None of us start our business walking and running on our feet. We all have to go through that awkward crawling stage and finding that perfect balance that could later propel us to growth. Guiding many founders in the early stages of their businesses, Allison Ball joins host Elliot Begoun to share some of her wisdom with us. Alli is an expert consultant for food industry entrepreneurs and the founder of Retail Ready®. She talks about the successes, mistakes, and challenges she has seen while working with new businesses and shares some great tips on how to stand out and sell more. Alli also discusses the things you need to think over before deciding to expand to other markets, getting your product on the shelf, building a relationship with your buyers, and more.

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Listen to the podcast here

Retail Ready: Getting Your Products On The Shelf With Allison Ball

I want to introduce my guest, my friend, Alli Ball who is one of the early and true pioneers of trying to find solutions for founders in one-to-many programs. Part of the inspiration for our new hybrid eLearning program was what Alli is doing with hers. She spent a lot of time with founders in the early stages and sees a lot of the successes, mistakes and challenges. I thought it would be good to have her here to chat about that and share with all of you some of the things that she’s learned and trying to help brands understand. Alli, thanks for doing this with me. I was on Alli’s podcast and it’s still one of my favorite podcast experiences. I feel like we are amateur next to her podcast. If you haven’t listened to it, make sure you do. I’ll let her tell you more about it. Alli, introduce yourself. Give your plug to your podcast. Do all the necessary stuff.

Thanks for having me, Elliot. I’m honored to be here. I cherish the opportunity to spend time with you and talk about our industry because we both love it so much. I help early-stage brands figure out how to get on the retail shelf and how to have high sales once you do. I am a former grocery buyer, head of grocery, retail store manager turned wholesale consultant. I was doing one-on-one consulting for years, and realized that there were many founders who needed support around pitching to wholesale buyers, understanding broker and distributor relationships, and navigating that behind the scenes of wholesale that I couldn’t help when I stayed in that one-to-one business model. Many years ago, I launched Retail Ready, my online course. We hit our 500th brand who has taken Retail Ready. That is the only way that I work with founders now, through Retail Ready and through Food Biz Wiz, my free podcast that comes every single Thursday.

Both programs are fantastic. For the readers, check them out. I’m going to start with a question of my own harking back to your days as a buyer. When you met with a brand, what were some of the things that you almost wanted to roll your eyes at when they would do it? I’m always starting out with our crashes. We’re all human. We want to see them. Tell us about some of the biggest train wrecks that you had and what elements were consistent in those train wrecks?

The number one thing that would cause me to roll my eyes and be a little bit frustrated behind the scenes is when a brand would start a pitch based on how delicious they are. They are like, “My name is Nancy and I make the most delicious almond butter.” I’m naturally rolling my eyes and I’m like, “Sure, Nancy. You and everybody else.” Any founder thinks that their product is delicious, functional, the most sustainably made, values-oriented, or whatever it is. When you craft this pitch based around the idea that your product is delicious, you craft a pitch that isn’t of any interest to a buyer. That’s bolt number one. Should we talk about what to do instead?

Yes, we should. I always say tastes are table stakes. They’re not differentiators. Those are just fundamental requirements. You’re not going to sit down with the buyers going, “It tastes like shit,” but it’s a good point. You understood that everybody drinks their own Kool-Aid and believes their products taste great. I want to know from your perspective what would have made you stand up and applaud like, “You’ve got this Nancy. I want your almond butter.”

It’s a subtle shift, but it’s realizing why buyers bring in products in the first place. That is to help a particular category in their store. In Nancy’s case, she is in the nut butter category. As a buyer, I’m evaluating her brand based on whether or not Nancy’s product is going to bring higher sales or more margin, or whatever my goal is with the nut butter category to my shelves. When Nancy prompts a pitch that’s all about how delicious her nut better is, it’s not telling me, is it going to sell on my shelf? Is it going to increase the basket average in my store? Is it going to help me reach my velocity or margin goals in this category? What I want as a former buyer is a pitch where the first line recognizes what that product is going to do to help me as a buyer hit my category goals.

