How to work with retail chains when promoting goods. How to sell yourself in retail networks

Organization of product promotion in retail trade

Trade is represented by wholesale and retail companies. The latter are engaged in promoting products to end consumers. Competition in the market is intensifying, which is influenced by the active development of retail chains.

Definition 1

A retail network is a collection of trade organizations (stores and other points of sale of goods) that are located in a certain geographical area.

To attract more customers, many companies supply their products to large retail chains. The reason is the expansion of sales markets, greater traffic of people, the likelihood of making impulsive purchases (the consumer came to the store for one product, but purchased others).

The system for promoting goods in retail chains pursues a number of goals:

• demand generation;
• sales promotion;
• improving the image of the retail network.

The structure of promoting goods in retail store chains is a general and specific communication program for retail chains. It includes a complex of four elements: advertising, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling. Typically, networks do not use one single means of promoting goods, but use them comprehensively.

In modern conditions, the means of promotion in retail chains are active sales, which include:

1. searching for new buyers;
2. sales logistics;
3. comprehensive promotion techniques.

Note 1

The most effective marketing means of active sales is considered to be trade promotion. This is the stimulation of trade activity through incentives that are designed to speed up the process of selling goods in retail chains.

Trade promotion is a marketing method that is aimed at increasing demand for goods presented on store shelves through the distribution of samples (sampling), special prices, product presentations, loyalty programs and sales promotion.

Conditions for promoting goods in retail chains

Many manufacturers dream of getting into retail chains, and even large ones (local or federal), such as Metro, Auchan, Dixie, etc. In order for the product to be on the shelves in retail chains and attract customers, it is necessary to complete a number of steps:

• conducting marketing research of potential consumers;
• drawing up forecasts of expected profits;
• competitor research;
• determination of a representative or decision to independently offer products to retail chains;
• familiarization with the key principles of the trading network;
• meeting a product category manager;
• conducting product presentations.

When studying the retail market and choosing a retail chain, it is necessary to answer a number of questions:

1. Is your product in demand and in demand or is it on the market?
2. Do you have a retailer or chain store in mind that would benefit from your product?
3. What do you need to know about a product to find your buyer?
4. When concluding an agreement with a retail chain, will you be able to produce the product in the required, even large volume?

The answers to these questions will show the feasibility of promoting your products in retail chains.

It is advisable to predict the expected profit. It should be within reasonable limits, but not cause a loss to the company.

The production cost is 1/5 of the retail price, sometimes less. Next, the cost of packaging, marketing activities, and sales of products at wholesale prices is calculated. It is important to remember to factor in retailer costs for other fees. Retail chains often organize promotions and provide discounts to customers. Therefore, there may be requests to reduce the wholesale price for retail. You need to carefully study the pricing process.

When a company is looking for its buyer, in this case a retail chain, it studies its activities. Before deciding to choose a retail chain, you need to visually inspect stores that offer similar products. Subsequently, when the product is already on the shelves of the retail chain, you will have to make presentations for buyers to inform and attract attention.

The manufacturing company can independently promote its product to the retail chain, or it can hire a representative.

Having decided to enter a specific retail chain, the company draws up an application and prepares a package of necessary documents. You definitely need to study the operating principles of the selected retail chain and understand what it means to become its supplier.

Before choosing a retail chain, it is advisable to contact the manager for your product category and find out whether similar competitors’ products are in demand, and whether they are interested in getting another supplier. Perhaps a meeting will be scheduled where the company will be asked to make a presentation. In addition to words and beautiful slides, it is necessary to provide the opportunity to see the product and try it. Therefore, in addition to the presentation, a demonstration or tasting of the product should be arranged at the meeting.

Merchandising as an effective way of promotion

Currently, merchandising is of great importance for the development of trade.

Definition 2

Merchandising is a set of activities that are carried out on the sales floor of a store and are aimed at promoting a product or brand.

Merchandising is a list of technologies for creating effective communications between consumers and products at the point of sale.

To use merchandising, companies must comply with the following requirements:

• availability of a full range;
• special design, namely the organization of the sales area (showcases, stands, counters, refrigerators, if necessary);
• placement of goods in the hall;
• lighting.

The most expensive and exclusive products are located on shelves at eye level for ease of grasping. Cheap goods are at the very bottom, for which the buyer needs to bend down.

Essential goods (bread and dairy products) are located at the very end of the sales floor, so while the buyer reaches the shelves with these goods, he is more likely to put into the cart something that he did not intend to purchase.

The key goal of merchandising is to increase company profits and turnover indicators.

To achieve this goal, the following tools are used:

• store design inside and outside;
• advertising at the point of sale;
• drawing up a route for customers to move around the store;
• color solutions;
• assortment, etc.

Research shows that up to 70% of all purchasing decisions are made by consumers directly at the point of sale. This suggests that it is unplanned purchases that make big sales. And this is the merit of competent merchandising.

Standby mode

If a company sells a popular product at the lowest prices, then sooner or later the retailer will be interested in it. The main thing is to have a margin of financial strength and patience.

Co-owner of the Rostov group of companies "Vek" Konstantin Ostapkevich produces dumplings, dumplings, and sells wholesale Polish mushrooms and apples. In 2012, Vek's revenue amounted to 1.6 billion rubles. According to its own estimates, the company in the south of Russia occupies 60% of the frozen pizza market and 20% of hand-made dumplings. But even as a leader, Ostapkevich does not always sign contracts easily.

Two years ago, the buyer of one hypermarket chain did not want to introduce Veka mushrooms into the assortment of the Krasnodar store without an entrance bonus. “The selling price of goods for chains at that time was 250 rubles for a box weighing 3 kg, which included our markup of 15 rubles,” recalls Ostapkevich. “Bayer began to bargain: “Give it cheaper, otherwise I’ll take it from a competitor.” After negotiations our price was already 235 rubles per box, but the buyer did not let up.” Plus, the buyer demanded that Vek deliver goods every day in small quantities. Taking into account logistics costs, the entrepreneur would trade at a loss. Ostapkevich refused to cooperate. But he was tormented by a thought: who could be the mysterious supplier of loose mushrooms for this retailer? Suppliers' selling prices did not differ much. The secret was revealed unexpectedly. One of Vek's clients, who was trading at a vegetable market, suddenly began purchasing 500 kg of mushrooms per day instead of the usual 100 kg. “We wondered why the client needed such a large volume. And the wholesaler replied: “I have a large store that buys them, and I sell them to them.”

After detailed questioning, Ostapkevich identified the mysterious buyer. It turned out to be the same buyer of the hypermarket. Moreover, he bought mushrooms for 240 rubles in cash. for 3 kg and delivered the goods himself. “The wholesaler at the vegetable market picked up the goods himself and did not pay for delivery,” explains Konstantin. “Therefore, the selling price for him was lower than what we offered mushrooms to the chains.”

Ostapkevich realized that the buyer was bluffing, pretending that the network contained a competitor’s product. Having figured out the simple combination, Konstantin took a wait-and-see attitude. A week later, when the buyer was tired of going to the market, he himself contacted the company and agreed to supply the products on initial terms - 250 rubles each. for 3 kg. Considering that the supplier compensated for VAT plus delivery, it was more profitable than buying on the market.

Mystery shopper

The “mystery shopper” method is well known to retailers - with its help, companies regularly assess the quality of service. But sometimes controllers perform other functions - they contribute to sales growth.

The general director of the regional representative office of a building materials manufacturer, Alexander Vasiliev (name and surname have been changed), worked for a long time as a network manager for a Caucasian manufacturer of alcoholic beverages. Six years ago, he was given the task of introducing mid-price segment vodka into the range of the Magnit chain (it cost 70-80 rubles per 0.5 liter) without paying an entrance bonus. At that moment, introducing one product item into 250 points of the network cost the supplier $40 thousand. Vasiliev agreed on a trial supply of goods to 22 stores.

“The buyer wanted to see how customers would buy the new product, and then decide whether to buy the product on an ongoing basis without an entry bonus,” recalls Vasiliev. “250 bottles per month from one point were considered good sales.”

The supplier's managers developed a plan and allocated a budget of 250 thousand rubles for its implementation. (just over $8 thousand). The idea was simple. The company hired “mystery shoppers” who took turns coming to Magnit stores, purchasing its vodka and returning the goods to the warehouse. Thus, the supplier artificially increased sales of its goods and lost money to a minimum. Of the funds allocated for the promotion of vodka, 250 thousand rubles. the manufacturer actually spent only 70 thousand rubles - they went to pay for the work of “mystery buyers”. Two months later, the contract with Magnit was signed. By the way, once on the shelves, vodka continued to sell well – without the participation of “mystery shoppers.” However, after a year and a half, the vodka of the cunning supplier disappeared from the network: the company moved the bottling of alcohol from the south of Russia to one of the factories in the Central region. Because of this, logistics have become more expensive, and along with it, the selling price of the goods has increased. A half-liter bottle of vodka cost 20 rubles. more expensive, demand fell, and Magnit removed the product from its range.

Duel with a competitor

Each company considers its product to be the best. If this belief is supported by the good quality of the product, then even with not the lowest price you can get online for free. Let's say, by arranging a show for the buyer - like the TV show "Test Purchase".

The St. Petersburg company "Honey House" - one of the largest suppliers of honey to retail chains - produces about 400 tons of products per year. General Director of the Honey House Anton Georgiev considers counterfeit goods to be the main problem in his market: “Sellers often lure buyers with unusual names, for example, they sell taiga honey, ginseng honey, sea buckthorn honey.” Although sea buckthorn honey does not exist in nature, Ginseng is a rare plant; you can spend a month searching for it.”

Network suppliers also use other tricks: most often they mix honey with syrup or sell cheap sunflower honey under the guise of flower, linden, and herb honey. At a time when Honey House was just entering large stores, Georgiev went to negotiations with the buyer of the Dixie chain. Anton looked into one of its outlets and bought a couple of jars of his competitor’s honey. During the negotiations, the buyer explained to Anton that the price of the Honey House was higher, and he was satisfied with the turnover and product margin indicators of the current supplier. Plus, changing one manufacturer to another is associated with bureaucracy, and he does not see any compelling arguments for replacement. Then Anton pulled out the honey, showed the receipt from the Dixie store and began to explain. “Your product says “May”, but in GOST standards there is no such concept,” said Georgiev. “Honey can be flower, acacia, linden. This is how the manufacturer tries to hide the real origin of his honey.”

Having finished the educational program, Anton began tasting. The entrepreneur took a jar of his competitor’s buckwheat honey, gave it to the buyer to try, and then handed over his own. The differences in color and taste were obvious: Georgiev’s honey was dark brown and bitter, while his competitor’s was sweet and amber in color. “Most often, suppliers bring selected samples to tenders, but after the contract is concluded, they begin to supply cheaper products,” Anton explains the test results. In the end, the show worked. The buyer was outraged by the fact that the supplier was deceiving him. And forgetting his previous arguments, he decided to take the Honey House products without bonuses.

