The grocery industry doesn't need more suppliers. It needs better business partners.

As products, promotions and prices become easier to compare, success in the grocery retail industry is determined less by what you sell and more by how well you understand the customer's business. Therefore, today's salespeople need to evolve from supplier to business partner.

The grocery industry is full of suppliers who want to get closer to their customers. But as products, campaigns, data and arguments become easier to compare, the position with the customer is determined less by what the seller has to offer and more by how well the seller understands the customer's business.

There is a fundamental problem with traditional sales to the grocery store, and it is not that the salespeople are too bad at selling. The problem is rather that almost all suppliers come to the customer with roughly the same ambition, roughly the same agenda and, to be a little mean, quite often roughly the same PowerPoint.

They want to increase distribution, get more products in, gain more shelf space, create better exposure, launch new products, run campaigns and of course increase volume. Each supplier also has good arguments for why their products deserve a little more space, a little more attention and a bigger share of the customer's business.

That's exactly what a sales organization is expected to do. The problem arises when everyone does it.

Because then even customer meetings start to resemble each other. Sales trends are reviewed, some new products are presented, consumer trends are discussed and the salesperson argues for increased distribution, better exposure or the next campaign, before the conversation sooner or later ends up where conversations tend to end up when the difference between the options becomes difficult to see: price, discount, campaign support and terms. Then the next supplier comes with their presentation. And also wants to sell more.

When the customer's time becomes a scarce commodity

At the same time, something else is happening in the grocery industry. It is becoming more difficult to get customers' time, meetings are becoming shorter, and fewer suppliers seem to be naturally welcome at the table.

The most common explanation is that customers have become more stressed. Organizations are leaner, the pace is faster and the calendar is full. Of course, there is a lot to that. But there is a slightly less convenient explanation that is worth considering.

What if the problem isn't just that customers have less time. What if part of the problem is that we add too little value to the time we are given?

After all, time, just like retail space, is a scarce resource. And scarce resources tend to end up where the return is perceived to be highest.

If a meeting helps the customer solve an important problem, discover a business opportunity, or make a better decision, it is reasonable to assume that the meeting is valued differently than if the customer knows in advance that the next 45 minutes will be mainly devoted to the supplier's products, campaigns, and internal priorities.

Perhaps it is therefore the wrong question to just think about how we get more time with the customer. A more interesting question is what we need to contribute to deserve it.

The customer unfortunately has his own income statement

The natural response to a tougher sales environment has long been to try to get even better at the same thing. More product knowledge, better presentations, stronger arguments, more skillful negotiation and even more data that shows why the customer should do more business with us.

It's a perfectly understandable strategy. It just has one small problem.

A retailer, store manager, category manager or buyer hardly goes to work in the morning and thinks about how they can increase the sales of an individual supplier. They have the somewhat awkward characteristic of being more interested in their own business. There, sales and margins should increase, rotation should be improved, categories should be developed, wastage and tied-up capital should be reduced, changed consumer behavior should be understood and a limited store space should be used as profitably as possible.

Yet, surprisingly, a lot of sales start at the other end: our product, our campaign, our launch, our distribution, and our volume. Our products may, of course, be a central part of the solution. But our products are not the customer's goal.

It almost sounds too obvious to need to be said. Which is perhaps why it needs to be said.

Because if we take this into account, the sales mission will also change. The first question will no longer be how we can sell more to the customer, but how the customer can create a better deal and what role we can play in achieving that.

The product is a means. The customer is interested in the result.

The traditional seller's natural starting point is their own portfolio. Which articles are lacking distribution, what news needs to be added, which campaign should be implemented, how can we get better exposure and how can we increase volume?

These are relevant questions. But the business partner needs to start one step earlier.

How is the category developing, what drives sales and profitability, where is untapped potential, how is shopper behavior changing, which products create turnover and which tie up capital, where are sales being lost today, and what changes could create a better overall economy? Only then does the question of what role our products can play come into play.

The traditional salesperson sees their products in the customer's store. The business partner sees the customer's business and what role their own products can play in developing it. One perspective tries to find more space for our business with the customer. The other tries to understand how we can make the customer's business bigger. The difference may sound small. Commercially, it is quite big.

Everyone wants to be a business partner. The customer decides who that is.

