The Real Mechanics of Getting On Shelf and Staying There | Betsy Gillette, Synergy Sales Consulting

Speaker: 00:00
Welcome to Shelf Help. Today we're speaking with Betsy Gillette, co-founder and CEO of Synergy Sales Consulting Group, essentially the sales team for brands that don't have their own sales team. Betsy's definitely spent a lot of time in the space prior to starting Synergy, spent time in leadership roles at UNFI, White Wave, Ignite Sales Management before we sold the Acosta, as well as Jewel Osco for about 10 years. So a lot of great experience in the space. So definitely excited to get into it. Betsy, just maybe first off, just for the listeners that maybe aren't that familiar with Synergy, maybe just kind of give us a quick play of the land just in terms of kind of origin story and why behind the company when you originally started it, kind of core services, Synergy's offers. And then maybe, you know, for Tom Tool, maybe just throw out a few brands that you work with as just an example or two. And then we'll go from there.

Speaker 1: 00:53
Well, first, thanks for having me. Happy to, happy to be here and talk about Synergy and how we help brands to scale. Yeah, we um there was a group of us that were at Ignite Sales Management, and Ignite ended up selling to Acosta, and we all stayed on for a while and it was fun, but then then it wasn't as fun. And we decided, like, let's let's do our own thing. Like we loved working with emerging brands. We didn't want to work for the man again. We had some brands that were willing to kind of help us get started. And we, a few of us had a little bit of money in our pocket because we had worked with Talenti Gelato for a while and they had an exit, and we got a each of us got a little bit of money from that to, you know, kind of help us pave the way. So as brands were coming into the portfolio, we could pay um our team and not get paid ourselves for almost a year, which was super nice. And we did some side hustle consulting to keep kind of keep keep the lights on at home and our spouses were were very helpful. But yeah, we we started almost eight years ago, which um it's just hard to believe it's been that long. And you know, in terms of what we do and how we do it, well, at first, a couple brands we work with. Um Culture Pub Soda is one of our larger ones, Ale Salumaria, um, a great salami brand. Heavenly Hunks is one of our bigger ones, and then we have some smaller ones like Tarazi um falafo mix and tahini and green chili foods burrito. So a wide swath from like one million to maybe 100, 150 million. So pretty big swath of um across our brands. But in terms of what we do, right now we have two main pillars. The biggest by far is our sales management, which we're, you know, that's what we're talking about today. So we um uh, as Adam said, we are the sales force for brands that don't have their own. We work with grocery, dairy, frozen, and deli brands, and we sell into the conventional grocers, the natural grocers, and mass um channels. And, you know, we are we are the sales team. So most of our brands don't have their own team, or they might have a VP of sales that handles like the Costco and the food service and the other channels that we don't touch. And we we help the brands identify the right strategy. We help them spend their money wisely, we help them stay out of a ditch, and then we we put the strategy together and then we go execute our portion at retail. And that's from hiring the brokers, managing brokers. We do all the trade plans, we do all the category review submissions, we're talking to the distributors, you and if I and Kahee typically talking to the retailers, we're doing data and analytics, making sure that all our sales presentations are up to speed. We're monitoring our performance and repeat, rinse, repeat the cycle, right? So typical sales, and we do work with 10 to 12 brands at any one time to make sure that we can do a really good job. The other smaller part of our business, small but mighty, growing quickly, is what we call Synergy Services. So we do that, it's more project-based work. A big chunk, there's two main chunks of that. One is go-to-market strategies. So we've had some brands that want to come in to the United States from Europe or companies, people that have a really great product and they they're like, I just don't know where to start. And so we work with them to put a go-to-market strategy together for them based on their finances, what they want to accomplish, where do we think they could make the best hay as quickly as possible? And so we'll look at things like pricing models. If you can make it for a dollar, what will it be sold for on shelf? And how does that compare against all the competition? And how do how would we need to promote to me to be successful? Where would we think you should start in terms of retailers? We'll help you put a sales pitch together and kind of get ready to do the selling, and then they can take that and do it on their own or whatnot. And then the other piece of our Synergy services is data and analytics. We've got a couple companies that we're gonna hire an internal analyst and we're like, why don't you just hire us? We'll do it on a part-time basis so it saves them a headcount. We have access to data so that we can use that. So we do ongoing scorecarding and like internal reporting for these couple of companies. But then also um we've had some brands say, Hey, I think I want to go in the cookie category. What does that look like? And we'll do a deep dive into the cookie category. And, you know, how does your brand, how would it fit in? What is the pricing? What kind of promotions do you need to do? And then what is the competition doing? So deep dive into data and analytics.