Exclusive brand

Network buyers are not without professional vanity. Suppliers can use this to their advantage.

Deputy General Director of the St. Petersburg "Classics Company" Vyacheslav Golovnin worked for the Avangard company several years ago and promoted the manufacturer's main product online - wet wipes. “Our market was very difficult in terms of entering stores,” recalls Golovnin. “Competition was high, and the product was not the main one in the chains’ assortment.”

One day, the Avangard sales manager sent a commercial proposal to the Vologda grocery chain Black Cat, which included about 100 stores. The buyer received a standard answer: “Thank you, we don’t need anything.” However, the persistent manager achieved a meeting with the commercial director of the network. Before his trip to Vologda, Golovnin brainstormed how to surprise the buyer. The salesmen thought that flattery was a powerful weapon in negotiations, and decided to put stickers with the chain's logo and the inscription on the sample napkins with the inscription: "Special price only for Black Cat stores."

“Our selling price for napkins was higher than that of our competitors,” recalls Golovnin. “But an emphasis on special conditions would increase the chain’s authority in the eyes of customers.”

During negotiations between a representative of Avangard and a buyer, the general director of the network entered the office. He looked at the samples and praised the supplier for his creativity. As a result, the company managed to enter the network at an interesting price and did not pay bonuses. The company made several deliveries of goods to the Black Cat chain with stickers - they were printed in a printing house and then glued by workers in production. “The stickers cost us a penny, but thanks to them we got not only into the Black Cat chain, but also into several chains from other regions. The idea was the same, only the names of the stores changed,” says Golovnin. A few months later, the promotion for selling goods with stickers ended, but Avangard wet wipes, according to Golovnin, are still sold at the Black Cat

While researching the market of retail chains and their suppliers, I have long tried to understand why for many sellers entering a retail chain is such a big problem.

What is it: the reluctance of networks to accept new partners for cooperation or some other reasons? Who is more to blame here – the supplier or the retail chain?

Of course, the networks put a lot of “effort” into creating exactly this state of affairs: these include entrance fees, terrible contract conditions, and simply delaying the negotiation process. But sometimes these are largely the results of the seller’s mistakes; very often, when he comes online, he does not understand why he is doing this.

A simple question to the supplier’s network manager: “Why did you come to this network?” – will most likely confuse him. The answer, as a rule, sounds approximately the same: “So that our products are sold there.” The next question: “Are you sure that this network fits your product range, that it will increase your sales and contribute to the development of your company?” - almost always baffles not only network managers, but also their leaders.

Too often, companies do not know, do not have a clear idea of ​​why they need this or that retail chain and how they will further develop relations with it. For a long time, it was unclear to me why this happens, because every time we are talking about money, often quite a lot. Probably, the roots of this problem lie in the fact that most suppliers are practically not engaged in their development strategy, and certainly not interested in the development strategy of their clients. The main motto and at the same time the guide to action of most companies is the postulate: “The more, the better.” But, alas, for all the attractiveness of this phrase, unfortunately, quantity does not always translate into quality. More doesn't always mean better, sometimes it's just the opposite. Many companies have learned this from their own disappointing experiences.

Let's look at working with a large network, such as Auchan. Working with these stores, making a number of mistakes even at the stage of concluding a contract, the supplier company comes to the conclusion that its goods are sold in this network at a loss, and the more the company sells, the greater its losses. Accordingly, it directly follows that the larger the turnover, the worse; There are many such companies operating in the red today in this and other networks.

All you had to do before entering the network was ask yourself the question: “Why do we need this network, what will cooperation with it give us?”

At conferences and round tables, and just in conversations, my interlocutors often answer this: “To increase sales, to expand distribution channels, increase fame and promote your product.”

But to perform which of the above tasks does the company need this particular network? After all, not every retail chain today performs all of the above functions simultaneously and equally well.

Let's take two such large and well-known chains: Auchan and Perekrestok.

What does Auchan give to suppliers?

“Auchan” gives sales volume, “Auchan” gives popularity - every day each of its stores passes through 20,000 customers. But with all this, Auchan still often causes a “breakdown” of the market, a drop in prices throughout the entire market space. If you set a low price for Auchan, you will have to lower it for all other networks according to contracts. But with all this, Auchan does not provide distribution, it does not provide representation, for this there are too few stores in the network.

What can Perekrestok offer?

How identical are its capabilities to Auchan? Does it generate the same sales volume? - No, it doesn’t. But it offers many times more presence in more regions and many times more retail outlets than Auchan. “Perekrestok” is one of the first Russian chains, which is a kind of showcase of the retail market, which many companies in the regions are still focusing on, including Moscow, in fact, too.

So are Auchan and Perekrestok the same? Auchan is a hypermarket that works with all groups of the population. “Perekrestok” is a store for those who already have money, who are willing to spend an extra hundred rubles for better quality products at higher prices.

Let's take the Azbuka Vkusa network, the third participant in this unequal trio.

It's also made up of supermarkets like Perekrestok, but will it give you the same benefits as it does? - No, he won’t. This chain has a much smaller number of stores and very high prices. It serves a completely different segment of the population than Perekrestok or Auchan, and offers its customers rare and unique products.

Each of these three networks is aimed at its own contingent of buyers and conveys to them its ideas and its positioning with the tools that it has.

Do these tools match your product?

Do you need clients of this network?

Are they worth the money?

This must always be taken into account and calculated. Are you doing this now?

Once you start to think about whether you need this network, ask yourself the following question: “Do we even need this network at this point?” Often, companies do not need to work with retail chains at all or are not timely. This applies to suppliers with limited production of an interesting product that has a good market, or those who have limited production or financial capacity. Why do they need networks? Why do they need this trouble? Often products are sold in small volumes, occupying a narrow market niche, and have a good margin, and in this case nothing else is needed. Every time you plan to cooperate with a particular network, ask yourself the same question: “Do we need this network and if so, why?” The company must have a sales strategy that clearly defines the role of each format and, accordingly, each network in the development of sales of its product. In order to solve this problem, I can recommend using a very useful exercise that helps companies in all industries.

ASK Five unique questions for yourself.

Question #1:“Why do we need this network?” After you answer it, you ask yourself question #2:“Why do we need this?” After answering it, you ask yourself the following: Questions No. 3, 4 and 5:"What for?" (yes, the same question three times). And when the answer to question No. 5 remains as important for you as to question No. 1, then you have every chance to start working with the network and start making effective, good sales.

Thus, entering the network is not the main thing, the main thing is to enter it correctly, to conclude agreements that correspond to the company’s goals and satisfy its strategic development plans. This is the key task of signing an agreement with a network, because otherwise you can simply “die of victory,” as happened with many companies that have replenished the necropolis of failed businesses.

You need to seriously prepare and take it seriously when working with retail chains. After answering the question: “Why do you need this and what results do you want to achieve?” – you begin to understand what and how you need to do in order to achieve significant progress in negotiations with the network and achieve successful cooperation with it.

What is concluding an agreement with a network?

First of all, this is a sale. Large, complex sales are a feature of working with networks. Retail stores belong to the B2B sector, to the so-called complex sales, because they are complex large clients, and decisions on purchasing goods are made not by one person, but by many. This is an important detail because today's business community has a somewhat distorted view of buyers as all-powerful supermanagers. In fact, the buyer is an important, but far from the only link in the organization’s chain. He does not determine the pricing and assortment policy, he implements it and, of course, has sufficient authority to select suppliers. But it is important to remember that the network is not just one purchasing manager; it does not begin with him, nor does it end with him.

And no matter what kind of sales transaction is being made, B2B or B2C, complex or simple, there is one key detail where it all begins. And this detail is the client’s needs!

In my book “Techniques and Techniques for Effective Sales” I devoted a lot of time to this aspect, the most important in any sale - identifying client needs.

IN ORDER TO your offer was accepted on the most favorable terms for you; it must first of all meet the interests of the person to whom you are addressing it. It should be understandable, interesting to your partner and satisfy his needs.

How to understand the needs of the network? How to identify them?

As in any other sale, work should begin by studying the structure of the client, the processes occurring within him and analyzing his needs.

You need to clearly understand how you will do this, what you need to know, how you will use this information. Conducting seminars and trainings on this issue, I often hear: “Yes, we collect information, analyze it, conduct monitoring, do market analysis and much, much more.” But, unfortunately, companies often forget that information is not the purpose of this work. The goal is the conclusions that will be drawn based on the analysis of this information, but it is precisely with them that problems arise.

I would like to note that the functions of an online buyer include responsibilities such as studying their suppliers. A good manager should know everything about his suppliers, down to the cost of their products and even their individual operations.

I remember during one of the negotiations in which I happened to be a participant, we tried to sell wine for $5 per bottle to one of the retail chains. The buyer demanded a 15% discount from us, but we said that we could not give it, that the maximum possible concession was only 5%. Then he told us the following: “Dear, the cost of your product is 72 cents, and you sell it for $5, making a decent profit, so either share the income or agree to my terms.” However, at that moment we ourselves did not have knowledge of the cost of our goods. It is clear that the negotiations failed that time, we somehow finished them and came to report to our management. And only then the director told us: “Yes, yes, guys, he, of course, was mistaken - not 72, but 74 cents.” During the conversation with the buyer, naturally, we were not up to par.

Due to the observance of commercial secrets, one of the funniest secrets of the 21st century, we lost the negotiations. This incident is etched in my memory, and many years later I remember it. The buyer managed to beat us for only one simple reason: he knew more about us than we knew about ourselves.

People are often content with the information they have, trying to explain events happening around them based on the basis of knowledge they have. At the same time, they are often too lazy to obtain additional information that will help them make a new, more informed decision. In order not to get into trouble, you need to study your client well, understand what he wants, what his needs are.

I suggest studying networks as follows: algorithm.

First, what determines the needs of the company - these are her goals.

The goals it sets for itself determine its future strategy and tactics of behavior in the market. It’s easy to find out about them; all large networks are public companies, they post a lot of information about themselves in the public domain. Especially information about your aspirations and aspirations. By going to the website of a large network and reading all its semantic sections, you can draw certain conclusions about the plans of this company for the near future. In addition, at industry conferences and exhibitions, network representatives provide a lot of information about themselves, enough for those who want to hear.

What can the company's goals tell you? Let's answer this question with the following analysis.

Each large company, including Mosmart, Auchan and METRO, openly demonstrates its goals, for each of them, this is primarily regional expansion.

