Retail Detailed

Who am I? I am the retail samurai merchant. Perhaps I was the buyer or merchandise manager sitting across the desk from some of you. Those who were prepared flourished in their dealings with me. Others were not so fortunate. Retailing is a tough profession, with innumerable hours spent pouring over sales information, searching for details to drive businesses. Retail is detail. If you weren’t meticulous, I, the buyer, wasn’t that pleasant. I have crushed a few peddlers along the way. However, many well-organized salespeople were very successful with me.

I’ve been an assistant buyer, buyer, senior buyer and merchandise manager for the top specialty, department and super stores in America, in a career that has spanned more than 25 years. I’ve played the game with really terrific sales people, dominating huge multi-million dollar businesses, and negotiating rather gigantic deals. But I played the game with my cards pretty close to the vest. There was no way that I would have shown you my hand. I wouldn’t tell you my plan or what was going on in my cranium. Back then, I was on the retailer’s payroll.

In this book, I’m putting the cards on the table face up. I’m revealing buying skills that are utilized on a daily basis in the retail world. Why am I doing this? I want to help you and many other salespeople and manufacturers to be more successful in your dealings with retail stores. There is way too much miscommunication in business today. If I can cut through the haze for you and reveal the inner thoughts of the retail buyers, you should be able to understand how they conduct themselves. Speak their language, improve the communication and your business with them should prosper. That is my goal.

I also want to provide this book as a guide for existing retail buyers. Although it’s a charming way to learn a career, most buyers are taught their craft through trial and error, without textbooks. Retail buyers operate in an almost mysterious fashion, but it’s not rocket science. The buying profession is a covert society that delights in passing their methodology out via verbal means. It’s time to deliver the secrets in a more professional manner.

I’d like this book to guide your sales careers. I also want the retail business to boom. If I can show you a different path – one filled with wisdom, logic and preparation – your livelihood should undergo a change. I’d like to lead you down the road to a special place. When you get there, you will be armed for the challenge, prepared to confront the retail store buyer.

Are you ready? It’s time for your metamorphosis. It’s time for you to become a retail samurai salesperson.

Introduction

Everyone lives by selling something.

In the olden days, sellers sold and buyers bought. They were magical times. The history of retail sales is filled with stories of street merchants lining foreign thoroughfares, little ramshackle booths and peddlers hawking products near ports of call. The wild, uncharted western United States had its weather-beaten, rickety, slat board stores on the frontier, trading posts where pioneers pushing across America bartered for needed wares. As a retailer, once you owned the goods back then, you were totally responsible for the success or failure of the product and its sales rate. Customer service and an exchange policy didn’t exist. The manufacturer didn’t service your account. But that was a long time ago.

The retail world today has a distinctly different landscape. Salespeople don’t merely hand off the merchandise to a store and collect a check for the goods. The salesperson’s life is infinitely more complicated than that. Nowadays, the seller’s responsibilities go way beyond the initial sale. Corporate retail store buyers have expectations that must be met if a salesperson is to be successful. If the seller doesn’t meet the buyer’s needs, it’s unlikely that the store will purchase products in the future from that source.

A salesperson representing a manufacturer must take care of their customer, the retail store buyer. Today, a salesperson must convince the retail store buyer to first buy the goods. Then, the salesperson must monitor how the products sell after the purchase and provide sales support at store level. Also, the salesperson must offer point of purchase signing, redesign packaging, and provide markdown allowances and coop advertising programs. If the merchandise doesn’t fly out the door, the salesperson must take back things that don’t sell and damages. Salespeople also will encounter poorly trained buyers and they must learn the art of covering the ass of the buyer when they make mistakes. You can meet with the buyer, giving them a product and proposal exactly as they’ve requested, and then you won’t get a response. Phone calls placed to the buyer won’t be returned. There’s the regular turn over of personnel in the buying office and on the sales floor, so salespeople are always training someone new. Whew!! Its enough responsibility to give you heart palpitations.

If you’re a salesperson and you’re calling on a buyer or a corporate retail headquarters, all of the above shouldn’t be new to you. As if that isn’t enough to make you scream out of your office window, other people are conspiring against you. While you are dealing with the intricate needs of the buying office, your competition is waging a guerrilla war against you, taking store managers and buyers out to lunch to get information about you and your products. Ethics are non-existent to these people. Some of them will tell the buyer tall tales about your products and why their goods are superior. It’s not uncommon for one vendor to offer to buy out another manufacturer’s items on the shelf, making room for their products. Some suppliers will do anything to get an advantage over you. Buyers love this – they’re more than happy to play one supplier against another – and they will win no matter what happens.

Meanwhile, bombs are going off in buyer’s offices. They are disorganized and slammed by the workload and have limited, untrained bodies to help them to do the job. As a salesperson, you desperately need the buyer to move the process along, to decide to buy your product, to enter the merchandise specifications into their computer system, and to eventually generate a purchase order. But it’s not that simple.

Buyers today are focussed on way too many things. Years ago, they were responsible for picking merchandise, running ads and negotiating deals with suppliers. Today is different. Big business stretches buyers to the breaking point, requiring many to work nights and weekends to keep up with the pace. How are you going to get the buyer to purchase your items? Many of them don’t even have time to eat lunch sometimes.

How can you help the buyer? How can you be more successful with them? If you understand the buyer--how they evaluate their business, how they will perceive you, what is affecting their daily schedule--you just might sell them your merchandise.

You sell products for a living to retail store buyers. I’m sure that many of you are great salespeople. You’ve probably taken a few courses along the way that taught you how to further hone your skills.