Speaker: 05:25
That's a great RB, man. You guys play such a crucial role for for uh the brand that you guys work with. When does it make sense for a brand to engage in terms like maybe when it's too early or maybe they're too big, it's too late, or is it kind of very pretty broadly?

Speaker 1: 05:39
And and it, you know, there are several sales management companies out there. We're obviously the best, right? But and we're all a little bit different and and have different specialties in terms of the type of brands we work with. But for us, what we commonly see like brands coming into our top of our funnel is either they've lost a person on their team and they're like, I don't know what to do. They just got some private equity money and now it's time to bring in some professionals, or the brand is just not sure what to do next. Like they they have a product, they may or may not have a salesperson. Usually it's the the CEO doing some sales and they're like, where do I go? What do I do? And for us, what makes a good brand for the synergy portfolio is one, we have to really like the people. We have to really like the product, especially if it's um, you know, if it's an ice cream, it has to taste really freaking good. If it's a cookie or a candy, it has to be really, really good because there's too much competition otherwise. They have to want to go national to work with us. They might not need to be national at the moment, and most of them aren't, but they need to want to scale to be national, like with us, kind of at that moment in time. And then they need to have the resources to be able to do it because they have to afford us, which is no different than hiring an internal salesperson, really. And you you need to, you know, have the wherewithal to mostly know what you need to do, just how to get from, you know, you're at A, you know you need to get to B. You might not know how to get there necessarily, but you know, they have to understand the industry a little bit in terms of, you know, UNFI and Kahee and the distribution model, and they have they know where they're going to make their product and that sort of thing. You know, we've worked with brands that are pre-revenue, like Tom First from Culture Pop. He had been there, done that. It was a pre-revenue brand, but we knew he had everything in order and he had the finances to support it. And then there's been other brands that, you know, they were several million dollars in sales online. They knew how to make this stuff. Now it's time to go into retail and we could we can help them with that. So, but they they need to for us to make it work for our team and our model. It has to be a brand that wants to go national pretty maybe tomorrow, but over a fairly short period of time.

Speaker: 07:50
Yeah, cool. That makes sense. Why why do you feel like um kind of 10 to 12 brands is kind of the the sweet spot for you guys? And does it feel like, you know, if you start going beyond that, are there like certain aspects that of the service that you feel like kind of degrade beyond this number or maybe trying to give as much attention to it? It does.

Speaker 1: 08:08
Yeah, we um we want to keep our people for a very long time and you can't you can't continually overburden your team because then all of a sudden they feel like they're not doing a great job for anyone, right? And so we want to do really good work for our brands. We don't ever want to have a conversation with the brand where they're like, Yeah, what have you done for me lately? Or you missed this, or how about this? Like that that doesn't happen with us because we we have the right, I mean, we're all working hard, don't get me wrong, but we don't overwork our team or overburden the company with too much. And all of our team members work with all of our brands. So it's not as easy as bringing on one more person and then bringing on one more brand because all the workload would have to shift at that point, and it's it's that it it doesn't it doesn't reduce the workload as uh enough on the rest of the people to make that to make that work.

Speaker: 09:00
Yeah.

Speaker 1: 09:00
What we've seen so far, and based on just how our model works and how, you know, to make our business thrive, 10 to 12 is the right, right number. But we also want to grow a little bit. We don't want to be a big company, we want to be a boutique family run company, but that's why we're you know kind of delving into this synergy services because that we can scale a little bit more easily by just adding on another analyst or or whatnot, if if we ever need it.

Speaker: 09:26
That totally makes sense. For brands, let's just say uh a brand that was fairly well off from a pretty good position from a finance financial standpoint. Um, I guess when and why does it like make sense to hire a sales agency like Synergy versus a brand just saying, hey, we're gonna, you know, take the time and effort to build out an internal sales team, or maybe it's sometimes it makes the most sense to have a mix of both.

Speaker 1: 09:52
Sometimes it does, depending on the size of the company. And the answer kind of differs depending on the size of the company. Um, you know, we've seen, you know, brands that are ready to hire somebody, like they, whether it's a VP or a sales director or an external service like ours. And one, we're all about the same price, right? But for the same amount of money, you get 12 people that have been, most of us have been VPs of sales at other companies. And we all live in the markets. So we know almost all of the brokers, we know almost all the buyers at all the retailers. So there is a built-in network, there's built-in expertise that you don't have to build yourself, as well as we have the tools and the systems for trade spending and making sure everyone knows what's going on with the business. We call it our Synergy Sales Tracker, and then we have the data and analytics that you don't have to hire outside. So it's a more efficient, in our opinion, it's a more efficient spend to hire sales management, someone like us, than it is to hire a guy or a gal that's running all across the country that might know a lot about Whole Foods, but doesn't know anything about Rayleigh's or Albertsons. So we have all that our expertise on our team, and we've been there, seen it all, done it all, and we think that's why it makes a lot of sense for totally makes sense.