What can the supplier do, knowing about this task? What does this give him?

After a little analysis, thinking a little beyond the shelf and the characteristics of your product, you can understand that in order to work in the regions, a large retail chain must have the support of equally large suppliers. It is no secret that today is the era of networks, the era of their unconditional dominance. They are approaching the stage of transition to a new stage, the stage of better cooperation with their suppliers, because competition between retailers is intensifying and will soon begin to make itself felt. Retail chains will move further into the regions, opening stores in the Far East and Siberia, which is, in principle, already happening today.

This state of affairs will primarily affect the relationship between the network and the supplier. The management of retail stores, represented in most regions of the country, will have to make a choice between quickly changing suppliers, suppliers to fill the budget and reliable suppliers, with whom they will have to build partnerships and without omissions and looks down on them.

What will cause this? Neither in Europe nor in America will networks ever have such a problem, because this territory is much smaller than the geographical expanses of Russia, and the transport infrastructure there is also much better than ours. Look for yourself, from Moscow to Vladivostok there are 10 thousand kilometers, and any chain needs to provide logistics for its stores throughout this entire territory. Both Moscow and the regions today generate greater sales volumes than European companies. Proof of this is the experience of such large chains as Auchan and OBI - the largest sales in the world in these chains are provided by Russian stores.

And the chains will face the problem of timely delivery of the required volumes of goods to different parts of the country. Doing this yourself will be very difficult and expensive, which means you will have to attract partner suppliers. But not everyone will be able to do this.

But that’s not all, another aspect is accounts receivable. Today, one alcohol company I know supplies only a chain like Auchan with products worth 10 million rubles a month. We know that Auchan enters into contracts for a two- to three-fold deferment in relation to product turnover. Accordingly, the total receivables of this company from Auchan are about 20–30 million rubles. But this supplier works not only with one network, but also with such companies as METRO, Mosmart, Pyaterochka, etc. Almost each of them has accounts receivable from 5 to 20 million rubles. Thus, the total current accounts receivable from large retail chains alone for this company is about 100 million rubles, this is money taken out of the company’s turnover. And this amount reflects the debt only for the first-tier networks, and there is also a second-tier, retail and, of course, wholesale, which has no less receivables. Not every supplier can afford this, even with the help of banks.

But the networks are growing, not to mention the growth of deferment periods in their contracts. The Auchan and METRO companies are expanding, increasing the number of stores, opening up more and more new regions. According to the increase in the number of stores, sales volumes will increase, both for them and, of course, for their suppliers too. Two years will pass, and in order to ensure proper turnover of these growing networks, the supplier will have to keep receivables of the order of 300–500 million rubles.

Will every company working with these networks today be able to withstand such a financial burden? Will everyone be given factoring or other financial instruments to work with the network?

You know the answer yourself – no, not everyone. In total, the result: today the network has 40–50 suppliers per location, in 3 years the same network will have to work with 5–6 suppliers who will be able to ensure the saturation of stores with goods throughout the country and provide the required amount of free money in the form of deferred payment. These conditions will become a kind of filter for a number of categories of sellers, which will weed out the weakest and most uninteresting of them.

All of the above analysis is needed only to better understand the needs of the network, the needs of the client, although, quite possibly, not all networks clearly understand this. This knowledge can help formulate an offer that will satisfy the client’s interests not only today, but also tomorrow, and this is the basis for forming a loyal future partner.

Thus, a company's goals can tell a lot. They can tell you how the network will develop, what its strategy is, what its tactics are. All this can be calculated by knowing the long-term strategy of your potential partner.

So, the goals of the network company are the first element that the supplier should study before starting negotiations.

Next point, requiring detailed study is the structure of the company.

Why do we need this knowledge? The structure of a company largely explains the behavior of its employees, how they will interact in the flow of information. Having studied the internal structure of your future partner, you will begin to understand how to act and where to direct your blows.

When you delve into the organization of a retail network as a whole, you become more aware of the needs of the department that works with you, because the interests of the company as a whole are the totality of the needs of all its departments. And vice versa, when a network determines its goal, its general general need, it splits it into separate tasks for its structural units, giving rise to dozens of small needs, up to the personal interests of employees. And even these personal interests you should also know. Learning about a company's structure gives you a better understanding of your customer's needs at different levels.

Where can I get information about the structure? It’s simple - this information is most often publicly available; you can find it on the Internet and in internal company documents. For example, in the same Auchan the structure of the organization is displayed on a stand in the central office.

Remembering that any network is an ordinary branch organization engaged in retail trade, the skeleton of the structure can be drawn even without knowing almost anything about the network itself. All such companies have the same departments: stores, marketing service, personnel service, purchasing department, IT department, etc. You just need to want, and you yourself can determine the basis of the structure, and then you can use additional sources of information.

Rice. 1. Scheme of intersection of needs of different levels in the company

The needs of the organization consist of the tasks of the departments and the overall goals of the company (Fig. 1). Here you need to separately calculate the needs of the company, the needs of the departments, and the needs of the people working in them. It is in this triple intersection of needs that you need to look for the niche in which you can be useful to the retail chain and its employees.

Any proposal is interesting only if it is aimed at satisfying someone's needs. Understanding the common interests of a potential partner, the needs of its structural divisions and employees, and understanding the goals of key counterparties, it will be easier for you to build your commercial offer, because it can already take into account the needs of the retail network.

You also have to figure out who your client's clients are. Understanding this gives you an advantage over other suppliers, as well as additional leverage in negotiations, because, knowing your partner's customers, you begin to build your offer based on the needs of the customers of the network with which you are going to cooperate. And meeting their needs is a key element in the success of the network itself.

Unfortunately, today not all networks work taking into account the needs of their clients, because so far the market allows development without taking into account the interests of the end user. At present, it is more profitable for a chain to open new stores than to satisfy the needs of its regular customers, because this quickly leads to an increase in the company's capitalization and an increase in potential profits. An example of this is most chains: the level of their work and the quality of their assortment. But, looking at history, you can see and understand that the basis for the success of a company like Wal-Mart, for example, is that the management thought only about the interests of its customers and the company developed precisely in the direction of meeting their needs. I think, although I have no experience with the chain, if you go to Wal-Mart and start pitching your offering in terms of the needs of the end consumer, you will be talked to a little differently than if you just try to pitch your product to the chain. Although today, after the death of the founder of this network, I think a lot can change. However, be that as it may now, this giant grew and developed precisely thanks to caring for the needs of its losers.

Next point your study should become your client's behavior its history, precedents for its decisions, history of relationships with your competitors.

This is not difficult to do. I am often asked questions at the seminar: where can I get all this information? Much of the necessary information is located on the company’s website, and even more is freely available on the Internet in various forums and blogs; you just need to try to find it using well-known search engines such as Yandex, Google, etc. You can also get it in the stores themselves .

By visiting retail outlets of the network you are interested in, you can collect many bytes of information that is most valuable to you, completely free of charge, simply by analyzing the shelves, observing the activities of the staff, the cash registers and the size of the queues near them, analyzing the assortment, identifying what is wrong with it you can help, how and in what way you can satisfy the needs of this network with the help of your product. You must study all this thoroughly before you begin to formulate your commercial proposal.

Networks are public organizations; if they were not such, they would not be able to develop so rapidly and rapidly. We can confidently say: “Information about networks is not difficult to obtain, you just need to try.” Some companies, for example, such as Pyaterochka and Magnit, have launched an IPO; they publish all the information about themselves, which you should not be lazy to read. On their websites, magazines and newspapers, representatives of these networks often give interviews, sharing information about the company's plans. A fairly large amount of information about the network you are interested in can be provided by institutions that are already working with them. All you need to do is pick up the phone and ask your interlocutor about what interests you. Of course, it may happen that they don’t want to answer you, but you don’t lose anything. As people say: “They don’t punch you in the nose for demand.”

Very often, supplier companies neglect studying their clients, believing that they already know them well. But knowing and understanding are two different things. Almost always at seminars, conferences and trainings where I have to speak, when I start talking about studying partners, the audience twitches with a kind of veil of melancholy: “Well, yes, clients, of course, this is an interesting thing, but let’s talk about them later, but now it’s better discuss us, our problems." It is clear that your problems are more painful and harder to bear, but they are all born from the fact that you do not think about your clients. Studying them should be a constant, ongoing activity.

What do you know about your clients? What are you selling them? I often conduct such simple testing in companies: write down what you sell to your clients, what do you sell to networks? And I immediately pose the second question: what do the networks buy from you?

The answers do not always coincide, because very often what a company sells and what is bought from it are very different things. The needs at different levels in the network do not always coincide - there are the needs of people working in the network, there are the needs of departments and there are the needs of the network as a whole. Therefore, studying clients and their interests is a fundamental element of working with the network.

YOU MUST know the needs of the company, its departments and the individual employee at his workplace tens of times better than you know your job description, because you most likely don’t know it.

Very often, suppliers focus their attention on studying the buyer, believing that he is the key link. They try to meet him at the resort, in the sauna and other traditional places of negotiation. But what do they know about his real “official” needs, and yet they stem, for the most part, from his official duties. Do you know them? In the next chapter we will come close to finding the answer to these questions.

I have already said more than once that selling online is a classic, big, complex sale, and it is in its complexity that it differs from others. Procurement decisions are made online not by one person, but by several. A single manager in a network is not the person who determines the assortment policy, he is only its executor. Yes, he has great power to vary the implementation of these policies, and yet he is just part of the overall mechanism of the network.

Knowledge of network policy will help you guide the buyer to acceptance your his offers, not your competitor's. This will lead you to success faster than studying the personal life of this employee and trying to reach him through the traditional channels I mentioned in our country: a restaurant, a gym and other cultural places. Concluding this topic, I want to emphasize once again that customer research is the basis of a successful business and, of course, the basis of successful sales.

WHAT'S HAPPENED decision matrix? This is the sequence of discussing incoming information, analyzing this information and developing a decision-making algorithm based on it, taking into account all influencing factors: direct and indirect. This is an understanding of how a given company makes decisions about cooperation and other aspects of its life.

In any organization, for each area of ​​activity there is its own decision-making matrix. As I already said, any retail chain, be it small like Ostrov, a giant like Magnit, or an international heavyweight like Auchan or METRO, is first and foremost an organization, and like any organization there are many divisions.

See if you can draw the general structure of your client. Draw this diagram as you understand it, and in each department mark the people you know.

In most cases, there are surprisingly few such people. A tiny number of network managers or executives are engaged in building relationships with the network or with any other client at various levels.

