The Playbook for Scaling a Brand from $1M to $100M

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. Today I'm here today with Corinna Bellizzi, the CEO and Principal advisor of a growing Need, which is a natural products consultancy. She's also the host of Care More Be Better, which is a podcast about sustainability and the reason why I brought her onto the show.

Sean Weisbrot: Is to talk about revenue growth, sales, getting your product on shelves, how to handle those relationships and a lot more. So I hope you enjoy this fantastic episode with her. She's very gracious and her experience is very abundant. Uh, I won't spoil any of the details, but the impact she's had on the company she's worked with is astounding.

Sean Weisbrot: What makes you the right person to talk about growing revenue?

Corinna: I kind of fell into the environment of sales and marketing.

Corinna: I never really sought it out as something that I wanted to do per se. So if you really wanna go back to the beginning, I started in retail sales and I learned to sell things like sunglasses that were super expensive and very technologically proven. Got to a technical selling perspective early in my career while I was still in high school, in college, right?

Corinna: And then when I went into the professional sphere. I took that same kind of method with me where I was really focused on serving the needs of my customers, understanding the perspective that they're coming from, and also using kind of an ethnographic approach because my schooling was all in anthropology, so I would think more about what the consumer really wants.

Corinna: And then try to give it to them in the way that they wanted to hear about it. So I'd package everything essentially for them. So when I was selling directly to the consumer, or directly to the retailer, or directly to the business, I was able to kind of change my mindset in order to work with them and really think about how I could create programs that would enable sales before sales enablement was even really a term.

Sean Weisbrot: I am not sure everyone listening understands the usefulness of anthropology in sales. I understand anthropology, correct me if I'm wrong, to be kind of the study of. Culture from a historical perspective?

Corinna: Not necessarily. I mean, it really is a study of cultures and people and how they react and interact in a variety of settings.

Corinna: So you have a culture within a company. You have a culture within a particular area of the United States. We have many cultures throughout the course of the United States. You know, somebody in Seattle has a different persona perspective and just idealism than you might see. Versus someone who lives in Manhattan and New York.

Corinna: There is just a different perspective from, you know, a variety of backgrounds. Whether it be something that's as simple as, oh, they're from China, or, you know, they're from a metropolitan city and these are the wants and needs and drivers of how they interact with one another. I just think it's a, a really important piece of the puzzle that often gets left out.

Corinna: When you're considering the audience and how they're going to receive the message that you're working to give them. I've basically taken this perspective to every role I've had over the years, you know, with the screaming success really being, uh, what I did with Nordic Naturals. I joined them before I had any experience selling.

Corinna: Specifically to retailers, I'd only really sold direct to other businesses, selling ingredients or selling direct to consumers. But I understood the retail environment because I'd worked inside of retail stores in my high school and college years, right? So I was able to adapt my learnings and essentially say, okay, how do we target the customer were seeking to impress and ultimately went over.

Corinna: And so I worked to build programs that would enable to us to do that in a more clear kind of pathway, open the road in front of us, create a blue ocean so that we could do something new, unique and disruptive. And so we did that through creating disruptive experiences in the store by showcasing the effects of omega threes to consumers.

Corinna: And doing demonstrations of fish oils so that they could see firsthand that they didn't have to be fishy, that they didn't have to burp up anything unpleasant and that it could really be something of a unique experience while then still backing it up with all this scientific research to say, here's the reasons that you want to consider taking an Omega-3.

Corinna: Here's the study out of. The Journal of American Medicine Association or jama, here's this other study from NCBI. Take a look at this. This is why it's important. It's going to benefit your heart health. And look, it was pleasant to take. We can even create fruit flavored chewable capsules for little kids and make it an experience that they'll look forward to.

Corinna: So we did this through retailers. We did this in the direct to consumer environment. We're ultimately able to showcase the unique benefits of an Omega-3 while also making it pleasant, which was something that had not been done before. So what this enabled us to do over the course of my nine, almost 10 year record at the company, was to catapult us from less than a million dollars in annual revenues to well over a hundred million and placement in over 37 countries around the globe at that point.

Corinna: Within the industry. We were seen as the leaders in Omega-3 fish oil supplementation and really commanded a shelf presence. That enabled us to also carry with us that brand presence at shelf. That speaks for itself when a consumer walks in if they've never even seen the brand before. So all of that kind of led to us being able to continually succeed, ratchet, get that flywheel spinning, and ultimately continue our growth forward.