Speaker: 11:14
You mentioned the team has a relationship with all the kind of key buyers. That one thing that I'd heard is thing that thing, one thing that's changed a little bit in the retail environment is um retailers are putting more kind of emphasis on rotating buyers on a more frequent basis. You know, they don't get, I don't know, get too ingrained with like the brands they have good relationships with and and like they don't have to build too close a relationship with brands. I guess if that I guess first question, is that like an accurate thing? And do you feel like that's actually the case? And if so, what are kind of the the pros and cons of that change from your perspective?

Speaker 1: 11:52
Yeah, I mean it it it does happen. We see that happen at the largest retailers like Target and Walmart the most. We've seen a bit of it happen at Whole Foods recently. I I'm not a hundred percent sure if that's by design. I think with some of the larger retailers it is, and some there's just been turn a lot of turnover. And I I I don't know from the retailers' perspective, is they don't want to have relationships like people that get too ingrained in relationships and kind of keep doing the same thing the same way, you know, for I'm not 100% sure why, but we do see it happening. And I I think we're also seeing a younger buyer, you know, back when I was at Jewel, like we were, you know, I was like the young person, and everyone had so much more seniority and they had been there forever and they knew exactly what to do, and they didn't move desks hardly um at all. And now we see so much more of that, and I think new set of eyes, more data. Um, and I also think with the um the social media being more in the forefront, like like I'm out of date sometimes because I'm not on TikTok all the time, like some of the younger, like the younger buyers are. And and I think now that that makes more of a difference than than it ever has in the in the past.

Speaker: 13:05
That makes sense.

Speaker 1: 13:05
But you know, we do our best to keep abreast of who's who's on first at each of the retailers, whether we have a relationship with them or our brokers do. Sometimes we'll pick the broker based on the best relationship they have, but we also have to know that's a moment in time because two years later it could switch. You just don't know. And we don't want to switch bro, like we want to keep things as smooth sailing as possible.

Speaker: 13:28
Yeah, that totally makes sense. From your perspective, like what do you look for and kind of what do you recommend founders should look for in sales leaders? And and does that criteria significantly differ between yeah, that CRL level, VP level, down to like director sales manager level?

Speaker 1: 13:43
I mean, it does, but at the same time, like I've been doing the sales management gig for like 15, uh almost 15 years now. And we rarely, I don't even maybe never have seen all three layers in one organization. Like when I was at White Wave, and of course it was a much bigger organization and you needed to have all those levels, but for the emerging brand space, you have one level or maybe two. And it's, I mean, like I'm not big into titles, right? Just as long as you have the right people to do the right job, I think that makes a lot of sense. But in my opinion, like a chief revenue officer or VP of sales needs to understand how to manage your brand across multiple channels, whether it's food service, alt channel, grocery, Costco, and really understand how those channels are intertwined or not. And then the sales directors usually manage other people. But like in our team, we have sales directors because they've been in the business for 20 years and they don't manage other people. They manage a really big territory. And then the sales managers are typically, you know, kind of the newer, newer kids on the block that are working with more of the independents, maybe have a couple of key customers, but more on the lower level, and then they move to director and sales manager, but or VP. But I don't, like I said, I don't typically see all three levels at one company. And that's honestly why it's why a sales management company like Synergy can be really good, because we can do some of the lower level work, the mid-tier work, and the higher level strategic, where what we do find, and I I think you you might have thought this for a question, is you know, what like what what do you look for in terms of brands and how I'm not saying this right, the how their sales kind of progresses over time. And what we see mistakes often happen is a brand will bring in a cousin, an uncle, and like, oh, you're my sales guy, right? A friend, and they're trying to figure it out and they're grinding and they're doing a great job. But then as soon as they get five or six customers, now that like they don't know how to manage them, right? They've gotten a little bit of luck, they've you know, you know, just went to a show and they've, you know, got some customers, but they don't really know how to manage them. They don't know how to manage the distributor, the retailer, they don't know how to submit a promotion. And, you know, then they're like, okay, well, I don't have any more money to hire an additional person. So Susie goes away, and now they bring in the next next level of person, and then they do the same thing when it's time, you know, to kind of level up to that VP level. And so that's that's what we see a lot of turnover in a business because they doesn't make sense for them to keep the salesperson they started with and keep them on for multiple years as they continue to scale. And you always lose traction when you change brokers or salespeople.

