Are you obsessing over your product, pitch deck, and perfect pricing, but still struggling to land deals with major retailers? The truth is, the most important asset for getting your product on the shelf isn’t financial wisdom or a flawless presentation—it’s flexibility. In the high-stakes world of retail, deals never go exactly as planned. From rigid container quantity demands to refusing a minor packaging tweak, inflexibility can be a deal-breaker, costing you millions in potential sales. Discover why top sellers consider flexibility their secret superpower and learn the critical difference between being flexible and being a pushover. Read on to find out how a simple willingness to adapt can transform your negotiations and secure those coveted retail placements, even when the buyer throws a last-minute curveball (like a surprise pallet requirement).
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Retail Success Secret: Why Flexibility is Your Most Underrated Superpower
It’s good to be here. I hope you guys are doing well. I’m going to make this a little bit short only because this topic doesn’t need a ton of discussion, but it’s been coming up lately and so I wanted to put it out there in front of you guys and get your feedback. Hopefully, you guys have some comments on it, but it revolves around flexibility.
Flexibility Is A Retail Superpower
I know that’s a weird topic in terms of retail, but I think flexibility is truly a superpower. If you don’t have it, you’re really going to struggle in trying to work with retailers, trying to get your product noticed by customers and get it on the shelf. My question to you is, would you consider flexibility to be your superpower, or one of your superpowers? You don’t know? I’m waiting. Waiting to hear. The thing is, it’s underrated. It’s an underrated asset, I think.
Flexibility is truly a superpower. Without it, you’ll struggle to work with retailers, get your product noticed by customers, and earn a place on the shelf. Click To TweetWhen I’m coaching my clients that are looking to get into retail, I find that flexibility is an underrated asset. They have all kinds of assets. They have financial assets, they have a lot of wisdom, they have a lot of experience. As far as flexibility goes, they don’t throw that in there as, “I do all these things really well and I’m also really flexible.” In retail, people, they obsess over their product, the pitch deck, their overall pitch, what retailers they want to go into, how much they’re doing on Amazon, what their listing looks like, their images.
Why Retail Deals Never Go As Planned
All of these things are what take up the majority of the time when you’re going to retail. The one thing that you’re not thinking about is are you going to be flexible when the time comes, when you’re in the room with the retailer? Number one, I think flexibility’s underrated. I think that you need to ask yourself, am I rigid in my thinking? Am I rigid in what I want from a retailer? Am I rigid in the deals that i’ll do? Am I rigid in my pricing? Number two in this whole thing about flexibility is that the retail deal that you’re looking at, it’s never going to come around the way that you think it’s going to be.
I’ve been in literally hundreds of buyer meetings and never one time did it go exactly the way that we thought it was going to go. Did the buyer say exactly what we thought they were going to say? Did they agree to the things that we wanted them to agree to? It just doesn’t work out that way. If you walk into that meeting saying to yourself, for instance, “I only sell in container quantities,” let’s look at that. The chances of you getting a retail deal is technically I would say,\ probably zero.
I don’t want to say zero because I don’t know everything, but I’ve never seen a first-time retail talking to a potential vendor say, “We’ll take container quantities,” right off the bat, unless that person’s a celebrity, unless that person’s got a lot of notoriety, they’re George Clooney and selling tequila, for instance. If you walk into that meeting and say, “I’m not going to take anything less than container quantities from my factory,” you’re probably going to be disappointed.
If you walk in there saying, “This is the packaging, it’s not going to change, this is how it is. I’m not going to make any changes to it,” again, you’re probably going to walk away without a deal. If you walk in there and say, “I can’t do anything on price, this is the price,” you’re again going to be disappointed. I just thought of this. One of my very first clients back in 2009 when I started TLB Consulting was this furniture manufacturer out of Canada.
This guy had some phenomenal furniture and what he had learned to do was he had figured out how to cut granite so thin, like razor thin, and then he would affix it to these hollow core aluminum boards. They basically look like pieces of cardboard, thick pieces of cardboard, but they were aluminum. When he affixed this thin piece of granite to it, it actually looked like a granite tabletop, but you could lift it. It was light as light could be. It was amazing.
