SALESPEOPLE: I want you to sell more merchandise, more successfully, to more retail chain store buyers. I want you to avoid all the pitfalls of the numerous sales warriors who have called on me over the years.
Who am I? I am the retail samurai merchant. Perhaps I was the buyer or merchandise manager sitting across the desk from some of you. Those who were prepared flourished in their dealings with me. Others were not so fortunate. Retailing is a tough profession, with innumerable hours spent pouring over sales information, searching for details to drive businesses. Retail is detail. If you weren’t meticulous, I, the buyer, wasn’t that pleasant. I have crushed a few peddlers along the way. However, many well-organized salespeople were very successful with me.
I’ve been an assistant buyer, buyer, senior buyer and merchandise manager for the top specialty, department and super stores in America, in a career that has spanned more than 25 years. I’ve played the game with really terrific sales people, dominating huge multi-million dollar businesses, and negotiating rather gigantic deals. But I played the game with my cards pretty close to the vest. There was no way that I would have shown you my hand. I wouldn’t tell you my plan or what was going on in my cranium. Back then, I was on the retailer’s payroll.
In this book, I’m putting the cards on the table face up. I’m revealing buying skills that are utilized on a daily basis in the retail world. Why am I doing this? I want to help you and many other salespeople and manufacturers to be more successful in your dealings with retail stores. There is way too much miscommunication in business today. If I can cut through the haze for you and reveal the inner thoughts of the retail buyers, you should be able to understand how they conduct themselves. Speak their language, improve the communication and your business with them should prosper. That is my goal.
I also want to provide this book as a guide for existing retail buyers. Although it’s a charming way to learn a career, most buyers are taught their craft through trial and error, without textbooks. Retail buyers operate in an almost mysterious fashion, but it’s not rocket science. The buying profession is a covert society that delights in passing their methodology out via verbal means. It’s time to deliver the secrets in a more professional manner.
I’d like this book to guide your sales careers. I also want the retail business to boom. If I can show you a different path – one filled with wisdom, logic and preparation – your livelihood should undergo a change. I’d like to lead you down the road to a special place. When you get there, you will be armed for the challenge, prepared to confront the retail store buyer.
Are you ready? It’s time for your metamorphosis. It’s time for you to become a retail samurai salesperson.
Introduction
Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Author
In the olden days, sellers sold and buyers bought. They were magical times. The history of retail sales is filled with stories of street merchants lining foreign thoroughfares, little ramshackle booths and peddlers hawking products near ports of call. The wild, uncharted western United States had its weather-beaten, rickety, slat board stores on the frontier, trading posts where pioneers pushing across America bartered for needed wares. As a retailer, once you owned the goods back then, you were totally responsible for the success or failure of the product and its sales rate. Customer service and an exchange policy didn’t exist. The manufacturer didn’t service your account. But that was a long time ago.
The retail world today has a distinctly different landscape. Salespeople don’t merely hand off the merchandise to a store and collect a check for the goods. The salesperson’s life is infinitely more complicated than that. Nowadays, the seller’s responsibilities go way beyond the initial sale. Corporate retail store buyers have expectations that must be met if a salesperson is to be successful. If the seller doesn’t meet the buyer’s needs, it’s unlikely that the store will purchase products in the future from that source.
A salesperson representing a manufacturer must take care of their customer, the retail store buyer. Today, a salesperson must convince the retail store buyer to first buy the goods. Then, the salesperson must monitor how the products sell after the purchase and provide sales support at store level. Also, the salesperson must offer point of purchase signing, redesign packaging, and provide markdown allowances and coop advertising programs. If the merchandise doesn’t fly out the door, the salesperson must take back things that don’t sell and damages. Salespeople also will encounter poorly trained buyers and they must learn the art of covering the ass of the buyer when they make mistakes. You can meet with the buyer, giving them a product and proposal exactly as they’ve requested, and then you won’t get a response. Phone calls placed to the buyer won’t be returned. There’s the regular turn over of personnel in the buying office and on the sales floor, so salespeople are always training someone new. Whew!! Its enough responsibility to give you heart palpitations.
If you’re a salesperson and you’re calling on a buyer or a corporate retail headquarters, all of the above shouldn’t be new to you. As if that isn’t enough to make you scream out of your office window, other people are conspiring against you. While you are dealing with the intricate needs of the buying office, your competition is waging a guerrilla war against you, taking store managers and buyers out to lunch to get information about you and your products. Ethics are non-existent to these people. Some of them will tell the buyer tall tales about your products and why their goods are superior. It’s not uncommon for one vendor to offer to buy out another manufacturer’s items on the shelf, making room for their products. Some suppliers will do anything to get an advantage over you. Buyers love this – they’re more than happy to play one supplier against another – and they will win no matter what happens.