There is hardly a larger B2B organization that does not have somewhere in its strategy the ambition to get closer to the customer, create more value and develop the relationship from supplier to partner.

It's a laudable ambition. The only problem is that business partner is not a title you can give yourself. It's a position the customer gives you. And the customer probably has significantly fewer business partners than the suppliers themselves think. The interesting question is therefore not whether we want to be the customer's business partner, but what we actually do differently to deserve the position.

A supplier brings products. A business partner also needs to bring perspective and use data, category insights, consumer knowledge, and experiences from other customers and stores to help the customer discover things that may not yet be obvious.

It can be about identifying potential that the customer has not yet seen, questioning a range that has historically been taken for granted, showing why an activity is unlikely to create the impact the customer hopes for, or recommending a different path than the one initially on the table. Sometimes, the real test of the partnership comes: recommending something that is right for the customer's business even though it does not maximize our own sales next month.

In the short term, this may seem commercially dubious. In the longer term, the logic is the opposite, as the supplier that consistently helps the customer make better business decisions builds something that is much harder for the competitor to beat with a few more percentage points off: trust in the business expertise.

This is roughly where the word business partner begins to take on meaning.

More data hasn't automatically made us wiser

Otherwise, the conditions should be better than ever. Sales today have access to dashboards, category data, shopper insights, consumer surveys and market analyses that allow a modern salesperson to enter a customer meeting with a basis for decision-making that previous generations of sales organizations could only dream of. That should have made everyone more consultative. It is not certain that it has.

Showing the customer that a category has grown by seven percent is information. Explaining why it is growing, what the development means for this particular customer's business, what the economic potential is and what the customer should therefore do differently is something else. It is advice. The difference is therefore not primarily in how much data the salesperson has, but in the ability to refine it from data to insight, from insight to recommendation and from recommendation to action and business impact.

This is also where Powerpoint sometimes plays tricks on us. A well-rounded presentation can create a reassuring feeling that a lot of value has been delivered, even though after forty minutes the customer is still expected to do the hardest work themselves: understand what all the information actually means and decide what to do with it. The business partner therefore does not stop at “this is what we see”, but dares to continue the reasoning:

“We think this is important to you, and that's why we recommend that you do this.” It's not about making decisions for the customer. It's about taking responsibility for your expertise.

Then it's not enough to be good at selling

If the assignment is mainly to sell products, the salesperson needs to know the products, build relationships, argue and negotiate. However, if the assignment is to develop the customer's business, that is not enough.

Then the salesperson also needs to understand store economics, margin, rotation, category, shopper behavior, capital tied up and the commercial logic that ultimately determines whether an activity is good for the customer or just good for the supplier. The salesperson needs to be able to read data without hiding behind it, ask questions that make the customer think, discover potential that is not obvious, challenge ingrained assumptions when necessary and translate their knowledge into recommendations that can be understood, acted upon and preferably also counted on.

It's not less sales. It's more business acumen in sales. And perhaps that's where one of DVH's biggest competitive advantages will lie going forward, as products can be copied, campaigns can be matched, prices can be pushed, terms can be negotiated, and data becomes increasingly accessible to everyone.

The ability to help customers understand their business better and make better commercial decisions, however, is much harder to copy. Which, somewhat paradoxically, can also prove to be one of the best ways to sell more.

An uncomfortable stress test

This leads to two questions that more CEOs and sales managers at DVH might want to ask their own organizations: If we removed our products, prices, and promotions from the next customer presentation, how much value would our salespeople still be able to create in the meeting?

And perhaps even more inconvenient: If the customer didn't need to buy anything from us right now, would they still think it was worth meeting with us?

If the answer is very little or perhaps none, you probably still have a traditional supplier position, no matter how much you talk about partnership in your strategy. If, on the other hand, the answer is that salespeople could still help the customer understand their business better, discover potential, see risks, challenge old truths and make better commercial decisions, then you have started to build something much more interesting.

A position that is not primarily based on what the customer can buy from us, but on what the customer can achieve together with us. And in a world where customer time is becoming increasingly difficult to come by, perhaps that is the simplest definition of a true business partner:

Some customers find it worth meeting even when there is nothing immediately to buy.

Mikael Nylund, CEO, Mindit – the House of Sales & Leadership