It’s something that you and I have talked about before. It comes back to that superpower of empathy. Where I see many mistakes in the conversation between a brand and the buyer is that you make it about the brand and you don’t make it about the buyer. If I’m a buyer, I want to know what’s in it for me. How is it going to help my category? How is it going to help me perform better against my competitors? How is it going to help me win consumers? I don’t want it to be cannibalistic. I don’t want it to take away from something else that doesn’t do me any good. I’m making the same margin. “Tell me why it’s different. Tell me why it’s creative. Tell me why it’s going to help my category gross margin.” Where that starts with is understand how buyers are evaluated by their bosses, understand what they need to be a good performer in their business, and then tell them how your brand is going to help them better perform.

I was at Bi-Rite Market here in San Francisco, first at 18th Street, and then head of grocery when we opened Bi-Rite, Divis. My success was measured on the grocery department sales, average gross margin, and our spoilage. Those were the three metrics that I had to hit in order to be a successful grocery buyer or head of grocery there.

Those are not uncommon. That’s typical. The other thing that I see is that there’s a finite amount of room on the shelf or in the door. If you haven’t taken the time as a brand to understand what’s in the set, what you would recommend the buyer to replace with your product, then you’ve done yourself a disservice. You should know the category and the set of those stores as best as you can. You come informed. They’re not going to build a new 5 feet of shelf space for you. They’re not going to add it. It doesn’t come magically. It has to come at the expense of other facings.

That’s important too because one of the small things that the founders forget is not only do you have to bring high sales to that category, but you have to do better than the thing that you’re replacing. It’s easy for a brand to say, “You should put me on the shelf and you should carry my product instead of this other one because I’m local or because I’m a female founder.” If that buyer goes through all the trouble of discontinuing something on their shelf and putting your product in its place, which there is a whole bunch of steps that a buyer has to take behind the scenes, your product better outperforms what was discontinued. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time for that buyer.

Sometimes your argument as a brand isn’t that my product is going to sell more or that it’s going to outperform what is existing there in terms of maybe philosophy or dollar ring. There are other things that your brand could be doing to the category. For example, if you have a good premium product that’s going to go on the shelf next to their private label, what your product could be doing in a good conversation with the buyers by featuring my product that establishes a deeper value point to your private label, and therefore it grows your private label sales.

It’s not necessarily that your product is going to generate that more, but you’re creating a premium anchor against the existing private label. It could be an upcycle of the product or the product that’s going to go into the category, and make a statement in the category that this retailer is on the edge of innovation or doing those kinds of things to have those consumers come in. You have to know your why for being on the shelf. You have to be able to express that why to the buyer so that they understand.

It’s important that that why is focused on the wholesale buyer. One of the challenges that come up or one of the places where founders get stuck, especially in 2020, is this idea that they launch a brand direct to the consumer or they’re focused on direct-to-consumer sales. All of their marketing is focused on how to speak to the end shopper, that end consumer. When you craft a pitch to a wholesale buyer, you’ve got to switch that around and focus on the buyer being your end consumer, not the shopper.

That’s an important nuance. You want to have a little bit of the consumer, but the focus needs to be on the customer or the buyer. Let’s be honest, 95%-plus of all the brands won’t fall into what I’m about to say. Unless you are dramatically disruptive or innovative that you’re going to create new shoppers in that store, the buyer recognizes that they already have the customer. Your job by getting on the shelf is helping the buyer and the retailer sell more to that shopper who’s already in the store to fill their basket more. That’s a different thing. I’m going to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about some of the questions that were sent to me around what’s changed since the pandemic and what might be some of the lasting changes. Let’s riff on that a bit. I won’t get that specific, but what have you seen are some of the changes since this happened? If you were putting on your swami’s hat and channeling your inner clairvoyant, what’s going to stay? What’s here for the long-term?

