Supporting Your Sales Story With Data

September is here and the pace post-labor day has definitely picked up during these three short days of being back. 

I wanted to quickly give a shout out to everyone who downloaded the investor pipeline from last week’s issue, it was the first time testing downloadable content in the newsletter and it was well received across the board. 

Just a reminder to everyone that Tuesday opened up an aggressive 10-12 week fundraising window and if you are looking to raise ahead of 2025, I would go back and check out last week’s issue. 

We also have over 110 registrants for our investor round table later this month. We are not capping this event so feel free to grab a spot HERE and listen to an amazing panel of the top investors in the CPG space. 

This week I am diving into the importance of supporting your sales story with data, but before we jump in this is also the first week that the newsletter has a sponsor 🎉. 

This newsletter has become a great platform for myself and organically for WeStock, but navigating which platforms to prioritize and trust can be difficult as a CPG brand which is why I wanted to highlight a few of my favorites in the coming months.

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Everyone is trying to sell your brand data. 

Including me, it’s literally been my career purpose over the last six years, and because of this I have developed a lot of empathy over the years for the plight brands have when it comes to what data sets they should be prioritizing, but more importantly, the story they are trying to tell with that data. 

In this issue, I want to focus on the correct way to position larger data sets when creating your sales story and next week I will go into how to use smaller data sets to support that story as well. 

Most data roads in CPG lead to one of the big three; SPINS, Nielsen, or IRI. These are great companies with a manifold of immensely valuable data sets and when I speak with brands they are most subscribing to these data sets for two reasons: 

1. Support their sales story 

2. Understand performance 

I am going to focus on number one in this issue and how you should be framing those insights. 

I don’t want to completely dismiss the understanding performance piece, because it is critical to understand your movement and performance in comparison to your peers, but that is an issue in itself and one I plan to cover in the near future. 

What I will highlight is that pulling your velocity/per SKU/per week and calling it a day is not extracting the true value of that data set, but it might be all you can do as an emerging brand right now and that is ok. 

It’s important to not beat yourself up if you feel like you're not extracting all the value from these data sets. Within larger CPG companies there are data analysts and teams dedicated to extracting actionable insights from all these different sources. The threshold I usually see for this hire is ~$50M in annual revenue and until you  have someone in that seat internally who can put those data sets to work and humanize them for the sales and marketing teams it will be tough to justify the spend, but in many cases it’s necessary when working with key retailers. 

Supporting your sales story with data is key. 

Most sales people and founders sell with data from a standpoint that the data is there to serve as a way to prop up your brand when it’s actually there to de-risk the brand for the buyer. No slide or data point is going to act as an aha moment in your pitch, but still most brands will cram all their insights into a page or two, hoping this is the effect it has. 

Data is there to send small signals to the buyer that you and your brand are going to support them and their category. 

One data point that I will see in almost every slide is “brand X is the fastest growing brand in the category over the past 52 weeks.” 

This is not an actionable data insight for the buyer, since most emerging brands are starting from a very small revenue marker, so any growth is going to inflate that percentage and not mean much to the buyer.

Instead focus on the following points that will support your sales story and de-risk your brand to the buyer: 

• Overall Category Growth - The strongest story you can tell to a buyer is one that highlights how you will support incremental growth inside of their category. They will know their category growth data, but you showing that you care about category growth versus just your growth sends a signal to that buyer that you can be trusted. When you pair category growth with market trends and consumer preference insights, you build a story that shows your brand can bring incremental growth to their set and not cannibalize any of their current performance. 

• Pricing Strategies - You need to show that you understand the product mix they currently have and that your pricing strategy aligns with what they already have on shelf. If you're priced higher, most brands will try to tell a story around the consumer's willingness to pay for their item still at that higher price. The story you need to be telling is that consumers are willing to pay for your product AND their usual weekly purchases given our pricing strategies because that is what the buyer is thinking about. 

• Promotional Effectiveness - All brands have some semblance of a trade spend plan in place when they present to a buyer, but this page is void of data usually. Trade spend should be where you go on the offensive, where you show what works for you based on what you have tested at other retailers. Data supports this when you show the performance spike and more importantly the trailing lift you have after a specific trade spend plan. You're not selling them on a certain promotional mix, demo count, or digital rebate spend, you're selling them on the expected result of those campaigns and that is where data can support you here. You’re also protecting yourself against the buyer suggesting certain trade spend programs that they believe will work and instead dictating the conversation based on the programs you know work for your brand. 

These are three separate slides where you can interject small data cues that show your understanding of not only how your brand performs, but what your brand needs to do to support that buyer, category, and retailer. It’s not all packed into one slide, but strung together subtly like a trustworthy supporting character throughout your entire sales story.

Humanizing data to tell a qualitative story to buyers is difficult, but my suggestion is to build your deck and sales pitch and then find the places where you feel the story is strongest and interject supporting data points there. Don’t focus all your insights into one page just to check off a box, but instead weave it carefully into everything you do. 

I hope this week’s issue was helpful and I will be back next week with another issue of On-Shelf!