Building Trust With Buyers by Leading With Support.

Next week we enter Q4 and everyone is knee deep in review season and fundraising.

If you haven’t yet, please be sure to sign up for our investor roundtable HERE.

Last week, I spent a lot of time going through the importance of telling a different story in your investor story.

This week, I want to tell a similar story, but shift our focus to trade spend.

We aren’t going to focus on the approach to trade spend and which programs work best, but instead the positioning of trade spend and how I feel like might be an underutilized part of your sales strategy.

But first, a quick shout out to Vividly who helps brands get a clear handle on this very topic.

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Mastering Your Trade Spend Strategy

Navigating trade spend effectively is essential for CPG brands — it's where a huge chunk of your budget goes after all, right into promotions to boost sales. But here’s the kicker: when you really dial into managing these dollars wisely, you’re not just saving cash, you're also cranking up your returns. By getting a solid grip on where each penny is flowing, brands can pump up their marketing game, slash unnecessary costs, and pump those saved dollars back into winning strategies. This move isn’t just smart—it’s crucial for keeping the financials in check and showing investors you’ve got the savvy to maximize every dollar.

Investors love seeing a brand that’s not just throwing cash at promotions but is strategic about where and how they spend. Getting it right means your brand can show impressive sales uplifts without breaking the bank. So, what’s the secret sauce? Keep a detailed ledger of your trade spends, analyze which promotions are hitting the mark, and adjust your spend in real-time to fuel the most profitable campaigns.

But how can you get there? Start by leveraging tools like Vividly’s trade promotion management software to keep your promotion planning sharp and your data clean. Make use of forecasting tools to predict hits and misses, and don’t shy away from tweaking your strategies on the go. Always be ready to pivot—flexibility can turn a so-so campaign into a major win. By showing your investors that you're making calculated bets, you'll not only boost your bottom line but also build stronger trust and interest from those funding your ventures.

Discover how Vividly’s trade promotion management software can help you optimize your spend and grow your bottom line. Learn more.

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When reviewing a brand's pitch, the support slide will tend to be very light and a bit buried in the overall page count. It is very far from the tip of the spear of a brands selling story and I believe brands would be better served getting on the offensive when it comes to how they approach their trade spend plan.

You spend so much time going through a detailed exposition on why your brand is different, when it shouldn’t be your brand story that makes you different, it should be your support efforts.

What if trade spend was the first thing you led with in a retailer conversation, cold email, or pitch.

What if you didn’t spend ten minutes on a preamble that outlined the brand and your personal story, and instead spent the first ten minutes outlining how you're going to support that buyer and their category more than anyone else.

It might seem drastic to lean into trade spend so heavily as the main differentiator in your sales story, until you boil it down into the simplest terms of the story you want to be telling.

I am with brand X and this is why you should carry us.

I am with brand X and this is how I am going to support you.

When you boil down your pitch to that elementary level, the stronger positioning is pretty clear.

Now, support doesn’t mean that you hand the buyer a blank check and ask them how they want to be supported.

Support through trade spend allocation needs to happen on your terms.

You have to have an internal playbook that you have developed where you know exactly what levers to pull in a new market or retailer to hit the velocity numbers that are expected of you.

This comes from years of learning and testing to understand how many units you sell during a certain promotion, demo, or event where you can easily show the path to when we do this we know the outcome will be that.

When you can tell this story with confidence to the buyer and ensure that you are thinking about them first and not just the top line revenue their account is going to bring, you're opening up a much healthier dialogue and long term relationship with that buyer.

This does not mean that you draw a hard line in the sand against buyer and distributor suggested programs. You need to run these to show that you're willing to participate in their programs as well, but you need to have a percentage of your overall trade spend budget that you feel comfortable potentially losing in this endeavor. If the retailer or distributor suggested program hits and you see the increase in trailing lift, great, document it and add it to the playbook.

The happy medium should sound like this; we know that when we execute on these programs we can expect this amount of lift, which is why a majority of our budget is going to support those efforts, but we also understand that you have set programs that work for you and we are willing to incorporate those into our trade spend strategy as well and then lean into the programs with the highest ROI.

Your support slide in your deck shouldn’t be an afterthought on page 15, but instead front and center as a way to capture that buyers attention from the start.

When you present trade spend in your deck, please make sure it is touched upon within the first three slides. You need to get to this statement as quickly as possible.

This is my brand, this is who we are, this is how we are going to support you.

The buyer hears the same pitch, thousands of times a year, your story and positioning is most likely not different enough to resonate with them, but when you get deeper than the surface level and enter into a relationship where you de-risking that decision for the buyer, that will stop them in their tracks.

I would follow support with traction, so your building that confidence with the buyer that the support plan you have built for them is based on the results you have proven out already somewhere else.

Finding relevant topics to nudge buyers with and stay in contact with them is crucial and the tenth email where you say you're just “circling back” is not going to elicit a response.

Instead, focus your follow up around support.

Try sharing a piece of UGC you did for a new retailer launch or the results from a digital rebate you recently ran for a similar profile of store, as we always talk about here, you should always be building FOMO and how you are supporting others will do that.

I hope this is helpful as we are in review season and you're clamoring to stand out in a buyer's inbox.

Let me know how your brand thinks about support and if this strategy has worked for you in the past.