The rise of eCommerce was huge. There was a scramble for brick and mortar stores to figure out their eCommerce solution. Whether they were adding Instacart or they were working directly in-house to create an eCommerce platform and curbside pickup or whatever it is. That makes me excited. I love brick and mortar. I love eCommerce as well, but anything wholesale, that’s my jam. It excites me that COVID forced these brick and mortar stores, these traditional stores to get with it and offers an online solution because of a few things.

One, we failed to realize how shoppers purchase groceries. We see these eCommerce numbers skyrocketing in 2020 and we think, “I’m going to sell direct-to-consumer. I’m going to launch a website and everybody is going to come and buy the functional beverage that I sell in glass bottles. I’m going to ship it around the country and it’s going to be great.” What we forget is that shoppers want to create an entire basket of groceries and checkout in one singular place. While direct-to-consumer increases in 2020, and there’s no denying that, the trend of purchasing groceries online from a single retailer is exciting and it’s here to stay.

The Brick Meets Click study came back that November 2020 became the highest month for online grocery sales. It topped $8 billion in November 2020. That’s a staggering change, but 73% of that was click and collect. eCommerce is huge but click and collect where people aggregate and it’s either delivered to their home or they’re picking it up. What’s going to happen long-term is that there’s going to be a hybrid click and collect. You’re going to click and collect your basic stuff. You’re going to go into the store and the store is going to be set for you to do that, but the perimeter, the impulse, and all of that stuff is going to be there as you go up to collect.

I also think that one of the bigger and better changes is that buyers are going to take a lot more virtual meetings long-term. First of all, it takes a lot of the cost of travel and the time of travel of the backs of earlier stage brands. That’s a difficult decision. It’s frightening and stressful when you’re meeting with the buyer, and even more so when you’ve spent some of your precious capital on flights and hotel rooms. For many of you, I know that you would book flights to Austin and try to make the turnaround in a day and save a hotel room. The more of these that happen virtually, the better. The fact that they are more accessible, it levels the playing field of who gets to those meetings.

That’s exactly the phrase that was in my mind. I wrote a blog post about this idea that was published that buyers are busy. I wish when I was a buyer that it was acceptable for me to do a Zoom testing or get on a Zoom call. With only so many hours that we have in the day and as a buyer, flying to Expo West or even taking Burt to fancy food in Downtown San Francisco is disruptive to your already busy schedule. I’m excited about the virtual meetings and virtual trade shows. It expands opportunities for founders. That’s here to stay. People are craving in-person events. There’s nothing like that experience of walking a trade show floor or having after-hours drinks with a great group of founders after Expo, but the virtual meeting is here to stay.

Even as a relative introvert, I’m still missing that human interaction and that ability to see everybody, and that’s what makes this industry special. I don’t think that goes away. I think it changes and there are benefits. One of the questions that fit into this is, what are some of the challenges that you see that have come from this that are going to stay?

I’ve got a big one. The challenge of product discovery when we have the rise of click and collect or click and ship. It’s challenging. You and I know that it is relatively easy to land on the shelf, but it is hard to sell off the shelf. You’ve got to have a robust strategy for getting those sales. I’m nervous about that. It’s something that early-stage founders should be aware of, especially if you’re in an impulse buy category. We’ve removed that experience of standing in line and grabbing nut butter cups or bag of chips or those little impulse buys. That makes me a little nervous. I think there are ways to counter it, but that’s the big one.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that my biggest concern is discovery. That was a concern pre-pandemic because I saw the tide changing, and the fact that so much discovery has been monetized at the retailers that it was also becoming expensive. Post-pandemic for early-stage brands, if you are reliant upon the typical promo TPR strategy, or hoping that you are seeing in the grab and go cooler or things like that for discovery, you are following the field of dream strategy of, “If we build this, they will come.” I think that it’s expensive. If I could push anything from founders now, it is before you go into new distribution, into new markets or new regions, be able to answer the question, “How am I driving discovery and file?”