Speaker: 16:32
The higher level of the VP, you know, chief revenue officer type type level. Um, for the brands that, you know, the founders that are intent and they are going to hire that that higher level role. Like what's the, especially for maybe first-time founders, what's kind of some of the most common mistake or mistakes you see them them make?

Speaker 1: 16:52
Well, the the most common mistake we see, believe it or not, is that the brand will hire a marketer before they hire a salesperson. And we typically see this from like founders or CEOs that had come from big food because they know marketing and marketing was kind of the engine. And then they get to small food, emerging brands, they were like, I think I need a marketer. And they do that before they have any product on shelf. And then they're spending a $200,000 salary, and then the person's twiddling their thumbs a little bit, or that person is doing really low-level marketing work, and then they leave because they're not happy. Right. And you need to have product on the shelf, in our opinion, before you hire a full-time marketer, because there's lots of good fractional part-time people that can help you, you know, bridge the gap until you until you get there. But I think my other point is that when a company is looking for that first sales hire, they need to hire for a level that's higher than what they need today. Today they might need a grinder and that's all they need. But a year from now, they're gonna need someone that understands how to submit the promotions, how to manage a broker, how to find a broker, how to do some data and analytics. And you don't want to change your people. I mean, if you can add, that's great, but not many brands can just keep adding people year over year over year. So that's one of the mistakes that we commonly see.

Speaker: 18:17
On a bit of a different track, what do founders and do you see founders and brands often get wrong or misunderstand when it comes to how retail buyers actually make decisions?

Speaker 1: 18:30
I would say one of them is thinking that a retailer is just gonna fall in love with your product and they're just gonna bring it in because you told them about it. Every founder thinks they have the best, you know, new loaf of bread and which, as they should, it's amazing. But at the same time, there has to be realistic expectation that just because you knock on their door doesn't mean they're gonna answer your call.

Speaker: 18:52
Totally.

Speaker 1: 18:52
And the ability to get something in off-cycle is like uh, you know, just not a good strategy. I mean, can it happen? Yes, but it's very few and far between. It is by far the exception and not the rule. And we have seen some brands come in like, oh, just just call that retailer. You know, they should bring it in. No, that's not how this works. Now, can it like can it happen? Yes. If if you have a if you have a competitor that's going out of business or had a major recall or had some guffaw that you're aware of that they won't be able to supply, you might be able to sneak in off-cycle because the retailer doesn't, you know, want a big hole on their shelf. Or it's possible that you have had tremendous success online and it's the, you know, everyone is asking for it in the retailer's world. And we've seen that happen a couple of times where um direct-to-consumer brands are coming in off-cycle into retailers. You usually have to offer an exclusive to get that done. And usually they call you and not the other way around. And you know, sometimes you can get lucky, and sometimes you got a friend of a friend that knows the CEO of a retail. You know, you can play that whack-a-mole game and it it can happen, but it is by far the exception and not the rule.

Speaker: 20:07
Yeah, yeah, it's a great example. I had a sure if you're familiar with the brand Seek S-E-E-Q, like a clear whey protein brand, and one of the co-founders on podcasts a while back, and they have were one of those unique cases where they got into like, you know, an off-cycle category review and got on the shelf in Target pretty quickly after being in the market. But that's exactly what you said. They had, you know, crazy success on TikTok and grew really quickly, and they had an inbound from Target, you know. Like if you don't get the inbound, it's probably gonna be pretty hard to get something off-cycle.

Speaker 1: 20:39
Yeah. Unless, like I said, unless another brand is falling off a hill for whatever reason and you can slide in there. But or if you have like like with some smaller retailers, if you have a really good relationship with the buyer because you've been there and you've done that, you've provided these other products, and now it's you know time to bring in a new category. Like I've seen that happen for sure. But again, it's it's not a strategy that you should build, you know, your company around.

Speaker: 21:08
Other than velocity numbers, which I assume is kind of one of the important things that retailers want to see in other retail locations is say, yeah, you'll probably do well in our store too. Other than those velocity numbers, what other metrics do retailers care most about that can be most useful from a a sales story standpoint?

