Hello, and thank you for joining us.
I'm Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET and Notch, and I'm so excited to welcome you to the Nombase Podcast.
Be sure to check out nombase.com, the new platform powered by BevNET, where you'll find our job board, press releases, and of course this very podcast, which brings us all together today.
On today's Nombase Podcast, we are exploring one of the most effective, yet often challenging ways to drive trial, and that's demos.
Jana Goodbaugh, founder and CEO of Happy Wolf, brought this up as a key pain point for emerging brands, and I knew it would make an excellent conversation.
Joining us to break it all down is demo dynamo, Jason Smith, Director of Retail Activation at Ithaca Hummus.
He's got some excellent tips to share, and we can't wait to get into them.
So demos give brands a powerful way to connect directly with consumers.
They help you showcase your value proposition, how they help you gather invaluable feedback.
Plus, they're a signal to retailers that you're actively supporting your product on their shelves.
But demos can also be a massive money drain if you don't have the right people, the right locations, or a solid logistical plan in place.
And once you scale, it's nearly impossible to manage every demo in every store yourself.
So how do you make demos work for you and not against you?
Let's get into it.
Jana and Jason, thank you so much for joining.
Jana, thanks for having the question.
And Jason, thanks for having so many great answers.
Thank you for having us.
Why don't we start, Jana, with you and a Happy Wolf intro.
Please tell us a little bit about the brand, you know, what you've done so far and what your demo experience and strategy has been up until now.
I'm Jana, co-founder of Happy Wolf.
We make refrigerated snack bars for toddlers and kids, kids of all ages are welcome, all of you are welcome as well.
They are a super clean ingredient, which is why they go in the fridge.
We launched about a year and a half ago in a handful of retailers, and now we just are three months into our Whole Foods launch, which is sort of our biggest launch by far to date, 320 stores, which is both super exciting and I'll be honest to this group, super scary as a sort of emerging brand.
For us, we're in a unique position where we're not where customers expect us to be because we are a kid snack that's in the fridge.
So we knew from day one that demos would play a really important role in aiding the discovery of our product.
It's not like we're putting out a cool new tomato sauce and putting it beside all of the other tomato sauces where customers looking for a tomato sauce will find you.
Sort of health conscious parents aren't necessarily looking in the section of the fridge where we are.
And so demos are a way for us to intercept them in a way and make sure that they find us.
And so when I was preparing for our Whole Foods launch, I tried to have as many conversations as I possibly could.
And actually Jason's name came up several times as the goat, the greatest of all time of demos.
Yeah, Jason, you really your name comes, you really are a demo dynamo.
Your name just comes up over and over again when the topic of demos and retail activation comes up.
So please, this is not your first rodeo here at Ithaca Hummus.
Please tell us a little bit about what your background is like and some of the overarching philosophies and things you've learned over the years when it comes to retail activations like demos.
Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity.
My name is Jason Smith.
I am the Director of Retail Activation for Ithaca Hummus.
I just wanted to say first and foremost how excited I am about Jana's product.
I've tried it many times before I ever met with Jana and it's truly a category disruptor.
If you taste good, you can scale anything and that's really where Happy Wolf wins.
But there's a lot of other great things about it.
It's been very allergy safe, things like that.
My knowledge comes from just a lot of hard work and experience.
I was the first real employee for Perfect Bar, which when I started was Perfect Foods Bar.
When I started with the brand in 2010, they had no distribution.
I was their distributor, I was their broker, I was their everything.
I had to learn really quick how to fall on my face the least.
Basically, I'd wake up in the morning, I'd go to a cold storage in Commercia.
This is back when I grew up in Denver, Colorado, outside of Boulder.
I'd go get all the product, I'd go to all the stores, five o'clock to 11 o'clock till the receivers close the door, and then I had to learn how to sell to make money, because I got 20 percent of the delivery, but if there wasn't enough sales or velocities, I wasn't going to make any money.
