Are you ready to unlock the secrets to landing your product in a major big box retailer? Welcome back to On the Shelf! Today, Tim Bush dives deep into the buyer’s mind—understanding what they really want, why they won’t tell you, and the critical factors (like margin, category growth, and inventory turn) that make your product an absolute yes. Stop guessing and start pitching with confidence. Tim is back to help you develop the B2B strategy necessary to capitalize on big breaks, like a Shark Tank spike, and build a successful, diversified ecosystem for your product business.
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Inside The Buyer’s Mind
The Secrets To Giving Buyers What They Really Want
Big boxers, welcome to On The Shelf, a program that is dedicated to helping you get your products into a major big box retailer. This is Tim, back with you. It’s so good to be back. Thank you for tuning in and for downloading. I appreciate it. A lot more downloads on the previous episode, the first one after a few years’ hiatus. It’s good to see people coming back quickly. I really appreciate it.
Some of you guys reached out, which was fun. I’m glad to be back, talking about the thing that we’re all wondering about, talking about getting your products into retail, talking about entrepreneurship, talking about getting into the head and the mind of buyers, talking about pitching, and everything that goes along with having a successful business.
There’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. This is not the topic of today’s conversation, but I’ve been thinking a lot about whether you’ve got what you wanted. A lot of times, marketing is used to drive sales, or drive consumers who hopefully will drive sales. A lot of people will put a lot of money into marketing, and then something happens. They get what they wanted, but they don’t get it in the way that they thought they would.
The Shark Tank Spike & The Missing B2B Strategy
I’m going to give you an example. Let’s think Shark Tank, for instance. Let’s say you go on Shark Tank, and Shark Tank creates this huge business-to-consumer wave or flurry of business. You spike and then, these days, it’s going to come back down. What also happened at that time is that you’re going to get a flood of B2B opportunities; retailers, small, medium, and large international distributors wanting to carry your products, sell your product, and distribute your product.
What are you going to do with that? Do you have an actual strategy for it? First of all, if you don’t, definitely reach out because I can certainly help you with that. When you hear about these people getting on Shark Tank, and then they’re gone, I think that’s what happened. They hired a bunch of people to handle the influx of business, the B2C business that they got. They didn’t have a strategy, so they kept backboarding or backlogging all these B2B opportunities. “I’m going to wait for later on,” but they don’t have a strategy on how to capitalize and deal with that.
What they did was they bought a bunch of products. They hired a bunch of people to handle this influx of business, and then the business went away. You rode the Shark Tank wave, and now it came back down. Now what? You have all these employees, and you have all this product, but you’re back down to your baseline. Maybe you came back down, and your baseline is higher, but still, it’s not that peak. It doesn’t last forever. I wish it could. It would be great if it did, but it doesn’t. What now?
You have to have a B2B strategy. You have to understand, “What am I going to do when all these different countries come to me? They saw us on Shark Tank, and now they want to carry a product and distribute it in this country. How do I handle that?” What about all the mom-and-pop retailers that think, “Wouldn’t it be great to carry this? I would love it. This is a great product. I wanted to do that.” How do you do that? Do you have UPCs? Do you have G10s? Do you have interpass? Do you have master cases? Do you have PDQs for display? Do you have retail packaging?
All of that business goes by the wayside because you weren’t ready for it. You were too busy with your B2C, and you forgot about that. What about all this stuff? It’s all that other. It’s all the B2B that’s going to fill in the gaps. Once your big wave of consumers ends, it’s that B2B business that grows your company day in and day out; the retailers, the mom-and-pops, and the distributors. You need to have a strategy for that.
Building A Full Ecosystem (B2C + Amazon + B2B + International)
This can even go for marketing. You’re putting thousands and thousands of dollars into your marketing to drive business and consumer business. That’s also going to catch the attention of B2B. You need to have a strategy. You can’t just put that stuff on the back burner. A lot of clients that I take on will send me like 40 inquiries that they’ve had over the last five years from people who want to sell their product or distribute their product in other countries.
They don’t know what to do with this. They’ve been putting it in an email file, and then they send that all to me, “Can you run this all down?” A lot of stuff is old now. Those people are gone, or they’re not interested anymore. You have to capitalize on that when it happens. There’s a certain strategy and things that you have to have in place to capitalize on it.
I want you to keep that in mind because a successful sales product business takes advantage of all of those things. B2C, Amazon, B2B, distributors, and international, it’s a whole ecosystem. That way, when something starts to falter or something starts to do less than it was, it’s okay because you have the other parts of it to prop up the company. If you focus only on one sector, and that sector starts to fall out, then your business is over.