He had created this furniture using this method and the furniture of course was ready to assemble furniture. You break down, but these boxes weren’t heavy but they had this cool granite look to them. I probably took that product to 25, 30 retailers and they all said the same thing, which was they liked the concept, but the style of the furniture wasn’t what was hot right now. If he were to take that concept and put it on this style of furniture, then they might be interested. My client was like, “No, not going to do that. Not happening. This is the furniture, this is how I want it, this is the way it looks, this is what we’re going for.”
We agreed that we couldn’t work together anymore because simply I wasn’t able to help him anymore. Of course, I think he went on to get into politics. That concept that he created was still awesome. He could have sold millions of dollars worth of furniture had he just been flexible enough to say, “I’m not tied to this, I’m not married to this. It doesn’t matter to me what kind or what the look of the furniture is, I just want to get this concept out there so people can have this cool granite look without all the weight.”
Leverage Misconceptions: Why Retailers Hold The Power
This was 2009, so Amazon wasn’t near what it is now. Imagine that he’d kept going and the type of furniture he could be selling on Amazon or just online in general at this point. Craziness, had he just been a little bit flexible. All right, number three, you don’t have the leverage that you think you have. A lot of times, i’ll talk to clients and they’re like, “Won’t Costco just do this, or won’t Target just do that? This is what I want them to do, why won’t they give me this or give me that?”
Well, because they don’t have to. They don’t need you. They don’t need your product. Your product is not going to make or break them. You have to be flexible to them. They don’t need to be flexible to you. Sorry to tell you that. I apologize if that hurt your feelings, but you don’t have the leverage that you think you do. Although years ago, maybe twenty years ago, retailers would change this or change that or try to accommodate, they just don’t do that anymore.
You either take the deal as they put it, or you don’t take the deal at all. I’m in the middle right now of a specific deal with Costco and a client where Costco’s coming in literally the 25th hour and saying, “By the way, you need to use these pallets.” In the 25th hour, like day before the pos are supposed to arrive. Of course, we didn’t know anything about this. Of course, we didn’t even get this information and we hadn’t factored this into our pricing.
None of this was anything that we knew. Are you going to be flexible or are you going to say, “That’s a deal breaker?” That’s where the rubber meets the road right there. Are you going to get the deal done, be flexible, work with it, call the pallet company, get these new pallets, figure that out, or are you going to say, “That wasn’t in the original deal, so I can’t do it?” You got to decide.
That was number four, which was a real story that’s happening literally right this minute. Number five in what I’m talking to you guys about is I don’t want you to get me wrong here. I don’t want you to think that, “I got to say yes to everything.” I don’t want you to be a yes person. Flexibility doesn’t mean being a pushover. It means knowing the difference between things that you can do and things that you can’t do.
If the deal is no good, then don’t do it. If these pallets, let’s say were gold plated and are going to cost thousands of dollars, no, then that’s not going to make the deal good. We can’t continue with the deal, we’re not going to make any money. I’m not using flexibility as a gateway to say yes to everything. I’m using it as an understanding that things aren’t going to go the way you think they’re going to go.
If you walk into a deal saying, “This is what I would love to have happen, this is what I would like to have happen, this is the deal that I would like to make,” so that there’s a little bit of a framework, but knowing full well that the buyer’s going to have a different example of what they think they want the deal to look like. That’s the whole idea behind sales. Once you’ve decided that the buyer’s interested in your product, you’re not actually trying to sell it to them anymore.
You’re literally just trying to get the deal done, and a lot of deals fall apart right there. Think about Shark Tank. How many times are the sharks interested in the product and they actually decide to invest but then the deal falls apart later, off camera? I can tell you personally the amount of due diligence that goes into actually getting one of these deals done will blow your mind. It makes an IRS audit look like a trip to the playground. It’s a lot of information.
