The Importance of a Retailer Post-Mortem 🧟

We all dread it.

The email where a buyer reaches out to you and let’s you know they will be discontinuing your brand.

It is a difficult pill to swallow and for emerging brands, losing a large anchor account can often be a hard thing to come back from.

Before I made the switch CPG to SaaS, I was unaware of the word churn and now, going into year six of WeStock, I don’t even like typing it out.

When we lose a paying client, we mark them as churn, and it used to really weigh on me for a few days after. I felt physically ill when a customer would leave our platform and I didn’t care to do much digging into the why behind the decision.

I remember one time my family was getting ready to head out the door for a family vacation when I got an email notifying me that a valued client would be leaving. It is safe to say that I unfairly let it impact my mood that weekend.

Now, although I don’t embrace it, I do try and use churn as a learning experience to make our team, product, and processes better.

Internally we try to do a post-mortem on churned clients so that we can identify what went wrong and I believe CPG brands should also adopt this for when they lost a retailer.

Most often the reaction after losing a retailer is to go make up the business quickly somewhere else, but taking the time to take a step back and evaluate what happened and where you could have made changes is critical.

Here are three key topics I believe your team should dive into when it comes to doing a retailer post-mortem and why its imperative to share your finding with the buyer.

1) Trade Strategy - The main reason for brands failing inside a particular retailer is not because they aren’t a fit, but because they didn’t have the correct trade spend strategy in place.

You need to look at the budget you allocated and the programs you implemented. Each program should be evaluated from an ROI perspective and you need to be able to identify which program performed best.

Retailers and buyers are steadfast in the trade spend programs they want you to run. Most brands, simply oblige their requests to show face, but rarely push back.

When looking at this part of your post-mortem it’s important to not only identify which programs worked best, but to create a future playbook so that you can show the next retailer the plan your going to put into place and the reasoning behind it.

2) Visibility and Placement - You need to ask two questions here. Were we placed correct in the store for success? And, did we have visibility into our performance?

Emerging brands can find themselves flying blind when they onboard a retailer. They might not have a strong enough presence inside the stores to check on their merchandising efforts or access to enough data to understand what their volume is inside the stores.

It is crucial to ensure you have access to the movement data on a consistent cadence to ensure your hitting the metrics the buyer established and to be in the stores as much as possible.

Visibility into the data and the physical product set is key and looking at your on the ground efforts will make you come to terms on whether or not you had enough resources allocated here.

Placement is a byproduct of visibility. I can’t tell you how many brands say, “we aren’t performing well there because they placed us in the wrong part of the store.”

You need visibility and you need to have a clear idea of where your product performs best inside the store so that you can guide the buyer on placement as much as they guide you.

3) Timing

Timing is critical for retail success.

Brands can often commit to stores that are too big for them and that they can’t fully support them yet, that is a timing issue.

Brands can commit to tests in stores that are not a fit, which they take to increase top line revenue, because the timing of their expected results has to be rushed to show success.

Brands can rush into a region where they don’t have the resources, because they didn't time for their brand to be available there yet.

You have to be transparent on your timeline and mostly that comes down to answering the question of if you said yes too early. Being truthful about what stage your in will save you a lot of future heartache.

Creating an internal document based on these three bullets is a great resource to come back to internally, but it is also a great resource to share and review with the buyer who kicked you out.

I promise, most buyers are not hearing from brands that they did a deep dive into what went wrong and want to get their feedback.

They are mostly hearing from brands who are just pitching them again and trying to get back on shelf.

This angle opens up a much more collaborative relationship with the buyer where they can see that you put in the work and that you have a clear plan to have success if they were to bring you back in.

The post-mortem can also serve as a guide for which retailers you approach next and ensuring they check all the boxes before you fully commit.

Having this as a living document inside your company can ensure your learning from your retail mistakes and ensure you have success in the next retail account.