TLBConsulting.com. Reach out to us. We’re happy to help you build that strategy and help you get on the path to talk to these B2B customers and being able to capitalize on that. I recently did a seminar for a co-packing company that wanted to offer something to their clients on how to actually sell more to retail. Obviously, it’s a cyclical process. They sell more to their clients. They have to order more. Their co-packers get to make more, and everybody is happy. I put together this seminar on what retail buyers really want. What do they want?
Wouldn’t it be easier, and wouldn’t life be amazing if they told us what they want? “Tim, I need a couple of products that do this, that have this, that are packaged this way, that hit this price point, that give me this margin. Can you make those for me, come back to me, and I’ll buy them?” That sounds amazing. That sounds like, “Here’s my marching orders.” I can go execute on that. I can either do it, or I can’t do it. I can either hit it or can’t hit it, and away we go.
Why don’t they do that? First of all, I think it’s for a couple of reasons. One, I think they don’t know. They’re so busy trying to manage the products that they have. They can’t even spend two minutes thinking about what they need or what they could have or what would drive their business. They’re relying on us to do that. They don’t have a lot of time to even look at what we have, let alone try to come up with something that they could give to us.
Why Buyers Don’t Tell You What They Want
The second reason I think is that they know that we’re going to be like a dog with a bone. The second that they give us that information and the second that they reach out to us and say what they want us to do, we’re going to go do it, and then we’re going to come back and expect them to buy it. They can’t commit to that. They’re saying, “Tim, this is what I want,” but once you come back with it, they still may or may not be able to buy it from you.
They know that we’re going to be knocking at their door, saying, “Remember when you asked me to build this stuff? Here it is. How much do you want? When can you take it? How much are you going to buy? Let’s get this thing done. Let’s move this work.” If they told that to more than one manufacturer, they’re going to have people coming out of the woodwork, trying to get them to buy what they’ve built for them based on the specs that they gave them.
Those are the two reasons I think. 1) I don’t think they have time, or they don’t know what they want because they don’t have time to think about it. 2) They don’t want to set us off on something that we surely will sink our teeth into and surely will come back to them with product that we want them to buy, and they don’t want to be on the hook for buying it. What does that leave us with? What do we do then?
How do we get our products across to the buyer when they don’t have time to tell us what they want, or they won’t tell us what they want, and they don’t even know what they want? What I think is that there are certain things that we do know that the buyers are trying to accomplish. Some of those things are found in what they are basically accountable for, or the things that their bosses hold them accountable for.
There are certain things we do know that the buyer is trying to accomplish, and many of them are tied to what they’re actually accountable for. Click To TweetIn the pitch of our product, if we can show them how we’re going to help them achieve what they’re trying to do, make them look good, help them hit it out of the park, and elevate them in their positioning, ultimately, our product becomes far more interesting and far more attractive to the buyer than if we’re not helping them do that.
The Core Questions Buyers Ask
Before we get to the things that they’re responsible for, let’s get into some questions that buyers often ask. Some of that is going to be in these questions. They’re not going to ask you outright. They just ask themselves in their own head the things that they’re trying to figure out. If we can try to address these things up front in our pitch before they even have to ask themselves down the road, that ultimately brings the buyer further into what we’re trying to accomplish, because we’re now partnering with them.
What is it that they’re asking? Number one, is this company already a vendor? Eventually, they’re going to ask you that in onboarding. When they think about onboarding you, they’re going to ask you that, but I’m talking about at the very beginning. If you are a vendor or not a vendor, you can’t fake that. You either are, or you’re not. The reason they want to know if you are is that things become infinitely easier if you’re a vendor.
If you have a decent-sized company that sells multiple channels, and let’s say, you’ve already sold Target towels, and you’re now trying to sell them pet food under the same umbrella vendor, then things become infinitely easier. Think about this scenario, and this has happened to me more times than I can care to recount. Let’s say you’re working with a buyer. They love the product. They want to bring it in, and everything is going well. They’re sending you initial quote information and paperwork, this and that. You feel like, “I got this. This is happening.”
All of a sudden, out of nowhere, with no warning, you reach out to the buyer, and the buyer sends you just a one-liner that says, “We’re going to pass.” You reach out to them, and you’re ike, “Wait, what? Pardon me. What did you say? Did I hear you right? Did you send this to the right person? Can you explain that?” They don’t explain it. It’s total radio silence. You’re left wondering, “What just happened?” Two seconds ago, you were on top of the world. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got nothing. What just happened?
I’ll tell you what happened. They took your offer, your product, and you as a vendor to their boss, and their boss said no. They don’t want to tell you that their boss said no. They just say, “We’re going to pass.” That’s what happened. Every time they add a vendor, they basically have to go to their boss and justify adding the vendor.
Retailers don’t want to add a vendor. They would much rather expand a vendor than add a new one unless they really want the product, and it seems like it’s going to make sense. It’s hundreds of man-hours involved in getting you on as a vendor and setting you up, and there are some risks involved. Are you who you say you’re going to be? Can you do what you said you were going to do? If they don’t have to do it, they don’t want it.
