Retail selling … How to create value when everyone is following the plan
Many people ask what makes Target such a successful company? A recent story about them said that it is their creation of a planogram system, which made their company unique.
I hate to argue with the writer, but companies in the grocery industry, in California, had a variation of the planogram 20 years before Target. To the sales people, who call on stores with a planogram, they can be a joy, if you have great shelf space or murder if your products are in poor
locations. Planograms are a starting places not an end and anyone that can’t sell a store manager on change, should turn in their sales bag. I know this because for the last three springs I’ve been working around them in the Lowes and Home Depot stores.
In 2004, the BayerAdvanced company reached out to the master gardener community to find people to promote their products, so in the spring of that year I worked in Lowes stores telling the stories of new products they introduced. The following year Bayer developed their first merchandising, in house, program for their line of lawn and garden care products and I worked with them in Dallas. The next year I lead a team of six people working with
more than 75 stores. In each year my sales data was up over 30% of the previous year, it all happened because of relationship and value based ideas that benefited store sales. Ever store had a planogram, but every store or department manager did what he or
she had to do to make his or her numbers. Good sales people showing store people what is in it for me, can always work magic to making selling fun and profitable. Planograms are a tool, but they are not a strait jacket.
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Let me give you some basic thoughts on selling value. Each of the displays above is at the entrance of the store or garden center – ideal for moving the product, but not always part of the planogram. But, when store managers are shown selling data they want to put what is hot in a place where it can be seen. Then when other stores see these displays and the results they produce they too want good results. It is the
role of the sales people to develop a reason that benefits the store to make change possible and to help your sales efforts. While this sounds like of course – it takes loads of preparation and great graphics or else the displays and other changes won’t
happen.
Take a look at the above display of pallets of Complete insecticide, next to Scotts fertilizer spreaders. When the store and I saw the quantities of product that arrived in the store, we devised a plan to
move it. This was not the planogram, but it was what was possible to move product and when the week was done we set up other displays of what was left – nobody gets a huge aisle display like this for more than a week. At the end of the season sales had nearly doubled for this product. Everyone was happy.
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One of my co-workers asked me why I did this project and I told him that there is an ancient concept - "Those that can do and those that can't teach." I wanted to make sure that what I am doing still works and that I am able to
see how the modern sales environment works for me and my customers. If you have two or three years of double digit growth then you the data supports sales ideas. Things change - but not much. I also learned a great lesson about the attention span of visitors to a store and from this developed a speakers program for the Dallas Master Gardeners and the Texas Home and Garden shows.
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