If you can’t answer it with clarity and relative conviction, then don’t go into those new regions until you can. There are lots of ways. There are some parts of it that are exciting to me. B2B, eCommerce, democratizing, and getting product closer to where the problem you’re solving is pronounced or the need you’re filling is acute. It’s a great way to drive discovery. That could be alternative locations and smaller places that create that, and then retail serves more as a fulfillment center. It’s different for every brand. It’s different for every region. If you can’t answer that question, if you don’t have a good strategy or at least a good hypothesis around how you’re going to drive discovery, then think twice before you expand distribution.

That’s one of the mistakes that I see brands make early on. They think that the path to success is national sales or they’re eager to expand outside of their region as quickly as possible because somehow we have it in our mind that’s what brands do, “Within three years, I’m going to be a national brand.”

We’re guilty of that. As an industry, we’ve done that to ourselves. Part of it is the VC mentality and that’s not disparaging at all to the VC readers. They are very transparent about what they’re trying to share, but it’s also what we celebrate, what we talk about, what’s sexy. It’s all of those kinds of things. The truth of the matter is for most brands, and especially in the early days, it’s the wrong approach. It does not work.

I would much rather see a brand completely penetrate their own region, have wonderful relationships with their buyers, brokers, and distributors have a great marketing strategy regionally, and keep up high velocity than a brand that is spread cross-country and doesn’t know how to support on the shelf.

Another question that came up here is, would you be more interested in seeing a brand that had strong velocities in a small market or had consistently won new doors of distribution?

I want velocity. I’ll take door number one. I don’t care how many accounts you’re in. If the sales aren’t there, who cares? What I care more about is that you’re going to land on the shelf. You are going to have consistent sales, and you’re going to be an easy brand to work with, with no drama.

One of the great benefits of what we do is the fact that we get to see this business from a broader perspective. You’ve had 500 brands go through your program. You’ve been involved with hundreds of brands, maybe more than that. We get to see patterns, behaviors, and things along those lines. If you could grab the shoulders of a burgeoning entrepreneur now and say, “These are the 2 or 3 most important things that I would want you to know and to stay focused on that are going to be the greatest predictors of you having long-term success,” what would those be?

There are two things, your metrics and mindset. Understanding what is going on underneath the hood of your business, understanding your metrics, looking at them, and managing your mindset around those metrics and the challenges that come with being a founder. It’s tough.

I certainly agree with both of those. The one thing that we don’t talk enough about is the necessary mindset to get into this business that the needed resilience, perseverance, and the healthy balance between being stubborn and malleable. You have to find that balance between the two. A couple of others in addition to those that fall closely with metrics is around being committed to capital efficiency now more than ever. It’s to not get into that mindset of raising money for the sake of raising money and being like a punch drunk sailor and pissing it away, be dogging about, “For every dollar I deploy, what is my return on that going to be?” Thinking that through it. Another is being creative and problem solver. It’s not following the well-worn path. Too many founders do that. They follow the well-worn path because it seems safer and it seems like there’s more surety to it, but it’s often the path to ruin. You have to chart your own. Just like your products are differentiated, you have to be differentiated in everything that you do to win.

I see that too and I know why founders feel that way. I know why founders follow a specific path. It is because you see these brands ahead of you and you think they’ve had success, “I’m going to do what they did and success will come to me as well.” That’s simply not true. There’s no guarantee of that. We talk about a lot in Retail Ready that we have no idea what is going on behind the scenes in other people’s businesses. We see these brands with enormous sales, huge distribution, huge growth, rapid growth, and we don’t know if they’re profitable. We don’t know the burnout that was happening to that founder. We don’t know if they have taken investment or not. We don’t know. There are many assumptions there. That’s a dangerous place to be in when you follow someone else’s path to success.