But successful sales in the B2B sector are built on as many levels as possible. Below is an approximate organizational diagram of a conditional trading network (Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Organizational diagram of a conditional trading network

This diagram is very approximate and is given here in order to simply explain the principle of operation of the decision matrix. Within any company, there is interaction between the sales and marketing departments, the marketing department and the financial department, and together they collaborate with the human resources department, i.e., with the personnel service. In other words, all departments in the company are closely interconnected to ensure the achievement of a common goal. Whatever one may say, all structural units are connected to each other, and these threads, often not externally visible, have a great influence on the decision to cooperate with a particular supplier. The network manager must, after drawing the organizational structure, write down the contacts and needs of each department.

Why does the supplier need knowledge of all departments of the network, the principles and order of their interaction? This information helps the network manager more accurately select the qualities of an offer that can interest the buyer, and better calculate his “blow” against the “armor of indifference” of this client. This is necessary so that you can form a coalition of influence within a given client.

COALITION influences are those people who will support you in a collective discussion, those employees who will vote in your favor or simply speak well of you.

The time spent creating an organizational chart and analyzing it pays off handsomely. The company benefits greatly from this investment of time.

¦ Better understands the client, his processes and dynamics.

¦ Identifies needs at all levels: company, division, employee.

¦ Receives a detailed dossier on his client.

¦ Systematizes work with this client.

Once the company has done the work to develop the structure of a potential partner, the path to concluding an agreement will be shortened significantly. I will give a few examples from my practice.

At one time, when I was still working as a sales director, I was given the task of entering the Mercado network, or rather, not entering, but staying. Our products did not fit their format and store areas, as a result of which they had minimal sales, which did not suit either us or the network management. At all retail outlets we sold products for only 160 thousand rubles. And we had to continue cooperation with this company only because one of the owners of our company lived not far from one of the Mercado stores and, accordingly, wanted to see their products on its shelves.

After lengthy negotiations with a network employee responsible for prolonging contracts, I was told that our company had two weeks to wind down its activities in stores and announced that the contract with our company would not be renewed. The conversation was over. Walking towards the exit, in the corridor I saw a door with the inscription “HR Department”.

I don't think you need to explain what the HR department is. The functions of this division include not only personnel selection, but also its development. Sales personnel in retail chains is one of their sore spots, since there is a fairly high level of turnover and there are almost always problems with staffing and training.

I decided to look into the Mercado HR department and began a conversation with its boss. Of course, the leitmotif of my address was the significance of the role of this department in shaping the success of the company. Thinking about the needs of this department, I offered to help the head of personnel services in training new personnel for the alcohol department; noting that since we are partners, we can contribute to solving the personnel problem. I offered support for free, especially since our company had its own sommelier, who was often unemployed. As a result, we agreed on a series of training seminars for new and existing store employees, set a schedule, and discussed the details.

When I arrived at Mercado two weeks later, the contract with our company had been extended. And the commercial director was actively interested in how I “bribed” the head of the HR department so much that he was now strongly in favor of continuing cooperation with our company. The main result of this work was the extension of the cooperation agreement up to the purchase of the Mercado network by Perekrestok, and the basis for this was the partnership program, which, while satisfying the needs of the personnel service, helped to bring the company’s main goal closer.

At seminars, when I give this example, they tell me: it’s an accident that this happens sometimes. Yes, this may be an unplanned and uncalculated action, but it is well thought out. After this successful surprise, I conducted a small training in my company, explaining the power of such “accidents”.

Let's remember D. Swift's book “Gulliver in the Land of Lilliputians”. When the hero woke up on the shore after a shipwreck, he could not move his arm, head, or leg, he was tightly tied to the ground. Moreover, he was tied with ropes, each of which was thinner than his hair. They entangled his body, and the number of these thin threads was so great that he could not move. So, when working with a network according to the proposed scheme, approximately the same thing happens: the more contacts you have with various divisions of the client network and its employees, the more likely it is that you will be able to conclude a profitable agreement with this retail company.

So, was it by chance that I managed to achieve continued cooperation or not?

I will now give you a few more examples that will give you food for thought and, perhaps, tell you whether this is an accident or the result of a certain technology.

In one of the companies where I worked, it was necessary to conclude an agreement with the Auchan company. Our cooperation was politely refused, one after another our proposals were rejected by the assortment committee and the buyer, and we could not enter the network. The deadlines were running out, and we had to reconsider our concept of negotiations, think and act a little differently.

First, we visited all the stores of the Auchan chain, at that time there were only six of them, met all the department managers with the sole purpose of explaining to them how good it would be for them if they had our products on their shelves, and, of course to understand the specifics of the stores and their needs, and through this the needs of the entire network.

Of course, this did not happen right away and was not easy; when visiting each new store, we tried to increase the number of contacts, find new people with whom we were not yet familiar, and at the same time we used the recommendations of Auchan employees who were already in contact with us. This whole procedure took a little over three months, during which time we were already well known in the company, especially in the stores, and we had thoroughly studied the company, its tasks, needs and working conditions with suppliers.

As a result, we made our next proposal based on the information received, using our knowledge 100%.

And at the next “synergy” our products were sold on favorable terms for us, since we were already well known and the product we offered was already expected. Even the buyer did not resist in this situation, because he did not have a negative experience with our company, but he heard only good reviews about it from store employees.

Simple technology, but why is it still rarely used? I think because of simple laziness. Company executives often approach me with a request to help establish work with retail chains. One of the first procedures that I do during pre-project diagnostics is to find out the level of activity of network managers, the level of how much attention they pay to their clients.

And “Auchan” in this case is the simplest and most illustrative example, I simply ask an employee working with this chain about the names of the managers of the line of the product group with which he works in each store. The answer speaks volumes, very often there is simply no answer, and out of every ten only two give a complete list of names.

This example is the case of one chain of large stores with a name starting with the letter “M”. The company I worked for at the time negotiated with them for quite a long time, almost a year. This was due to the fact that in the M network there are a large number of counterparties per buyer, sometimes this figure is more than a hundred, so he is not able to respond to everyone’s letters quickly and on time. And also, of course, this is also connected with the company’s internal culture, discipline, process efficiency and attitude towards the supplier. Many who have worked and are working with this network have encountered a similar situation.

Companies experiencing a period of rapid growth, such as M in Russia is currently experiencing, often suffer from a complex of similar problems, and the size of the company only exacerbates their manifestations. As a result, after a year of negotiations with M, a cooperation agreement was signed, but we could not activate the matrix.

I don’t know what it was: the buyer’s “malicious intent” or his catastrophic lack of time. Imagine the situation we were in: we paid money for entry, but the product is not activated in the “card”, we cannot ship it. Accordingly, we, as employees, are called to management on a weekly basis and asked: where is the money, where are the shipments, and so on? The emotional state of the employees of our department left much to be desired. Something had to be done.

We decided to sit down again to analyze the structure of this client and discovered that in any network it is not the buyer himself who activates the client’s card, but a certain service; in this network, in fact, as in many others, this is done by the IT service. Having thought this over, we call the IT department, it’s clear that they don’t make purchasing decisions, but they make a decision about literally activating the cards, they simply turn them on. The representative of this service asked whether we had a legal basis for the cards to be activated, i.e., whether there was a contract, and, having received an affirmative answer and checking it, he activated our positions within a few days.

Thus, an issue that we could not resolve for three months was resolved in one day. Bayer returned from the next store opening to the activated cards, to the already shipped goods. And it is clear that he could no longer refuse our product, for this he would need too compelling reasons that do not lie on the surface, and there was no point in it anymore. Of course, as we found out later, it was not easy for the “IT people” (my sincere regrets about this), but the main thing is that our goal was achieved.

People often tell me about the above incident: “And this is an accident, you were just lucky!” – maybe I don’t argue, but once is an accident, twice is a trend, and three times is a pattern, so we’ll talk about the third case further.

I was lucky in my career: almost all the companies I worked for had a little-known product with high prices, the sale of which required maximum effort and effort. This gave me the opportunity to develop and hone my skills and gain maximum experience.

The last company for which I was an employee had a good product, but very bad relations with almost all networks, both international and local, regional. This was also due to the company’s policy, its financial affairs and many other management features.

The company made a mistake in defining its role position; it placed itself above the chains and believed that it had the moral right to violate its obligations and agreements, while trying to dictate terms to retail chains: a laudable aspiration, but within the framework of today’s realities, difficult to achieve and a little dangerous. And the dictate of conditions must be supported by compliance with the agreements reached, and this was precisely the problem here. Due to all the above features, when I arrived, the company had a low sales volume in the retail chain segment. This was due both to the reluctance of the networks themselves to develop sales of these products, and to the company’s attitude towards this process. Such a difficult situation that arose at that moment forced us to look for more complex moves and more elegant ways to solve the problem. My employees and I drank more than one liter of coffee, correcting the situation, developing stratagems and tactical plans to overcome the crisis.

One of the serious challenges that we had to face was working with the Ramstore network. Ramstore is notorious for its financial discipline that leaves much to be desired - many companies are unable to collect money for their goods from this chain for a long time. So we, working in the company described above, were faced with the problem of non-payment of money for the delivered goods. The network owed the company more than 7 million rubles, and this was only for overdue receivables. Before this, neither I nor my employees had ever worked with the Ramstore chain, and, naturally, we did not have any personal contacts there. The management of the company where I worked at the time set us a task: to take all the money from Ramstore - a debt that had been accumulating for three years. Agree that this task is not an easy one, but it is the difficulties that deserve greater interest, because only the best can cope with them.

After the first negotiations at Ramstore, we realized that now no one was going to pay us. It is clear that this situation could not satisfy us, and we set about solving this problem. We began our work by drawing out the organizational structure of the entire retail network. We spent several days drawing, trying to understand how certain structures operate in this company, who is responsible for what, what influence they have and what they have, what the network is interested in, what its needs are. The manager responsible for working with this network did a lot in this direction; her task was to test all our hypotheses in practice, collecting first-hand information. As a result, after some time we had a bright and clear picture to understand how this company works, who is responsible for payments in our category. Using our hypotheses, we drew up a plan for further negotiations and, within a week, talked with several responsible employees regarding the return of the entire amount of the debt.

As a result, a three-year debt of 7 million rubles was repaid in the next four months. We were unable to return only 500 thousand rubles, because, as Ramstore employees put it, this amount was a guarantee for them that we would work well in the future. I would like to note that after the conclusion of these agreements, Ramstor never violated its obligations, fulfilling payments according to the schedule. And in order to prevent possible misunderstandings, all agreements were concluded exclusively within the framework of the conditions specified in the contract.

This is another example that may be an accident, or may be the result of the painstaking work of our company’s employees. It is the third in this book, confirming the regularity of the effectiveness of the technology I describe.

The deeper you study your client, the better you understand his needs, the easier it is for you to work with this client and the more likely it is that you will be able to conclude an agreement with him with less effort and less financial losses.

