Sticky Learning Lunch 48: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today's topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 6.

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 learning lunches. Just making sure we've got screen share on there. Welcome to today's session. Yes, I'm not wearing a white shirt, it's Thursday. Just gonna give it a few seconds while we wait for the last people to arrive in the room. If anyone's got any opinions about the shirt today, I'm more than happy to hear them. What do you think, on a scale of one to 10, one terrible, 10, phenomenal, happy. Let's go with the ratings on that. Just while we're waiting for everyone else to turn up.

Colin:

I say that it's certainly better than the sound and I'm, uh, supporting today.

Improve your category management opportunities

 

Nathan Simmonds:

8.5. Thank you, Colin. I'll, I'll take that and run with it.

Colin:

Nine for me. Thanks Colin.

Nathan Simmonds:

Yeah, finally.

Nathan Simmonds:

So let's make sure we're setting everyone up for success. First things first, as always, let's get the mobile phones up. Let's get the little airplane lit. Zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention. Also, making sure we've got a drink. Let's make sure we're staying hydrated. We're in the thirties here in the south is getting warm. Let's make sure we're looking after ourselves. Keep, keep ourselves hydrated and keep the brain lubricated.

Nathan Simmonds:

Also, fresh sheet, fresh thinking. Get yourself a blank page. Make sure that top of that you've written, keep us and these are the things you want to remember and remind yourself about when you reread them so you can reignite that thinking and really make this learning stick. It's the end of the week for us in the sticky learning. Before we go any further, and before we go into the introductions and get the session rolling as well, if you have not signed up for Monday session, which is the last one of the 73% funnel, now is the time to do that.

Nathan Simmonds:

We'll get a link into the chat box so you can click through there and sign up for Monday's session. We've also got Tuesday's session. We're gonna move into the leadership coaching model, evoc, which I've designed. It's all gonna be about self-evaluation and getting really deep on who you are, what you bring, and how you develop yourself as a leader as we move through the course of next week as well. So if you haven't already signed up, now is the time to do that.

Nathan Simmonds:

We are on, let's do this. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, home of Sticky Learning, and we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Idea of these sessions is to give you a 20 minute, 20 to 30 minute micro learner. It's gonna help you be the best version of you in what you do right now, and also preparing you to go back to the brave new world, that whatever that might be as we move into the future. What are we covering today, Andy? Do

Colin:

A Okay. Nathan. Today we are covering, landing those opportunities in store. So it builds this funnel continually does by targets, shoppers, our stores, our insights and recommendations, selling it through to landing it. So it today's about landing it, it's about that, uh, last hundred yards, ensuring that all that time and effort and analysis we've put in actually hits the shelves. It hits the shelves, right? Um, so for meLearning opportunities in store, why the funnel flows is largely about preparation.

Colin:

Um, what we're trying to ensure happens is that those recommendations that you make to the buyers that you've sold to the buyers don't just look good on paper, that they actually can work in store and then giving them, uh, sustainability for the future. So getting into this one, um, there broadly, two groups of people that work for supermarkets, those that work in offices and those that work in stores.

Colin:

Yes, of course, there's some other areas, but broadly speaking, those two groups of people, this is really about bridging that gap between those particular areas. Um, talks about, it's the last 100 yards. Um, it's a difference between ideas generated and where they are implemented. So I'm gonna start with a quick story. Um, one of my colleagues may be in this afternoon, this story is actually, um, uh, about him so many years ago, and he'd probably tell us it was about 20.

Colin:

I think the reality was it was probably maybe 30 or 40 years ago. Um, he was an up and coming, uh, frozen foods buyer, and that buying department at, uh, this particular supermarket was trying everything to drive sales. They would draft in suppliers, they would go through all the analysis, through all the skew level, store level by week analysis. And it was all with a view to try and getting availability sorted, uh, in, in frozen foods.

Colin:

Hundreds of spreadsheets, lots of analysis hours spent on it. Nothing was improving. So my colleague himself decided, you know what? Maybe I need to get out to stores. So he did out of his desk, off to stores, and he spent some time working in stores, spent a few days observing what colleagues are doing. He spent a few days helping colleagues in store, putting stuff into the shelf. A couple of weeks later, he pulled and gathered the guy buying team back together.

Colin:

What he then did was placed 50 pairs of gloves down on the table and said, there's our issue. It doesn't matter how much analysis we do, it doesn't matter how much, uh, how many recommendations we come up with. It's about this. And everyone kind of went, what do you mean it's about gloves? What then went on to explain was that the insight he got from working in the stores, but frozen food was cold.

Colin:

And so because frozen food was cold, everyone in store avoided filling or replenishing that particular part of the store. By providing gloves to the stores right across the estate, they were able to increase availability. So they made it just in that little bit easier for people to go, do you know what? We pick up those cold cardboard boxes, open it, put it on the shelf, just make life a little bit easier. The point of that really about closing the gap between what we see behind our screens and within our spreadsheets and bits of paper to what actually happens in true reality.

Colin:

So finding your gloves is the kind of, or the equivalent of, is my real challenge to use for this afternoon. Find those gloves, close that gap between the analysis that you do and the opportunities that you are recommending. Making sense, Nathan?

Nathan Simmonds:

Absolutely. And it's the real life stuff and what you see on your computer screen and from where you are sitting is completely different to the reality inside a store. Now you are in, and geographically you may be twenty, thirty, a hundred and fifty miles away from that location. So you have no idea actually what's going on in the head of the individuals that are supporting you. Make those opportunities land. You have to be there.

Colin:

Yeah, I, um, gonna share another little model. Why not? Um, we, we looked at the staircase the other day. This is another staircase I seem to like staircases and, uh, three letters or, uh, acronyms this week. This is, um, effectively the, the staircase of learning. Some of you may well be familiar with it, but I actually think it works really well for, for this particular topic as well. It draws up, got these two areas. There. Not a big fan of this work, but it makes sense. Unconscious incompetence. It's the things that we don't know.

Colin:

And this is typically what can typically be the area that some category managers tend to reside in. They don't know what they don't know. Sometimes getting out to stalk and, uh, can help that. I often think about this as, uh, my 8-year-old, she doesn't know, she can't drive. She sees Daddy get in the car, do some stuff like this, do some stuff like this, move his hands in the car, get to be, she has no idea.

Colin:

She couldn't jump in that seat. Over time, we move them into conscious incompetency, start to become aware of the things that you both can't do. Sometimes it's getting out to store and going, you know what? Hadn't appreciated that loves example. It's a great place to start. So for me, this was my son, uh, probably a few years ago when he started asking these questions, he was getting slightly closer to taking that first, uh, driving lesson and he started asking, put your feet up.

Colin:

You going there? What's that bum for? What's that lever do? How are you getting in the car to do that fee? And he moved from, I don't know, I can't do it through to my God, I know I can't actually do that. I'm gonna need some lessons. Absolutely. He then starts taking some lessons and he moves into conscious competence. He's now aware he can do it over time.

Colin:

And to ask anyone in the room who's done a drive recently and to ask you how many gear changes you make providing you've got a manual car, you're not gonna know because you're doing that stuff unconsciously. So you then move into unconscious competence and it's about taking our cashflow managers ourselves on this journey through, dunno what I don't know. Now I know what I dunno through to now I can do it. And then finally making this stuff just automatic so we're not just sitting behind spreadsheets.

Colin:

We're spending some time in store and we're now unconsciously competent on that new level of knowledge that we've got. Um,