One of the secrets to boosting your supermarket sales?
Get the most out of your distribution network!
Yes, as we'll see throughout this article, brands offering their products in supermarkets have many techniques at their disposal to help their retailers increase sales of their products. Sidely shares its secrets with you, from inter-departmental collaboration to in-the-field network animation techniques. The key: increasing your brand's visibility with consumers!
And the first thing to do is to set up an organization conducive to animation. That's what we're going to look at now.
One of the keys to energizing your distribution network is collaboration.
Like most brands that work through a dealer network, you're well aware of the importance of implementing field activities to boost your sales. But before you start improving your field activities, we recommend that you establish effective collaboration between marketing and your sales force.
Sales Enablement is the synergy between your marketing and sales departments. This strategy is based on two simple facts:
The marketing and sales teams, although in the same company, tend to work separately. They are often functionally and hierarchically separated. On the one hand, marketing plans its strategy in advance, while sales adjusts to the realities of the field and its ups and downs, forcing it to remain flexible.
Faced with this loss of efficiency, companies are trying to break down these silos. The aim? Improve collaboration between departments. The marketing department draws on data and feedback from the field to assess and improve the relevance of its message, while the sales department benefits from marketing information and concepts that give it a more global view of the market and its product. Ultimately, this collaboration improves sales strategy, and enhances the skills and efficiency of each stakeholder.
To ensure that your distribution network is properly coordinated and that sales and marketing are properly aligned, you need to take a number of steps: reorganize your human resources, set up collaborative processes throughout the purchasing process, and develop tools to coordinate the whole process...
A CRM designed for supermarket brands will centralize data of interest to all stakeholders. And when this knowledge is shared and used as the basis for a common sales strategy, performance is guaranteed: sales reps sign more deals and are better equipped for their negotiations!
Finally, the marketing department sometimes opts for a "category management" strategy. This category-based approach aims to analyze in depth what consumers want from a certain product category. This enables them to be better promoted and sales to be increased in this product segment. This expertise is an invaluable aid to sales staff when negotiating and selling to external distributors.
Combining the expertise of your marketing and sales departments significantly boosts their respective impact on sales, and helps you optimize the management of your network of external distributors.
For all these reasons, it's vital that you give your sales people all the tools they need to excel in their job.
The above-mentioned strategies enable you to broaden the skills of both your marketing and sales teams. With the right management, you can maintain these processes. Management that sometimes justifies the creation of a sales enablement manager position. A good manager is one who improves and consolidates winning processes by strengthening the skills and competencies of his or her teams.
Training your sales force is the secret to success. Your sales force will become hyper-performing in the animation of your networks when you train them to :
Rewarding your sales staff is a way of keeping them motivated and willing to acquire new skills to improve their performance. They are at the heart of your external distribution network.
Sidely Council
A fun and effective way to make your salespeople aware of marketing logic is to offer them a training session in collaboration with marketing, during which you address the famous 4Ps of your marketing strategy:
By integrating all the stakeholders in the marketing mix, you enable everyone to see their place in sales enablement and understand the importance of contributing to the ultimate goal: performance!
Now let's move on to the next step: segmenting your resellers.
So, how can you animate your network more effectively? Get to know your distributors! An analysis of the different distributors of your products can help.
Who are your top earners? As a salesperson, you need to focus your efforts and your animation budget on the distributors who sell you the most.
You probably already have some field data to tell you this: numerical distribution rate (DN), value distribution (DV)...
Analyzing your sell-outs, via your checkouts, will enable you to identify the points of sale that generate the most sales on your products.
Your distributors' sell-out is undeniably a key criterion, but don't overlook their untapped potential. Good promotion also means knowing how to boost sales of your product in a high-potential outlet that has not sufficiently promoted your product, for example by not offering you the best facing on its shelves.
This potential may lie not only in its market share in relation to competing retailers in the area, but also in its ability to attract your target clientele via its brand image, its ability to train its sales force, or even the number of sales people it employs. These criteria are important to your end customers, and therefore to you too.
Exclusivity has to be earned: pamper your exclusive distributors! In the long term, maintaining this exclusivity means making a major effort to preserve this privilege. The distributor prevents your products from being drowned out by the competition. So, return the favor: take care of this relationship, listen to them, give them the right tools and advice so that they can sell even better, for a win-win partnership.
But that's not all: your distributors are also animated by the knowledge and energy you pass on to them.
Your resellers' salespeople are good at selling the products they know well. So you'll have to work hard to get them to know how to sell your brand!
It's possible to train your resellers' sales staff, provided their manager doesn't object. After all, these are their teams. To make these training sessions attractive, offer short, easy-to-access and fun formats, either face-to-face or online. Don't hesitate to "gamify" your training courses. In addition, try to offer training courses that are not restrictive and that ensure participants retain the essentials they need to sell well.
Why not fuel their competitive spirit with best-seller contests and challenging rewards?
Finally, if it's difficult to make direct contact with sales staff at the point of sale, you'll suggest solutions to their manager or to those responsible at higher levels.
Now we come to the tried and tested classics! You can offer your supermarket partner merchandising solutions for your product. Whether it's suggestions for cross-merchandising, advertising trays to promote your brand or product, POS (point-of-sale promotions) or other promotional actions, these offers are all ways of reducing your distributor's expenses, boosting their sales, and therefore yours. Sales aids are useful for promoting the different qualities and features of your product. Present them well and offer them to your distributors. Their sales representatives will also use them to support their sales arguments.
So, as we've seen throughout this article, there are many ways to stimulate the animation of your network of external distributors. The human element is at the heart of this win-win situation, and you should invest the necessary resources in sales training. It's also essential to get marketing and sales working together. Last but not least, on-the-ground promotion plays a crucial role, using classic merchandising techniques.
Feeling that your CRM isn't ready for these changes? Request an online demo now!