What is the advantage of this approach?

By drawing the matrix, you begin to understand how your client works, and begin to delve into who is responsible for what in his company. Analysis of the organizational structure and the processes surrounding it will allow you to better understand what actions in the company a particular division is responsible for, who is in charge in this division, how it influences other departments in the organization, how information is transferred in the company, how and by whom decisions are made and approved.

I repeat once again: the more you know about your client, the easier it is for you to work with him. The more contacts you have in different parts of the network (think Gulliver, tied to the earth), the stronger your connection with that client, the greater the guarantee of success and the stronger the coalition that will advocate for you at the decision-making stage. People are more willing to accept the familiar and much more wary of the unknown. And if many people in the company know about you, then imagine the situation: let’s say you made some kind of mistake, and even if the company’s buyer speaks against you, then surely one of the other team members will stand up for you and give their vote in your favor.

So, the deeper your interaction with your client's company at all levels, the higher your chances of low entry fees, small retro bonuses and more.

Thus, the technology for identifying the decision-making matrix works at all levels of the company, at all stages of cooperation, starting from the stage of entering the network and ending with issues of contract extension and price increases. The closer your connections with the company, the larger the coalition that supports you, the greater your chances of successful cooperation.

ONE the man went to the temple and turned to God: “Lord! Help me win a million!” And so he prayed every day, praying with increasing zeal. Time passed, there was still no winning, and with despair and reproach he shouted at the sky: “Well, why not? Am I not worthy or is this impossible? And a voice from heaven answered him: “You should at least buy one lottery ticket!”

In business, as in one well-known parable: in order to be able to get a large, or indeed any retail chain as a client, you need to send there at least one commercial proposal. Drawing up this document is not an easy job, although, unfortunately, it is often done carelessly. I had the opportunity, communicating with buyers as a consultant, to become familiar with various examples of this managerial “creativity.”

In one of the large international chains, whose buyer I am well acquainted with, I was shown commercial proposals coming to them from supplier companies. As I looked through them, I analyzed the samples presented to me. I asked my purchasing friends to explain to me the principles by which they select which commercial proposals to work with and which not. I made the same requests to many buyers in other networks with whom I dealt. The answers from different managers from different networks, and even industries, were the same. Therefore, I will quote a remark from one of them: “Peter, look, I have three piles of commercial proposals, in electronic form these are three folders. They are divided into three types." So I would like to dwell on each of these types in more detail.

¦ The first type of commercial offer, the most numerous, describes the history of the company “since the time of Genghis Khan”, how the company developed, what interesting people work in it, in what picturesque place the office is located, etc. At the end of the sentence - a little about the product and what the company is about may be of interest to the network.

¦ The second type of commercial offer: The supplier, without much strain, sends a price list by mail, which indicates the price of his products depending on the size of the batch, and the network is asked to make a choice that suits it: 1 box - price 1000 rubles, 100 boxes - price 900 rubles, 1000 boxes – price 800 rub. It is clear that there is only one way to work with such a proposal - the lowest price is chosen, and the sales volume is whatever it turns out to be.

There are exotic offers of the second category, indicating that the author of the message is a unique company. For example, the writer states: “If you want to work with us, look at the products on our website www..., where you will also find coordinates where you can contact us in order to find out about prices and working conditions.” Of course, there are few such proposals today, but nevertheless they still exist. The qualifications of the employees sending such “notes” cannot but cause surprise.

The problem with offers of the first and second types is that they are too vague and do not seem targeted, so they can easily get lost among their peers in the mailbox of any large networks. And then company managers who send proposals of the first two types complain about buyers that they do not respond to business letters because they are lazy, uninterested, etc. Let's look at why, in fact, a purchasing manager leaves such proposals without attention.

This is elementary: commercial offers of the first two types do not take into account the interests of the retail network to which they are addressed, or the specifics of its work. As mentioned above, networking is a big sell and is of the complex type. These are sales that require more thinking and less talking. Like any other transactions, they are characterized by the fact that they must first of all take into account the interests and needs of the client and start moving from these needs. More than once I had to work in companies that, trying to break into the network, used the method of the 1990s: a cavalry charge - we are so “beautiful”, so nice, now we will break into the network, “fool the buyer” and live a glorious life. But, as a rule, it is not possible to start cooperation with the network without losses, on normal terms, with this approach; such methods have been bringing less and less success to the “dashing cavalrymen” for the last five years. This results in greater and greater losses for companies, not only monetary, but what’s worse, temporary. I repeat once again - the whole point is that many companies do not take into account the needs of their client.

When talking with managers of such organizations, I asked: “Gentlemen, tell me, what customer needs does your product satisfy? What needs do the networks you work with have?” As a rule, I did not hear any intelligible answers.

CHECK yourself while doing the following exercise. As an example, to simplify the experiment, you can use any network that you know.

Below are the questions you must answer.

1. What needs does the network have?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

2. What needs does the buyer have?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

3. How does the network make money? List these items in descending order.

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

4. How does your product help you make money and what needs does it satisfy?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Often, the answer to these questions begins in a company to change and improve the efficiency of working with networks. For some reason, many people forget that selling is, first of all, satisfying, even if somewhat inflated, the buyer’s needs.

Today, almost all companies strive to secure the support of buyers, give them gifts (or try to do so), invite them on business trips abroad and try to gain their favor by any means possible, coming up with more and more “prizes”. But rarely does anyone think about what the buyer does, what he does, what his interests are as an employee of the company. Let's look at this issue from a technology perspective.

Answer the questions: what do you know about the work of the buyer, what is his responsibilities and what is he responsible for?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

It is this knowledge that will help you understand how to work with a buyer. Then write down everything you think the employee does during his or her working hours.

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

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Filled out? How many points did you get?

How much time do you think the buyer spends on these tasks?

Now check your list against the actual daily to-do list of an online buyer. Take a look at a short list of its standard features.

ACTIVITY buyer.

¦ Negotiations:

– on entering positions;

– upon agreement of contracts;

– on price changes, etc. Analysis of commercial offers.

¦ Market monitoring, search for alternative suppliers.

¦ Analysis of the assortment on the shelf, its effectiveness.

¦ Coordination and organization of promotional events.

¦ Monitoring the activities of stores in their category.

¦ Resolving conflict situations with suppliers.

¦ Organization of tenders.

¦ Conducting internal meetings.

¦ Reporting to management.

¦ Coordination of internal issues with other departments.

¦ Personal affairs.

What does this list say, what useful things can be squeezed out of it? What are the needs of the buyer?

The same as any other person, first of all – safety and comfort.

Safety is when job tasks are performed to an acceptable extent and at such a level that it provides the buyer with career growth and does not cause any financial or material losses. Having analyzed the manager’s time expenditure, taking into account the hours spent on negotiations, approvals, etc., we come to the understanding that the manager lacks exactly the same thing as others - time. And it is clear that reading commercial proposals that consist of 5-6 pages of text or do not contain any useful information for him or his company is not part of his important interests. And this leads us to the idea that he simply “leaks” such letters.

Imagine yourself in his place. What kind of sales proposals do you need, how should they be structured and what should they contain? You need informative documents that answer as many questions as possible, preferably presented in a concise form.

What questions might concern a purchasing manager? Almost every retail chain is primarily interested in turnover, liquidity, margin, and total sales volume. And also some other important issues that have individual significance for each network. For example, for chains such as Auchan or Magnit, this is a question of the possibility of supplying a large number of products at once; for Magnit, it is also a question of making deliveries to all regions of Russia. For the Azbuka Vkusa chain, this is the exclusivity of the product, the absence of these products in other stores.

Having determined all the factors that are important for a retail chain, we will also find what is important for its buyer. Having identified its selection criteria, we can already create a table, an example of which is given below (Table 1).

Table 1

For commercial offer

As you can see, the table reflects all the main questions of interest to the buyer, as well as the preliminary analysis that we have already done for him, thereby saving him valuable time. We have shown the expected sales volume, its cost on the shelf, the size of the marginal markup, etc. The buyer can only decide whether to accept or not accept this offer.

Of course, all this cannot serve as a 100% guarantee that you will be happy with concluding an agreement with the network. The buyer's task is to push you to the maximum limit, since he defends the interests of his company in the same way as you defend the interests of yours. But the more prepared your commercial proposal is, the more fully it takes into account the interests of the client, the greater your chances of receiving a quick and favorable response from the purchasing manager of the network with which you want to cooperate. So, third type proposal the optimal proposal, which we have partially analyzed, should contain the following points.

¦ Brief description of the company (no more than 5-10 sentences); at the same time, it must also take into account the interests of the client. Few people want to read about what kind of office you have, but it is important for everyone to know that you have experience working with similar clients and that you have a good reputation as a reliable supplier.

¦ A table with calculations that take into account important indicators and needs of the client to whom you are sending your commercial proposal. You can add quantifiable criteria that you know your customers are interested in.

¦ Description of your product, note that a product is not a product that you produce, but a product plus a set of services that accompany it. At the same time, the story about the benefits of your product should be written in the language of correctly and accurately formulated benefits of the retail network. For example: “television advertising support for our product will allow you to increase sales by so much” or “the quality of our product will allow you not to have problems with customers for 50 years after the sale of the product.”

¦ Proposal for partnership in various areas of activity that contribute to the development of the network and increase its profits.

The use of a package of partner offers, which was mentioned in the last paragraph of the list, transfers the company pursuing such a policy to a separate cohort of suppliers.

Today, networks are at the turn of one of the stages of their development and are moving to a qualitatively different level, which is dictated by the conditions of Russia as a large country in spatial terms. The distance between Moscow and Vladivostok is almost 10 thousand kilometers, and it is beyond the power of a small company with weak or no partners to overcome. Retail chains are actively growing, adding stores and new regions of presence. The market puts forward modern conditions for suppliers: today they must be large, and tomorrow they must become even larger. In order to maintain the same level of income per square meter of area and constant uniform interest of customers in their assortment, chains must somehow attract and retain customers, and for this they need the same dynamically developing partners, since due to their capacities alone they they won't be able to do it. Therefore, tomorrow networks will need supplier companies that offer a large package of affiliate programs and are able to participate in the development of the networks themselves and the market as a whole.

In my experience of working with chains, there was such a case: the company’s management set me the task of placing pallets in all stores of one international chain in a week in October, and, naturally, this was a spontaneous action on our part, and, of course, this our no one was waiting for initiative. When we contacted the central office of the partner company, we quite predictably received a refusal, since this was outside the agreed procedures, agreed promotion schedules and other agreements. However, during this period the chain was celebrating its birthday, and it needed to organize competitions and other shows to attract and entertain customers, as well as create a festive mood in its stores. And like any company with such promotions, this network had some problems with the organization, because holding all kinds of holidays and other amateur activities is not the network’s core business. So, when I contacted the stores directly, they put forward a counter request to me: “Help us organize this event, and we will help you solve your problem.”

