
• New product development scheduling – the opportunity to grow your business with additional lines and seasonal opportunities.

The Route Into Retail programme also covers techniques for researching a market, developing a marketing plan to support listings and creating a compelling pitch to buyers to help to win retailer accounts. With practical information and guidance, proven theories and techniques, peer to peer learning and mentoring sessions, the programme is packed with useful content to provide delegates with the tools they need to succeed in retail.