I got very passionate about the brand just because I needed to survive.
But then I learned really quick how great people thought about the brand when I was sampling, and how great the taste was, and all the attributes about the bar was so special.
I knew it was special, and I had some other brands underneath my brokerage that I loved.
Nanus Cookies, Betty Lou's, Not Butterballs, all these brands probably aren't around anymore.
But I dissolved the brokerage because I saw the success of demos, and what I could do with just doing that.
Pretty soon, I had every natural grocer by Vateman College, which is Vateman College, and Whole Foods pulling our product in, and all the independents like Mountain Mamas, Pura Vida, all these independent retailers were just cranking through product.
Then soon, we're talking to UNIFI, and it all just started to escalate from there.
I really learned in my own backyard how to build trial and awareness just by a simple sampling program.
I delivered the product, I'd spend every, a little crazy, but I'd spend eight hours Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday selling.
I do deliveries in the morning, and then I try to take the next few days to communicate with the stores and everything.
And I was selling on average 100 to 200 units every time I walked in a store.
So I could literally go back to that store over and over again.
And then I learned really quick where the best stores were.
And I started thinking to myself, I can't go to every store, I'm only one human being.
So I started focusing on the top stores.
And then I was like, well, this is great because the velocities, it didn't matter.
And then I, and this is something I tried to, I explained to every founder, and when they're starting out in CPG retail, is it doesn't matter.
You can be in 50 doors, no category manager out there is looking at each account on a micro level.
They're looking at it on a macro level.
They want to see your turns overall.
They want to see that you're investing in growth, that you're spending the time to try to build velocities and trial in their stores.
Demos are going to show that.
And if you can demo at a high level and show those really high velocities and turns, win the demos and afterwards show baseline growth, they're going to get behind the demo program.
Something you said there, it truly blew my mind.
And I think every food founder, every CPG founder needs to understand this.
I didn't.
So what you said is it's not how you do in every store, it's your overall velocity.
And I think my co-founder and I, we think we're pretty smart.
You know, at the beginning, we were looking at our goal velocity, let's say, is four units per store per week.
And what we were doing is we were looking at our overall store count and we were saying, what percentage of our stores are we doing over four units per store per week?
And which percentage of stores are we doing under four units per store per week?
Let's demo at the stores where we're underperforming so that we can try to move the needle and get our overall velocity up.
But I think what you told me that is so mind-blowing again, is that the buyer doesn't care if you have underperforming stores within the chain.
All they care about is your overall velocity.
And so you're so much better off hitting the same few stores, even five stores where you can sell that 100 units for you, maybe not 100 units for me, but 50 units for me, rather than going and trying to sell 20 units at one of your underperforming stores, that's going to move the needle more.
And so that totally changed how we were thinking about scheduling demos and where we were scheduling demos.
So if you keep demoing at the high-performing stores, how do you know you're not wasting your time in a saturated location?
Like if they have the same shop, like how do you know when it is time to move on?
Or maybe is there never a time to move on?
That's a really good question, Melissa.
And that's the thing that you really have to measure effectively is so we...
And I'm just going to use Whole Foods as an example.
You have a huge advantage working with Whole Foods, whereas you have access to portal data.
And having access to portal data is key to building out a demo program because you need to understand first and foremost where your baseline is in that account before you ever do a demo there.
Why?
Because you need to measure incrementality based on demos.
Everything should be based off incremental sales.
There's going to be a baseline at every store that your customer base has already established for you.
And then you have to build from that baseline and assess where you're building from that baseline over and over again to make sure that you're consistently meeting your KPIs and still creating more of a fan base than just going back and just having the same customers using the same coupons to buy the same product.
Not always a bad strategy, because you're still putting really high velocities through the register and nobody knows who's buying it.
No one's like, oh, well, they were a customer, so that doesn't count, right?
Nobody cares about that.
But it's also one of the things too, those top stores and I know every top store of Whole Foods in every region.