Corinna: By the time I left the company, we'd produced 20,000 demos in a single year. So if you think about that as, you know, a part of the whole, it was well over a third of our marketing budget, and I'm including in that every print material that we might have put into place, all of the digital advertising, cooperative advertising elements, and even, you know, digital media and other spaces, trade shows, et cetera.

Sean Weisbrot: You mentioned in the demos, one of the things you were trying to do was demonstrate the benefits of taking the pill. How can you do that when taking these kinds of pills? Actually, you don't feel any different on a day-to-day basis. So how can you show that to them in the store?

Corinna: The reality is, if somebody is deficient in omega threes, they will notice a difference and they'll notice it really fast.

Corinna: So what I would do is I'd say, you know, here, take this teaspoon of cod liver oil, go ahead into your shopping and come back by, tell me how you feel. And the thing that people notice when they've been truly deficient of Omega-3 is like, let's say they don't consume fish. They might not have a vegetarian diet.

Corinna: They might, you know, really be eating the standard American diet of the burger and fries and not taking such great care of themselves, enjoying that ice cream sundae. When they feel like it, whatever, that person, when they take an Omega-3, it's like your cells finally say yes because you can absorb the omega threes that are in that.

Corinna: Rather quickly into your system. And what it will enable you to do is just like all of a sudden it feels like your cells are firing better, you're better able to create energy, you're better able to utilize the nutrients and micronutrients that you've absorbed. And generally speaking, people will just feel a little clearer.

Corinna: Um, when they've taken omega threes for a couple of weeks, they'll start to notice simple things like they're not misplacing their keys as much, or that, where are my sunglasses? When your sunglasses are right on the top of your head, that just. Doesn't happen anymore. And so it's something that I am super passionate about.

Corinna: I mean, obviously I've worked mostly in the Omega-3 space for the primary two decades of my career. I'm working in an algae space now because I honestly believe that we can create better nutrition solutions that are more sustainable for the future by harnessing the power of algae as opposed to relying solely and exclusively on fish or animal species.

Corinna: Plus it's just more friendly. Those little critters. At any rate,

Sean Weisbrot: uh, you don't have to sell me. I agree. I think algae is the right way to go. And I, I personally don't eat fish. Uh, I do take a vegetarian cap for Omega-3, six nine. So when you were doing the demo, this'll get into the psychology a little bit.

Sean Weisbrot: When you're doing the demo, did you suggest to them that they were gonna feel better or all, all you did was say, try this out and just tell me how you feel. In like 15 minutes.

Corinna: So you're asking if there was a psychosomatic effect and the reality is, yeah, sure. There probably was. I mean, there's a placebo effect.

Corinna: Even when you take a sugar pill. There's probably some truth to that. Just getting into the psychology of how things work. Yes, the suggestion is made. So ultimately, you know, when somebody. Is taking something and then going through and spending 20 or 30 minutes shopping around the grocery store floor.

Corinna: They've had that power of suggestion, I guess you could say, that might manipulate them into feeling like they noticed a difference and be more motivated to buy. That's true. I don't feel like it was because I have literally seen people. Shift how they feel, how they think. The reality is that so many people too will suddenly drop weight that they had been holding onto, largely because everything in their body just starts working better.

Corinna: It's the sort of thing that if I were working in an environment like selling tobacco or cigarettes. I might feel a little guilty about even saying something like that to them, but the reality is I know I'm selling the benefits.

Sean Weisbrot: Oh, I, I appreciate the honesty. As long as you understood that there was a potential for that, that's what matters.

Corinna: Yeah, I think there's a potential for placebo. Anytime you expose somebody to just about anything, even an idea of breathing deeply to relax you, I mean, there's science behind it that shows that breathing deeply relaxes you and helps you manage stress. But even suggesting that automatically kind of instills that placebo effect as well.

Sean Weisbrot: When you started with the company, how did you come up with these kinds of ideas? How did you package them? How did you present them? How did you get the go ahead to try these things that led to this revenue growth?

Corinna: Yeah, so I worked with your Opheim, who is the CEO and founder of the company, and I worked with him very closely.

Corinna: He was a graduate of Santa Clara University's MBA. I recently also got my MBA from Santa Clara University, you know, 20 years later thinking about that. But you know, one of the things that we're constantly tasked to do as we go through that program in particular is to think a little differently. And to consider what it would take to disrupt the marketplace.

