Sticky Learning Lunch 44: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today's topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 1.

73% of your Category Opportunities Never Make it to Store.

You will learn: - Each of the 7 parts of the MBM Category Management Funnel. - How each part is essential to creating an effective Category Management approach. - Various tools and techniques to support each stage of the process.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today's learning. This is going to be slightly different. As I said before. This is gonna be a super niche presentation series, talking about category management. We're just gonna give it a few more seconds while we're waiting for the last attendees to arrive in the room. It's gonna give that a moment. Welcome, Colin. Good to see you. Thanks for being here. Darren, thank you for being here. It's appreciated, FAAB, and good to see you again. Jim, I think this is your first time attendee to these sessions.

Nathan Simmonds:

Thanks very much for being here. Really appreciated, Tim, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you very much. Let's get you guys set up for success initially. So as always, what I wanna make sure we're covering is getting our mobile phones. Let's get the mobile phones, get the little airplane lit up. Let's zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention on what we are doing here today.

Nathan Simmonds:

Also, making sure you're hydrated, so making sure you've got a drink available. Herbal teas for me today. Let's keep ourselves, you know, keep ourselves hydrated so we can keep our brains lubricated. And also making sure that we've got a fresh page for fresh thinking. So we want a nice blank page. And at the top of that, we wanna write keepers. We also wanna write in there the 73% funnel, which is what we're gonna be covering today as we talk about category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

And Andy's gonna be covering more of that in just a second. Top of that page, keep us, these are the things you wanna remember. These are the things that you want to be reminded of. And these are the things when you reread it, it reignites that think, and it makes the learning stick, which is what we are here to do now. That's what MBM is all about. So let's see who's got coming in, right?

Nathan Simmonds:

Let's get into this. I've got my notepad and my pen ready. I've got a series of questions to be firing into Andy as we go through this. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning Lunch with myself, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM. I'm joined today by Andy Palmer, resident expert on category management. And the idea of these training sessions is to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do.

Nathan Simmonds:

And whether that's whether you are when you are at home or returning to work, or preparing to return to work, it's about pushing this thinking. It's about helping you take your business to the next level. And as we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the UK grocery and manufacturing industry, it's right that we talk about category management. Andy, this next seven sessions, they're all yours and you're gonna take us through this, please, you know, take over and let's see what category management is all about and how it can help these people.

7 Simple Ways To Understand The Category Management Process

 

Andy Palmer:

Lovely, thank you Nathan. Welcome everybody. I'm super excited to be sharing this content with you. Over the coming days, we're gonna take you through our seven step category management process session each day, looking at each different stage of the funnel, bringing it to life now to manage expectations. I guess we're only gonna be scratching the surface but hopefully leaving you hungry to want to reach out to us afterwards and learn more. Learn how we can support you with category management.

Nathan Simmonds:

So starting with that, what is category management? It's one of these topics that's been wrapped up quite heavily and shrouded in a dark mist of jargon and complicated terminology. In essence, it's about helping you as a business to be able to identify more opportunities, sell opportunities, and land those opportunities in store. The crux of category management is really about suppliers working in partnership with retailers and making sure the consumers, the shoppers needs are at the heart of any decisions that are made.

Andy Palmer:

So whereas we see our account managers taking care of certain slice of the pie, we have our category managers that are there to take care of the whole pie. So as category management has, has developed over the years where it's first started in its inception back in the 1990s for me this is really now about a business as usual principle. Not something that's dipped into once every six months where people lock themself in dark war rooms and generate 1,000,001 different spreadsheets.

Andy Palmer:

It's actually about a very simple structured approach that we're gonna come to but helping you be able to identify more opportunities. So we're gonna talk you through our funnel. We're largely gonna do a brief introduction to the funnel in a moment and then help you understand what each of those different areas look like. So it's about agreeing catch free targets at the top.

Andy Palmer:

We're gonna talk about that a little bit more today about keeping the shopper at the heart of our decisions. We're getting to that a little bit more tomorrow then around understanding and knowing the channels that you're in. So what supermarket or particular retailer that you're focusing your efforts. Then getting into the good stuff, getting into identifying opportunities. They're gonna come from lots of different areas with capture management.

Andy Palmer:

It's very, very data-driven. So often we can get lost in that and we're gonna help you to not get lost in that. But around identifying the opportunities, then it's about selling those opportunities effectively, landing those opportunities in store and then coming back around our funnel evaluating, improving, ensure that you've got this consistency and we've got the cycle going on now to manage expectations. And just like caveat why these funnel stages literally build on each other, it's a bit more like think about it as a Venn diagram.

Andy Palmer:

They've got to overlap. You are gonna do some level of recycling back through different areas. It's not that chunk start, stop, start, stop all the way through. So we've got this process, we're gonna bring it to life a little bit more today. Hopefully that then generates some questions for, for you. Once we've got those questions, we'll be able to bring it to life. So we'll spend about the next 10, 15 minutes some questions to Nathan, to me some questions from you guys as well. And we'll see if we can bring this topic a little bit more to life and hopefully help you realize how you can identify, sell, and land some more opportunities.

Nathan Simmonds:

And for me, Andy was talking about the questions. If you do have questions, you've got the question box, please get them in there. I'm watching this to, for Andy to support in this conversation. If anything comes up and you want to go deeper into that, let's bring that up. And if it's appropriate to answer it here and now, we will do. If not, we can take that offline and we'll get in contact with you separately to help support that.

Nathan Simmonds:

The other thing that Sarah so lovingly reminded me of is if you are looking at the screen with the cameras on at the moment, I'm gonna drop off that screen and sit in the background and watch what's going on. But there's a gray bar in the middle there. If you wanna make the webcams bigger, click and hold on that gray bar, pull it down and you can make the presentation just that little bit smaller so you can see more of what's going on in the whiteboard. Okay, as I say, any questions, get 'em in the question box and I'll be paying attention in the background. Thanks very much.

Andy Palmer:

Great stuff. Thank you Nathan. Okay, so we're talking about our funnel here and we've got these seven steps that I've briefly covered. As I said, we're gonna work through each of those different areas over the next seven days. We're gonna start today with agreeing category opportunities. So more often than not we work with clients and they're busy doing category management in a way that they've already done it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Recently we started working with a client and they said, yeah, we've got all this data, we've got all this information, we're at the beck and call of the buyer. And I said to them, okay, great. So what are you looking to achieve with your category? And they said well, whatever the buyer tells us to do, we will do it. Whatever opportunities pop up, we will make them happen.

Andy Palmer:

And if we spot some along the way ourselves, we'll get those landed as well. And that's fine. That's not necessary the wrong way. Where we try to steer them to was actually, if they have a single absolute clarified target, all of the efforts are then focused on achieving that. And it's not the scatter on approach to, they seem to be working towards its far more sniper rifle. It, it's there, we've got our category target or we're gonna go after that.

Andy Palmer:

That then means all the time and the resources and the efforts they put in are focused on achieving one thing. And that doesn't mean to say that category target can't change. And it will of course adapt and develop. But actually once you've got that category target, it then allows a far more joined up approach to, to take place and not just becoming kind of quite reactive.

Andy Palmer:

As I mentioned earlier, category management, very, very data driven.