I know that there's always going to be a new customer influx there.
Let's take, for example, two stores in a city that are always the two top stores.
KVS, Linkin Park, Chicago, Lakeview.
Two top stores for Whole Foods, period, and the whole Midwest pretty much, right?
They just do such a high volume.
Linkin Park's three levels.
I've had someone doing demos there for over a year.
She averages 80-something units per demo.
And those are the top two stores for us in the entire country.
We're from New York.
We're a New York brand.
We're our two top stores in the Midwest.
That's what demos do.
But it also has built this awareness to where Whole Foods is a premium customer.
You're hitting your customer base.
80% to 90% of the customers in Whole Foods are your clientele.
They're looking for better for you, just like the Jana's product.
They're looking for better for you.
They're looking for convenience.
They're looking for something that's going to be special or different.
But also, they're not really willing just to buy it without trying it.
The great thing about a demo is you're doing a trial right there.
You can build awareness.
You can explain to them why you're doing what you're doing.
And a lot of the people who shop at Whole Foods love to support the small brands.
That's another part of why Whole Foods exists in the first place.
So it's a win-win.
And as you build velocities, you keep tracking that baseline sales, make sure it's continuously going up.
Always making sure you're measuring your incremental units.
Just for example, and so I build a Power BI.
I worked with a nice gentleman to build a Power BI off Microsoft Excel program that takes all our Whole Foods portal data and it drops it in.
And weekly, I obsess about what we're doing.
We averaged in March so far, 58 units per demo.
We averaged 50 incremental units per demo.
We've done 224 demos in Whole Foods thus far.
We've sold 13,000 units, 11,000, 121 are incremental.
I don't hire a lot of people.
I invest in people and our team is very tight knit.
I don't want to brag, but I love our team.
It's like a family.
I honestly, I wake up every day just really grateful and blessed to be able to work with these people.
They work so hard to build this brand.
They don't get a lot of recognition.
The person I'm speaking about in Chicago alone will be doing a Costco roadshow with me soon.
It's just an awesome thing, but it's, sorry, I get really excited about these things.
I've taken all of your advice and I wrote it all down and I look at it all the time.
And we are going toward the top performing stores.
We're going there often.
We're asking if they knew about Happy Wolf so we can sort of get a sense of what would be incremental, what wouldn't be.
We are having serious challenges with having enough product to help us through the demo.
Like we're running out of product in the store after two hours, even though we called in advance to order.
So talk to emerging brand founders who are, let's say, new to Whole Foods about managing inventory.
And it's especially hard if you're perishable because you can't bring it in.
Exactly the same issue we faced with Ithaca Hummus when we started this program in Whole Foods two years ago.
We were selling through really quickly.
So we use a CRM, it's called Go Spot Check.
There's a lot of others out there, Wiser, Repsly, I've used a lot of them.
I measured every demo, like I pull all the reports and I just started noticing like we're selling out all the time, right?
At least one or two items are always sold out every demo.
And you start to think about that and that adds up really quick because if you sell through it, yeah, it looks good.
You're like, oh yeah, I sold these out and the retailer's like, oh great, you sold out.
It's not really great because you're going to miss velocities for the next few days at least.
It takes a while to replenish your product on shelf.
You don't know how long that's going to take.
You don't know if another vendor is going to come along, remove a tag and then you lose a placement and you didn't even know what happened.
So that's another reason why I love the consistency of staying at the same stores over and over again.
As you start to prove that you can sell at a high level, the store buyer will get that.
You have to understand, Whole Foods, since they were purchased by Amazon, has completely evolved into a different, almost more like a conventional retailer on their practices, but it's founded on emerging brands.
So they will get behind your product, but they also have this fear like truck to shelf.
It's a reality.
They're not supposed to really keep back stock unless they're afraid to order too much.
They tell us that on the phone.
A hundred percent.
That's definitely a fair measure.
