Even if you make your retailer or stockist presentation the most entertaining ever, the best you can hope for is that only two thirds will be remembered!

That’s at best. At worst, research such as that carried out by John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, suggests it can be as little as 10%. According to presented.co.uk audiences remember 50% of what’s said in any given presentation. By the next day, they only remember 25%.

So how do you ensure your retailer pitch is memorable, powerful and persuasive?

• Start with the problem

If your presentation and sell-in decks start with you - time to take note. Your brand is the plucky heroine – she doesn’t make an entrance until you’ve created the danger and made it personal.

Substitute our beleaguered villages for consumers and start by outlining the problem your brand solves.

If you have a clear brand strategy - you know who your consumers are and you've positioned your brand to meet those needs, you'll be able to articulate the problem, gap, needs, or opportunity at the heart of your story.

Ideally, you should have your own insight and data to demonstrate what you know to be true. And not just true, but sizable and of importance. Who are the consumers that have the identified need? How is their need manifested? What are they looking for in relation to the need and how is the need triggered?

If you can’t start with a need, or problem or opportunity that has teeth and is real and measurable, then you're not ready to start selling in your brand or product. If you can, open your presentation here.

• Demonstrate relevance for your audience

You’ve started strongly, showing how the problem or gap matters to consumers. Now it’s time to make it relevant and of importance to your audience.

We're substituting the child in our story with the retailer or stockist and we're demonstrating how the consumer problem, need, gap or opportunity plays out in their stores or business model.

What are they missing? Are they being out-paced by competitors, or is fulfilling this need for consumers going to help them out-pace others? Will it help the retailer or stockist become a destination of choice for a particular consumer group? Does it relate to an objective or mission that they've outlined for the category? Or even more generally - does it help them achieve steps towards longer-term strategies?

As well as doing the standard data analysis (looking at sales and category data if you have it), brush-up on what matters to your retailer and therefore to the buyer you're speaking to. Has the retailer been in the news - if so, how is it relevant? What's hot and what's not for them at the moment?

Visit their stores, their website, read relevant reviews. And if you can, speak to the buyer before you pitch. Find out what they're currently working on? What are they looking to see? What challenges are they facing?

Play back what you discover – every presentation and pitch deck should be personalised to your audience - there're no one-size-fits-all when it comes to seeking to gain a listing.

• Show how your brand meets a consumer need

Your brand is the heroine of our story – here to save the day! Be choiceful. Your buyer doesn’t need to know everything about the her back story – just the bits that matter. Her raison d’etre – her fire in the belly.

Show how your brand responds to the needs that you’ve identified and how you do that differently from other brands.

Take a few slides to introduce your brand/product:

- Convey your positioning in the market.

- Show how your brand/product fulfils the need that you’ve identified.

- Be clear about who your consumers are, who you're targeting with your proposition

• Articulate the size of the prize

This is the start of your happy ending! When you demonstrate the potential for the retailer:

1. Be clear about exactly what you’re recommending – which products and why, where you see them sitting on the fixture.
2. If you’ve got access to the retailer’s data or some approximation of the data; if you’ve got some wider market context, you can show how big an opportunity for them this proposition is. You need to make a strong category argument – any proposal that depletes category margin is unlikely to be of interest. You need to show how you:

• Bring new consumers to the category that aren’t currently shopping there – ideally from the category shoppers of another retailer.
• Or how you deliver additional purchase occasions such as delivering on the breakfast occasion not just lunch or snack.
• You might show how you increase purchase frequency or weight of purchase – the sorts of metrics that your retailer is looking to achieve.
• Always show your working out in the appendices – how do you get to that size of prize?

If you don’t have retailer specific data, you can use your own sales out data to create a model of what it could look like in the retailer you’re speaking to. Can you show how having your brand in Retailer X has grown category sales year on year, for example, or you could hypothesise the outcomes based on certain assumptions?

• No data? Go back to first principles

We know that it can be tough for small, scaling brands and start-ups to be able to invest in retail data. So, if you don't have any useful data to speak of, go back to first principles and reflect on the problem through the eyes of your audience:

- What retailers are fulfilling the need for consumers that your retailer isn’t? How are they doing that?

- Can you show a model of what good looks like – for example, instore images from other retailers?

- And show how your retailer doesn’t have the need fulfilled

- Is there any relevant online traffic/search for the need your brand meets, for example on Amazon or Google Trends?

- Could you show how other categories in the retailer’s store are fulfilling the need, but this category isn’t (for example – a retailer that is clearly catering for sensitive skin in one category but not in yours)?

- Can you replay anything from the retailer’s mission, objectives, or initiatives? For example, does your proposition meet a particular objective that the retailer is on a mission to fulfil such as inclusion or environmental objectives?

• Follow-up in an action-oriented way

Your presentation is only the start of the story. The ideal next-step is for you to be able to submit a full commercial proposal, samples, product information, and so on.

Your hard copy or pdf of your presentation should include:

- A summary of your pitch – the consumer problem, the proposed solution.

- Why it’s of importance to your buyer – the size of the prize with the data to back your thinking

- Your clear recommendation/ask

- Any additional reading material that they might find of interest – more detail of your primary or third-party research, more information about your brand (such as reviews and recommendations), images from instore.

- And how/when you will follow-up with them

If you're stuck with your story, we can help. In managing brands large and small, we've written dozens of presentations that have helped to successfully land commercial objectives with retailers. We can turn your insight and strategy into a meaningful and personalised retailer or stockist pitch to help achieve your goals.

We can start by doing a quick review of your existing deck. Email us at hello@atalantemarketing.

Let's slay some dragons!