In many cases, those brands that are the darlings are the ones that we read about. They’re often built on a house of cards. It’s not wrong because it’s just it is. Some brands that are in “unicorn path” is fine. It works and makes sense. They’re okay with that and have the risk tolerance of that because it’s high-risk, high-reward. A question here about your program, what are some of the fundamental teachings? What are the key lesson buckets that are part of your program?

Retail Ready is set up with three main stages, attract, pitch, and grow. In the first set of modules, we talk about attracting your target audience, understanding who is buying your product, and what problems you solve for them. We want to identify this so we can sell more to those people who are in love with our brand. We talked about the wholesale strategy there. Which channels are you selling in and does your product as it exists now makes sense for those channels in that pitch section? We talked about how to pitch to buyers. A little bit of what we talked about now, but what does the buyer want to hear? How do we contact them? Are we calling them on the phone or sending emails?

What is that sales pipeline to get the first order? In the grow section, we talk about working with brokers and distributors, how to set up in-person and digital marketing strategies to make sure that your product sells? Do you land those accounts? Retail Ready is great. I’m proud of it. It’s based off my years of one-on-one work with brands. I realized that founders were coming up against the same exact roadblocks at the same stages of growth in their business, and didn’t realize what small changes they could make to find their success.

You should be proud of it. It’s interesting that you say that because that’s how I talk about our Tardigrade Program. It’s something I’m proud of, which sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable because I don’t want to seem self-aggrandizing, but I’m proud of the impact it has. I’m proud of the fact that it’s informed by the founders and the entrepreneurs, not by me. It’s very important. The same is true with yours. Many of the readers here are relatively early-stage and you’ve now seen 500 people go through your program. Do you have some words of wisdom or things that you want to impart upon them to think about, to consider and to take action? That’s the most important word in this show. When people leave each episode, I’m hoping that there are things that they can do in their business that promotes a meaningful change. Share a little Alli’s words of wisdom.

I want to talk about two different things. The first one is related to this idea of connecting with buyers and getting your product on the shelf. You’ve got to be the squeaky wheel. One of the mistakes that I see early-stage founders do is that they give up too soon in getting in their ideal retail accounts. I know why it is. You send an email, you don’t hear back, or the buyer responds and says like, “We’re going to review your category in a couple of months,” and then you wait, you give up or somehow you forget to follow up. It’s dangerous because it feels like you’re leaving money on the table with every lead that you let drop. One of the most important things from the beginning is realizing that you have to communicate and follow up with, be that squeaky wheel in the buyer’s ear so much so that it makes you uncomfortable or it would make me uncomfortable.

Saj Khan was a guest from Nugget Markets. We asked him and he said, “The number one thing I wish more founders did was follow up.” Getting back to your comment around mindsets, one of the mindset challenges that a lot of founders have is they don’t want to be overly aggressive or be a pain in the ass, or any of those kinds of things. They’re worried about the cadence of their follow-up, their emails or phone calls. I promise you, the best way to gauge it is until there’s a restraining order taking out on you, you have not crossed that line. Buyers are busy. If your email is not returned within hours, it’s no longer even a viable email. It’s long lost in their email inbox and it will never rear its head again. If you sit back thinking, “I don’t know, it’s been a week since I’ve reached out to them.” That’s your own narrative. You’re killing yourself and your opportunities. Be persistent.

What we do in Retail Ready is we have a flow chart and it starts at the top. You send email number one. If you get this response, you go down this path. If you don’t get a response, you follow up in this way. It keeps branching off and off so you know exactly how to follow that sequence. That’s sales pipeline. The other thing related to that is the idea of using templates and having a process that you repeat for every new wholesale account. I want to be clear here. When I say use templates, you do customize them to the account that you are pitching to. You do talk about their own product set and where your product is going to fall in line.

