Latest Post
Why You Need to Host a Food Broker Partner Summit
“Forget champagne and caviar – Taste the world instead!”
Before meeting with your broker to build-out objectives, determine what are the key metrics that drive your economic engine.
From there, set time with your foodservice broker partner to construct a strategy. You hired them to be the local market expert, so it’s important to let them collaborate in the strategic planning process. When you allow your broker team to be a part of the planning process, it creates ownership for everyone involved.
Not of caution: we would recommend shying away from handing the broker expectations that they had no say in creating. They are a part of your sales and marketing efforts and having their buy-in is critical for your mutual success. Brokers manage multiple brands, so it’s important that you’re positioning yourself and your brand in a way where the broker is excited about growing your line.
So, what is the best way to go about building out objectives?
Simple… Begin with the end in mind.
Few things to figure out first:
Step 1
Determine your company’s overall growth goal on an annualized basis. This can be either calendar year or fiscal depending on how your company runs their accounting.
Step 2
Figure out how much of that country-wide growth will be required in the market(s) your broker operates in.
Step 3
Now let’s get in to how to break up the growth goal for your broker. You need to factor in the following:
- Core: Retention of existing customers & existing products.When setting objectives, consider potential attrition within your core base. For instance, aiming for a 10% growth might require planning for a 15% increase due to possible losses. If you started with a baseline of 100 cases, and you aim for 10% growth (110 cases), but experience a 5% reduction due to slower business or lost customers, you’d need a plan for 10 new cases plus 5 more to offset the core loss, totaling 15 new cases. This approach ensures your goals are realistic and adaptable to potential challenges.
- Penetration: Existing customers & products. This means selling more sku’s in to existing customers.
- Innovation-Acquisition: New customers & new and existing products. This is all about new sales!
- Plan Total: Must equal sales goal.
Step 4
Once you have the numbers figured out, now we go in to the tactics to make it come to life. This is where your broker partner needs to be a part of the conversation. For Core, Penetration, Innovation-Acquisition, you and broker need to collectively determine the individual objectives to create the plan
Step 5
Ensure both you and your broker have a copy of the objectives.
Step 6
Set a cadence for meeting with your broker to review their progress.
Step 7
Objective planning isn’t an exact science. No matter how you draw it up, it most likely won’t look like that at the end of the year and that is ok. Just adjust throughout the year as you go along.