You don't want them to get yelled at.
You also have to realize how many demos get scheduled at Whole Foods where nobody even shows up.
Then they're stuck with all this extra product.
So it's a balance that you have to have with the retailer and know that we're always going to be here to support you, we'll guarantee sell through things like that.
Coming weekly makes them feel better about the risk of ordering too much because they know even if you don't run through it this weekend, you're going to run through it next weekend, you have another demo scheduled.
Exactly.
It's really key to start building those relationships in that retailer with the order writer, with the grocery team leader, with the grocery assistant team leader, ATL, TL is what they use for GTL.
We schedule almost 250 demos a month in Whole Foods.
I don't know if I should share this information, but if you need to get the email for the buyer at Whole Foods, it's a really easy way.
As long as you've signed in at the front desk, you can go in the back area where the back stock is and dairy and stuff.
There's always a grocery communication board.
There's a two-week schedule there.
There's the first and last name of management, which is a team leader and assistant team leader.
That's going to be their email.
It's going to be john.smith at wholefoods.com.
It's just that simple.
You start communicating.
Every store also has a three-letter abbreviation.
For Lincoln Park, it's KBS.
You can do KBS grocery specialists at wholefoods.com.
That goes to all their grocery team.
Those are the little tricks about communicating with Whole Foods, but I'll tell you there's even a better way to do these.
There's another way to do this too.
There is a global demo team at Whole Foods.
I hope they don't get mad at me for sharing this information, but I'm not going to go too in-depth.
But if you build a relationship with them and show them how much you're selling out, they will work with you.
They want to see success from brands.
We brought over $3 million top-line growth to Whole Foods last year with this program.
They're on fire for it, and that's what I want every brand to have.
Walking to Costco, there's like eight KBS stations just sampling all day, and they're just selling through everything, right?
That's where it used to be, at Whole Foods.
That was a thing back in a decade ago.
You'd have four or five brands demoing any given day, any given time in different categories, and it was awesome.
It was driving a lot of sales.
There was times with Perfect Bar, I'd walk in the stores, I'd have master cases stacked in the back.
They'd send me to a region for three or four months, whether it was Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami.
I'd build that region out and I'd leave, and we'd never have to worry about it again.
How do I find a Jason for my brand one day?
How do you find your star players, your girl in Chicago that you were just talking about, who's so incredible, how are you finding them?
How are you training them, and how are you keeping them engaged?
I'm not going to lie, it's probably a 50 percent success rate hiring in this role.
It's tough since the pandemic.
A lot of the really great, I call them product specialists because they are, but brand ambassadors left the space or might have found other jobs.
So I had to recreate the wheel and go back to Basics and just start from scratch with Ithaca because it had been four years since I'd really hired anyone to do a demo.
I lucked out with a couple, but I'm not going to lie, I've went through quite a few to get the team that I have now.
They have to be able to communicate well.
They have to be able to communicate with the store well, and that's such an important thing.
But I also train them and teach them from the second they walk in that store.
And I tell them 24 hours a day, seven hours a week, I will be available for you until you are comfortable.
Jason, let me ask you, how do you find the people that you find?
Is it LinkedIn?
Is it Craigslist?
How do you even find them?
Well, I have a network of a couple people that I trust really a lot.
Sam Kaplan being one of them.
We live six miles from each other, you'll see him on LinkedIn a lot too.
He runs a brand, a demo company himself.
Sam and I helped Super Coffee a long time ago.
I helped Super Coffee when they were just getting started.
And I showed them like demos are the key and they destroyed it.
You can still do this.
Really, it's not that hard.
You have to build your team.
You have to build your own tribe.
I build my own tribe by investing in the people and making sure they're appreciated.
We pay, honestly, our hourly wage isn't higher than anyone else's.
We start everyone at 25 unless you're in a really high-end market.
And then it's like a six-week review to get to $27.50 and $30 an hour after three months.
