The following are takeaway excerpts from the webinar.
Jim Slama
Expo West is the big kahuna of trade shows in the natural products industry. Last year 65,000 attendees came to visit the booths of 3,000 vendors showing their wares. For brands, there is no better place to connect with retail buyers.
Jonathan Lawrence
I'm a huge fan of Expo West. It's very impressive, and I think it can be very intimidating, not only to retailers and new buyers but also to brands, especially new brands. So I really jumped at the chance to talk about, if you're a vendor out there, how to get in front of retailers and do it the right way, to where you're effective, you make an impression, and hopefully you make that connection and get your product on their shelves...
Tip number one is capture the retailer's attention... First thing you want to do is share the highlights around your brand strategy. Why did you create this product?...
The natural food space is poised to launch innovation. So you’ve got to tell us, why is your product different, unique?... Understand the market that you're in, share how you're differentiated from what the retailer carries... Then, within the natural foods industry, emphasize your unique mission. Why do you do what you do? What impact are you having on the world, on your community, something bigger than just the product themselves?...
Say you get on the shelf. How are you going to get that product off the shelf? How are you going to take care of those stores? Are you partnering with a broker? Do you have reps? How can you educate my teams at store level?...
Have a positive and open-minded attitude. Be open to having conversations with people at all levels... When you're talking about your brand, your product, talk to everyone that will listen, because everyone's a consumer. Your product could be the next new product they tell people about. They might be able to give you great feedback, they might be able to make a great connection for you...
Talk to the other brands when you're at your booth. Some of those best connections are the people right next to you. The natural foods community is all connected...
Be efficient with your time... There's thousands of brands out there, so you don't get a lot of time. Make sure you're prepared. Have your elevator pitch ready, have maybe a sell sheet, product samples ready...
Sometimes a person will jump out and say, ‘Hey, have you ever tried this product? Can I tell you about it?’ More often than not, we'll say, ‘Sure, yeah, tell me about your product.’ So make sure you're engaging. Don't be sitting back behind your booth. Don't be on your phone, looking down. Act like you want to be there, enjoy it, enjoy the fact that you're in front of all these people at the biggest trade show...
I would focus on new retailers or new people that you don't have those relationships with. And then keep conversations going. Not everything happens on the trade floor... Great connections can be made in hallways, in passing on the show floor, off the show floor, at dinner. Utilize all the time that you have. While you're there, you'll have plenty of time to rest when you get home.
As a retailer, once we get home, we're exhausted. But then Monday comes around and it's back to work... Take a little time, but then make sure you're following up. I would say a personalized note, don't just send a canned email, that's not very personal, it doesn't show that you took the time to connect after. Send samples... I would say between a week to two weeks after. If it goes further than that, it might not be top of mind anymore. So make sure you act fast.
Benji Fitts
So you're at your booth, spent a lot of money to get to Expo West, you're meeting people, shaking hands, all that sort of fun stuff. And you're going to need this little piece of paper, your sell sheet, to talk about your product...
There are just some simple things that you can do to make sure that your sell sheet looks good. First of all... it's usually a piece of paper, 8-1/2 by 11, usually double-sided. You don't have a lot of visual real estate... So really, this has to be an amalgamation of the best things that you could possibly say about your product... Be brief, be succinct, and get the message across.
Second... if you have the sell sheet in front of you... squint your eyes at it. And if the biggest, most unique thing about your product, or whatever message you're trying to convey, isn't immediately apparent, then it needs to be fixed... These shows are really all about discovery, finding out what's new, what's next… if this is what's driving your product, is what is differentiated, innovative, what's new and fresh about whatever you're making, make sure that's the primary message that a user is going to receive whenever they pick up one of these pieces of paper...
We have our qualitative key elements, we have our quantitative key elements. So qualitative, so that's talking about the quality of something... This is where you're going to have your brand story, the mission, the reason, in a nutshell why you're doing what you're doing, if it's really interesting and cool and unique and differentiated...
The storytelling element is really what drives a lot of the passion behind things... It's a very passionate group of buyers, it’s a passionate industry,so lean into that a little bit, right? Make sure you're highlighting sustainability and the key differences between you and the competition... It's also a great spot to talk about your outside-of-the-store efforts to bolster your product. Say you got started in direct-to-consumer, you started online first, what kind of results did you get from that? How many data points could you pull out of that and say, ‘We've been successful here.’...
It's also smart to sometimes talk about your distribution partners or other people who you are already partnered with... And don't forget to put your contact info and a call to action. Don't just put a name and a phone number on there, but say, ‘Give me a call and let's do business together.’…
Now, hard numbers... Sometimes point of sale data can be really helpful to building a good sell sheet... SPINS is obviously a provider of some key data here. But some of the things that we like to put on these sheets and were asked by clients to build them are some simple comparisons... So your sales or your sales growth versus the category. Often this is written down as a multiplier, like two categories grew 10 percent, and you grew 100 percent, a 10x...
If you're the number one growing brand or and number two growing brand, something like that ranking, your performance can be really, really nice.
Velocity is the king metric... You can't grow at 100 percent forever, right? But your sell-through numbers or your velocity rates, those can be something that you can brag about... And my advice, if you're going to put velocity on a sell sheet, make it as simple as possible... It can also be really good if comparing your velocity overall to other brands, if you're double their velocity, or something like that.
And then finally, from a design perspective, make sure you're keeping it very visual. People are visual learners, it's a visual medium. Hopefully, maybe you'd have a graphic designer that could help you out with this... My gold standard for the folks that I work with is when someone first looks at whatever you've made, they should feel the point before they understand it. So aim for that.