When the buyer goes to their boss and pitches your product, if the boss is not convinced that this is worth bringing on a vendor, they say no. That buyers are then left holding the bag, too. They’re left telling you that they’re not going to move forward. They don’t want to tell you why. They leave you wanting and wondering. It’s a horrible situation. If you are already a vendor, they don’t have to have that conversation with their boss. They just have to decide whether they want to bring in your product because you’re already a vendor. They don’t have to get a new vendor approval, which makes things infinitely easier.
Number two. Could this product turn into a category leader? When I say that, I’m not talking about every product that the buyer brings in, they’re hoping is going to turn into a category leader. It’s going to be awesome, amazing, and crazy. I’m not talking about that. Everybody wants that. I’m talking about whether this is a product that could expand from a single product or two products to a 2-foot section, a 3-foot section, to eventually a 4-foot section? Is this expandable?
Let’s say you had a knee injury wrap. If that product did well and the customers liked it, do you have a lot of other products that can help the leg, the knee, and the elbow, so that they can expand into a 2, 3, or 4-foot section if people were starting to resonate with your brand? That’s an important question. Buyers want to know. It’s infinitely more interesting if it could expand into a category leader.
Number three. Does the product have a track record and a reason to be there? A lot of times, clients come to me, and they say, “I have this product. It’s awesome. I built it. It’s in my garage now. I want to sell it to Target. I want to sell it to Costco.” I’m like, “Great. What have you done? Where has it been sold?” Nowhere. “How is it doing on Amazon?” It’s not on Amazon yet. You want to take it to Target. It’s not on Amazon. It’s not on your own website. You haven’t sold it to any retailers. You have zero demand proof, but you want to take it to one of the biggest retailers in the country. You’re going to say, “I want you to give this product some shelf space because I think it’s going to be great.”
That’s not going to go well. Whether they like the product or not, whether they think the product is cool or not, they’re not going to bring it in without some demand proof. It has to have what I like to call a sales story. You guys have heard me talk about this before, which is the story of your trended sales increase over time.
“We launched our website this year. We moved it to Amazon. We’ve had double-digit year-to-year growth on Amazon, and then we moved into specialty retail. Now, we’re in 200, 300, or 400 specialty retailers. They generally reorder at about a 60% reorder rate, and things are grand. That has got us thinking we need to move this into bigger box retail, which has got me on a meeting with you, Mr. or Mrs. buyer.” Does a product have a track record and a reason to be there?
Number four. Does this product catalyze, replace, or complement? These are big questions that buyers are asking in their heads. Is this going to be another me-too product that I’m going to put on the shelf? Instead of selling ten of this product, now I’m going to sell five of that product and five of your product. Is it actually going to replace a product that’s starting to falter? This is a bigger and better version of that. I’m going to be able to get rid of that because the sales have declined, and this is going to ramp back up.
Is this a complement product? It’s not a product that I currently have, but it complements a lot of the products that I have, so it’ll be an add-on. When they buy that product, they’re also going to buy this product. Obviously, the complement-product is the best of the scenarios that you could look for because it’s not hindering the sale of the products that they already have, but it’s adding to that. It’s going to create better AOV, or average order volume.
What Buyers Are Actually Judged On
It’s going to drive category sales. By the way, category sales are one of the things that buyers are judged by. Their bosses want them to increase their category sales. If you can speak to, in your pitch, how your product does that, how your marketing does that, how your social media does that, how you’re going to drive people, how it’s a complement product, how it’s an add-on product, and how you’re going to help them increase their category sales, now you have their attention.
What are some of the other things that they are judged on? Margin. They have a margin goal that they have to hit. Let’s say it’s 50 points, just to make things easy. Let’s say, they have to hit a 50-point margin for their whole category over the entire year. If you’re trying to sell or offer them a product that has 48 points of margin, that’s not helping. That’s actually hindering the possibility that they’re going to hit their marching goal. That’s not helping at all. Let’s say you’re offering up something that is 50 points of margin. That’s not helping either. That’s not hurting, but it is certainly not helping. If you offer them 50.5%, that’s helping, and it becomes more interesting. I’m hoping that makes sense.
Increased category sales and margin are two of the major things that buyers take a look at. If you can work on how you can help in those areas in your pitch, then that’s going to become infinitely more interesting to them. You’re going to have their attention. They’re going to understand that you understand what they’re trying to do, what they’re trying to accomplish, and that you’re going to partner with them rather than them trying to bring in your product, and it’s going to be a slugfest. Not only that. If you’re a new vendor, they take your product to their boss, and you’re hurting their margin and their category sales, how well do you think they’re going to be able to sell that product? What’s the chance that their boss is going to even say yes to that?