Speaker 1: 21:24
Yeah. I mean, units per store per week is certainly um uh you know the bellwether in terms of metrics, but it's not the end-all be-all. You know, we've worked with a brand, a high-end brand, Costa Arena olive oil, and you know, it was like $20 a bottle. You know, would a retailer sell rather sell two units of that or 10 units of something that's a dollar, right? So it, you know, not all units per store per week are created equal, and you have to make sure to point that out to the retailers because as they're doing their category reviews, sometimes they forget that, right? And so showing the what you know your Dollar sales makes a big thing difference, but also how does your product, how does it stand up in the category? And what does the category look like? And you know, I've been in some situations where I'm like, oh, we're going into category review, our turns are terrible. And then we go in and they're like, Yeah, they're terrible, but you're the best of the worst. You know, understanding where you where you are relative to your competition is really important. And also, like, we sell a falafel mix. It sells at best one unit per store per week, at best. And there's all it's the only one, right? And you know, everyone would like for it to be more, but the retailer needs to carry one and it's it's ours. And then also other retailers like Kroger in particular, you know, they're looking at household penetration. Like how how important is this particular product to their consumer base? And is that consumer gonna leave that store if that particular product isn't on shelf? So kind of looking at household penetration, dollars per household, and and what does that consumer look like in the eyes of that retail? It's hard to get to that data, but sometimes you can, sometimes panel data helps and just really understanding your category really well, really well can make a difference.

Speaker: 23:13
Yeah. Yeah, I think you kind of answered answered this question, but in case there's something you want to kind of build upon, like assuming Gap brand is working within kind of the standard category category review process for brands that are like newer to retail, what can they do like planning-wise ahead of that meeting to set themselves up for a really great category review meeting that results in whatever ideal outcome they have in mind?

Speaker 1: 23:37
Yeah. And and first getting the meeting is super hard. And that's we rely on our brokers to help us with that because they have that, you know, they're in the market in the relationship. So that I think that's important. But, you know, we try to, I'll say stack the deck, but um, if there's a show coming up, right? Like try to get them to come over to our booth or give them a recap from the show. Um, you know, you want to ping your buyer periodically without annoying them. And you want to make it short and sweet, like two or three bullet points they can read in 20 seconds and go move on to the next. But, you know, if if we you know, it depends if you're brand new to the market or if you have a little bit of traction or whatnot. But, you know, if you have a little bit of a data story to share, like if you have access to spins or buys or data, you can say, oh, we're the number two fastest growing cookie in the better for you segment. Click, here's a picture of our new product, but just a couple snippets without being annoying. Like you can't do it every week, like maybe once a month at the most. And then, you know, that then when it's time for the review to come around, like hopefully the buyer remembers you. Hopefully it's the same buyer, but hopefully they remember you from one of those interactions and you can build on that.

Speaker: 24:52
Yeah, that makes sense. That's super helpful. What's the best way to communicate a price increase to retailers?

Speaker 1: 24:59
So uh a lot of your questions are kind of just loaded or they have some nuances because every situation is a little bit different, right? But um, generally in the emerging emerging brand space, you we're shipping through one of the distributors, typically Unify and Kahee, and they require 90-day notice. So they will, in their own way, send the communications out to all of the retail partners so everyone knows that this price change is gonna be happening. But then some retailers also require you to tell them directly, even if they're buying your product through a distributor. So Whole Foods, Albertson's as example, there's special forms you have to fill out, and then we send a note to the buyer saying, hate to do this, but here's what's happening, here's what's gonna be executed, here's why it's happening. Let's have a discussion about it. If there's a promotion in place, like timing is everything, you have to think about promotions and other things in the future. Like, do you have to increase a scan because you agreed to a two for three? Do you need to negotiate? You can't do the two for three anymore, or whatever that case may be. You need to tell the important customers and the ones obviously that require it.

Speaker: 26:06
I think I've heard you talk about this kind of the importance of just transparent and kind of upfront and honest communication with retailers and just you know keeping them in the loop and not surprising them. Like what's I guess can you give an example of kind of what this looks like when when issues arise?

Speaker 1: 26:20
Yeah, it it these typically stem around production and um supply chain issues, is what we typically see them around.

