You’re living the entrepreneur’s dream – you’ve gone from inspiration to the hard work of creation and refinement of your product. It tastes great. People at the farmer’s market love it. Maybe you’re on the shelf in a few local shops and markets. But to truly unlock growth and scale, you’re going to need to start talking to some bigger chains and retailers.

It’s time to fire up PowerPoint, Canva, or Google Slides. Grab a cup of coffee while you’re at it. Now let’s get to work.

Part 1: Things to Consider Before You Start

One of the biggest mistakes we see is brands making a one-size-fits-all retailer pitch. Each retailer is different, and there is a lot of pride in those differences. Differences can manifest themselves in many ways; some retailers don’t allow artificial colors or flavors in their products. Others are aggressive about keeping pricing low, and sometimes shirk sales in lieu of every day low pricing (EDLP.) In short: Know your audience!

Learn about what’s important to a retailer by spending time inside the store and on their website. Go inside and ask yourself where your product would be merchandised in the store – sometimes this is an easy question, but sometimes it is not, especially if your product crosses or hybridizes categories or departments. Figuring out where your product will sit on the shelf will help you determine the correct buyer or category manager to talk to about your products.

Next, consider these questions:

• What are the retailer’s goals? Ask them if you don’t know. Retailers are often locked into invisible battles with one another, and are often trying to entice away customers that shop at a competitor. On the other hand, some retailers are all about building up “basket size” or the average total of a customer’s purchase. Will your product bring people over from the other side of town? Or will folks already in the store add it to their cart without substituting out something else?
• How will you deliver your pitch? In-person is great, but many retailers have moved over to virtual meetings. Sometimes retailers ask you to submit things via an online portal. Can your pitch tell the full story without the benefit of your talk track?
• What metrics matter to them? Many retailers judge overall success by comps (sales compared to last year) and brand and item success by velocity. Do they want to raise the basket size or focus on moving units? Figure out how your product can help them achieve their goals; find the win-win.

Part 2: Elements of a Basic Pitch

Broadly speaking, the elements of a sell story can be broken out into two buckets: Qualitative and Quantitative.

Qualitative elements are descriptive, emotional, and language-based.

Quantitative elements are countable, measurable, and numbers-based.

If this is your first sell story, you’ll probably have a lot more Qualitative information than Quantitative – and that’s OK. You can achieve a lot with just Qualitative elements.

Let’s go through common Qualitative elements:

• Origin Story, Problem, Solution: The duty of an entrepreneur is finding a problem worth solving. In many cases the problem is personal to the founder or is troubling society at large (and therefore has a large addressable market.) Next, how is your brand or product different than what currently exists? Often this slide is more nuanced and can show off a raft of current solutions that are flawed in some way but ends on your brand or product being the perfect solution.
• Unique Selling Proposition: Tell the audience more about what makes your product different or innovative. Ingredients? Audience? Flavor, texture, nutrition? Label claims or certifications? Add in why the difference is important to potential customers.
• The Team: Who is bringing this vision to life – and why should the retailer trust you? If you’ve launched a successful brand in the past, that’s a great thing to highlight. If not, that’s OK – focus on how your past experience will be relevant to future success.
• Marketing Plan: Tell me how you will support your product once it is on the shelf. Demos? Social media? Print advertising? Retail media? Influencers? Sales? Promotions? Etc.

Part 3: Quantitative Elements

Now that you’ve got the core story or narrative down, it’s time to embellish it with numbers, facts, figures, charts, and tables. There are a lot of free and paid sources of data out there but here is a list of some of our favorites.

• Google Trends: Very useful to quantify interest in a topic over time; this site measures the popularity of search queries and can compare them against one another. Here’s an example for Regenerative Organic search interest over the last five years. We see that it started getting traction in 2017 but very recently has hit a high point in search interest. This can be used as supporting information that customers are searching to learn more about this topic and it is becoming top of mind for a certain segment of the population.
• Newspapers, Magazines & Websites: National newspapers like the New York Times are a great resource, as well as industry publications like Progressive Grocer, Whole Foods Magazine, BevNet, Nosh, Nutrition Business Journal and others. Some websites we find useful are Snaxshot, FoodDive and GroceryDive.
• Market Research: Circana, Mintel, and SPINS each put out lots of trend based content for free throughout the year.
• Syndicated Data: Check out the Ignite program where you can get access to channel level data for any category in the grocery store for free – sign up here.

At some point in your journey, you will start to get asked specific questions around your brand’s performance versus the category and other brands. Answering these questions with syndicated data is not only easy, but the answer will also match what the retailer can pull up on their side, which makes it trustworthy. You’ll also be able to quantify and visualize other things like whitespaces, contribution to growth, opportunity gaps and promotional strategies.

Should I Include DTC or Online Data in my Retailer Sell Story?

While preferences among retailers may vary, the benefit to showing online sales data in a sell story is that it can show that your idea has already gained traction with an audience. The flip side to this is that many of these online retailer metrics are not what the retailer uses, so it can come off as an apples-to-oranges comparison. If you have the opportunity before the meeting, ask the buyer or category manager if they would like to see this information.

Wrapping Up

Remember, sell stories are pitches, and pitches are a concise story. Stories have a protagonist, a conflict, an antagonist, and an ending. Your brand is the hero of this story. Raise the stakes of the conflict but keep them believable. It’s OK to name another major brand and point out how they are not meeting the needs of the market. Finally, end strong with an inspiring call to action, and a support plan for once you get on the shelf – because if you thought getting on the shelf was hard, getting off of it and into the shopper’s cart is even harder.