--- title: Retail Account Penetration Strategies for Shopper Marketers description: "\"Elevate the conversation with retail partners\" is an objectives that shopper marketers are often charged with. What exactly does it mean and how do you begin?" image: https://blog.shopperations.com/hubfs/Retail%20Account%20Penetration%20Strategies%20for%20Shopper%20Marketers.png --- [![Enlightened Shopper Marketing!](https://blog.shopperations.com/hubfs/2023-Shopperations-Theme/img/5435534.png "Enlightened Shopper Marketing!")](https://shopperations.com) - [Platform](https://shopperations.com/platform/) - [Services](https://shopperations.com/services/) - [Clients](https://shopperations.com/#clients) - [Who We Help](https://shopperations.com/#whowehelp) - [About Us](https://shopperations.com/about/) - [Blog](https://blog.shopperations.com/) - [Contact](https://shopperations.com/contact/) - [Client Login](https://shopperationsapp.com/auth/login) ### BLOG FOR PRACTICAL SHOPPER MARKETERS # Retail Account Penetration Strategies for Shopper Marketers By [OlgaYurovski](https://blog.shopperations.com/author/olgayurovski) Posted [July 12, 2017](http://shopperations.info/2016/09/) In [Insider Scoop](https://blog.shopperations.com/topic/insider-scoop), In [Shopper Marketing Best Practices](https://blog.shopperations.com/topic/shopper-marketing-best-practices) [0](https://blog.shopperations.com/retail-account-penetration-strategies-for-shopper-marketing#comments-listing) - [Tweet](https://twitter.com/share) ![Retail Account Penetration Strategies for Shopper Marketers.png](https://blog.shopperations.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Retail%20Account%20Penetration%20Strategies%20for%20Shopper%20Marketers.png?width=466&name=Retail%20Account%20Penetration%20Strategies%20for%20Shopper%20Marketers.png)Every CPG organization, at some point, realizes their existing relationships with Category Managers or Buyers can take them only so far. Their next challenge is to start strategic, long-term conversations with other groups inside their retail customer organizations. A large retailer’s headquarters can be a challenging maze to navigate. For shopper marketers, mapping out and understanding this maze is essential for long-term success. Start by asking, “Who are the key stakeholders and can you reach out to them effectively?” Below are some ideas on where to start and how to effectively partner with various groups in your key retail accounts in order to develop strategic Shopper Marketing relationships for long-term success.   ### Get in the Right Frame of Mind You may be thinking, “Why would a large, busy retailer talk to me?”. While your target contacts are indeed busy, stretched thin, and have dozens of other CPG vendors knocking on their doors, you shouldn’t sound needy when it comes to setting up appointments. Wear your consultant hat, and show them how you can improve their professional life by setting yourself apart from your peers: 1. **Inspire Them** — Offer insights that tell them something they don’t already know about their shoppers. 2. **Bring Scale** — Gather all your brands to showcase the breadth of your portfolio and how you can play a meaningful role in their shoppers’ lives. 3. **Fund Their Ideas** — Your shopper marketing budgets, especially when pooled across all of your brands, are a tremendous asset retailers seek to better understand and direct. 4. **Showcase Your Talent** — Position your team as a savvy partner your customer can rely on to help them achieve their goals. Your team’s ideas, energy and capacity can be a valuable resource to your retail partners. 5. **Offer Turnkey Solutions** — Make it easy to say yes to the complex, scale initiatives you bring to your retail customers by making them [completely turn-key](https://blog.shopperations.com/how-to-design-a-perfect-meal-solutions-display-in-12-steps).   ### Know Where Your customers’ Strategies Take Shape Most likely, your exposure to retail client organizations began with the category managers, or buyers, your sales team calls on. Category managers’ everyday goals are to deliver monthly or quarterly sales and profit results. To achieve their goals, they are focused on getting the right cost through supplier price negotiations and how to apply the right levers (feature, display, TPR) and shopper tactics to drive their top-line sales. Conversations with category managers tend to be short-term in scope and are heavily focused on pricing. If you want to walk away from price-centered conversations, carefully observe who sets the strategic course for your key accounts. Often, you can infer who the key decision makers are by attending annual vendor conferences and observing who presents or speaks for the retailer and what they talk about. Another way to find out