MAXIMISING SALES
60 SECONDS WITH: M
Natasha Rose, General Build Category Team
aximising sales between NBG Partners and Suppliers is a really simple equation, according to Natasha Rose, Managing
Director of the Rose Group - which includes Andrew Building Supplies - and the Chair of NBG’s General Build Category Management Team.
“The closer we work with the Suppliers, the better the sales are,” she says. “We don’t do yearly meetings or six-monthly meetings where we get shown a presentation and pictures of the factory anymore. Instead, we sit down together at the very least once a quarter, sometimes once a month, and are really focussed on what we want to achieve.“ The meetings can be really specific, Rose adds, often looking at products in detail. “We often ask what product from the Supplier’s range we could be pushing through the Partners. Between us we come up with key strategies that we could be pursuing or we might ask the Supplier for certain key Partners that they think could be spending more. I might get the Supplier to give me the names of three NBG Partners that they want to really build sales with, then I can put in a phone call and together we will grow the business.” There is a lot of trust at NBG between the Partners, she says, so often the opinion of another Partner can carry more weight than a Supplier’s salesman coming in and saying ‘you need to be selling this’. “That’s why we’ve been using case studies a lot. We want to be able to show Partners where things have worked. So where brands like, say, Everbuild and Simpson Strong Tie go in and do a stock cleanse or a remerchandising project or even launch a new product, they can then do a case study on that project and upload it to our Hub. When I see that, I can then ring the Partner up and say ‘take away the gloss, tell me how it is going’. When they tell me that, yes it is really flying, the merchandising is right and it’s really working, I can then translate that out to other Partners.
“One of the things we do in our business - and I know this is replicated throughout other Partners – is to it down with the Business Development Manager of the relevant Supplier and go through the minutes of our last meeting, looking at the action points, asking who did what, and whether is it working. If it’s not, then we look at whether we need to
January 2020
tweak things or schedule some training. Relationships between NBG Suppliers and the Category Management Team have become a lot more professional in the last few years, Rose continues. It’s become less confrontational and more collaborative and targeted. “We don’t sit through endless Powerpoint presentations, rather, we write down some objectives and try and stick to them. It used to be very combative, every time we would meet with a Supplier, the question was always how can we bash a bit more discount out of them, let’s pummel them until we get a bit more. We don’t have many confrontations now because we sit down and talk before we get to that stage.” Rose says that nearly all the General Build deals now have sales plans. “It really is so
The close working relationship is really important so we will be continuing these with our Suppliers. 93%
of members said that the close personal relationship is the key.
satisfying when a plan works. If, say, the sales plan is to increase sales of a particular product in the next quarter by 10%, when you hit that it feels really, really good. It’s good for the Supplier and it’s good for us. It also means an easier conversation at renegotiation time. The Supplier can show us what we set out to achieve together and then what we achieved.” That means that the group is then more likely to stick with that deal or keep them in for a longer term which helps both Partner and Supplier, she says. “Successfully implemented sales plans mean we go for longer deals: there are a lot of three-year deals that we do in a way that we never did before. Because of this, it means that you have to keep sitting down and talking because what you don’t want to do is for it to be three years until you chat again.”
The close working relationship is really important to NBG, Rose says. “When we did research amongst the Partners, 93% of us said that the close personal relationship is the key. Certainly that’s true in the General
Build category. We are quite a social bunch as merchants, so when we have our meetings we try to go out the night before or the night after.
“Sometimes it’s quite low key, but that is how you develop those close relationships which means you feel comfortable picking up the phone to ask a favour, or being a little bit cheeky and asking for a bit more than you might have done otherwise,” she continues. “What I think is really true in the way we work with our Suppliers is that we’re not asking them to sell us the product initially,. We want them to sell us their professionalism and their processes so that we know that if something goes wrong and the delivery doesn’t arrive, I don’t even need to phone the Supplier because I know that they are going to put it right. We have that trust. That can only be achieved by working together. “We are in a constant dialogue. It needs both sides. There’s no way we can grow sales if only one of you is invested in it, whether that be the Supplier or the Partner,”
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