Corinna: I think he carried that with him initially. He also had developed a product that really begged to be tried, and so if you're trying to do something with consumers where you're saying it doesn't have to be fishy and it doesn't have to be this, and no, really, this is different. They're not going to simply just take your word for it and grab that product off the shelf and start taking it.

Corinna: You need to prove it. And he understood that. And so as we went ahead and developed the programs, I mean, first we were starting with something as simple as, we wanna sell five bottles in a single demo. We're gonna run them for three hours. We're gonna pay a contractor $75 to do that demonstration. They're gonna cover all of their other costs, but we'll supply the marketing materials.

Corinna: The samples, the little sachets, the cups, whatever, that they're going to need to conduct that demonstration and we're going to track their performance and either, you know, say goodbye or hello to new demonstrators, dependent on how well they did. And so I developed the entirety of the program and just scaled it up as we grew.

Corinna: For instance, I might work with a sales rep in a particular area to. Test it and say, okay, I'm going to test this program in the Pacific Northwest and see how it does. And so we gave them five demos a month to start, and then just grew, grew, grew, and then started to roll it out to other territories. So a lot of tests, trial error, and then ensuring that we had a program that could ultimately sustain itself that wouldn't be overly difficult to manage.

Corinna: We did ultimately end up dedicating one headcount specifically to just coordinating demos because we had, at the height of the program when I was there, over 300 demonstrators active at any given time. So that's a lot of people that are cycling through that need to be trained and that need to ultimately understand what it is that we're seeking to do in every demonstration.

Corinna: One of the things that I think. Actually made the program as successful as it was, is that we were often recruiting demonstrators through our brokers from people that worked at the store in general anyway. So when they were on off hours, they were now educated on how to sell the product, and then when they go return to work.

Corinna: Guess what? You have this person who knows your product really well, loves it, is already paid directly by you, and then has this kind of incentive in the back of their mind to have that continual performance, like they're not likely to go and sell a competitor's fish oil then. So all of that I think played into the long-term success of the program.

Corinna: There's one other thing that I did really differently though as I led demonstrations for the company, I really worked to treat our demonstrators as if they were extensions of the company.

Corinna: And much the way that I treated our brokers. This is something that I write about in a blog post that I did on LinkedIn.

Corinna: So many companies in the natural channel and elsewhere, they treat brokers as if they are, I don't know, kindergartners or red haired stepchildren. Choose your vernacular for this. They just don't necessarily treat them like they're part of the company. And what I would always seek to do was ensure that I.

Corinna: Brought them into deci big decisions we were making, even just to get their opinion. Not necessarily that, you know, their viewpoint would end up being the one that we chose, but just to hear them out and ensure that I was continually farming the field for intelligence that could affect our decision making so that we'd make better decisions.

Corinna: It also, I. Gave them respect. And I think when you show people that are working for you, whether they be contractors or employees, that you treat them with that same level of respect, they're going to do more work for you. Like that's the side benefit. But there's this piece to me that made it so important to do that, and that was simply my viewpoint on my own cannot be the thing that drives the success of the company if I am not taking the perspectives from the field of the people that have their feet on the street in the stores every single day.

Corinna: Then I am not going to create the best plan for the company. I am not going to have my finger on the pulse of what is happening in the industry in the same way that I would if I pulled them continually, if I showed them that I had that level of respect for them and for the hard work that they do. I. I also had one of the longest tenured broker forces where you really didn't see a lot of volatility in the team, and many of the brokers I hired when I joined the company in 2002 are still with the company.

Corinna: So that shows you something. I'm just very proud of that.

Sean Weisbrot: I love the getting the feedback from brokers. So I was just interviewing someone earlier today and we were talking about customer experience and we got a little bit into employee experience and how it kind of extends into customer experience.

Sean Weisbrot: And we were talking about feedback. He basically said the same thing that you did, which was if you're not getting feedback from everyone you're working with, as you said, they're the ones communicating with those people. They're seeing. Like we say, it's not fishy, but maybe like 20% of the people we demo to still feels like it tastes kind of fishy.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe we should rework our marketing or rework the formulation. So like you can get amazing feedback not only on how you're doing the sales, but maybe how the product works and whether it needs to be improved or not. So it's fantastic. I love that.

Corinna: I totally agree. There's one other thing I will just say. Language is really important, and when we talk about our brokers or our demonstrators or our field reps or our employees, if we use terminology like, oh, they're just an employee or just a broker, we've automatically kind of divorced ourselves from the level of. Let's say attention, we might need to pay to their perspective.