My company colleagues and I found five ensembles with which the network representatives had already negotiated themselves, and contributed as much as possible to organizing their performances at the network’s birthday. The result of such actions, strengthened by our sincere desire to help, was that our pallets were delivered to most of the retail outlets we needed on completely legal grounds.

For about a year now I have been cooperating with the Empire company, one of the most famous companies in organizing forums and conferences. I speak at all major industry exhibitions with master classes on topics related to sales organization and management. At each such event, Empire organizes a Network Purchasing Center, a unique collaboration opportunity for supplier and researcher. The first gets the chance to negotiate with 20–30 buyers from different retail chains in their segment, and the second, in particular me, can observe these negotiations in large numbers and analyze the expressed and manifested needs of the chain companies themselves.

Taking part in one of these conferences, I witnessed the speech of directors of purchasing departments of various networks and heads of purchasing unions, such as METRO, Union of Independent Networks of Russia, Okay, Mosmart, etc. The speech of many of them contained unambiguous message: “Gentlemen! We need partners, companies that will ensure our regional expansion and innovative product range.”

Each of these companies realized that it is difficult to grow alone; there are not enough financial, intellectual, or organizational resources. And the supplier is actually a free source of such reserves. It is clear that not every company will be able to get into the cohort of partners; not everyone has the required potential for this. But every company must strive to meet these demands of the times if it wants to increase its efficiency.

It is clear that at the stage of the first commercial offer you can hardly count on your affiliate program package being accepted. But it is worth remembering that “to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” Let me again give you a simple example from my experience.

My colleagues and I were faced with the task of concluding an agreement with the Mosmart network. At the same time, we could not speed up the negotiation process in any way. Those who worked on alcohol with the Mosmart chain at that time heard about the rather slow resolution of issues in this company. This relates more to issues of procurement and interaction with suppliers in some categories with which I have encountered participants. At that time I was still working as a sales director, and my department and I were faced with the familiar task of concluding contracts with retail chains and increasing sales in this segment. I want to emphasize that it is an increase in sales, not an increase in profits. Because already in the formulation of the task itself, at that time in ours, and today in dozens of other companies, the root of many problems is laid. Increasing sales does not always lead to increased profits, and when working with retail chains, this rule applies more than ever.

We, as usual and as many network managers and their leaders do today, knocked on the door of many networks, trying to conclude an agreement. Somewhere they answered “no” right away, somewhere they continued to have a conversation, but at Mosmart they didn’t say either “yes” or “no”, and this final “maybe” had already set the buyer’s teeth on edge.

At the same time, my colleague and I were invited to take part in a presentation at a conference dedicated to working with retail chains, at which representatives of the chains themselves, Russian and international, also spoke. There we heard a speech by the director for development of the Mosmart network, who spoke about plans for the regional development of his company. After listening to the speech of a Mosmart representative at the conference, we began to study the company’s website and its organizational structure in more detail, trying to better understand how decisions are made there and what we should do about it.

As a result of all this analytical preparation, we sent our next commercial proposal not to the buyer, but to that same development director. Most of our proposal in this case was devoted to partnerships in the light of supporting the regional development of the Mosmart network. Our company had a reliable and wide distribution partner network throughout Russia, and we could provide Mosmart with support in those areas in which they planned to open. Our company had sufficient trading and administrative resources to facilitate the retail chain's entry into the regional market. We reported this in our commercial proposal to the development director of Mosmart, emphasizing that this partnership will be beneficial and interesting not only to us from the point of view of distribution of our goods, but also to the Mosmart network from the point of view of supporting its regional expansion .

The answer arrived in an extremely short time; to our surprise, we received it within three hours. The buyer of the Mosmart company called us and expressed his regret about the delay in the response to our previous commercial offer, as well as his surprise at the fact that we contacted the development director directly, and not him. Of course, he insistently recommended that we conduct all further discussions only with him, but he did not promise prompt consideration of our “case.” That is why further negotiations were carried out in parallel with both the buyer and the development director, which allowed us to conclude an agreement with the Mosmart retail chain within two months, the draft of which had been gathering dust in the company’s drawers for six months.

This is again a prime example of how you can use the Customer Decision Matrix and how a focus on channel partnerships can influence the process of accelerating the acceptance of your proposal.

What are people usually afraid of when sending out any commercial proposal? They are not afraid of rejection. In fact, uncertainty is scary, that situation in which you do not know the result of your activities: whether you can count on cooperation with this client or not, whether you were refused and why this happened. The well-known final “maybe” of a buyer has destroyed more than one business in the world, because the only thing worse than uncertainty is more uncertainty.

To summarize this section, I would like to say the following: in your commercial proposal you must go through all the emotionally and technologically important points of your client, that is, answer his questions that he may not even ask you.

¦ Security. The network should be configured to believe that working with you is a guarantee of smooth business (supplies, quality of goods and services). You must show that the customer is safer when working with your company than when interacting with anyone else.

¦ Profitability. It is advisable to note what your partner receives as tangible and intangible benefits. As advantages, you need to highlight everything that may look like such from the retail network - prices, consistency, quality, stable income. When talking about benefits, you, of course, must first take into account those that are a priority for the client. If you are selling a unique product, then you better find out in advance what is most important in this product for your client, and that’s what you offer him. You should not rely on your perception and knowledge of your product, you need to study it thoroughly: often the client sees it completely differently.

¦ Emotional component. Let the buyer feel prestige, pride from choosing your product, enjoy pleasant communication with you, etc. Feelings are almost always present when choosing, even if it is in the B2B sector. Selling the characteristics of yourself and your product without taking into account the emotional overtones is a dull and unpromising activity.

¦ Comfort. Provide your client with the most convenient range of services and pleasant communication. Comfort is one of the constituent elements of the general emotional background, and it is worth talking about separately, since today it is often the determining factor in interactions with partners. What I mean by comfort here is technological support for cooperation, timeliness and completeness of deliveries, quality of paperwork, deadlines for processing claims, and much more. This is precisely the basis of convenient work with the supplier. Increasingly, your sales and your customer base depend on whether it is comfortable to talk and work with you, and not on the price.

Summarizing all of the above, I would like to highlight the main thing regarding the preparation of a commercial proposal.

1. Yours the commercial proposal must take into account:

A) the interests of the network, the needs of the units that it can influence;

b) professional interests of the buyer: comfort, safety and convenience of considering your proposal.

2. The document must be extremely concise and clear, as informative as possible. In a concise form, you should reflect as clearly and completely as possible the compliance of your proposal with the interests of the retail network.

A) a brief description of the company – no more than 5-10 sentences;

b) description of the product (product + services) offered to the network, in the language of the client’s benefits;

V) a calculation table that gives the maximum understanding that cooperation with your company promises benefits for your client;

G) a description of the prospects for partnerships and the affiliate programs themselves with the network that you can implement.

Who are your competitors? Competitors are companies vying for your market share, for those meters of shelves on which you plan to display your products. These are suppliers who want to ensure that the money you earn today flows into their pocket as quickly as possible. Most likely, you will not like such plans of your competitors; and if this is not so, then you are very gambling.

The competitive struggle for meters of shelf space in networks leads to rapid fatigue of companies and the loss of money by all warring parties. The only ones who are warming their hands on this are retail chains. The pattern is obvious - the higher the competition in the segment, the higher the stakes for competing parties. Until recently, before the notorious alcohol reform, which so harshly remade the market, alcohol companies competed tooth and nail, paying 30-50 thousand. that is, for one SKU only in order to place your product at the point of sale. In other segments where competition is not so high, for example in the children's toys segment, there are much fewer similar examples, and such expensive entrance fees are unheard of.

One of the most common techniques that buyers use and which many fall for is the so-called swing. It consists of the buyer telling two main competitors the same thing: that the competitor gave a lower price. As a result, suppliers often drop the cost of goods much lower than they wanted.

A technological continuation of this technique is closed tenders, when all bidders receive the bid size of the next round, and at the next stage each supplier receives a price higher than what he gave in the previous one, sometimes the difference is hundreds of percent. It happens that in the excitement of competition, rates fly up like birds, sharply upward, surprising the buyers themselves. As a result, there is again a loss of money and, as a consequence, a decrease in the company’s profits.

But in order to somehow resist this, you need to know your competitors well. Very good to know. Moreover, I’m talking about all opponents, even those whom you, out of “arrogance,” may not consider such at all. I’ll give an example from macroeconomics; I think it will be clear to everyone. Today Russia is one of the largest oil suppliers in the world. Who is its competitor in this market, who can reduce the country’s income from this activity? The answer is obvious - other countries producing oil. This is a correct answer, but not entirely accurate because it is incomplete. Our country’s competitors are also our own Gazprom, and other gas-producing countries, and growing companies producing vegetable fuels, and, of course, companies that are working today on alternative energy sources: solar, wind, nuclear, etc. And If you don't consider them all, relying only on your oil reserves, you can easily find yourself in a poor competitive position. You need to take into account the movements and actions of all market players, even those who are not direct competitors, or those who, in your opinion, cannot be considered competitors at all.

Another example from business. The Polaroid company, which produces world-famous cameras and staked out the right to produce them for many years, missed the breakthrough of Kodak photo laboratories, which developed an entire industry under their noses. And then these two photo giants together “missed” the rise of digital photography.

Such “omissions” of competitors happen all the time. For example, alcohol companies closely monitor the activities of their direct competitors who produce similar products: vodka or wine, but completely lose sight of producers of beer or alcoholic cocktails. And sometimes more “surprising” miscalculations occur, when companies that produce the same products, but in a different price segment, or simply operate in a different region, are not considered as competitors.

Can you list your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses? And their strengths in relation to their weaknesses? How are you better than them, what is your difference from your competitors? What is your advantage over them in the eyes of network buyers?

In order to clearly understand how you will work with a particular network, you must clearly know in what ways you are stronger than your competitors. Suppliers often confuse competitive advantage with superior differentiation. If your company has very fast logistics or powerful production, this in itself is not a competitive advantage, but your superior differentiator. In other words, what you are objectively strong at. You only begin to have a competitive advantage when you become better at something that interests your customer. If he is interested in delivery within 24 hours and you have it, while others do not, then this means that this is your competitive advantage. If this is not the most important criterion for the client and he is satisfied with delivery that is more extended in time, for example 48 or 72 hours, then your strength in this part of logistics is just your superior differentiation, but not superiority over your competitors.

