If you’ve been operating as a retail business for a while, then you might be considering starting a wholesale program. If so, then you likely already know that to achieve this objective, you have to acquire your first wholesale customers.
The question is, where do you find such wholesale customers?
Sometimes, the search can be as simple as identifying the people who often re-order from your retail store, then determining what they use your products for. In most cases, such consumers are already on-selling your items. Thus, they can serve you well as your first wholesale customers.
On the other hand, if you aren’t lucky enough to have such buyers, you’ll need a way to identify potential wholesale customers.
But don’t worry! Because in today’s post, we’ll be exploring the various strategies you can employ to help you find retail companies to invite to your wholesale program. On top of that, we’ll talk about a powerful tool that can help you capture leads for your store.
So let’s get started!
4 Tips For Finding Retail Companies To Invite To Your Wholesale Program
To start a wholesale program, you need retailers to buy products from you. While finding them can be challenging, taking advantage of the right strategies can make the process much easier.
With that in mind, here are for 4 great tips for finding retail companies to recruit for your new wholesale program:
1. Find out where your audience shops
Why should you figure out where your audience shops? Simply put, this information can lead you to the retailers whom you can potentially target with your wholesale program. Thankfully, there are several simple ways to narrow down your search.
To start with, here are two great techniques you can try today:
1. Pick a similar product and find out who stocks it
This is fairly simple to do. Basically, you should browse the websites of the companies that sell products similar to yours and check out their list of stockists (i.e. the retailers that stock specific products for selling purposes). Fortunately, such lists are usually freely published for all to view.
But what if some of those companies don’t publish their stockist list? Simple: try calling or emailing them as a customer, then ask where in your area they’re stocked.
2. Survey your existing customers (retail or otherwise)
This survey should ask your existing customers about their shopping preferences.
Big companies do this kind of thing all the time when launching new products. As a strategy, it can help you get to know your customers better, therefore allowing you to determine the locations where they do most of their shopping.
If your customers frequent a specific spot, you’ll probably find more of your target market there, making it a good place to search for retail companies to recruit.
2. Determine where you sit in the market
In our recent article about how to price your products for wholesale, we talked about using Value-Based Pricing when determining where you sit in the market.
From a price point of view, we generally recommend sitting somewhere in the top third of the market. This gives you a bigger margin to play with for promotions while maintaining a healthy wholesale business.
Determining where you sit can also help you narrow down potential retail partners for your wholesale program.
Can you think of general retailers in your space whose market positioning is similar to yours? Their customers might also be interested in your products.
Of course, you’ll need to analyze these companies on a case-by-case basis so you can eliminate those that don’t meet your requirements. For example, you wouldn’t want to retail your high-end products to stores that focus on the bottom half of the market and vice-versa.
3. Spread your distribution geographically
It might be comfortable to stick to your geographical area when it comes to finding wholesale customers. However, there are untold benefits to having a wide distribution of wholesale customers.
The main benefit is that consumers outside of your area won’t be in direct competition with your local ones. This can help maintain margins for your retailers as they won’t be tempted to play the discounting game to compete with one another.
4. Think different
Can you think of alternative retailers who might want to stock your products even though said products aren’t exactly aligned with their core business?
For example, let’s you sell a range of healthy snack bars. Conventional logic dictates that you should target companies that sell such snacks. However, you might want to consider approaching people you otherwise wouldn’t consider, such as yoga studios or beauty salons.
These alternative retailers might have lower volume orders. However, adding large numbers of such companies to your wholesale program can provide you with a healthy stream of orders. As a result, they can help diminish the risks associated with relying on only one or two big retailers.
Wholesale Lead Capture: A Powerful Lead Capture Tool
Wholesale Lead Capture is a versatile WooCommerce plugin that boosts the wholesale store owner’s ability to capture leads.
Essentially, it automates customer recruitment and registration. Among many other things, this robust tool also allows you to moderate your website users.
Below are just some of the core features Wholesale Lead Capture boasts:
- A user-friendly registration form builder
- Email templates and email automation
- A comprehensive system for approving users
- Customizable fields
- Quick, automatic setup
Are you looking for a user-friendly yet powerful lead capture tool? Then look no further than Wholesale Lead Capture!
Conclusion
To start your wholesale business, you need wholesale customers. Thankfully, using the right strategies can help you recruit retail companies to your wholesale program.
In summary, you can use the following tips to achieve this objective:
- Find out where your audience shops
- Determine where you sit in the market
- Spread your distribution geographically
- Think different
Do you have any questions about how to recruit retail companies to your wholesale program? How about the tool that can help you capture leads for your wholesale store? Feel feel to leave us a message in the comments section below!
