Sticky Learning Lunch 47: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today's topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 4.

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:

Good afternoon. Sticky lunches. I don't know, is that the right way? Getting this? Yeah, I'm just getting my screen up here. Bear with me while we get that going. Share screen. Oh, hold on. There we go. That was the problem. 'cause I wasn't the presenter.

Nathan Simmonds:

Okay, now we're, now we are here. Okay, we're in. Welcome everyone to today's sticky learning, uh, with me, Nathan Simmons and Andy Palmer, resident expert in category management. We're just gonna give it 30 seconds while we wait for the last people to arrive in the room. And then we are going to crack on and share stage four of the 73% funnel. Let's just give it a moment. Let's make sure we're setting ourselves up for success.

Improve your category management opportunities

 

Nathan Simmonds:

Mobile phones up and higher. Let's make sure the little plane is lit up, zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention on you and what you are doing here. Let's make sure also that you are hydrated here, is getting warmer here in the uk. Thankfully, we might actually have a summer this time, who knows? Um, although according to the government, they have canceled some of this year, but I don't think technically you can do that.

Nathan Simmonds:

So let's make sure you're staying hydrated, you're keeping your brain lubricated. And also let's make sure you've got a fresh page for fresh thinking. So let's get these ideas. Any ideas that Andy is sharing, any questions that I asked that trigger a new thought, let's make sure we're getting them down there on that sheet so that you can go back and remember, reread and reignite that thinking to keep your learning sticky. I think we're almost on time, but do you know what?

Nathan Simmonds:

I'm actually gonna say this at the beginning of this episode, rather than at the end of it, if you have not registered for tomorrow's sticky learning lunch, I'm putting that if it's, if you cannot see it in the chat box right now, I'm putting that in the chat box. Hold on. He says, bear with me. I'm putting the link in there for tomorrow's session and all our future sessions in the chat box right now.

Nathan Simmonds:

So if you have not already registered for tomorrow's session, for next week's sessions, whatever it is, the link is there. Please click on that, get that screen ready for you to go in there and register for the future sessions. And also, it's there for you to copy and paste and share to your friends if you know someone that's gonna get value from category management. If you know someone that's gonna get value from, uh, a deep dive on their own leadership skills in the next week, share this link with them.

Nathan Simmonds:

Let them know about sticky learning lunches and get them involved in these classrooms to help them take their thinking to the next level. Let's do this. Welcome everyone to the rooms. It's good to see you all. Thank you, Tim. Good to be here. McKayla. McKayla, good to see you. First time. Fiona, Fabian, Darren Collin, thank you very much for being a greatly appreciated. Let's dive in. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter.

Nathan Simmonds:

We are the leadership and development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry. I do with these sessions is just to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do, especially in category management. Andy, welcome back for day four of this. Thanks very much for being here. What are we covering today,

Andy Palmer:

Nathan? We are now moving down into the fourth stage of our funnel. This is around turning and analysis and understanding into opportunities. So this is where the fun sex stuff happens. Um, we back in last week, talked about green category targets and more, better understanding our shopper. Yesterday we, uh, covered understanding our channel or our supermarket. Today we're getting into turning analysis from all those various data sources and information that we have, information turning those things into opportunities. Then for the next few days, we'll then figure out how we can sell those opportunities and those opportunities in store and close off our funnel by taking some learnings back. That's what today's about.

Nathan Simmonds:

Great, and Andy dropped the word in there, sexy about the analysis side of thing. Andy is very blue, he is very analytical, so he is gonna use words like the sexy when it comes to data. It's not everyone's cup of tea. What I will say is, though data is absolutely vital, you know, we can't always make the right decision. What it is though, is when we get that information, then we can make better decisions on what it is we're gonna be doing in order to get to know our supermarkets better, in order to get better, know who are, um, our shoppers and our preparers and our eaters are, and making sure actually we're creating the right opportunities for those people when they go into our stores as well.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. I thought it was worth, uh, me just kind of caveating the, the blue comment, uh, as opposed to blue may, may have certain meanings, um, but it also from, from our kind of, uh, terminology means I am very analytical, very left brain thinking. It's one of those, uh, psychometric profiles that puts me in a quadrant that happens to be colored blue as opposed to maybe how I

Nathan Simmonds:

Your actual emotion .

Andy Palmer:

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how big a hole I was digging. Um, but there we go.

Nathan Simmonds:

But look, you know, and that's a great, that's a great lead. I was gonna say, that leads us on, we have looked to booking in some future sessions around HBDI and profiling, um, and I think that's a great lead into that. Now, if you are interested in understanding your, your psychometrics psychoanalysis on what we do in those, on those profiling, there's also that link that's gonna take you through to those future sections. We'll cover some of that as well, so we can get into that in a bit more as we progress in the coming weeks. So let's dive in. What does, what does section number four this funnel look like? And I'm gonna skip along that slide so you can see a bit more of this as we go in and

Andy Palmer:

Great stuff. Um, yeah, so it, it's taking all of the information that we've got and right now out in the world, there is a ton of data. We know that qualitative data, quantitative data, and, and typically we see most category managers and category analysts get lost in the data. There is just such a volume of it. Um, they jump into the data, uh, and effectively we look at it, it's a bit like a black hole. They just kinda get sucked into this thing.

Andy Palmer:

And then the time is spent generating charts and tables and graphs and hundreds of these various different pages. But actually what we're really looking to do is challenge the people we work with to come up with insight, true insight that leads to recommendation. We talked about it yesterday. Let is absolutely more, it's not about presenting. A nice big deck is about presenting real hard, powerful category management opportunities that can drive a category forward.

Andy Palmer:

Um, I've got a huge toolbox of techniques and calculations and formulas and things like that. Now we're not gonna be able to cover all of those. So I've got a sample that we can share with you today. If you're hungry for this and you want to know more because this is an area where maybe you wanna improve on, then hey, let's, let's start that conversation, uh, um, later on this afternoon. More than happy to kind of, uh, explore that with you to ensure that, uh, you're, you're getting this bit right because getting this bit right just means everything we do with our category management is underpinned with solid data, powerful recommendations.

Nathan Simmonds:

Good. I'm just looking here, just making sure I've got all the right information to hand. So where have you seen, and when you talk to other companies about this and look for examples, where have you seen good examples of this data being used?

Andy Palmer:

I think it's, it's any company that has clarity on what we talked about on day one, having that target and then tailoring what they're doing to achieve that. So there are 1,000,001 examples of where it's done particularly well. And equally there is the, a whole range of suppliers out there that are not doing it well. They're, they're getting all this data and then they're not focusing on what's really important. What's really important is using the data to back up things like hypotheses. And for me, I believe briefly mentioned this the other day, this is one of my biggest tips.

Andy Palmer:

If we can start with hypothesis or hippos as we, uh, lovingly call them, um, we can then more better focus our, our time and our effort into understanding those. So it's that stuff that starts, I believe market share's going out. I believe we've got less customers than we had last year.

Andy Palmer:

I believe there's an opportunity by driving X, Y, or Z. And then it's about testing them. If we can develop those hypotheses first, as opposed to just jumping into the data, data and, you know, getting lost in 101 Excel tabs, then test it, prove it right or wrong, we will then be able to start on a journey of understanding where the true category recommendations are. Um, there's 1,000,