Speaker: 26:29
Yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:31
There's been, you know, with COVID, it was terrible, right? Like, let's let's not go. I'm having PTSD about that. But you know, you want to be transparent to a point. The retailers don't want to know every little hiccup that you've encountered with your co-man and the trucking company and the 3PL and all of that. But also like understand, like we've had some brands go, you you gotta tell Sprouts that we're not gonna be able to ship. Like, well, hold the phone, maybe. How much product does the distributor have? Like sometimes we see they have six weeks of inventory for whatever reason, and you're gonna short, you know, 20 cases. Okay, like let's like have realistic. We need to tell you know Kahi that you're gonna short these cases, but you don't need to, you know, set the world on fire with sprouts because because of that. Now, if and now that both UNFI and Kahee, you have access to their portals, you can see exactly how much inventory they have on hand and how much how long it is expected to last. So not only can you prioritize your POs if you're like, okay, I'm getting 20 pallets of product, you can prioritize where they should go based upon the needs that you can identify in those portals, which is super helpful. And then if you're gonna have a long-term out of stock, by all means, you need to tell your biggest retail partners, especially if you're having promotions or there's it was a new item launch or not, like whatever the situation is. And particularly with the new item launch, if you're gonna be late, you need to tell them as quickly as possible so that you can put a plan in place to get it on shelf as quickly as soon as you have the product available, or or you're gonna, you know, hire airplanes and your own trucks to get it from A to B. And sometimes that does happen. So, but you you need to be transparent to a point. And you know, not every case that's missed is the sky is falling. You know, it's not good. You need to ship on time and in full, but you need to look at it relative to the bigger picture.

Speaker: 28:24
Yeah, that makes total sense. Shifting gears a little bit, this is definitely a broad question. So I'll let you answer it however you want. What does um a well-rounded go-to-market strategy look like?

Speaker 1: 28:35
Yeah, that is a high-level one. Um like you you need to understand your product and where it fits in, right? And some of it is gonna be just inherent, like it's gonna be a no-brainer. They're cookies. Or do you make a bulk thing of tahini? Well, then the bulk thing at tahini isn't gonna go into retail, it's gonna go into food store. So some of it is pretty well defined. But cookies, as an example, could go anywhere, really. And then you have to think about what kind of packaging do you want? Does it need to be peggable? Is it like two cookies in a package or is it 10 cookies? And so understanding where you want to spend your resources is is, you know, you need to spend some time on that. We've had some brands that like Heavenly Hunks, they started in Costco and were several million dollars there before we went into retail. And we went into retail with a slightly different product because we knew like couldn't be the same exact, you know, same exact product and value proposition. And then we could kind of go like our whole strategy was don't screw up Costco. Don't screw up, like we're gonna go low and slow. And we have, and and that's worked. Um, but like understanding where you want to start, your product and how it fits in, and then what does it take to be successful on each one of these channels? Can you do it yourself? Do you need a broker? What kind of broker? How much do they cost? What where do you think you can have where's the lowest hanging fruit? Generally, grocery isn't the lowest hanging fruit. It can be in in microcosms, but it takes a very long time to get things done in the grocery channel because the category reviews only come around once every six months, once a year, or once every two years. So it's you just have to understand all these things and do your homework before you can figure out which area you want to go in.

Speaker: 30:18
What does um a good sales deck look like or include in kind of a similar, even maybe more simpler question? Kind of a sell sheet should look like and include.

Speaker 1: 30:26
Yeah, so we work on this a lot with our brands, and it it is so much more important now than it was even pre-COVID to have a great selling presentation because it's really hard to get a meeting. So you have to submit and cross your fingers and hope that you get a meeting generally. And we make sure that our brands have as hard of a hitting as a deck as possible in the fewest amount of pages. So, but what they look like is we need a a page about the founder or the like the story of the beginning story, or what the you know, you bet you started at the farmer's market and then you perfected your recipe, and then you did this, and then now you're in reach you started in, you know, a whole food store and you know, the northeast part of the country and whatever. So you need a story because some people, you know, it's very familiar, they want to know that and like the sustainability. You need um a page about the products. What are the reasons to be? Why should a retailer look at this product relative to the 20 other salsas that are being presented to them? What makes you stand out? And then we also include a comparison page, which typically is here are the brands, here are the attributes, or vice versa, here are the brands, here are the attributes, non-GMO certified, organic, how much protein, how much sugar, the sustainability. So whatever makes you stand out relative to the major competition, just in a very visual, you know, click, click, click, they get it right type of thing. And we always include that. If we have access to data, depending on how much, it could be one, it could be four pages of data. How are we doing in a particular retailer or region? How are we doing in that retailer or in the total US, whatever makes us look the best? And then we also have what we call a one pager. A sell sheet, you mentioned that is something we define as something. A sell sheet is just very generic information about the product that usually use at trip. So it's kind of like a spec sheet, right? Yeah. Spec sheet, yep. But we call it a one pager, and the one pager must have, at least for us, it has to have really good pictures, front-facing pictures of the product, a scannable UPC. It needs to have a few bullet points for the reason to be what this is the, and then it has to have all of the like logo attributes, the non-GMO project verification, the kosher, the certs, all of that. And then it needs to have the ranking of each of the items if if there is one. And then we typically include like a written out UPC, what are the UNFI and KHE code numbers, and then we also include the case pack and size so that, and then sometimes the length, width, and height, just so that everyone like if you could only send one page to a retail, it's kind of like your elevator pitch. If you can only send one page in, that's it. And so all of ours for every single brand has those same attributes on them, and it works quite well.