But we put a lot of SPFs or sales incentives in place to where they can control their own destiny every month.
That person in Chicago last month made $42 an hour just on sales incentives and hourly wage so it's a win-win for them too.
We have a question from the audience that hinges on just that.
So you know, you've been talking about building your own tribe, but we have a question from Kim Pablo, which I think is a very good one.
She said they're just starting out in Whole Foods.
They just launched at the end of 2024.
They're thinking about using Whole Foods markets in-house demo team, their demo solution.
What are your thoughts on that?
First of all, congratulations on the Whole Foods distribution.
That's awesome and it's a huge win.
I don't know how many regions you're in, but this is what I would say.
I would really focus on not going too deep on just demos everywhere.
She just said three regions.
Just in case that changes your answer.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't change my answer and no, I wouldn't use their team.
What I would do is I would use a third-party HR department, which is how I run demo companies.
I love HQ Simple, but there's a bunch out there.
You can look for basically what a third-party HR department is, is they do the hiring, they do the I-9, the W-4, they do payroll, they'll help with expenses.
It's a little bit of an increased cost per hour.
But it really, first of all, it makes that third-party the employer record, which is very important, so we're not really liable.
My whole team right now are W2 employees of HQ Simple.
What I would suggest is finding out what this top stores are in each region.
I could definitely help you with that.
Trying to pinpoint about a 25-mile radius.
I use Workable to hire.
You can use which pulls from LinkedIn, it pulls from ZipRecruiter, it pulls from Indeed.
It might be a little bit more expensive.
I tried Trusted Herd for a long-term brand investor.
I have not had much success with Trusted Herd.
I know they're great with staffing one-offs and things like that.
Or just like a Costco road show for a weekend, you can definitely use Trusted Herd.
And maybe check that out.
There are some cheap ways to do it with Trusted Herd.
I love Workable because I can vet out the person very well, but I also don't hire a lot of people right now.
I try to keep my team to about 15.
But what I do is I would find that third party that you want to work with.
Once you have that set up, you can start interviewing people.
If you find someone you really like, it's very low risk to hire them, test them out, give them a couple of stores, figure out which stores you really want to focus on, give them what stores.
We do pay mileage after 25 miles.
I try to keep everyone within 25 miles where they are.
I try to pinpoint strong Whole Foods, at least three to four in an area.
Sometimes you can get a lot more than that, but you also have to understand there are certain cities that are just really tough to get around.
LA, New York City, Washington DC.
It might look really good on paper.
All the stores are really close to each other.
It's really not that easy to get back and forth to the stores.
You have a scheduler.
You have someone helping you with the scheduling.
Yeah.
Honestly, Cameron helps with just more than that at this point, but she also helps with marketing and other things.
But yeah, absolutely.
What are your experiences when you see other brands using, let's call it like a big agency, whether Whole Foods or not, versus having an in-house team?
How do you see the difference?
I see a significant difference.
I hear it from a lot of people.
They'll show me demo reports from some of these third parties, and I'm just thinking to myself, wow, how are you going to use that to assess how effective the demo was or anything like that?
I think it's so much more important to build your tribe, to create your tribe.
What I mean by that is finding those people who are going to be super passionate about your mission, what you're doing, and there's a lot of people out there.
It's not a small number.
I found a lot of great people who are very passionate about Ithaca Hummus, who really just want to see the brand succeed.
They're still with us today because they're fired up.
They love what they do.
They love the brand.
There's going to be the same for Happy Wolf.
I happen to know one of your brand ambassadors very well.
They're the fiance of someone who I work with.
You have to be able to manage people.
And if you can't manage people, find someone who can manage people.
That's it.
Culture is everything to the brand when you're emerging.
You need to have people who are out there who are willing to do what.
When I would start with Perfect Foods Bar, Perfect Bar, we slept in vans.
We slept outside stores.
We did whatever.
We showered at the YMCAs.