Corinna: I think it's really critical that we shift our thinking Overall. It has been the feedback I've brought in to almost every organization I've worked for. I'll, I'll give you an example. I worked for Nutri Gold for a couple of years. I first joined as VP of marketing. I was five months pregnant and didn't have it in me to be on the road as much as being in sales often requires.

Corinna: This is gonna be my second child and I loved what the company was doing there. Very focused on creating the highest quality supplements that money can buy, and they put quality before just about everything. The CEO of the company reached out to me specifically because of that article I wrote for LinkedIn, talking about how brokers needed to be valued and he had hired somebody else to be the VP of sales.

Corinna: That VP of sales came in and did what? So many do they, uh, suddenly want to replace half of the broker force with salespeople they already know or make a bunch of changes that could make them look good on the short term, but not necessarily have the payout over the long term. I had counseled him to say, look, you know, I think you should take a little bit more into account.

Corinna: Give them some time, make sure that you've evaluated the sales revenues of the company and the performance of representatives for at least six months, because even though six months could be. A long time. That first six months when you come into a company is a critical period where you really get to understand the business.

Corinna: And once you understand the business, the decisions you'll make will be much more rooted in really what will support the company's long-term growth. It will also ensure that you're not seen as a slap dash leader who's just not going to take their employees and contributors. As carrying a level of import with them.

Corinna: So I think it creates a much better, stronger culture where people will work for you and with you as opposed to just feel like they're a slave.

Sean Weisbrot: Absolutely. I recently hired a product manager when I handed over responsibilities for her to manage like the sprint planning and execution alongside the development team and the CTO.

Sean Weisbrot: She went above and beyond my expectation. She started having one-on-ones with the developers and wanting to communicate with them about the ideas we were getting ready to develop and see if they could figure out any problems that they might encounter before they start to develop any of it, and really spending a lot of time communicating with them before anything is actually developed or designed.

Sean Weisbrot: It's. Allowed us to work much more smoothly because of it. And it's not something that I really thought of doing. I mean, of course, I, I wanna empower everyone. It just wasn't something that I thought to do. It was like, oh, I've written out the details. I've designed it. This is why we're gonna do it. Go. And then they would find problems and then it would mess up all of our plans and we'd slow down.

Sean Weisbrot: So like, the way that she's changed everything has just made it operate much more smoothly. I'm really appreciative for that. So, I, I definitely agree that having.

Corinna: What you've revealed is that you gave her enough freedom to be able to execute with her own ideas. And if you tell somebody where you wanna go and you give them some bumpers, and you generally say, okay, here's the end game.

Corinna: This is the goal of where we want to head now, you know, these are the things I think we need to consider, but you know, you have free reign to go ahead and design how we get there within. X budget or whatever, then suddenly that person is empowered to be able to bring their creativity to the job. And I think that makes life so much easier for both a leader and also for the person that's there to execute, because they'll be more inspired to work hard and develop new strategies that you might not have thought of it before.

Corinna: So I think that's exactly right. Really nice.

Sean Weisbrot: How long did it take to come up with the first part of the plan and get to test it?

Corinna: Not very long. A matter of a month maybe.

Sean Weisbrot: What kind of a budget were you given? I guess what, there was already a marketing budget before you came in. Did they say we need to add to it, or did they take away from what was already there?

Sean Weisbrot: How did you negotiate to test?

Corinna: It's interesting because the CEO, in this particular case, he didn't really want to give budgets. He just wanted everything to be very mindful, and so he would choose to say yes or no if something made sense. And so as long as you could say, here is what I want to do, as long as it made sense, he'd say yes.

Corinna: And so that might be as simple as me saying I really want to do a cooperative advertising budget. You know, we're still in this pioneering phase, so our brokers haven't generated really enough sales to be able to, you know, have a good enough bank to be able to, you know, support this particular retailer's cooperative advertising.

Corinna: So instead what I would do is say, okay, their past three months sales have been. $500. Let's just choose that number. It's not a huge number because they're just getting started out. They might have moved about 150 to $200 a month and product off their shelf. Talking wholesale value, so double it for retail, right?

Corinna: Let's just assume that this retailer is going to order the same amount over the next year. They're going to have sold at least a couple thousand dollars worth of product. Can I have a budget of a hundred bucks to put something in a local rag in their neck of the woods or to. Print a flyer that they're going to put in every bag that they send through their registers as a grocer, you know, so that volume would be quite high.

