Achieving Wholesale Excellence: Lessons from a Chinese Proverb
Jan, CEO
Nov 8, 2024
When a tree falls over, it is because the crown has grown bigger than the roots.
This Chinese proverb reminds us: growth needs strong foundations.
In wholesale, it can be tempting to chase expansion — new products, markets, partners — but without solid roots, growth can quickly plateau.
Avoiding Overgrowth: Why Scale and Efficiency Matters
Wholesale networks are complex. You have to navigate:
Dozens of products
Dozens of markets
Dozens of partners.
Hundreds, if not thousands of retail doors.
Expanding too fast without the right foundation makes profitable growth harder to sustain. Growth without depth adds more doors, but without the processes to drive success at the store level, the impact on your bottom-line could go either way.
The Five Roots of Wholesale Success
Strategic Planning & Segmentation
Not all retail partners contribute equally to your success.
By segmenting your retailers by tier, store type, product assortment and so on, you can determine the level of support each partner needs.
This enables you to prioritize and tailor your approach to maximize impact and maintain efficiency at scale.
Effective Partner Collaboration
Multi-brand retail is about win-win-win collaboration.
Your brand wants to win, but you are also reliant on your retailers to win, and your retailers are reliant on their store staff to win.
Keeping partners motivated and aligned on goals can be challenging, especially when resources and priorities vary across retailers.
Provide your retailers with empowering resources—training, merchandising guidelines, campaign plans, and feedback mechanisms. Keep everyone aligned and moving towards shared objectives. And do it in a cost-efficient way.
Scalable Field Operations
Field reps are the link between you and your retailers. They are a critical part of your go-to-market process — from sell-in to sell-out.
The goal is to build a field team that can engage and empower retailers and store staff, at scale - without breaking the bank on headcount.
Localization
Adapting strategies for different regions without losing brand consistency can be tough.
The end goal is to be able to localize how you activate and support your retailers to meet specific regional needs while maintaining brand alignment.
Actionable Insights
Getting consistent, high-quality data from retail partners is challenging. Accuracy and timeliness will vary - making it difficult to get a clear picture of your performance. And, without any data at all - optimizing your efforts is nearly impossible.
Negotiate data sharing into your trade terms to ensure retailers provide performance insights on products, categories, and campaigns. Good data is the key to targeted, informed action.
Balance and Efficiency for Sustainable Growth
The image of a tree falling because its crown is too big serves as a powerful reminder — long-term growth requires strong, effective roots.
True wholesale excellence means building strong foundations as you expand. Expanding sales and partnerships is great, and continuous investment in the fundamentals keeps profitable growth sustainable.
Grow your roots as much as your branches to support the long-term success of your brand.
Using a Retail Activation Platform to Overcome Wholesale Challenges
A Retail Activation platform can help you overcome wholesale growth challenges. Here’s how:
Segment your retail activation efforts
Set up your retail partners in different audiences that make it simple to share the right activation tools with the right retailers, at the right time.
Audiences make it easy to segment your retailers based on product assortment, tier, store type, store format and more.
Every retailer deserves activation support, but without the proper tools to segment and scale the distribution of training, campaign plans and guidelines, the long tail of your retailers is often forgotten in the go-to-market process - costing your business dearly on the bottom line. The cost-to-serve simply becomes too high.
Effective Partner Collaboration
Use shared planning tools, like a campaign roll-out, and real-time two-way communication to boost partner collaboration.
These tools enable you to set joint action plans and maintain transparency on the execution of key actions to ensure campaigns are launched on-time, every time.
Scalable Field Operations
Equip field teams with mobile tools to enable them to reach and engage more stores, more consistently.
With a retail activation platform, field reps can set up store visit checklists to ensure that stores are presenting their brand and products in alignment with their guidelines.
Additionally, with the ability to track engagement and POS data in real-time, field reps are able to take action on underperforming regions, retailers or stores instantly, rather than a month after a campaign has been launched.
Localization
Localizing activation approaches to each retailer and market used to be a timely and inefficient process.
With a retail activation platform, you can use templates to scale content creation and distribution across markets.
Creating language variations is a critical part of the localization process, so finding a platform that can support auto-translation and proof-reading is a must-have.
Actionable Insights
Making data-driven decisions is on the agenda for any modern brand. Getting the right data is the real challenge.
With a retail activation platform, you are able to easily gather engagement data on:
How many store staff you are reaching with your activation efforts?
How many of those store staff find your content engaging?
Have our campaign actions been executed on-time?
Are our retail partners' compliant with our brand guidelines?
A mix of engagement data, and real-time performance data, through an integration of your retailers' POS data is a gold mine of business critical insights.
These insights will tell you:
Are our activation efforts leading to sales?
Are upskilled and empowered store staff able to better sell our products?
Which markets, products, campaigns etc. are underperforming?
Which markets & stores are performing well, and should be rewarded?
And much more...
Conclusion: Deep Roots Foster Tall Trees
Growth isn’t just about getting bigger — it’s about building a solid foundation. Strong roots —strategic planning, collaboration, efficient operations, and actionable insights — are what keep your business standing tall.
Ready to elevate your wholesale game with a retail activation platform? Talk to one of our experts today!
