How to win the retailer sell-in
Promotions at 31.3% of grocery sales and own label past half of volumes. What to prepare before this autumn's sell-in, and what to say when the buyer pushes back.
17 September 2026
September and October are sell-in season: brand days, category vision presentations, JBP conversations and range reviews.
This year’s buyer arrives under pressure. Promotions are running at 31.3% of grocery sales. Own label has passed half of grocery volumes for the first time. Margin pressure is sharpening every simplification target. Buyers under that much pressure lean hardest on the suppliers who turn up with evidence rather than ambition.
We have put our sell-in preparation into a guide: what to do in the twelve weeks before the meeting, and what to do if the retailer says no. Three things from it are below.
Start with your real shelf position, not the one in the deck
Twelve weeks out, pull facings by SKU by store cluster, share of space against share of sales, and what actually changed at the last relay. What you think is on shelf and what is on shelf are often different things, and every argument you make afterwards rests on getting that right.
“Your data says one thing. Ours says another.”
The retailer trusts their own EPOS and loyalty data over your panel data, and they have reason to. It is a census of their shoppers, and yours is a sample of everyone’s. When the numbers disagree, yours usually lose.
The counter that fails is re-presenting the same analysis with more conviction. If your evidence class lost the first time, volume rarely changes the verdict.
The counter that works is to switch evidence class. Bring something their EPOS cannot produce: shopper-level behaviour, observed substitution, tested response to the actual proposed change. EPOS tells the buyer what sold. It cannot tell them what shoppers would have done under a different fixture.
“That SKU is in the tail. It’s going.”
By rate of sale, they may well be right. Tail rationalisation is one of the easier wins on a simplification target, and arguing the rate of sale is better than it looks, or offering promotional support to inflate it, goes nowhere with 31.3% of sales already on deal.
Move the question from the SKU to the shopper. Transferable demand analysis answers what actually happens when the SKU goes: if demand transfers within the category, the delist costs little; if the shopper walks, the buyer is trading a tidy fixture for lost baskets. Quantify what the delist does to their category number and you have turned your problem into their decision.
Get the full guide
The full version is free to download. Inside:
- The complete pre-sell-in checklist, week by week: twelve, eight, four and one week out
- The third pushback, “There’s no evidence shoppers want this”, and the only thing that answers it
- What to commission, and when, if the evidence you need does not exist yet
- Where the evidence for each of the three pushbacks comes from
Download How to Win the Retailer Sell-In
If you are preparing a brand day, a category vision or a range submission this autumn, we can show you your real shelf position in the time it takes to have the conversation. Email hello@vazen.com.