Speaker: 33:20
Cool. That's a great overview. How can a brand truly partner with their distributor to maximize success?

Speaker 1: 33:26
Depends on the distributor. It depends on the size of your company. But I'm assuming most in this audience are on the smaller side and emerging. I recommend that you get to know both your buyer, buyers, and your category managers a little bit. You don't need to be best friends, but I want them to know what my product is. I want them to know that I care enough that they know what my product is. So I send them samples. We have a couple of calls. I don't need six calls a year. We need two or three a year so that they know what's going on with our business and we keep them informed and we participate in some of their programs, not all. Kind of an aside, the distributors don't make a ton of money by selling products. Like it's very, very low margin. They need they keep the lights on also by you know utilizing different marketing programs and off invoices and whatnot. So, you know, we find it important to participate in a few of those. And we want to be on the good list and not on the naughty list, right? And Kahee has good, better, best program. And you, you know, you don't want to be, you don't want to be on whatever the lowest, the lowest metric. Right. But so you you want to do your your annual planning sessions with them and you want to keep them up to date on what's going on with the you know, POs. Like if if no news is good news in their mind, I'm sure. They have lots of retailers to service and lots of brands that they cover. So they write a PO, you ship a PO, or they pick it up. So, but if if there is a problem, like notifying them as soon as you know that there's going to be a problem is the best because then they might be able to move product. Like they had a PO for Moreno Valley, but they're like, oh boy, we need this over here. And so they could cancel that PO. And if there's only so many cases, they could put it where it's needed the most to make sure that their customers stay in stock and in full as possible. So, and then some of the other things are very contractually obligated, like price increases are 90 days and you know, those sorts of things. But keeping just keeping up your finger on the pulse with the buyers and the category managers a few times a year, I think is best. But then the also for emerging brands, they have it's not it's not automatic you get into them, but they have new brand programs for both Kahee and UNFI. And we've had several brands go through the program and it's been super helpful because they there's there's cheaper, it's cheaper programming and they hold your hand a little bit more because their systems are big and complicated, and they'll walk you through the system a little bit more if you're part of those programs. And I highly recommend them.

Speaker: 35:57
What do you feel like brands like what do brands still not understand about how distributors actually think or what are things you feel like are common that brands kind of miss when it comes to distributors?

Speaker 1: 36:09
Yeah. The the biggest one by far, like 10 to 1, is a lot of new brands. I'm in the distributor, their sales team will take care of it. Right. It does not work that way. Right. Like it's hard to get into a distribution center, but if you you know get enough customers on board or you get the right retailer, it'll open up a DC. Um, it it they have a sales team, yes, but honestly, they don't really care if they're selling your peanut butter or the next guy's peanut butter. They just want a peanut butter, right? Yeah, and you know, sometimes you can get to be friendly with some of the sales reps and they can help you. That's on a very microcosm level. Like you can't scale that forever with every single I mean, they give hundreds of reps, right? So um, certainly you you can send them information and do spiffs and that sort of thing with some of the reps, but um they're generally not going to sell on your behalf. You need to have your own plan with your own strategy, with your own people to sell your products. That's probably the number one thing. And then the other thing I mentioned is, you know, a lot of brands just think that these distributors they just make money by selling stuff. Well, that's not the case. If you think about the different markups, you know, some of the larger markups like a Whole Foods, it's an 8% markup from the distributor. It's probably on in actuality a little bit less than that. Well, you can't ship the product for 8% to get it from a warehouse to each retailer across the country every single almost every single day. Like they're they're not making money on it. So they need to augment with other programs, and you just need to figure out which ones of those make the best sense for your brand and participate in the right ones.

Speaker: 37:50
Yep. Cool. That makes total sense too. Really helpful. On the broker side of things, when does it make sense to for a brand to engage a broker brokers? And then assuming it is is the right time, what's the best way to kind of diligence and decide who's the best one to actually work with?