You have to do some customization in each template, but you don’t reinvent the wheel every single time you pitch for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th email. What I like to see brands do is create their own flow chart, where they know exactly what they’re going to email. They copy and paste it, change a few sentences, and send it off. They’re not sitting there agonizing over, “What do I say in email number three? What do I say in email number four?”

I wouldn’t have thought to make that suggestion. It’s something we candidly do internally in our business. We use templates and sequences. First of all, it’s a time-saving hack. Anything that you do in your business, especially when your team is still small, you and a couple of other people, or you and fractionals. Anything that you do more than 2 or 3 times, if you can systematize it or templatize it, you are creating a time-saving. Emails are great for templating. Sequences are a fabulous way to overcome your self-narrative and mindset.

If you can set up an email sequence that only gets interrupted if there’s a response to it, we do this all the time. We’ll set 5, 6 or 7 email sequences that go out. Maybe it’s every other day or every 3 or 4 days, sometimes it’s every week, whatever the right cadence is for what we’re trying to do. We have that sequence set and launch it. I don’t think about it again. I don’t have to worry about, “Is this too soon to follow up?” It’s being done. It’s being nurtured in the background and I don’t have to do it. If that’s one of your struggle points in terms of giving yourself permission to be persistent, systematize it or templatize it.

The last thing I’ll say there too is this idea that imagine if you could sit down and you write the best sales email that you could ever craft, and then you have it there to use forever and ever. How wonderful is that gift that you are giving your future self? What happens is founders don’t do that and sure enough, you get an important email back and you want to shoot something off, you’ve realized you half-baked that email, there are some typos and you forgot to attach your sell sheet. That could have been completely avoided if you had spent that 90 minutes creating all your sales templates.

What’s the right length of an email?

The shorter, the better. We have these templates in Retail Ready and usually, my students don’t believe me. They’re like, “You want me to do three bullet points and that is it?” I’m like, “Yes.” We’re keeping them short because buyers are busy. They don’t have time to read a paragraph on your business, your values, and why you are better for your brand. We don’t care about that or that can come later. I want three bullet points, an embedded picture of your product in the email so I don’t have to open any attachments. I don’t have to do anything, especially if you have a sexy brand. You attach your sell sheet and your price list, and then I want a call to action.

This is the missing thing for a lot of people. Often, the emails end with, “I’d love to be carried in your store, looking forward to hearing back from you.” There’s no call to action for that buyer. If I could give an email tip to everyone, it is every single email needs to be moving the conversation, moving the relationship forward with that buyer. You want to think about, what do you want to happen next? Do you want to ship samples? Do you want to get on a Zoom meeting? Do you want them to place their first order? Whatever you want to happen next, you need to end with that, prompting the buyer to take that appropriate action.

I’ll add a few hacks with that. One is if you can get to 50 words, that’s the magic number. An additional hack to that is a great way to augment that 50-word email is to use a tool like Loom or Dubb or something where you can embed a quick video. For whatever reason, it’s easier for somebody to click on a video and watch it. No more than 90 seconds, preferably closer to 30 to 60 seconds, but you can add some commentary and some color to it. It creates some semblance of personal interaction. If they don’t do it, they don’t do it. What you’re trying to do in these emails and the reason why you want to have a regular cadence of emails is to stay top of mind. It’s top of mind awareness. That’s the biggest thing. I would do that and a call to action.

The other one that I say is warn them that you’re not done, “I’m sending this and I’ll follow up with a phone call. I’ll follow up in a couple of days with another email.” What you’re saying nicely is, “If you don’t respond, I’m coming back at you.” Sometimes that’s what it takes to get them off. A couple of questions came in on this is, are your templates available for purchase? I would say yes. If you want to join the Retail Ready.

We don’t make any of the Retail Ready content available outside of Retail Ready for one-off purchases. Elliot, I imagine your programs are like this too. The people who have the most success are the ones who follow the entire program from start to finish. It would be easy to say, “Here’s my training on how to make an effective sell sheet.” You can make the most beautiful sell sheet in the world, but if you don’t know how to use it, which emails to attach it to, how to get it in the hands of the buyers, what good does it do to you?