This often happens with quality assessment. The company places great emphasis on this product indicator, investing large resources in it, but today the majority of consumer goods have acceptable quality, and the consumer is most often satisfied with this level. Thus, the end buyer, and especially the chain, will not particularly highlight and purchase the product due to its exceptionally high level of quality. To verify the validity of this statement, look at the shelves of almost any store, is quality at the forefront or are all products of approximately the same level, which does not cause problems for the seller when consumed by the end user?

Thus, here we are again faced with the needs of the client, with what is for him the criterion for choosing a supplier company, a factor that has a special advantage for him. It is important to remember that when a buyer buys a product, entering into a contract, he is not very touched by the fact that your product tastes incredibly great or has an amazing original design; By and large, the trading network is not interested in this; it only cares about the level of its sales, the possible profit - the benefits that it will receive from it. The retail chain does not consume the goods it purchases, it sells them!

Analysis of competitors and knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses are necessary so that you can negotiate more carefully and more effectively, regardless of what they are aimed at: extending an agreement, entering the network, or resolving other issues of cooperation, such as, for example , such as increasing prices, changing the assortment, etc. Without useful information, you risk getting hit precisely because of your ignorance.

I witnessed how buyers, when negotiating with a supplier, set him as an example the capabilities of his competitors and how the manager was lost, realizing how weak he was in comparison with other companies or, on the contrary, emerged victorious, showing how strong he was, offering additional conditions . It is not a fact that the examples given by the buyer were true. But if a network specialist does not have complete information about competitors, he loses the negotiations because he is not able to challenge any of the buyer’s statements about the capabilities and proposals of his trading opponents.

The more you know about your competitors, the more transparent the market becomes for you and the better the commercial offer you can make. By clearly understanding your strengths and weaknesses, you can position your product in such a way that it completely falls within the competitive gaps of your business rivals. This will allow you to develop efficiently and with less losses.

In order to study your competitors and understand your competitive advantages, you need to establish constant work in this direction. The establishment of such activities is often part of the consulting projects that I implement with my clients as part of the development of the commercial service of companies. Below I outline some procedures that you can use to try to do this in your company yourself. This is not an easy and very valuable work for the development of an organization; it is worth doing regularly, not only before going online, but also just to stay in good shape.

This procedure is carried out with the participation of network managers and key employees of services that provide work with clients: marketers, logisticians, accountants, etc. The group should be no more than 12 people, if there are more such people in the company, select those who can be most helpful in this procedure.

Before starting the process, you need to get into character, talk about the characteristics of your clients for 20–30 minutes, discuss the main parameters and important features of this group of clients. During the conversation, it is important that the group identify and analyze those factors that help the client earn money, highlighting those from which he makes the most profit; without understanding these factors, further work will not bring the greatest possible effect.

Then invite all participants to imagine themselves in the place of the buyer, let everyone choose a company that you work with or want to work with, and describe it in three to four sentences. Give people 2-3 minutes to get into the buyer persona, let them feel like they are in the client’s shoes, imagine their needs and tasks.

Now let's get acquainted with the methodology for determining the ideal supplier.

1. All participants are given A4 paper and within 10 minutes they identify 10 ideal qualities of a supplier from the point of view of a retail chain.

2. Then the managers are divided into groups of 3-4 people, so that there are 3-4 groups.

3. Of the 10 identified qualities, within 10 minutes each of these groups selects the 3 most important and valuable. Write them down one per sheet and hang them on the wall. In total there should be 10–12 such parameters, but usually it turns out to be 12–18, since there are always additions.

4. Each group is then given 2–3 votes, one less than the number of participants. They distribute these votes according to all the important, from their point of view, qualities of the supplier from these 12–18, justifying their choice.

7. This entire list is discussed again in order to harmonize all opinions. The majority principle does not apply here; it is important to know everyone’s point of view.

8. Then all received parameters are awarded

7 points is the maximum assessment of the supplier's level. (A seven-point scale, according to a number of psychologists, most accurately reflects a person’s opinion: 5 points is too low, 10 is vague, it is possible to give 5 without defining your attitude to the question. That is why I always use such a rating bar.)

Thus, a profile of the ideal supplier company is drawn from the buyer’s point of view. Further, through discussion, the compliance of your company’s qualities with this standard is noted; For each criterion, a cumulative score is calculated that your company meets.

As a result, after such an analysis of your capabilities, you will receive:

¦ a new assessment of your product-service offer and its correspondence to what, in your opinion, interests your customers;

¦ the direction in which you should work to improve your position;

¦ assessment of the level of knowledge of clients’ business by your company’s employees. And this knowledge, as I have repeatedly said, is the basis for the prosperity of the company.

For the head of a commercial service or director of a company, this technique is useful for at least two reasons.

Firstly, As you discuss and work on this profile, you see how and what your employees think about your customers, what they offer to customers and how much this corresponds to what your customers want to buy, it becomes clearer the understanding of how these two items coincide in the minds of your employees .

Secondly, A pleasant effect of this procedure is the analysis of your offer from the outside, its compliance with the client’s needs. Also, when using this technique, you can see not only the flaws in what you offer to the retail network, but some shortcomings in the organization of the company, such as low order processing speed, unclear document flow, poor after-sales service, etc.

If you identify your shortcomings before customers notice them, they will cost you much less. Such a procedure will cost you 3-4 hours of working time, but will save hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of rubles.

The methodology described above is aimed at developing a common understanding in the company of what your partners need and how well you correspond to this. But remember, this is a projection of your knowledge of the market and your customers, so don't forget to ask directly what retailers want.

Another method of self-analysis and assessment of one’s competitive position is somewhat more complicated, as it requires additional preparation.

After completing the first technique, you will receive an approximate list of criteria by which your client will choose a partner, in this case it will also be a very valuable tool. To do the other, it is advisable for you to research your competitors' market. During this process you choose:

1) those competitors that you directly encounter “on the shelf”;

2) those who can influence your fight with the former;

3) those who, in principle, influence the consumption of your products - substitute goods, substitutes, etc.

Thus, you have three lists with which you have to work. In order not to overload the book, here we will consider working only with the first group.

Having received a list of the most dangerous direct competitors, as well as the criteria for selecting your clients, you enter them into the table (Table 2). And only then, on a 7-point scale, compare yourself with your opponents according to each criterion. This simple benchmarking tool can save you a lot of money and time.

table 2

Summary table assessing the capabilities of the company and its competitors

Of course, it’s worth mentioning: in order for such an analysis to work, you need to collect information about competitors with no less attention than about the clients themselves. It would not be amiss to remind you that in the company’s marketing department, for each competitor, especially direct ones, as well as for each client, there must be a card in which all the important information concerning him is entered. In the future, such work, as I already said, will bring the company millions of rubles in profit, not only when working with retail chains.

This “lyrical” digression from the main theme of the book, upon careful examination, is not too abstract. Working with retailers is a high-stakes game, and having enough information to make a decision increases your chances of success.

Let's summarize everything that has been said in the third chapter.

I repeat once again: sales today, especially those as large and complex as when supplying retail chains, are not the same as sales, say, 5 or 10 years ago. If previously we had the chance to work as sellers with different types of clients, win deals and sell our products only through advertising or public speaking, today such business methods are fading away, especially when working with large clients. In the 21st century, when concluding a large contract, both the retail chain and the supplier risk a lot of money and, what is much more valuable, their business reputation. If the mention of the last factor still makes someone smile, this is temporary, believe me, today reputation costs real money, especially when working with retail chains. If you have a reputation as an innovative, reliable and predictable company, you move with low resistance because customers trust you, but if the opposite is true, there are many unpleasant stories about you - you will have to pay for this, and pay a lot to cover possible risks for your clients.

I remember a conversation with one buyer after he charged a supplier an entrance fee that was unprecedented for the sector. I asked him: “Why such a price, where did you even get it from? What formula did you use to calculate it?” His answer surprised me somewhat: “They are unpredictable guys, today they really want it, tomorrow they have no time to deal with us, and this amount is enough for them to value working with us and try to fulfill all the terms of the contract. If anything, this is my insurance against their poor performance!”

Today in the network segment, reputation costs money and mistakes also cost money, every step and every word brings the company closer to either profit or loss, which is why today everything is decided not by a cavalry charge, not by the oratory skills of a sales manager, but by a thorough analysis of all actions and good planning of your work.

Concluding a deal with a network is very similar to a military operation, if you take this comparison for vivid images. In the case when a company has not decided why it needs this or that network and continues to go there, this is tantamount to the fact that a commander, not understanding, for what, sends his soldiers to attack. If you act this way, you will end up with negative results in dealing with these retail stores and a poor balance sheet at the end of your work.

When planning to enter a particular network, you must first understand why you need it and set a goal that you want to achieve by collaborating with this network. After finding the answer to these questions, you can begin to move on.

The next step is to study the network, analyze information about it, identify its needs, the needs of its departments, and the needs of its employees with whom you will communicate. Much of this information can be identified as a result of desk analysis, some needs to be collected from the market, and some of it is easiest to ask the client himself. Some can be understood by analyzing the actions of the network and the cohort of its suppliers. You don’t need to buy any data, you don’t have to find out about the property of the buyers, you don’t need to find out what bars they relax in, what fitness clubs they work out in - all this is just additional information for your research, but not fundamental. The main thing should be to study the retail network as a company with its goals and needs.

Next, as part of the research, you should draw the organizational structure of the network, understand how the needs of the divisions in this organization relate to the interests of those departments with which you will work directly. How they correlate with the needs and goals of the company as a single organism. Try to calculate which affiliate programs you can be useful to the network and which of them you can implement without losing your budget, only improving your status.

When doing analytics, remember what Confucius said: “Planning is much more important than a plan.” So here, you don’t need to put analysis at the forefront, you need to remember that analysis is an auxiliary tool for decision-making, and it is important to know why you are doing it.

After you have analyzed all the interests of your client, you begin to formulate a commercial proposal, taking into account the needs of the network that can be satisfied through your product.

After doing all this work, your task is to develop a plan for entering the retail network. If the idea of ​​concluding a contract can be expressed in a short phrase, like: “enter quickly, yesterday, at any cost,” then it is frankly bad. Thanks to this “magnificent” intention to act, companies lose millions of rubles and sometimes millions of dollars. You need to make a plan with which you will achieve the goals we talked about above. When compiling it, you must follow a certain algorithm.

ALGORITHM drawing up a plan for going online

¦ Determine the project budget. It includes not only the funds that you are willing to pay for entry, promotion, etc., but also the amount of time that you are willing to spend on negotiations with this client; time is also expensive.

¦ Determine the number of people who can work on this project. Indicate the amount of costs that you are willing to incur before entering the “point of no return”, when everything is already possible at any cost.

¦ Reflect all of the above points in writing, because even the most talented of salespeople cannot remember everything they think about during the working day.