Corinna: And you just say, well, that makes sense to me. Yes. And then we build, build, build from there. That's not necessarily the norm for a lot of companies. One of the things I have tended to do is ultimately work from a budget of planned revenues. If you're looking at a, an entrepreneurial venture where you're really in the beginning and you don't have a lot of historical sales, I might build a plan where essentially says, look, you know, here's our planned revenues for the year.

Corinna: We need to spend at least 20% of what we anticipate of the revenues to build the market. And then here's the plan I'm gonna build. From that, if it's an established company, then typically, yes, you have a budget and you have something of perhaps 10% of revenues to be your entire marketing budget. That might have to cover everything from training to education of retailers, to print materials, digital advertising, et cetera.

Corinna: So you really just have to. Consider it as part of the whole, and then really try to show what the ROI is likely to be. So one of the things I always like to suggest to be done is small regional tests, because if you do a regional test, you can tell a lot from that. You can extrapolate what the success might be, and you can say, look, this is early days.

Corinna: Our early successes aren't as likely to be as strong as the future successes. And then. Go ahead and lay out what you think it can do over the course of the next year, and then just reevaluate on a continual basis, if not every three months, every six months, sometimes a particular project will need some time to get legs.

Corinna: So keep refining, keep looking at the data, and keep ultimately that creative hat on to say, what's working, what isn't, and how can I improve this program? How can I prove this effort?

Sean Weisbrot: When you joined, did you have it in your head that you were going to turn the company into a hundred million dollars company or did you just go, let's just see what I can accomplish, or where you're like, this is gonna happen.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm gonna a hundred x this company. Like what was your, your thought process when you joined?

Corinna: So when I joined, I was 25 years old, so I was a little bit fresh outta college. I had one big success under my belt already. I had spearheaded an international division of a raw material manufacturer or an ingredient manufacturer, right?

Corinna: They're known as both things, depending on who you talk to. I had basically developed a company into a multinational organization from just a US based organization, and by the time I left. That company 18 months later, that accounted for 40% of their revenues and helped them weather a storm within the natural products industry where people stopped buying as many herbal extracts.

Corinna: There was controversies around Mah Wong and Kava, et cetera, in the marketplace. I. Some companies stopped formulating with as many herbal extracts by building that international business. I helped the company weather the storm. It became 40% of the company's business, and I was able to come to Nordic Naturals saying, I can't promise you the world.

Corinna: I can't say that we're going to get to a million dollars in revenue each three months. I. And you know, the next year, what I can promise you is that I'll put the same foot forward and with diligence work to grow this business and that I was willing to dedicate the next five to seven years of my life to it.

Corinna: When I said that I was quite serious, I was willing to dedicate the next five to seven years of my life to this effort. And as a young twenties, I had a fire in my belly. I was very much itching to prove myself, and I put a lot of myself into that job every day, you know, long hours. A lot of business travel.

Corinna: My first goal was that I wanted to ensure we had nationwide representation, and I'd put the internal goal on myself of trying to do that in six months. We had an inactive broker force. Um, several of them wouldn't even return my calls and then if I did get in touch with them, would say things like, well, who are you to tell me what to do?

Corinna: You're just this fresh outta college, 25-year-old or whatever. And yet I was going into the field with them and taking whatever learnings I could and putting all of my effort into it, and I would still be treated with a little bit of disrespect. So I did have to make some refinements to our brokers. I had something like, uh, three or four letters.

Corinna: I called them letters, but they were woo, the broker 1, 2, 3, of course, mostly just communicated via email, right? But like to try and woo who I knew to be really great. Sales representatives to come on board the company without putting a carrot in front of them to say, oh, well, we'll just pay you a retainer.

Corinna: We're trying to do everything purely on commission, which is really tough as a company starting out, but also something that's kind of required when you're in this bootstrapping brand build, right? Like you don't wanna just pay someone a couple thousand dollars every month and have it just whisper to the wind.

Corinna: So I really focused on building the company and building the brand and building a reputation. I didn't focus so much on a number. By the end of the first 15 months, we had surpassed the leader in the industry, and so I think there was something too, not just focusing on a particular revenue number, if we had just been hyper-focused on a particular revenue number as opposed to the build of the company and the build of the brand, I think we might have done things a little bit differently.

Corinna: And we might have actually put training wheels on ourselves and kept ourselves from kind of the growth trajectory that we otherwise experienced. We were focused on building that kind of, that emotional tie to the brand. We understood that if we could help people remember how we made them feel, we. That they would become emotionally connected to the brand and help us build.

