During my 40-year business career, I had the unique opportunity to sit on the other side of the table and lead the merchant team (Lowe’s term for buyers) for a Fortune 40 DIY retailer. That experience opened my eyes to the stark difference between good and poor supplier partners—and it fundamentally reshaped how I lead sales teams today. Seeing the world through the merchant’s lens gave me a deeper customer perspective and made me far more effective at building strategic relationships.
Merchants are extremely busy. Most manage multiple categories, each with 5–10 suppliers competing for their time and attention. And after the post-COVID economic slowdown, reorganizations reduced headcount while workloads increased—making it even harder for merchants to keep up.
Shipping on time, staying price competitive, and selling a product that turns are baseline requirements. They build trust, but they don’t build preference. To move beyond transactional trust and become a valued partner, consider the following tips:
- Make Every Interaction Count
Your merchant is constantly pulled in multiple directions. Respect their time by making every interaction—email, meeting, or call—worth it. Instead of sending multiple emails throughout the week, consolidate topics and address them during your scheduled touch-base meetings. Doing so makes those meetings more productive and signals that you understand their workload.
- Make Their Job Easier
Find ways to remove friction from your merchant’s day. If they have internal meetings every Monday, send updated sales reporting Sunday evening so they can walk in prepared. Submit all paperwork on time and complete, so they never have to chase you down for missing information. Over time, you’ll become their “go-to” supplier—the one they trust when they need accurate information quickly.
- Be Proactive, Not Reactive
Continuously analyze your business and proactively communicate both wins and challenges. When you deliver bad news, always pair it with your plan of action. If major line reviews or promotional planning sessions are approaching, be the first to request a meeting. Merchants often get behind on long-range planning, and your initiative keeps you top of mind while helping them stay ahead.
- Don’t Just Pitch a Product—Solve a Problem
A new product may be important to your company, but that doesn’t make it important to your merchant. Buyers move only when a solution addresses a real pain point for them or their customers. Structure your pitch around the problem first: present the unmet need, then clearly show how your product solves it. For more on this approach, The Challenger Sale by Dixon and Adamson is an excellent read.
- Make Them a Hero
This is the most important tip: treat your merchant as an ally, not an adversary. They have career goals too—your job is to help them shine inside their organization. Give them a short exclusivity window for a new launch. Offer innovative programs and use their stores as test-and-learn pilots. Better yet, collaborate with them to develop an exclusive product line. These gestures create significant internal goodwill for the merchant and cement your relationship as a true partnership.
Bottom Line
Companies that remain purely transactional with their customers rarely earn strategic influence. My time in the merchant seat at Lowe’s showed me firsthand how these behaviors strengthen buyer–seller relationships in meaningful, mutually beneficial ways. When you transform your merchant into an ally, your position improves dramatically. You gain access to more candid feedback, earlier visibility into upcoming changes, and a trusted seat at the table when decisions are being made.
Billy Henry is a 40-year business executive and the founder of Ardaigh Management. Ardaigh (pronounced ar-day) is an Irish Gaelic word meaning to elevate. We partner with owners—whether family, angel, venture, or private equity—and CEOs of small to midsize companies on a part-time basis to enhance performance by developing scalable sales and marketing strategies that unlock revenue growth. Need our help? Visit www.ardaighmgmt.com or email info@ardaighmgmt.com to learn more.
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