We treat this stuff holistically. You can’t isolate that. I get that, but if you spent some time and thought about what you would want to include in an email. What I would do is write 5 or 6 or 7 email sequence that you would do as your typical follow-up. Go through them, read them, and take out every superfluous word, any extra thing that’s in there, and try to get them as clipped, short and sweet as possible because it will be appreciated. One of the other missed important things is that 90% of the efficacy of your email is done on the subject. If you don’t pay attention to your subject, you type something like following up, you’ve lost a huge opportunity.

That’s what I would get, new products for your shelves.

I get many emails. I am admittedly an email compulsive. I like to have a zero inbox every night. That’s not a behavior I’m suggesting for anybody because I honestly don’t think it’s healthy. If I have an email that’s more than a paragraph, I will ignore it or I will simply reach out to that person or ask someone on our team to set up a call because it’s easier for me to deal with them to spend the time. I know I try to be good about it, but I know that that’s not the case with busy buyers who are getting either multiple numbers of emails than I get.



I am one of the most organized people you will ever know. I was still drowning in emails at Bi-Rite. I would get hundreds of emails in the workweek. Dozens of product pitches a week, dozens of samples left for me. It was overwhelming. One of the reasons why I left Bi-Rite was because I was working 60-hour workweeks, 52 weeks a year. It was overwhelming. That’s an organization that values its employees and did everything possible to have a great balanced workplace, but buyers are just busy.

Every entrepreneur reading this flipped you the middle finger because they would kill for 60-hour weeks.

I work more than that now when I have my own business. Sixty hours for someone else’s business and making $40,000, it wasn’t good.

When you sign up for an entrepreneur, you sign up for endless hours and little pats on the back, but you’re not working for somebody else. You’re not rinse and repeating. That’s the hard thing. A buyer is doing the same thing day in and day out, getting the same questions. It’s exhausting. How do you get the right email address for buyers and both large and small retailers?

There are a couple of ways to do it. I always say, “Pick up the phone,” especially with the smaller retailers or chains. Pick up the phone and call and ask the store. You can either do it in a straightforward way. You can say like, “I’m a new vendor. I’m looking to connect with the dairy buyer or the alcohol buyer.” You can do it in a sneaky way and you can be like, “I’m a vendor on your shelf. I keep getting a bounce back. Can you verify the email address of the dairy buyer for me?” There are ways to fudge it and do it that way. Pick up the phone, that’s my number one. Two, a good deep dive Google search will certainly help. Using LinkedIn and things like that is helpful. I use an extension called Clearbit Connect.

Is that like Email Hunter?

Yeah. It syncs with your Gmail inbox and you can put in any domain name or any end to an email address like @WholeFoodsMarket.com and it will pull up all of the email addresses associated with that website. That can be helpful. The power of community and connecting with fellow brands, consultants, brokers, tradeshow organizations or anything like that are valuable. I can’t tell you how often I see posts in Retail Ready that’s like, “Anybody has the buyer’s name in a grocery in the Pacific Northwest of New Seasons?” Sure enough, somebody volunteers that information. Connect with other founders in the industry. There’s no magic list.

Crowd surfing that information is great. A lot of the retailers publish it on their own website. It’s the directory for their buyers. It’s not a trade secret. They want their buyers meeting with vendors. Going back to some LinkedIn, when you do find a buyer’s name, see who they’re connected with that you know. If you can get somebody to make a warm intro for you, that goes a long way. It’s hard to start a buyer conversation with a cold email. It’s better to do it warm and get somebody to do that intro for you. What is considered good velocity moving off the shelf?