Corinna: And so by treating all the brokers that we had as well as we possibly could, by paying them a high commission, by giving them accolades at every turn, by recognizing their achievements. Like for instance, when my New York rep, his first month sold $2,000. I sent him a card in the mail, handwritten when he got to $20,000 in a month sales, I sent him another card and a small gift and just like handwritten a little touch to say, you know, you're appreciated.

Corinna: You're doing awesome work. We so value you. And these are things that I think many people overlook doing. They need to celebrate more, celebrate the successes. And if you had. In this pioneering phase, when a brand is brand new, put a bunch of dollar metrics in place. What if somebody didn't meet it? What if your goal was too lofty and suddenly the inspiration that they've been carrying with them might be thwarted?

Corinna: So while it's always important to have a number in mind of where you want to head, being clear with what your objectives are as a whole is, I think most important. Specifically when you're in that pioneering phase.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you think that's the difference between how women and men operate? I feel like a man would come in and go.

Sean Weisbrot: We're gonna have a hundred million in five years and like, let's do this. Not to say that what you did was wrong, I think it's fantastic. I also recognize that there's a psychological difference, I think, in the way we operate in the gender. Do you, would you agree with that?

Corinna: Well, I think that's mostly true, but I will say hats off to the CEO and founder of Nordic Naturals because this guidance also came from him.

Corinna: If anything, the goals I was creating for myself were even higher than the ones that he had considered. And so every time I came to him with what I thought the plan should be, he was, you know, like, well, that sounds really good to me. And it's not to say that he wasn't aggressive in reaching objectives.

Corinna: Once we had established the first two or three years of sales, we really got to the. Forward planning of saying what is our overall objective going to be this year? How are we going to get there? You know, what percent of revenues are we going to dedicate to sales, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm really speaking about that first launch phase because you can shoot yourself in the foot if you put goals in front of people that, that are later determined to be unrealistic.

Corinna: Sometimes I think especially entrepreneurs are, have very lofty goals and. If they're not capable of actually reaching those goals in the beginning, the people that they brought on the bus to be part of it could serve to be discouraged and even leave the company because, oh, well, they're not reaching what they promised.

Sean Weisbrot: What was the hardest thing about building this program and what percentage of the ideas you tried succeeded?

Corinna: As far as what percentage of the ideas I tried succeeded, I'm always building what I think will work for a company I'm working with based on what I know and what I know is continually changing and improving.

Corinna: And so even programs I have worked to develop that may not have succeeded as much in the beginning, I would simply adapt and say, oh, okay, well this piece of this program isn't working very well, but what is working within this program? Oh, well this, this, and this are so, therefore. I should just tweak this piece on like just fine tuning to the point where suddenly you have a, let's say, sales program that is really motivating to the retailer or to the business that you're working with.

Corinna: You know, one of the things that you find in a growing business and the consumer products and good space is that I. If you're selling through retail shelf space is at a premium shelf. Space is also critically important to the success of your brand, where you're placed in the store, how many facings you have.

Corinna: So developing programs that motivate that particular customer to partner with you can be really, really important. And doing them on a volume-based perspective can work great for, let's say, many of the multi-location chains, but maybe not as well for the mom and pop shops who might be moving a considerable amount of product on a per location basis.

Corinna: So what I worked to do from that perspective was create programs that would enable smaller retailers who dedicated more shelf space and who proved that they dedicated more shelf space, either via their broker representative or photographs or whatever, similar levels of discounts that the larger chains might receive simply for their level of commitment.

Corinna: Because that level of commitment essentially signals to their entire consumer audience. This is a brand we trust and love when it's placed at eye level or on an end cap, and. Consistently promoted with really nice shelf presence, then that's something that should be, let's say, acknowledged and rewarded.

Corinna: You know, some of that was trial and error. Figuring out, you know, what that level should be based on how many skews you had, or let's say in the lay person's term, how many products you had, sizes, shapes, flavors since things like that.

Sean Weisbrot: You mentioned something really interesting, so I, I want to get into it a little bit more.

Sean Weisbrot: The idea of working with retailers. Probably a lot of people listening to this have also. Watched Shark Tank before, I imagine. And on Shark Tank, they're like, I can get you into Walmart. I can do this, I can do that. For people who don't have those connections, how do you convince people to give you a chance and give you shelf space?