It's an awesome story like how he stayed in for a month.
I think he camped out in the Berkeley Whole Foods in North Hale just to win Whole Foods.
That's what we had to do back then.
But it's not that far from doing it today.
You can still win if you just put the energy in, you have people who are super passionate about your brand.
You can't accomplish anything in this industry.
Jason, you put so much energy into the people who are in those stores demoing.
How do you collect information from them?
You were talking about the number of demos that you do and everything that you learned in YouTube, Jana, everything that you learned from being the person who's there hearing the consumer feedback.
How do you collect that information when you're not the person behind the table?
So we use CRM, Go Spot Check.
And Go Spot Check is really neat for demos because you create an in-store mission, is what it's called.
And it's something they just do on their app, an app on their phone.
And I love it because it geotracks them to the stores.
But I can put whatever question I want on a survey and they do the survey in the store.
So take, for instance, I'm trying to track coupon.
So, you know, we pull back a lot on TPRs.
And I always suggest this for emerging brands.
Pull back on TPRs as much as you can when you're an emerging brand.
Pull back on as many OIs and MCVs as you possibly can.
There's two ways to promote if you can do it.
Scanning coupons.
Coupons are going to be your gold mine.
Why?
Because you can, you have to redeem it.
The redemption has to happen through the register to be viable, right?
So, I mean, those are really the key.
And so we track, so we pull back on all that.
We spend more money on coupons.
So I created this question like how many, how many buy two get one free coupons are you using per demo?
And so I'm tracking that now.
Are you giving coupons out during every single in-store demo?
No, you can.
And that's really, that, I mean, for any brand, trade spend is very important to measure your trade.
Like you always want to stay within 20% is the number that I've always tried to stay within.
Some brands want to go 15%.
Some will push as high as 25.
For a retailer, you're really trying to win.
You always want to go a little bit up and beyond and pull back from maybe some other retailers.
Coupons are so great because if you want to get people to buy multiples, you can get a coupon in there, like buy three, get one free.
But that's the best money you're going to spend because you just got four units out the door.
Your velocity just went up considerably.
Your USW there is probably maybe two or three units a week.
You already just beat that in one sale.
You just really got to think about what's the most effective way for me to promote?
Then just really dial that in.
With my CRM, I can add any question I want to.
Hey, is there a secondary?
Did you ask for a secondary?
Anything like that.
I try to keep it really simple because I want people focused on the customer and selling.
But we also set up our demos too.
This is something to think about.
Every demo, whether it's three or four hours, there's going to be set up and breakdown time.
You have to take that into consideration with any team member.
Our team averages 58 demos per four hours.
Now, if it's three hours, would they be averaging that?
Absolutely not, because there's probably a half hour 45 minutes on both sides where they're breaking down, finishing their survey, whatever they're doing.
Everything's done in Ghost Bow Check in the store, which is what I love, because I never want anybody to have to work for me if they're not getting paid.
And I think that's just out of courtesy and respect.
It's also a really nice thing, too, because you can send those surveys, you can pull reports from it, and you can really analyze what your display looks like from everybody, what they're setting up, what it looks like.
You can go pretty deep into those surveys, or you can go shallow as you want.
But it gives you a lot of detailed information that's collected over time.
And then what we do is we drop a lot of that information into Power BI, and we start measuring a lot of other things.
We do the same thing for our coupon redemption.
So we're tracking exactly how much we're spending on coupons every month against our trade.
Jason, so you have all the data, and I have modeled my data collection on a budget-friendly version of yours, let's call it, through Google Forms, but still getting all of the same outputs, maybe less easy to use it, though.
How do you think about ROI on a demo?
Like, you're using coupons, you're paying an hourly wage, you're paying bonuses.
Like, how should we think about how much they're going to spend or like lose, let's call it, on their demos at the early stage?
All in, I spend less than I would through a third party for a demo, with everything in consideration.
Now, it's a higher pay overall if you take salaries and my salary into consideration, things like that.