is to simply ask your current contacts, “Who sets or influences the 1-3 year plans for your company?” Here are a some of the groups you can reach out to and engage in long-term strategic conversations: **1. Shopper Insights/Marketing Research**  — This group researches trends and shopper attitudes, studies competitive landscape and identifies areas of risk and opportunity for their company. **2. Marketing Communications** — This group is typically in charge of in- and out-of-store communications, retail branding guidelines, determining major communication platforms and seasonal communications, and managing the entire marketing mix. **3. Merchandising/Promotional Planning** — These teams are in charge of coordinating weekly circular features and in-store display plans. They are very busy and mostly meet with large or strategic CPG vendor partners who can deliver the sales volumes and meet their weekly and monthly sales goals. **4. Loyalty/CRM** — Smart retailers leverage their shopper data to reward loyalty and look for CPG partnerships to shape and fund these efforts. The CRM and Loyalty groups are some of the most analytical, sophisticated and forward-thinking people in the industry, so you will have to bring some heavy talent artillery to the meeting. **5. E-commerce** — This is where many retailers invest heavily today to gain first-mover advantage and win omni-channel shoppers. These teams are very focused on building awesome user experiences online and offline. **6. Retail Operations** — This is where store re-design and aisle reinvention initiatives take place. These teams work closely with merchandising and marketing plus they do a lot of in-market testing and pilots before deciding what new sets will be rolled out across all stores. ### Building Relationships that Last Now that you’ve identified the key stakeholders and how to reach out and engage them, you need to put some effort into building and maintaining a long-term, productive relationship. These tips can help you find the balance between a helpful ally or an unwelcome disruption to an already busy workday. - Define “penetration” and its different levels and facets: Is it a LinkedIn connection, an informal coffee meeting, a formal capabilities presentation, a one-time project or an ongoing long-term partnership. - Set overarching goals and tie them to not only short-term sales opportunities but also long-term JBP process and [Kantar PowerRanking](http://www.kantarretail.com/what-we-do/consulting-and-analytics/organisational-performance/) scores. - Make customer penetration part of your team’s performance objectives. - Assign team members to reach out to specific customer contacts but be careful not to encourage territorial behaviors where only one person is “allowed” to make connections. - Work on the relationship between sales calls by joining networking organizations such as [NEW](http://www.newonline.org/) (Network Of Executive Women) which, by the way, is open to men as well. - Invite your key customer contacts to travel to industry conferences, such as [Path To Purchase Expo](https://path2purchaseexpo.com/) or [Shopper Marketing Summit,](https://shoppersummit.com/) better yet, sign up to speak together about your success stories.   ### Shopper Marketers’ Main Goals I believe strongly that the shopper marketer’s main goal is to *make connections*. Whether that’s by [busting the Brand-Sales silos](https://blog.shopperations.com/shopper-marketing-1-mission-bust-the-brand-sales-silos) or navigating the complicated maze of Retail headquarters or [building the right team](https://blog.shopperations.com/7-people-every-shopper-marketing-team-needs), shopper marketers must be able to see the possibilities in how to connect, engage, and build lasting relationships throughout the complex web of CPG and Retail. It’s one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of being a Shopper Marketer! What suggestions or tips do you have to start the strategic conversations with Retail?   [![Get the Shopperations eBook](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/1590127/2047697a-d482-470b-ab2e-04e4005ca4a5.png)](https://cta-redirect.hubspot.com/cta/redirect/1590127/2047697a-d482-470b-ab2e-04e4005ca4a5) ![OlgaYurovski](https://blog.shopperations.com/hubfs/1a44c7f28cfee6a9c9c285928d0db3ba.jpeg) ### [OlgaYurovski](https://blog.shopperations.com/author/olgayurovski) After more than 15 years in the Consumer Packaged Goods industry, I founded Shopperations to solve a problem I saw everywhere, marketing teams running complex retail programs with tools that were never designed for the job. Today I focus on building software that brings structure, transparency, and control to omnichannel marketing execution. 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