A lot of these deals fall apart right then because the expectations simply weren’t there, or the sharks had a different idea than the founder had. Founder has this idea, the sharks have this idea, and really, what you’re trying to do is just get the deal done. Your first part in any meeting with a retailer is to secure their interest, not the order. It’s to secure their interest. Once you have their interest, things will ease up a little bit because you’re no longer trying to sell or convince them that the product would be useful.
You’re now trying to figure out what are the specifics of the deal, how do we get it done, what are maybe some of the things that I might be missing, what are some of the things that I can do for you? This part is never really, like I said, going to go the way you think it’s going to go. What does that mean? What does that mean for any of us? First of all, if you want to know what it’s like to sit in front of retailers, to sit in these pitch meetings and talk to them, reach out, let’s talk.
I’ve done it so many times, happy to share that with you. If you want to talk to other people that are currently doing that, going to retail come check out our retail accelerator group. You can find that on my website, TLBConsulting.com. That’s a group of people that are currently going to retail and are living this story on a daily basis. If you want to read more about it, you can obviously check out our Substack, Shelf Strategy on Substack, a lot of great information on there in written form if that’s your thing, you want to read.
The idea is that there are people out there that have done it. If you’re wondering what it’s like or what you should be prepared for or how that might work for you, there’s enough people out there that are doing it now or have done it that can be a resource. That’s what we do. If you want to prepare yourself, if you want to understand yourself, how can I be better, is just ask yourself, “Am I flexible in my deal? Do I have room in my margin to negotiate? Is my logistics team ready for different types of routing guides so that no matter how the retailer wants us to send it to them, we can accommodate that?
If you’re wondering what it’s like, what to expect, or how it might work for you, there are plenty of people who have done it and can be a valuable resource. Click To TweetThe Costco Story: Flexibility In Real Time
The deal I was telling about with Costco, this is a really great example because when we started talking to them about this product, we wanted it to go in warehouse and that didn’t happen because it was just too expensive. They had never sold a product in this category as expensive as that and it was just too much of an investment.
They basically said no, but they said, “I think that we could put this online.” We started working through the online portion and talking to them about that and then there was a buyer change. Luckily for us, the new buyer was just as interested in getting this up online and so that part continued. The tariffs hit, and we basically shut the whole deal down because with these new big tariffs, we just couldn’t get the price point that Costco was going to want.
The tariffs got repealed and now we’re back in business. We started the conversation up again and then the price point again that they wanted, we couldn’t quite get there, so what we ended up doing is instead of us drop shipping this product off of Costco.com, we ended up actually Costco’s going to pick it all up at our warehouse and then they’re going to drop ship it out of what’s called their ddcs. Do you see, and now we have this pallet issue.
I got an email that said, “The images that you sent aren’t going to work. They’re not ADA compliant,” so we got to change those. It’s never going to be what you think. There’s always going to be a problem, there’s always going to be an issue. The question is how flexible are you, how ready are you to meet that challenge? That’s it. If you go into it knowing full well, things are going to shift, things are going to change, things are going to bob, things are going to weave.
The bottom line to this deal that’s happening is this product is going to get on Costco.com. It is going to sell. We are going to ship it. It’s been a long road to get here, but it’s going to happen. My client’s flexible. He’s not excitable. He’s like, “All those images don’t work? Yeah, well here, try these. You sent me your specs? Okay, let me look at that. These match that. It’s all good.” I have worked for many people that are just not like that. “It’s too much work, it’s too much hassle. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get the special pallet or the special images, I just don’t want to do it.”
I know, I’m going on and on and on and on, but I’m living it right now, so I guess I want you guys to live it too. I’d love to hear from you. If you’ve had a deal that just turned and didn’t go the way that you thought it was going to go and you ended up being able to make it work anyway, I’d love to hear about that. I’d love to talk about that.
I’d love to do a follow-up with you on there talking about how that happened. I’d love to have you in the come talk in the group and tell us what happened there. Let’s have a conversation. I guess in wrap-up, there’s a lot of superpowers that I’m sure that you have, a lot of things that you’re probably really good at. I just want you to make sure that flexibility is one of those. I appreciate your time, thanks for being here, and most of all, I look forward to seeing your products on the shelf.
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