Supplier growth meetings are an essential component of major retailers’ growth strategies. These strategic events help retailers refine growth strategies with their vendors through an on-site, collaborative process.
In today’s post, you’ll learn about the importance of supplier growth meetings and how Bluewater has managed the experiential, event tech, and AV needs of some of the world’s largest retailers, such as Walmart and Meijer, at their supplier growth meetings.
Supplier Growth Meetings: An Overview
For those unfamiliar with the term, a supplier growth meeting is an event hosted by a retailer (say, Home Depot) where all its suppliers are invited to get together in one room. The purpose of the meeting is for suppliers and retailers to discover new avenues and opportunities to sell products and promote them effectively together.
Supplier growth meetings are a great opportunity for suppliers to get an audience with retailers with the hopes of placing more products in the retail stores. But more importantly, supplier growth meetings are an incredibly lucrative opportunity for retailers. They can interface with all their suppliers in person in one location rather than fragmenting this process throughout the year and the world.
Retailers also have the chance to show off a bit. We’d be lying if we said retailers didn’t use these meetings to romance suppliers a bit. And that’s where we come in.
Open Communication is Key
Supplier growth meetings are a fantastic opportunity for open communication and building supplier relationships. As a retailer, your meeting objective should include taking advantage of your chance to deliver a unified message to all your key suppliers. What’s working well for you as a retailer? What isn’t? What changes to your approach are you planning to roll out in the coming year? What are the timelines for those changes? What key metrics are you using to measure supplier performance?
Your suppliers will benefit from hearing this information firsthand. For example, Walmart pushed packaging strategies that included large, clear fonts and visibly prominent barcodes. If suppliers want to look good to Walmart, they need to follow these updated guidelines. The supplier growth meeting was the perfect place for Walmart to inform relevant stakeholders about these new initiatives.
Of course, communication is a two-way street. The supplier growth meeting is also the perfect opportunity for vendors to show off what’s new or to discuss any supply chain disruptions or performance issues they are having with the retailer. Once again, getting all this information in one go is far more efficient than tracking down each individual supplier throughout the year.
When Planning a Supplier Growth Meeting, Experience Matters
If you’re a retailer looking for help with the experiential, event tech, and AV aspects of delivering an impressive vendor meeting, you know that experience matters. Sure, if you’re a small retailer with just a few locations, you may not need the latest and greatest. Any relevant firm can probably get the job done.
But if your retail portfolio has a national or even multinational presence, you need a firm with proven experience running meetings at that scale. That’s exactly what Bluewater has. We ran point for Walmart’s 2019 supplier growth meeting, and you can see a sample of our work in this video. Talk Business & Politics also reviewed this event, declaring it not only a success but a homerun. You won’t find mention of us in the review, but isn’t that the point? You don’t want your suppliers walking away praising your event tech vendor — you want them praising your team for a memorable experience that provided their brand with a pathway to success in your stores!
Walmart’s event had some unique challenges. We needed to create an impressive display for general sessions, but that event space had to be easily modified because the main space needed to be divided into several spaces for smaller sessions. We created a wall-to-wall display canvas that was modular. When the general session finished, we rearranged the air walls to create distinct spaces — using the same panels from the wall-to-wall display.
We’re not a one-shot wonder, either. Check out how we helped Walmart throw a successful sponsorship and booth at the 2018 Essence Festival.
Whatever the size and scope of your retail business (and your supplier growth meeting), they’re still important. The brands you carry want to feel like both you and they have a collaborative vision for the creation of successful sell-through. We’ve seen a lot running supplier growth meetings for massive retailers like Walmart and Meijer, but the biggest takeaway time and time again is the amount of trust gained at these events. That trust can be influenced tremendously by the experience they have at your next supplier growth forum.
Are you an upstart looking to launch your first supplier growth meetings? Or do you represent an established brand that’s tired of the status quo? Contact Bluewater today to discover what we can do for you.