It depends on your category. Let’s say if you sell honey, your jars of honey are going to sell a lot slower than a 12-ounce cold brew coffee or a can have coconut water or a bag of chips. It depends on your category. The most important thing here is that you don’t have to have the highest sales in your category. You can have the lowest. I always think that that’s good news because it means you’ve got to outpace somebody else in your category on the shelf and you’re good. You’re not going to get discontinued. You want to inch your way up that ladder there. It is category to category dependent.

Also, retailer to retailer dependent. Always ask your buyer, “What’s the threshold? What velocity do I need to stay on your shelves?” Know that before you even say yes to going in. If you’re honey and the top performer in that category is moving two units for a week, and they say to you, “You need to be doing five in order for me to keep you in,” you know that the deck is backed against you. It’s an important question to ask and establish a mutual definition of success.

One of the underutilized resources along that line is talking with the grocery stackers themselves or talking with the people who are physically stacking the product on the shelves. There’s a little bit of nuance here with COVID. If you’re trying to get in stores outside of your region, but going in and talking to that stacker. Let’s say they’re stacking the chips, just say, “Which chip sells the fastest? Which chip is the most popular?” They know that information because they are stacking the shelves every single day. Once you have that information, you can use that in your own pitch and figure out how you’re going to shape that buyer conversation.

How can you get the velocity numbers without Nielsen or SPINS or in-store data to calculate your distributor orders divided by the number of outlets? How do you recommend?

There are a few different ways to do it. The cleanest way is to go to that buyer and ask them, “How are my sales compared to other brands in my category?” If someone asked me that as a buyer, I would love it. I’m like, “This brand is clearly trying to succeed on my shelves. This brand understands the game of grocery. They know what they’re doing and they want this information to help them achieve the same goal that I want, which is higher velocity.” I always say, go direct and ask your buyers first.

This is where I think a lot of founders misunderstand. You and the buyer if properly done are aligned, you have the same objective, you are defining success the same, you’re partners in this. They want you to succeed and you want them to succeed because that means you both win. By asking those questions and getting that understanding, it’s in both mutual interest. As long as you don’t become a pain in the butt and having them run tons of reports, but asking them, “Can I check in with you next month and see how the velocity numbers have changed with the promotional plan? We’re doing things along those lines.” Any retailer that’s reporting to SPINS, IRI or Nielsen in return have access to that data.

The other point that you made is one of my all-time favorite hacks, which is go to a store and ask the person stacking the shelf or ordering it. Most of them have Telxon guns, handhelds, iPhones and iPads that when they scan that UPC on the shelf tag, it will tell them how much was their last order, when were their next orders. You can ask them to scan a few things. For any chain that you’re in, making 1 or 2 in-store friends is good for you and good for them. You can’t replace it.

One of the things that I would encourage all of you to do is begin to learn how much information is available to you on a shelf tag. There’s a lot of information from when the last price changes, when the promotion is going to end, who the distributor is. All of that stuff is on that little tag. A little intel on the store, you can learn a lot. Alli, this was awesome. No surprise, you are fantastic. Please share with the group if they want to learn more about Retail Ready or listen to Food Biz Wiz, how do they do that? How will they learn more?

Everything is at FoodBizWiz.com. We’ve got our Retail Ready waitlist. I’ve got the podcast right there. I’ve got a link to my Instagram. That is where I hang out every day. Send me a DM. I’d love to follow your brands back, Elliot. That will be fun for me.

Thank you for joining and I appreciate it. We will do it again. We talked about doing podcast simulcasts, which could be fun. We’re also open to your suggestions of how best to leverage Alli’s brain and experience. We can do some cool things with founder involvement as well, but thanks for joining. It’s always fun to have you on. Thank you, everyone, for reading. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Alli Ball

• Alli’s podcast – Cash, Current Affairs, and Community: The state of the food industry 60 days post-COVID-19 with Elliot Begoun

• Retail Ready

• Food Biz Wiz 

• Brick Meets Click

• Tardigrade Program

• Saj Khan – previous episode

• Clearbit Connect

• FoodBizWiz.com

• Instagram – Alli Ball

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