And that said, that's why it's really important to understand what your baseline is in that store when you start and then start measuring it as you grow.
The greatest thing about demos is, you know, there's all kinds of experimental marketing things out there, and you're throwing money at something and you hope it sticks.
I've seen brands hand out 50,000 free cans of something on a beach.
How do you track that?
Perfect Bar, we went to Wanderlust festivals.
Probably people don't even know what those are anymore.
We were going to these Wanderlust festivals, this hybrid yoga festival.
We're handing out.
We had a whole marketing team go to these shows.
We were handing out all these minis of the Perfect Bars.
Been tracking the ROI from it.
Nothing really happened.
It registered.
It really showed any growth.
Demos, you can literally track.
It's 100%.
And guess what?
You're generating revenue.
So it feels like expensive at the moment, but at the same time, we're getting this many hundreds of customers to pay with their own money each week, which when you're sampling and giving something out for free, you aren't.
So for us, that's really valuable.
Jason, I think our audience is realizing what a dynamo you are.
We have a few questions coming in that I need to ask you.
So the first one is from Maria.
Maria Artis wants to know, in your opinion, what are the top three cities or markets for product demos right now, do you think?
That's good.
That's a good question.
I mean, so I'm biased, but I'm going to tell you a straight up number, 100%.
Seattle, probably Chicago.
Everybody's probably like, why did you leave out of New York City?
Why did you leave out LA?
First of all, LA, you need a $500 food permit special on top of everything to sample there.
It's kind of different monster all together.
I'd suggest anyone who's doing SOPAC, focus on San Diego and La Jolla, Hillcrest, and Delmar because their velocities are insane in those stores and you're not going to have to spend extra money.
But those are the three cities I'd go to.
New York City is obviously a gem.
There's so many Whole Foods there.
It's definitely one that I've put in there too.
If you had to pick three New York City stores, you're like on a demo game show now.
What would be your three New York City stores if you had to?
That's easy as heck.
If you know Whole Foods, the three top stores in the country in New York City, Brooklyn, Third Avenue.
Number two is usually Columbus Circle.
Number three is usually Tribeca.
Can be Westbury, but those are usually the four.
Westbury is more Long Island.
If you were to pull all the sales from Whole Foods in Texas, and compare it to New York City, it would just be completely different.
The hardest part about New York City is hiring someone for New York City, I've found.
It's just such a competitive market.
Loyalty is a little bit tougher.
It's a lot more expensive, and it's tough to get around.
And I've had the least success with having stores order enough product in New York City overall.
Even as we storm the castles and keep them in the store over and over again, it just seems to be an issue.
I have a backdoor for that now, but as you grow, I definitely would go to New York City, but the three cities I mentioned are the easiest to win in.
And they're also really top stores.
Pearl and Cherry Creek Whole Foods and Rocky Mountain Region are the number two stores, and they're within reach of each other really easily.
In Seattle, you have Inner Bay and you have Bellevue, two top stores for the Pacific Northwest, really easy to get back and forth with.
And the other one I selected was Chicago, and that's because KBS and Lakeview.
Those are the two top stores that focus off there.
There are other good stores there.
I'm not saying don't go to Green Bay Road.
I'm not saying don't go to South Loop and everything.
I'm just saying those are your two top stores, period.
Cities can be tougher.
Cities are hard to sell in a lot of times.
Why?
Because you have most people traveling into cities, right?
Not traveling out of cities to work, right?
So a lot of people are there and it's great.
But for like for Jana and I, we have this issue with we're cold, we're so cold.
So I don't want to do demos in the afternoon as much in the cities because people are probably just going on their lunch break.
And are they going to buy a 10 ounce thing of hummus?
Probably not.
They might buy one.
But if I go there from three to seven at night, they're going, oh, and they're going to buy three or four and take it home.
So I'd much rather focus on the best times and best ways in cities.