Corinna: Well, a lot of times that is through just making sure that you have a really solid. Background on your company, like you have developed your sales pitch, you have developed something that resonates with that particular audience. You have packaging that is appealing. You have a promotional strategy that the retailer knows can work for them, and that you're willing to showcase for them that you'll make it work.

Corinna: So one of the things that I often did when I was presenting to chains like GNC or Vitamin Shop or Whole Foods or Walgreens, was develop what I call like the partnership pitch. You know, what you were willing to do and what you wanted to ensure was part of your baseline agreement. And that might be as simple as saying, we want to ensure that we're.

Corinna: Participating in four promotions every year at X percent, and we're willing to back those up with off shelf placement, which you're usually paying for with a lot of these large retailers, in addition to participation in your webinar program and, and, and, and just make sure that as a package, it looks like something that could help your brand succeed in their stores.

Corinna: Because if that piece is left out and it's just presented like, oh, here's our product and isn't it great? Sure, it's great, but look at what you know, these competitors of yours are doing to help me move the product. That gives me faith that they'll move the product. If it's a press clipping where you were mentioned in Women's World Magazine or on Oprah or you know, whatever, like whoever the media giant is at that particular moment in time, you could showcase that in your presentation and you know, really understand that being succinct.

Corinna: Also providing enough detail to show that you've thought it through is very helpful.

Sean Weisbrot: When you're trying to get a chance with a retailer who doesn't know you, do you go for like the owner or do you go for a manager? Like who do you target to really get their attention? Like who's the most likely person in that organization to actually make it possible for you to get to a yes, even if they're not the one saying yes.

Corinna: That is a question that's sometimes hard to figure out and that's where I have always leaned back on the sales reps who work that particular account. Um, this is why it's so critical and important that you hire people, even if they are on a contract basis, that really know their accounts and partner with their accounts that have a good relationship with that account.

Corinna: And sometimes I've just networked with other companies in my industry to say, okay, I'm having trouble getting into this particular retailer like that. I'm just gonna use. Mothers in Southern California, they've got a chain of about seven stores. They were recently bought as in like in the past five years by a conglomerate, and so they've gone from being independent to not so much, so their buying systems changed a bit, especially for a period there, it was a little tough to get new products approved, whereas before it would happen like snap, snap, snap.

Corinna: I had to connect with other manufacturers who had really strong sets in their stores in order to ensure that I was. Apprised of and knew who was actually making the decisions so that I could then target that particular person. This is one of the reasons I've always thought it was really important to keep friendly relations with other brands, whether or not they were competitors, because the reality is, I mean, you're in this together, you're in this industry together, and you don't know where you'll end up and where that valuable intelligence could come from this next time around.

Corinna: So I always even developed strong partnerships and relationships with people that were in my competitive space, specifically in omega threes.

Sean Weisbrot: That's why through the podcast, I'm building a CEO community. I mean, I've, I've already got almost 200 CEOs of varying industries and varying sizes in different countries.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, I don't know if any of them are going to provide any value in the future to me, but maybe they'll provide value to each other, and that's what I'm looking for, is to help them help each other.

Corinna: Commiseration is not to be undervalued like sometimes if you're just having a tough time getting through, getting to a yes, getting to the right person, even just talking to someone who's been there, if it's even with the same account, can help you to kind of, oh, well I hadn't thought about doing that.

Corinna: Interesting. Yes. Maybe I will go look at LinkedIn for the six people that report to them and just. Kind of create a soft sell approach to them. I don't know. It's just, you know, who do you need to develop advocates? Where do you need to develop advocates in order to ensure that you're successful in that presentation with a big retailer like Walgreens or Walmart, or something to that effect.

Sean Weisbrot: Once you've started working with a retailer and they can kind of see you performing, how do you convince them to give you better shelf presence? Is it something that they offer to do, or do you have to ask for it? Or do you have to pay for it with an ask? How? How does that work?

Corinna: That varies so much by retailer.

Corinna: So I can't answer the question in a blanket statement, but what I will always say is it never hurts to ask. And sometimes asking is all it takes. So you know, why are, I have a lot of familiarity with the vitamin shop? The vitamin shop is a retailer, doesn't really set brands necessarily together, right? If you have an Omega-3, it's in the Omega-3 section, but your prenatal DHA, that is also Omega-3 isn't gonna be with the omega threes.

Corinna: It'll be in the prenatal section. You're not going to get cross merchandised. But some retailers will cross merchandise you and they will give you an entire Omega-3 set, and then also placement in the prenatal section Ultimately. Typically, they make those decisions based on performance and more and more are going straight to metrics like, oh, how well is this brand doing?