¦ Next, you need to clearly outline the budgets: how much time should be spent on drawing up and discussing a commercial proposal, how much on agreeing on contracts, etc. Plan in detail the entire process of negotiations and its support, including possible options for the outcome of this dialogue.

For example, you send a proposal, you take about two weeks to analyze it online, during which time you should receive a response: positive or negative. Of course, the buyer may delay the decision, but to do this, you must have thought out actions tied to control points in time that will help speed up this process. At the same time, you should plan other work to develop this client: getting to know store directors, employees of marketing, development departments, etc.

Plan your actions in several ways: both in case of a positive and in case of a negative answer; You should also have a plan for complete lack of reaction to your proposals. For each scenario, you must have a plan of action with an intended result. You should work out different behavioral tactics for as many hypothetical situations as possible. It is clear that any planning is a person’s attempt to create certainty in the sea of ​​chaos in which we live, but the process itself is already the forerunner of this certainty.

By creating a plan for negotiating with the network, the sales manager begins to understand how the client will conduct these negotiations, he ponders scenario of your actions, their goals and sequence.

Quite illustrative in this case can be the example of law enforcement agencies, which have all the steps outlined for various emergency situations. It is clear that when such a situation occurs in real life, not everything goes as written in the plan: it doesn’t matter whether it’s worse or better, the main thing is that it goes. In the absence of pre-calculated actions, everything can go even more unpredictably.

If you have drawn up a competent plan with possible reactions and responses to positive and negative outcomes, you, as a seller, spend much less time concluding a contract, because, having planned schedules, you see the progress of your negotiations with the network, the direction of their movement and can give an answer to the question: are they going in the right or wrong way, are they within the budget or not. If you have not drawn up such a plan, then even after a year you will not be able to clearly determine for yourself whether there has been a shift in the negotiations. This especially applies, as a rule, to lengthy negotiations with large networks.

Concluding this chapter, I want to emphasize that careful, multi-variant planning of scenarios for concluding a contract with a client increases the manager’s work efficiency and reduces the time of the negotiation process itself, increasing the chances of success in the transaction.

The negotiation process will be covered in more detail in the next chapter.

The question “is it worth joining retail chains?” quite difficult. A wrong decision can have fatal consequences for your business. Therefore, before continuing to read this article, I recommend that you read the previous article on deciding whether to go online for your company.

If you have analyzed all the factors, conducted interviews with candidates and drawn up the approximate profitability of your work with the network, you can proceed directly to action.

The answer to the question: “how to enter the trading network?” look in this article. Below is an algorithm for entering the trading network that will help you perform this action correctly, with maximum benefit, and without extra costs.

Algorithm for entering the trading network:

• 1. Calculation of approximate turnover per one conventional retail outlet or retail meter. As we have already said, the calculation can be made on the basis of sales in non-chain retail and correlated with similar products present in stores and chains.
• 2. Calculation of the cost of entering the network and setting the minimum possible markup. You have the cost of production at today's volume; you need to calculate the cost at the volumes that you calculated per outlet, multiplied by the number of points in the network. So, you have the volumes that you are counting on, you have the cost for these volumes, you have a minimum margin that is interesting to you. And you get the lower price level. Never enter into negotiations with a network without calculating your price options for different volumes. You will not have the main tool for negotiations.
• 3. Fixing the budget for entry to the shelf. You need to be aware of what the costs of entering each retailer will be, whether it's a formal setup fee or a kickback or both. You should fix the amount and have it in your budget before entering the network.
• 4. Recruiting an employee for entry online or researching networking conditions during an interview. If you decide to go online on your own, without involving an experienced specialist, you need to be patient and have the ability to build relationships. You will need the skill of establishing personal relationships from a store clerk to a chain manager. The ability to “take a punch” is required, because they will test your strength.
• 5. Determination of priority players most suitable in terms of assortment, pricing policy, entry conditions. Each retail chain has its own rules of the game, its own assortment, and its own matrix. Therefore, it is necessary to study the conditions and decide on the highest priority networks. But work needs to start on all fronts, since the initial research may not work. You need to understand who will focus the main forces in finding entry points and achieving results. Because some negotiations can take more than a year. Moreover, these are positive negotiations when interest has already been indicated.
• 6. Identification and access to the Decision Maker (DM). The more entry points there are into a company, the greater the likelihood of success. Feel free to network with marketers, store managers, and general sales staff. To understand the priorities of the network, sometimes you can talk with a representative of one store, and although decisions are most often not made locally, you will receive valuable information about who actually makes the decision on how best to enter the network, what are the purchasing priorities, what are the sales figures for similar products . You can contact buyers, purchasing managers, commercial directors and managers. There is no need to hesitate to contact the very top about your product if all the paths below are blocked. You won't lose anything. Sometimes it is easier to contact a commercial director than an ordinary buyer. It is also necessary to take into account the characteristics of the network itself. For example, in MediaMarkt, decisions are made by the store managers themselves; of course, they need to sign an agreement at the central office, but what volumes of purchases may be, the length of the line and the conditions will be determined on the spot.
• 7. Determination of the position in the distribution network for similar goods. The easiest way to enter the network is to close a hole in the company’s assortment matrix. But “a holy place is never empty,” so personal contacts with people close to this information will be very useful if it was not possible to enter on a whim.
• 8. Negotiations with decision makers. The typical behavior with players trying to get online is pressing. Most non-brand companies are ready to make any concessions just to get on the shelves. This is the biggest mistake that networks use for their own purposes. Therefore, there are two main categories of suppliers for them. The first ones are long-term partners with an interesting popular product. The second are those who dream that their goods will be available in the networks and are ready to give them away for next to nothing. The former stand on the shelves for years, the latter actually stand up at their own expense and give all the profits to the network, then financial resources are depleted and the product leaves the shelves naturally. Of course, you can get from the second category to the first, but changes in supply conditions are not very welcome by the network.
• 9. Pressure on retail chains. It is necessary to clearly understand that any network is a huge mechanism where there is no single decision-making center. There are always different interests of different departments and different people. If the buyer said that your product is interesting, this means absolutely nothing; a lot of factors may arise that will prevent entry. The same is true and vice versa, if you were told that the product will never appear on the shelves of this store, then look for other entrances, perhaps through other product items, perhaps through wholesalers who already have an entry point into the network, perhaps through the company’s management. If you know the purchasing price of competitors and know that you can offer better conditions, while the product is not inferior in consumer characteristics, make every effort on various fronts, and you will get on the shelf, although this may take a long time.
• 10. Start of work. And finally it happened. Your product has been placed on the shelf. Now you can cross your legs and just count your profits. No matter how it is. Now comes the hard part. Both you and the network need sales, otherwise the work could come to an end very quickly. At the first stage, you need to make every effort to ensure that the goods go. Do not spare money on promoters, red price tags, participation in promotions. You need the network’s buyers to remember your product, try it and begin to make a turnover that generates income and allows you to save space on the shelf, otherwise you have done all the previous points of entry into the retail network in vain.

Good luck to you in achieving your cherished goal. And if any questions arise during the implementation of the algorithm, we will always be happy to solve another problem to conquer the shelves of online retail - call

Entrepreneurs often complain that it is extremely difficult to get their products onto the shelves of large retail chains. In fact, it’s easy to get into the network, it’s much more difficult to get into the buyer’s cart

What is needed is not bribes, but product

During all negotiations, I immediately say that my company is transparent and operates only in accordance with Russian laws. I studied in the USA and am a citizen of this country, so I do not accept any bribes. If during negotiations the topic of “entrance ticket” comes up, then I switch to English and pretend that I don’t understand what is being said. This is my principled position, from which I do not intend to deviate. Having paid once, I will not be able to refuse such payments to other networks in the future: rumors spread quickly throughout the market. In addition, it is possible that unscrupulous managers of the retail chain to which I pay for entry will blackmail me in the future with the threat of removing our goods from the shelves.

I took a different path - I created an interesting and attractive product. At my first meeting with managers at the Tsvetnoy shopping center, I just brought cookies in a bag and explained what was special about them. Having become interested, they invited me to a second meeting, to which I had already brought cookies and a packaging prototype. Interest was confirmed. For the third meeting there was a full commercial proposal with a presentation and a 3D model of the packaging. As a result, we signed a supply contract.

Get personal meetings

To get on the shelves of ABC of Taste, I wrote a letter to the relevant category manager. On the ABC of Taste website, in the “For Suppliers” section, there are contacts for the entire commercial management of the company. I sent a simple, clear, three-page presentation with more pictures than words. But it conveyed the emotion of my product. The cookie caught the interest of the pastry department and tasting committee, and the chain gave it the green light for the chain's first 50 stores. Only after that I began to purchase raw materials, rented a room and started baking “Marc 100% natural” in my own workshop.

Unfortunately, most retail chains have a high turnover of category managers, so an email may not be enough. My experience suggests that a few calls to friends and you will find a way to the person you need. Seek personal meetings if you are a good communicator. If not, find someone to hold a meeting who can bribe you with charm and the ability to listen/hear/sell.

Have you been refused? My principle: if you believe in the product, use the approach “if the door is not opened, climb through the window.” Find email/phone numbers/names of people at a higher level. I usually go straight to the CEO or shareholder. However, before that, you always need to have proof that you sought, but were ignored or rejected. Therefore, save correspondence, chats on social networks, etc.

If you managed to get through the window or a friend opened it for you, decisions will be made much faster. For example, I was introduced to Andrey Gusev [CEO of the A5 pharmacy chain] completely by accident. It turned out that we had a mutual friend who helped me. I sent Andrey a presentation. Within a few days, we met in their office and found points of synergy, although previously pharmacy chains were not part of our plans at all. A week later there was a cooperation agreement.

Use a distribution company

But personal acquaintances and an interesting product do not always attract category managers and management of retail chains. I tried several times to get on the shelves of Dixie stores, the product was tested, but so far without success. But since I don’t take “no” for an answer, our products will be represented by distribution companies in Dixie and other retail chains that I was not able to enter directly (Lenta, O’Key). This is not as profitable as selling directly, since I will have to share my margin with distributors, giving them up to 40%, but for now I have no other way to get on the shelves of these stores. We will wait, collect sales statistics in other stores and through the distributor, and return with our product again.

Finally, there is another way to get on the shelf - go online for a short period using the in-out system. They can hire you for a three-month period and see how sales go. I’m not sure that it’s possible to reach a high level of sales in three months, so I don’t use this method. In addition, retail chains themselves are not very keen on agreeing to this format, realizing that at the end of the period suffering will begin: the manufacturer will begin to persuade to extend the experiment, sales will most likely be low at first, and the internal administrative efforts for the chain will be equal to the introduction of a new supplier.