I love suburb demos on weekends because especially with Jana's product, it's a family kind of product.
And you have a lot more families on the weekend shopping on Saturdays and Sundays in those stores.
So for the cities, I like to focus on the weekdays.
And then for the for the any outskirts stores, any suburban stores, I always I always suggest you only really want to sample there on Saturdays and Sundays.
You can do well, decent on a Friday and Monday night.
Most sometimes, you know, it really just depends.
No, Jason told me very bluntly and I was already feeling this, but he's like, you do not demo on Tuesday, Wednesdays or Thursdays, like cut them out, erase them, never schedule a demo again on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
And we were feeling that in the data, but hearing him say that so firmly was very important.
And we have not scheduled one on those days since.
That's the cold hard information that everybody wants.
Jason, I have another question for you from the audience.
Ramsey wants to know, would you say it's important for your brand ambassadors to know the sales team to communicate key things they're seeing?
And I know you already said that you use the app to ask questions, but I think, you know, maybe what Ramsey's looking to know is if they notice something that's not directly answering a question that you have, or just providing general feedback, how do you connect the team to someone at Ithaca for that?
No, that's a great question.
So I always have an open notes for each person for each one of our missions.
There's an open notes part that I ask for just any feedback or any things that you notice that was outside of the regular demo.
What our team usually will add there is like, hey, there was a tag missing or something like that.
So we track that through there.
Is there more specific things we can do?
Absolutely.
Ramsey, I think I know who this gentleman is.
We might work together.
So recently, we did a shelf talker thing.
And so I just added a question, did you hang the shelf talker?
Just things like that.
We can put anything in the mission we want to accomplish, but if there is something that really pops out, it's usually put in that notes section, and that's where we tell them to put it.
But a lot of times, too, our teams, we've just been working together so long, they just send me emails.
That's how far they'll text me, hey, Jason, what's going on here?
The thing I'll say to that is, always be open to communicating with your team.
I'm always there for them, and they know that, and they might use, I think every one of them, I'm not really that structured when it comes to feedback like that.
I definitely make sure I collect it and turn it to everyone else, but I want an open door if it's text, if it's calls, if it's stuff like that.
But if you want to be really specific, I suggest using a CRM and putting that question in the mission or whatever you want to call it and calling out like, if there's something specific you're looking for.
Now, if it's like there was no tag or something like that, that's a simple fix, right?
You just need to talk to this for.
You've just been so open and communicative on this show alone.
We're getting feedback from Kim Pabla, Maria Artis again, thanking you for your information.
Jana, before we hop off, any final questions, thoughts, anything that you'd like to close with?
Like I said, we all need to find ourselves a Jason and we need to find ourselves demo reps who are gonna put their heart and soul into being an extension of ourselves, which I think is the very hardest thing to do.
But I think I can already tell that Jason is able to build that dream team and I've been trying to model mine on his.
And so thank you Jason for all of your intel.
I hope this saved you from a lot of coffee chats with others.
Now I'm just gonna send them this recording when they ask me about demo.
So thank you.
Yeah, Jason, thank you so much.
I mean, just the number of tips you gave today alone, never mind all the calls that you take all the time were so invaluable.
Again, thank you so much for joining and being so generous with all of your information.
And Jana Goodbaugh, founder and CEO of Happy Wolf, Director of Retail Activation, Jason Smith at Ithaca Hummus.
I cannot thank you enough for joining the Nombase Podcast.
Thank you so much.
And for everybody else, we'll see you next time.
That concludes another episode of the Nombase Podcast.
Many thanks to Nate Brescia, our recording engineer, Ryan Galang, our live stream coordinator, and Josh Pratt, our podcast editor.
If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice.
Want to be part of a live recording?
Register at nombase.com/podcast to join the conversation.
You can also watch and listen to past episodes on nombase.com, and don't forget to join our Nombase Slack at slack.bevnet.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions.
See you next time.