Corinna: I am having trouble keeping enough inventory of their product on shelf. And in back stock, because I only have two SKUs in a certain set of how much I can have in the back stock inventory. So if I give them more shelf space, I'm less likely to run out of inventory, which will positively impact my revenues.

Corinna: So they'll be more open to doing that. And sometimes it's just learning to talk in their language. Like are they like Walgreens looking at performance per square inch or are they looking at turns? And so you need to understand. Stand what the perspective of that retailer is, and then frame your ask with regard to what that perspective is.

Sean Weisbrot: I've never been in physical products, so this is all very new and interesting to me. You said earlier you sometimes had goals that were loftier than the CEOs. Did you think you were gonna do a billion and you hit a hundred? Did you think you were gonna do 50 million and hit a hundred like. How did your goals match up with reality over time?

Corinna: You know, my projections were always really close to accurate because I was basing it on not only cycles of seasons, but what I knew the pipeline to be.

Corinna: You know, I'm talking about the broader scope, right? Like I might come in and say, I. I really think we can achieve 20% growth this year, and my CEO would say, I think 15 is realistic and attainable, and 20 might be our stretch goal. And so he'd say, look, I'm willing to dangle another carrot for you. If you can hit that 20, you'll get this extra bonus. However, you know, I was also a very ethically minded salesperson and I wasn't someone who would suddenly go, okay, end of year I'm gonna just, you know, push, push, push and get that number.

Corinna: You know, I think that instilling something like that with. The wrong person in charge could lead you to pull sales into one year out of the other. Or if you were so far off from reaching that goal, you might push it into the future year. So I think from a compensation perspective, those in the executive seats need to be wise about how they incentivize their sales teams.

Corinna: I have known my brokers when I gave specific goals and stretch goals to kind of keep sales in back pocket and. Push them into the next month if it was going to mean that they'd reach the objective more easily in the next month if they were a little too far from goal this month. And so I just, I think you have to keep all of those things in mind.

Corinna: I think I kind of introduced a new topic there though, didn't I? Sales compensation, how you motivate people.

Sean Weisbrot: It is something I haven't really covered on the show yet.

Corinna: There's so many ways to compensate people and to keep them accountable. And you have to really, when you're structuring a sales comp plan, you have to be very mindful of.

Corinna: Where people will take advantage or not. And I guess the broader stroke for you is as simple as saying, you know, I was often looking at the bottom line and saying, look, we're paying our brokers 15%. We really could, at this stage reduce their commission to 12. I think that would make sense for us. And I was reporting to A CEO who.

Corinna: Who was like looking at the market and saying, you know, we can afford to pay 15 and I wanna keep their focus at the level it's, and he could have been right. We continued to succeed. So even the goals I was putting in front of myself, were like, okay, we, we can refine this. We can build a more profitable model with that extra 3%.

Corinna: I could do more X, Y, and Z from a marketing perspective and that would enable us. To achieve this other objective. So I just think it's all where your headset is, in my opinion. And you know, my goals weren't ever so lofty that it was like, okay, we easily could have attained another 120% of objective or something like that.

Corinna: It was just typically a little bit more aggressive even than what my CEO would want from me.

Sean Weisbrot: I hope that I can find someone like you that'll have larger goals than me.

Sean Weisbrot: 'cause the goals I have are already quite large.

Corinna: I look at it like this. This comes down to psychology too. I studied shotokan karate in college, and one of the things they say is, you're not ever aiming to hit your target.

Corinna: You're pushing through, and so you aim beyond your target. If you take that perspective to everything you're doing from a selling perspective, then you're more likely to reach the objective. And so I think that just is natural to me. To want to exceed the expectation, not to underpromise and overdeliver, but to be realistic and to then seek to just smash that objective.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there anything I haven't asked you that you'd like to share to kind of help close out the episode?

Corinna: I'd just like for people as they. Consider their lives in business to think more broadly about the people that they're connected to and how they collaborate and understand that if you take the approach of seeking to understand before putting a new plan in place of seeking to understand before commencing an initiative of seeking to understand somebody's.

Corinna: Background or their culture before implementing anything that you'll have more success, just generally speaking, and it that could be on a sales call. That could be in developing a marketing plan, that could be in hiring a new set of employees. If you keep an eye on the human element of what you're doing, you'll be more successful.