The seven numbers a buyer checks before your meeting. In order.
Your buyer will form a view on your product before you finish your first slide. Not because they are rude, but because they have done this hundreds of times, and the numbers tell them most of what they need to know.
I have spent fifteen years on the supplier side of these meetings, negotiating with Coles and Woolworths. The pattern does not change. Buyers check the same seven numbers, in roughly the same order, and most founders only prepare for two of them.
Here they are.
1. Rate of sale. Units per store per week. This is the first number and the most important one. A buyer can fix a margin problem. They cannot fix a product nobody buys. If you are already ranged somewhere, in independents, in Harris Farm, in your own online store, bring that run rate and be ready to defend how it translates. If your product would need to sell 2 units per store per week to hold its shelf space, show them why it will.
2. Your price point. Not "is it cheap." Whether it fits the category's price architecture. Every category has established price points that shoppers recognise. If the category clusters at $4.50 and $6.00, a $5.20 product sits in dead water. Buyers know their architecture cold. Walk the aisle and learn it before you set your RRP.
3. Their margin. The retailer's cut of your RRP, and how it compares to what the category usually gives them. In Australian grocery this commonly runs from around thirty percent to the mid-forties, depending on category. Pitch below the category norm and you are asking the buyer to go backwards on their own scorecard. That is a hard meeting.
4. Your promotional plan. How often you will promote, how deep, and who funds it. In this market a large share of grocery volume moves on promotion, and the buyer is planning their promo calendar quarters ahead. "We will support promotions" is not a plan. A plan is: frequency, depth, funding per unit, and what you expect back in volume.
5. Source of volume. Where your sales come from. If your product just moves shoppers off another line that pays the retailer the same margin, the buyer gains nothing. You need a growth story: new shoppers into the category, trade-up to a higher price point, or share taken from a brand that gives them less. This is the number founders most often cannot answer. It is also the one that wins meetings.
6. Your service level. Can you actually supply. DIFOT, delivered in full, on time, is the measure, and the majors expect it in the high nineties. A listing across hundreds of stores means pallets, lead times, and a co-packer or production line that does not fall over in week three. One badly missed delivery costs you more goodwill than a year of good ones earns.
7. Your staying power. The quiet number. Buyers have watched suppliers win a listing and then bleed out on free fills, promo funding and slow payment cycles. They would rather say no now than delete you in twelve months, because deletions look bad on their review too. If your numbers say you cannot fund year one, the best pitch in the world will not save you.
Notice what is not on the list. Your brand story. Your packaging awards. Your founder journey. Those things matter, but they matter after the numbers work. Buyers do not range products they like. They range products where the numbers work.
Range. Rate of sale. Returns. Every question in that meeting is one of those three wearing different clothes.
Before your next buyer meeting, write these seven numbers on one page. If you cannot fill in all seven, you have found your homework, and you should do it before you ever ask for the meeting. The meeting is just the delivery. The work is everything before it.