How is the chain game playing out in a (mostly) post-pandemic environment? Sales leaders from Firestone Walker and JuneShine and a leader of national accounts for Southern California wholesaler Scout Distribution shared their experiences during the Brewbound Live business conference in Santa Monica, California.
John Byrne, director of national accounts for Firestone Walker; Elizabeth Isenbart, director of national accounts for JuneShine; and Olympia Anton, director of national accounts for Scout Distribution, broke down the state of national accounts now that the selling has (mostly) returned to normalcy.
Isenbart noted that there’s a convenience level for buyers with platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. However, opportunities abound for sellers with in-person meetings.
“You can do a lot more ABPs (annual business planning) if you’re doing them virtual,” Isenbart said. “That said, anytime you can be in person, it just makes way more of a difference, right? If you can get certain buyers that are really important to your business in person, there’s just so much more that you can get done. They also can’t just hit end on the Zoom call at the 30-minute mark.”
Byrne agreed that virtual meetings create a level of inefficiency but the relationship building can “get lost when you’re strictly leaving yourself to a 30-minute Zoom or Teams call.”
“The ability to go past the 30 minutes is something that is a little more rare when you’re doing it strictly virtually,” he said. “We have seen more retailers and distributors want to get back to the face-to-face. I don’t think it’s going to go back to completely the way that it was in the past, but I do think it’ll be a mix in terms of where it was and where it is now.”
From a middle-tier perspective, suppliers need to “be strategic about your growth,” Anton said.
“The thing you don’t want to do is beat your customers to the grocery store,” she said. “You need to make sure that you have the brand recognition, and that you’re going to have shoppers buying your product once you get there. Because if you do go in and you’re not hitting that threshold that you need to hit, whatever that may be, it changes obviously banner by banner, the next time there’s a SKU rationalization or resets come through, you’re going to go out and you’re probably not going to get a chance to get back in again.”
As to what retailers want, Isenbart said it’s a mix of innovation and simplification and rate of sale.
“How do you make something that’s going to do all three of those things?” she said. “There’s the whole cooler stretcher — they’re not getting any bigger. They want innovation but they don’t have space [for] a million 6-packs. So it really depends on the retailer. And from a spirits perspective … for us I’m finding on the spirits side that they want distributor consolidation. That’s been our biggest challenge is that spirits retailers prefer to work with one to two to three wholesalers. They don’t want to deal with a hundred beer distributors.”
The key is delivering value to the retailer, either through powerful brands, efficiency with SKUs, great wholesaler partnerships and executives, Byrne added.
“Always looking at conversion, traffic, basket ring. Those are things that the retailers are looking for,” he said. “They want to continue to grow their market share, so how can you use your brands and goods and services to deliver that to them.”
Asked how a small, independent wholesaler can gain the attention of local and regional buyers, Anton said service is the key.
“We don’t have a large brand that you absolutely have to have in your sets, so the first thing we decided right when we were going to approach these chain buyers is that we were going to overinvest in merchandising and teams and make sure there was not holes on the shelf, that our resets were executed perfectly, that we were in these stores more often and we were going to out service the competition.”
Watch the video above to learn more about how the positioning of Firestone Walker’s 805 brand has unlocked opportunities, what brewers getting into spirits-based products need to know about selling those products, the importance of avoiding over promising, how the competition for the cold box has changed with the introduction of fourth category products and more selling insights.