Sales to Retail Customers

Companies that sell their brand products through retail customers must put their highest focuses at pulling sales through the point-of-purchase. Thus, the retailer is the middleman in the buying process. Manufacturers and importers sell goods to their retail-customers which require designing of dynamic service systems, such as for; negotiating a commercial contract with retail, order generation, delivery and merchandising and after sale services. And not the least to constantly help retail to build brand values to exceed consumer satisfaction through execution excellence at the point-of-purchase.

Although the service system design is structured around the company’s point-of-purchasing marketing strategy, ultimately the consumer demand at outlet level drives the service systems structure. The objective is to balance the value-added activities against the cost associated. This means higher service cost can be justified with incremental revenues. The service systems structure is local market driven and planning for optimization is rooted in the local market nature and effectiveness.

Production companies, distributors and wholesalers that sell their products to retail outlets must build an organized service structure around all the outlets they service. Many sales and production companies have tenth of thousands of retail outlets they service by fixed visit frequencies. Managing to service all these outlets effectively and efficiently can generate major competitive advantage.

In modern sales operations the objective is therefore, to focus on selling out of the outlets, rather than pushing product into the outlets. It is obvious that if the products will not sell out of the outlets the retail store will not anymore be interested in doing business with your company. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the differences between the push and the pull sales concept.

Orders and Sales Through Retail Outlets

Retail outlets principally have the ownership over the point-of-purchase. The “retail customers” are generally the owners of the point-of-purchase. They have the power and can therefore without any middleman in the process determine what success looks like! If a company is the owner of the point-of-purchase it is much easier to make perfect design and execute the look-of-success. Retail customers are also the owners of the shopper’s category sales information – which are the key factors for developing and measuring ongoing success.

Number of company’s utilize persuasion selling techniques, explaining the brand unique value proposition to consumers, this also includes product sampling and consumer promotions at the point-of-purchase to drive sales and enhance trials usage to capture new consumers.