How to walk into a category review and not waste the meeting

Buyers are not evaluating your brand. They are evaluating whether you fix a gap in their category. Here is what to bring, from someone who sat on the buying side for 21 years.

I spent 21 years at Kroger, a good stretch of it deciding what went in the meat case. Then I spent six years on the supplier side pitching people who had my old job. The gap between how those two rooms think is the single most expensive misunderstanding in this industry.

Here is the short version: the buyer is not evaluating your brand. They are evaluating whether you close a gap in their category. Almost every deck I received got that backwards.

What the wrong deck looks like

The wrong deck opens with your founding story, moves to your plant, shows your certifications, lists your awards, and lands on a request for distribution. It is entirely about you. Every slide is true and none of them answer the question the buyer is actually holding, which is:

If I give you this space, what do I lose, and what do I gain?

Space in a meat case is not free and it is not additive. Something comes out for you to go in. The buyer’s real risk is not that your product is bad — it is that they remove an item doing $X a week and replace it with one doing less.

What to bring instead

1. Their data, not yours. Come with a read on their category built from shopper data — 84.51°, dunnhumby, Circana, whatever the account uses. Who is buying this category, what else is in the basket, which buyers left, and what they bought instead. This is what “fact-based selling” means, and it changes the meeting from a pitch into a category conversation.

2. A named gap. Not “consumers want natural.” Specifically: this account under-indexes on a cut, a price tier, a pack size or a shopper group relative to the market, and here is the sales the gap is costing.

3. The item you would remove. This is the one nobody does, and it is the one that gets you taken seriously. Tell them which SKU you think should come out and why. You will sometimes be wrong. You will always be credible.

4. An honest velocity number. What will this item do per store per week? If you do not have a real number from a comparable account, say so and propose a test that will produce one. A made-up number is discovered in about six months, and it ends the relationship.

5. A first ask that is small enough to say yes to. Almost nobody should be asking for a national rollout in the first meeting. A division, a banner, a test set of stores — something the buyer can approve without a committee.

The part that happens after

Most brands do not lose the account at the pitch. They lose it in year two.

The item goes in, velocity is soft for a quarter, promotion support was never planned, a supply problem hits in month eight, and at the next review it comes out quietly. Nobody calls to tell you.

So plan for the second year during the first: what the promotional calendar looks like, what happens if you are short, who calls the buyer when something goes wrong, and what evidence you will have at the next review that the item earned its space.

One thing to stop doing

Stop leading with price unless price is genuinely your position. Buyers can get cheap anywhere. If your case is that you close a gap, make that case. If your case is that you are 40 cents under the incumbent on the same quality, make that case — but know that it is a position somebody else can take from you the following year.