Meanwhile, bombs are going off in buyer’s offices. They are disorganized and slammed by the workload and have limited, untrained bodies to help them to do the job. As a salesperson, you desperately need the buyer to move the process along, to decide to buy your product, to enter the merchandise specifications into their computer system, and to eventually generate a purchase order. But it’s not that simple.
Buyers today are focussed on way too many things. Years ago, they were responsible for picking merchandise, running ads and negotiating deals with suppliers. Today is different. Big business stretches buyers to the breaking point, requiring many to work nights and weekends to keep up with the pace. How are you going to get the buyer to purchase your items? Many of them don’t even have time to eat lunch sometimes.
How can you help the buyer? How can you be more successful with them? If you understand the buyer--how they evaluate their business, how they will perceive you, what is affecting their daily schedule--you just might sell them your merchandise.
You sell products for a living to retail store buyers. I’m sure that many of you are great salespeople. You’ve probably taken a few courses along the way that taught you how to further hone your skills.
But I’m not here to teach you how to sell. I’m here to arm you with information about your customer, the retail buyer, information they probably don’t want you to know. When you understand exactly how a buyer thinks, how they’re judged by their company, and the rules they play by, you will have an improved relationship with them. Master the way they think, and you should be able to land more product in their stores. But if you approach the buyer like just another salesperson, the buyer will probably blow you off.
You sell for a living and you’re good at that. But you’re sitting across the desk from your nemesis, the gatekeeper – the person who holds the pencil that writes the orders. They have power in that pencil. The buyer can order your goods and make you successful in your business, or they will pass you by and give business to your competition. It’s your choice.
Take all the sales courses you want, but they won’t let you into the mind of the buyer. Now, I know, getting inside a buyer’s mind is a very scary place. Oooh. Some of you might think that visiting the inside of a buyer’s brain must be a lot like visiting a psycho ward in a mental institution.
Do you know what? You’re not wrong. How do I know? Because I was a buyer, and a divisional merchandise manager and a vice president of merchandising. I was the beast who sat across the desk from scores of great sales people. Many products never crossed the threshold and never entered my assortment. However, some vendors did get me excited about their goods when approached me in an intelligent fashion – they understood my needs, and I rewarded them with my business.
Do you think you know all these principles? Do you? Well, I certainly hope that you’re reading this because you want to learn how a buyer thinks. Although the computer has impacted retail and more data is available to analyze products today VS.. 25 years ago, buying principles have not changed. I’m happy to share them with you. Armed with this information, you will be light years ahead of your competition and you’re likely to approach the buyer with greater skill and understanding of their needs. Approach the buyer the right way and you’re likely to sell them merchandise.
Years ago, I received one of the best compliments ever during my 25 year career. I was a buyer at the headquarters for a little office supply chain down in Florida, I think it was called Office Depot. One supplier had magically connected to my needs. Together, we improved packaging and introduced brand new products – we set the standard in the industry. This supplier’s executive vice president, a gentleman named Andy, understood the retail buyer and was able to consistently give me what I required to be successful. One day, he complimented me. Andy and I had revolutionized a basic, core business together – file folders. Trust me, no product is more basic, or mundane, than file folders. Despite that, we energized the category. Resulting sales for my company were off the charts, and my new products were light years ahead of my competition’s offerings.
Do you know what Andy said to me? I had fought till the death for my company, upholding the highest standards, and my sales showed it. I successfully differentiated my store from many others. Andy said, "Merrill, you are a retail samurai warrior."
But this executive vice president, Andy, was only half correct. He was a samurai too. He had mastered the way buyers thought, and he had consistently given me what I needed to succeed.
You can be samurai sales warriors too. Although I am an intelligent man, I am not a rocket scientist. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist either to master these concepts.
I was taught buying principles in classrooms at one company, but I largely learned how to buy OTJ – on the job.
What am I going to do? I’m going to tell you these principles, these secrets, the way the buyer thinks. Buyers today don’t have the time for teaching you what they want and need for their stores. Their goal is increased sales and if you impede the process, or require too much handholding, you won’t be doing business with that buyer forever.
You know what I used to do as a buyer when I’d encounter a vendor who couldn’t make me look good to my corporation? Where did a vendor go when they didn’t understand what my company needed from a supplier? It might take a year or two, but I would make a change and eliminate that vendor.
Folks who understood my language would get lots more business. I’d transfer business to them from weaker vendors.
You’re reading this because you want to be more successful salespeople. You’re here because you deal with buyers, store owners, or folks who make the buying /purchasing decision. Let me help you to improve your approach with these gatekeepers. Let me show you their thought processes and their rules.
C’mon. Let’s take a walk on the wild side. Let’s take you deep inside the cranium, the head, of a retail buyer.