Lastly, the reason I mentioned 60% sell-through return, or 60% of your specialty retailers coming back to reorder, is that this speaks to inventory turn. Buyers are responsible for turning their inventory, depending on what category it is, two, three, four, or ten times a year. The more times that they can turn your product, the better. Your ability to help them with inventory turns is key.
1) Are you already a vendor? 2) Could your product turn into a category leader? Can you expand it? 3) Does the product have a track record and a reason to be here? 4) Does this product catalyze, replace, or complement? What are the buyers looking to accomplish? What can help them be a rockstar? By the way, if you can help a buyer get promoted, guess what? They are now in an even better position to help you. It makes sense that you would want to help them look good, helping them increase margin, helping them to increase category sales, and then, ultimately, helping them with product turn.
Prioritizing The Buyer’s Goals Over Your Own
It’s easy for us to focus on what we want because we all want the same thing. We want to sell our product. We want to make sales. We want people to buy our product. We want them to love our product. We want them to use our product. We want to get out there in the marketplace. We want to expand. It’s easy for us to get caught up in that “Me, me, me. This is what I need. This is what I want. This is what I’m hoping that you can do for me.”
In the end, we’re going to get so much further if we put the buyer’s needs, the buyer’s wants, and what the buyer is trying to accomplish above ours, and if we try to help them do their job, utilizing our product. All you have to do is figure out how your product fits into that. By the way, if you’re trying to sell products into a big box retail that has less than the required margin, it’s a me-too product, probably going to cannibalize, the sales are already starting to reduce on Amazon, and you don’t have any marketing budget, it’s probably not going to get it into retail. It’s probably not going to happen.
We’ll get much further if we put the buyer’s needs, wants, and goals above our own and focus on helping them do their job using our product. Click To TweetYou can’t make buyers buy your product. It has to be good for them, which is why they burn through so many products, “I’m going to pass. I’m going to pass.” I hear “I’m going to pass” way more than I hear. “I’m going to take it. Tell me more. What is this all about?” I don’t even take on a product that doesn’t have all those attributes, and I still hear “I’m going to pass” more.
That’s because it’s not always the right time. It’s not always the right place, not always the right mindset. You can’t just take a product to a buyer one time. You’ve got to keep putting it in front of them. At the same time, you’ve got to keep it pushing forward, so that each time, you have something new or different to tell them.
I guess it’s not simple. It’s not a hard concept, but it’s not simple to do. I’m going to leave you with the task of understanding and being empathetic to what the buyer is trying to accomplish. A lot of the time, we can see the buyer as our enemy or our adversary, or we have to sell them, we have to convince them, or we have to make them. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to partner with them. We’re trying to help them. Let me clue you in. The more you help them, the more they can help you. The more your product makes them look good, the more open they’re going to be to other things that you have to offer.
I told my daughter one time. This was when she was in undergrad. She was going for the first time going to college. I told her, “Listen. Getting the professors on your side is not hard. Show up on time, ask questions, always do your homework, and study the best you can for the test. If the professor has an opportunity to give you a break, they’re going to. If you don’t show up on time, you’re on your phone, you don’t ask any questions, you turn your homework in later, or not at all, when they have an opportunity to give you a break on a test or something else, they’re not going to.
Sure enough, she had a professor with whom she had a statistics problem. Somewhere in the problem, she got lost, and she had a written-out. She wrote a note to the professor saying, “I don’t know what happened. Somewhere in here, I took a wrong turn.” The professor gave her a smiley face, and then he showed her where she went wrong, and then he gave her credit for 90% of the problem because she had done 90% of it right. She had only gone astray in this last little portion, but he gave her 90% credit for the problem that she got wrong.
That’s what I’m talking about. Buyers can be very much that way. Things don’t go your way, the product is late in your factory, and was shipped late. A lot of those things can be absorbed by the buyer if that relationship is there and if you’re partnering with them, but if you’re not, then they’re not going to partner with you either.
Hopefully, that helps and gives you a little bit of insight into the buyer, what they’re doing, how they’re thinking, and how they can help you think. The next time you’re about to talk to a buyer, ask, “What is it that this person needs? What is it that they want? How can I help them achieve that? Does my product do that?”
If you want to go through it, reach out to me. You can reach me through my website, TLBConsulting.com. I’m happy to go through role play with you, talk about the meeting you’re about to have, make sure that you are on the right track, and make sure you have the best opportunity that you can to have the best first impression.
I don’t know when this is going to get published, but right now, it’s one day before Thanksgiving 2025. I hope that you all are with family, that you’re enjoying yourselves, that you’re taking a little bit of time to rest, relax, and enjoy friends and family, and give thanks for all the things that have happened this year and all the things that are going to happen next year. I appreciate you, and I look forward to seeing your products on the shelf.
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