Speaker 1: 38:06
Yeah. So what what we always say, especially for like new brands, emerging brands, you just do it until you don't sleep anymore. Like you grind, you go out, you mean you're doing everything. And you know, when we started Synergy, that's what we did. I mean, we're not a brand, but like you grind, you just do it. And when you can't sleep anymore, that's when you bring on some help. And, you know, it could either be another internal person or a broker, depending on kind of what what your skill set is. And we often say that you should bring on a broker before you bring on like a higher level salesperson or even a team like us, because we need brokers to help us do what we do because we're only 12 people across the country. And you don't need to hire a national broker. Oftentimes you don't, you start with a regional broker and that can work out great. But like you could have a whole other podcast on how to select brokers and and manage them. But generally speaking, it's finding out like as a brand, you'll know like what type, like what area of the country you want to focus on, and then use your resources, use LinkedIn, call me, like whomever in the industry you know, who what brokers do you know, which ones are good, da-da-da. And um, you know, there's you could use Chat GPT too to find out like the you know the best questions to ask. But some of them you talk to as many as you can, you know, understand their payment terms, what it's gonna cost to do business with them, ask them like what their team looks like. You know, is it is it more important for you as a brand to have more key account managers or people at on the street level, right? Depends on your brand and what is most important for you. Do they have access to data? And can you do ride-alongs? Can you do spiffs and all these sorts of things? So ask a ton of questions. And it I think usually the the best will rise to the top. And also ask if they have conflict. Not all conflict is bad. So if you if you're selling a cookie, what other cookies do they work with? Again, not all conflict is bad because if you wanted to find a broker that didn't work with a cookie, you'd never have a broker because they all do, right? But you might not want your biggest competitor, you know, to work with one that's with your biggest competitor. And sometimes when you're small, you don't sometimes you kind of get what you can get, right? But you know, the the thing about managing them is you know, having regular calls with their leadership. Usually you'll be assigned a business manager and you'll have at least a monthly call with that person and you'll get have a finger on the pulse and and you'll set goals together and they'll they'll you know keep you informed of which um uh which retailer submissions are due when. But also, no, just because you hire a broker, that doesn't mean you give everything up. You need someone to manage them. And that's you know, one of the things that Synergy does really well is we engage with our partner, our broker partners, we work together, and you know, it's you can have one broker as an example in the Southeast, but there might be five category reviews that are all due within, you know, a two-week period. And you need to provide them with the strategy and the information that they need in order to put all the submission paperwork together because every retailer's different. So you need to be engaged and manage them. And if you don't have the time to do that, that's when it's time to hire somebody else to help you do that.

Speaker: 41:16
That's a really helpful checklist. Last question for you, Betsy. You're in this world so much, you work with a bunch of different brands, you see a lot of stuff. Any um, maybe outside of the brand brands you work with, because you may be partial to those, but any uh any brand specific brands or just broader trends in the CPG space that's have gotten you kind of particularly excited lately or things that you're kind of following closely at all?

Speaker 1: 41:39
Well, I mean, from a macro perspective, I don't think anything I'm gonna say is earth-shattering here, but protein is it. Everybody's talking about protein, right? You know that. I think fiber is coming up in the scale a little bit. Like in my social feeds, I'm hearing a lot about more about fiber, fiber, fiber. I'll be very interested to see, you know, over time with the new guidance on um the food pyramid, if that will do anything. I don't, I don't know. And then the other one, like, because I've been on GLP ones myself, I'm looking at that and like how how are brands responding to the fact that everybody is on a GLP one and how is that changing the the amount of food that's given in a particular portion or what those macros are gonna be, or even how are they gonna market them? So I'm interested in that. I don't like I have to believe it's gonna be a thing, but I I don't know. I'm not the best at picking trends.

Speaker: 42:30
No, these are all great. I mean, they're they're obvious, but I think they're, you know, they're definitely point for sure.

Speaker 1: 42:34
Mm-hmm.

Speaker: 42:35
I love it. Well, yeah, Betsy, this has been awesome. Um super helpful. I think people are getting a lot of value out of this. Um, you clearly have a lot of expertise in the space. So what what's the best place for people to follow along with you and all knowledge you've got? And then what's the best place for people to follow along with with Synergy and everything you guys are working on?

Speaker 1: 42:50
Yeah, I think we have um my own LinkedIn page, you just find me at Betsy Gillette. Um, and then Synergy, Synergy Sales Consulting Group. We have a LinkedIn page and then a website. So it's synergy sc.com. Perfect.

Speaker: 43:06
Awesome.

Speaker 1: 43:06
You can find me. Well, it's been great. Appreciate the time, Betsy. It's been awesome. All right, have a great day. Yeah, I think that's a pod.

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