Here’s the Hard Truth Regarding Food Sales Presentations
Want to get into the retail chains? Do you have a compelling food sales presentation? Do you assume so, but you’re not getting contracts? You might be doing these 4 common pitfalls in your food sales presentation. They may seem shockingly obvious, but nonetheless, they happen too frequently among the worst food sales presentations.
1. Failing to Sample Your Own Product
No, we’re serious.
Nearly every retail buyer has a story about taking a meeting with a food sales rep, only to have the salesperson demonstrate a lack of category knowledge so humiliating that they can’t speak to the uniqueness of their own product. Not to mention that food sales presentations are with the category buyer!
Sometimes, the buyer will ask the rep outright, “This product you’re trying to sell me, have you ever tasted it yourself?” and far too often, the answer is, “No.” This is the same situation at a restaurant, right? If you don’t know what you want to order, you may ask your server what their favorite dish is. If they can’t give you an answer or say they haven’t tried the food, that doesn’t instill much trust in the restaurant’s quality, right? Don’t give your category buyer a chance to mistrust your product this way during your food sales presentation!
2. Failing to Know the Retailer as a Consumer
Do. Your. Research.
Cater your food sales presentation to the buyer you’re pitching to today. Every store is different. If you make the same presentation you made to another buyer yesterday, it’s a fail.
However, the key is to pitch to your target retailers as a shopper, outside your own sales view. Do your research to learn the angles your target is taking to engage the customer.
How are they cross-selling? Are they offering meal solutions? Expanded fresh? What kind of campaign themes are they promoting? Are they big into supporting the community and local public relations?
Do your research about how your food brand can fit into these existing efforts and how your brand can bring new ideas that can add value. Your food presentation should be align as a win-win partnership.
3. Failing to Lead with Your Strengths
You don’t want to waste buyers’ time. They have very limited time and very limited real estate, and your goal is to get on the shelf.
So what products are your bestsellers? If you have an item that’s already moving 200+ cases a week, lead with that! Buyers want to know that their investment in your food brand will be worthwhile and that you already see a profit.
As a secondary “oh, by the way” point, you can pitch a shot-in-the-dark idea or one of your mid-range sellers.
4. Not Asking “How Can I Help You”
Again, you’re pitching a win-win partnership. This is Sales 101. Buyers have sales goals, too, according to their situations and make purchasing and inventory decisions accordingly. Your food sales presentations need to align with what the buyers need. And you both want to grow your business mutually. This needs to be the relationship that is the foundation of your food sales presentation.
If you didn’t find out what they need in your research, then at some point during the meeting, you need to close your laptop and listen.
At the end of the day…
Buyers have observed an industry trend that suppliers are getting worse, not better, at doing the necessary research before arriving at a meeting to make a compelling food sales presentation. Too often, sales representatives are short on experience and heavy on assumptions.
If you get a meeting, go in prepared to answer all the inevitable questions about your category, how your brand fits in it, and how you can adapt to the retailer’s needs.
Otherwise, not only do you risk killing the sale on the spot. Worse, you leave an impression that weakens your potential for other opportunities down the road.
If you have any questions about how to create compelling food sales presentations, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food brand marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.