After months of hard work and countless meetings, you’ve finally persuaded Sainsbury's to stock your new African Fusion firebrand sauce. They place an order for 500 bottles and stock them in 100 supermarkets and convenience stores. You feel justifiably proud that your hard work has paid off. Then the sauce stubbornly sits there and refuses to move off the shelf and into consumers’ shopping baskets.
You’ve sold in, but you’re not selling through. You now risk losing Sainsbury's as a customer before you’ve even started because there is no consumer demand for your product. And the problem is that you are responsible for creating demand – not Sainsbury's.
If you’re a seasoned seller into sophisticated retail you’ll know, before they purchased, Sainsbury's would have wanted to see your marketing and promotion plan. They provide the shelf space, but they don’t do much else. You have to create the demand.
Sell-through is marketing – the product, its positioning, its price, its distribution strategy and its promotion. A great approach is to ask yourself, “What will it take for my customer to sell my product to their customers?” Imagine you are your customer.
Where is your product positioned against the others fighting for shelf space? Is it an exact copy of something that’s already there or is there a clear differentiating factor that you can promote?
What’s the market price for this type of product and where does yours sit? Is it too cheap to be taken seriously or too expensive to be taken at all? Where is the demand coming from? Is this an impulse purchase or something that requires consideration? Your promotional strategy will be different in each case.
As for African Fusion, you had another meeting with Sainsbury's. Your firebrand sauce is vegan and you’ve hooked up with LoveMeat, offering a free sampler to their burger consumers and a discount voucher on their first purchase from Sainsbury's. You are tapping into the vegan community with a fiery Instagram introducer campaign and you’ve got your first celebrity endorsement from the Vegan Vlogger. At last you are promoting directly to Sainsbury's consumers and they are starting to purchase. And Sainsbury's is buying more. You are now selling your product through their channel, not just into it.
In my businesses the primary function of sales is to sell-in. They need marketing support to make the process easier, but selling in is about closing the sale. Marketing are responsible for sell-through and before you start selling into the customer you need to know the marketing sell-through plan.
Now you're on fire baby!
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