I have a passion for creating order and structure out of chaos. CPG Marketing vendor management and buying process is broken. I wrote about it a few times here, here and here. If you are a vendor selling to CPGs, welcome to my blog. I empathize with you.
I know first hand how hard it is to sell to the CPG industry. It’s always been like this. Their organizations are notoriously large and siloed, and their decision-making process is convoluted, resulting in very long sales cycles. Even when you land an account, you are likely just scratching the surface and leaving a lot of revenue on the table because you simply can’t know who else at that company may find your services useful. This is due to multiple hyper-specialized marketing departments who don’t follow the same process, do not use the same vendors, and rarely talk to each other or share best practices.
Even if you do know who to sell to, you run into the issue of prospects’ overwhelmed inboxes. Neither do CPG marketers pick up the phone anymore. Time and attention are the most precious commodities these days. Only a handful of trusted vendors get a chance to attend live client meetings and have strategic conversations around trends, and get to hear clients' long-term vision and plans. If you are not a top-10 media vendor for your client, chances are you sales reps will have a very hard time securing a sales call.
Before the pandemic, a big part of your sales strategy might have been meeting your clients for lunches or dinners or sponsoring industry conferences. Conferences used to be a perfect place to meet prospects who proactively seek new ways to reach consumers and shoppers. The scale of Groceryshop speed dating meetings that I had a chance to attend put me in the state of awe and made me realize that the need to innovate in CPG marketing has not slowed down. To the contrary, due to COVID-19 shift in shopper behavior, the appetite to learn about e-commerce and digital marketing tactics has skyrocketed among our CPG clients.
With the in-person conferences on hold for the foreseeable future and the barrage of information that prospects are bombarded with, how do you reach the CPG decision makers and get them to evaluate your products and services? To answer this question, Shopperations team launched Vendorstan.com - a new discovery platform for CPG marketers. It’s like “Yellow Pages” for the CPG industry where any vendor, no matter how large or small, has a fighting chance to be noticed.
Vendorstan is a place where vendors get to publish their company profile and describe their services in succinct, meaningful language that CPG marketers understand.
As with any new platform, we are not yet perfect, but we are eager to improve. Please send us your your suggestions in three areas:
Happy selling!