How I Got into 3,000 Retail Stores via LinkedIn

In the words of the famous poet Rebecca Black, "It's Friday!" Hope yall had a great week, crazy how damn fast this month has been going. Got some amazing news from my landlord this week saying that he wants to raise the rent by $800 effective next month, so your boy will be out touring Miami for a new two-bedroom apartment. 

Thank you seriously to every single person who's subscribed, every new reader who was either was forward this or stumbled upon me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I've been at this e-commerce journey for almost five years now, starting back in 2017 with just honestly a crazy idea. How the hell did a four-way volleyball net not exist? How did we get this lucky? I still have no idea, but I know we've busted our ass to get where are now. Also a massive shout out to my sponsors at Triple Whale & Gorgias who keep this newsletter free for you readers. 

Today's newsletter will be a response to the #1 most frequent question I always get, "How do I get into wholesale?"

I'll start with a little disclaimer:

• This will not 100% always work

• A shit product is a shit product

• It's all in the follow up

• Be realistic

• If you're not interested in retail, this same strategy will work for press & partnerships

So...Where do I start?

Step 1: Build a Linkedin profile

• Spend an entire day building out the portfolio.

• Create a bio and include links to articles & press

• Make a catchy headline with an updated profile picture

• Update your job experiences and remove that job you were at for 4 months

• Finally, update your skills, ask for endorsements and add your education + accomplishments

Step 2: Evaluate Your Options

When I started CROSSNET, I didn't know a damn buyer at any single retail store. Hell, I didn't even know what the term "buyer" was. I just was googling business development. I had three options:

1) I could cold call my local Walmart and try to get connected to somebody making the decisions. I usually got put on hold for 30 minutes, all to just be told to go fuck myself and email and info@ email. 

2) Go into my local DICKS Sporting Goods and try to talk to a manager. I used to be really nervous and not the best at selling on the spot. 

3) Use my sales skills from my old software selling days and connect with every damn person I could find on LinkedIn. 

I quickly found option three was the way to go! I got way more connections, got through to the decision-makers, and didn't deal with tons of bullshit in the process. As a small three-person team back in the day, getting the most out of every day was huge and you wanted to at least close your laptop at the end of the day with a good response or promising lead.

Step 3: Start Connecting

The next step is the fun part. Follow these steps:

1) Go into the search bar and search XYZ STORE Buyer & hit connect

2) DO NOT SEND A MESSAGE. I get hundreds of connection requests a month and almost 100% of them that come with a message are just bullshit fluff and get deleted in .2 seconds. 

3) Check your 2nd connections (people in your network are connected to this person and maybe there can be a warm intro)

4) Make sure to add marketers & business development people from these companies as well. Remember when you were at the boring corporate job? LinkedIn was dope because either it killed time, I was reading a great article, or I was finding a way to leave my shitty job and find a better one. These people at these companies are doing the same. If you start liking the guy in the marketing department's post, the buyer (your end target) may actually end up seeing it!

5) On the rare occasion, you can craft up a nice 100 character message to that one big shot. Take your chance and write something to stand out. Something as simple as this even works. I did this on Wednesday and now are team is working on a deal that will potentially be worth well over six figures over the next few years. 

If your budget allows it, I highly suggest getting LinkedIn Business for $59.99 a month. It will give you a ton more emails and allow you to not max out so frequently on connection requests. 

Step 4: Shoot Your Shot

As connection requests start to roll in the worst possible thing you could do is add somebody and then 15 seconds after they accept you hit them with a sales pitch. Nobody likes this! So don't do it. 

So you have a few options on how you move forward. In my world, there are typically anywhere from 5-10 buyers at a decent-sized sporting goods store. So using those numbers here is how I'd approach things. For some easy math let's use a sample size of you made 10 new connections at your dream retailer. 

4 People: Send them the sales pitch. Make it short, sweet, and to the point. DO NOT send them links, bullet points, case studies. They should be able to read it in 5 seconds and quickly say yes I like this or no I do not. 

2 People: Ask for an introduction to the right person.

"Hey Ryan, I see you're the buyer in the toilet paper section so you're probably not the right contact, but I invented CROSSNET (the world's first four way volleyball game) and it's really blowing up with over 150,000 units sold. Do you mind pointing me in the right direction for the sporting goods buyer? It'd mean the world."

4 People: Chill. Don't do anything. Let them be in your network. Engage with them. Like their stuff. Leave good comments, not just fire emojis. Eventually, they may either come inbound or reach out to them if the first 6 people never get back to you. Don't shoot all your shots at once. You may have a major breakthrough, PR moment, etc and you've already wasted all your outreach attempts. 

Step 5: Make Sure Your Customer Service Team is Ready

A few years ago I sent the above message to who would eventually become my DICKS Sporting Goods buyer. No response. A few days after that message on September 10th message I got a live chat inquiry on Gorgias that would ultimately change my life.

Although I don't have the thread, the message went a little like this:

"Hey this is the buyer at DICKS, is anyone there?" 

I get a ding and notification on my laptop and see a new message in Gorgias. 

"Yes, yes! How can we help you?"

"We have a purchase order for you. It's for $450,000. What's the best email to send it to?"

Lead response time is legit everything. Getting back to your customers asap and being well equipped with the answers is everything. I'm so thankful for Gorgias and don't know how CROSSNET would have been if we didn't get that message that day. 

I shared this story on LinkedIn the other day and the internet was loving it. The Gorgias team was generous as hell and wants to give anybody who wants to sign up for the best customer service tool on the planet the first two months for free. Just click here to download it, I promise you won't regret it. 

Lead response time is everything in sales. I'm so damn proud of the team over at CROSSNET for getting our lead response time down this week to under 3 minutes. Every customer counts and you never know who is on the other end of that screen. Simply converting one extra order a day for us can add up to an extra $55,000 in revenue a year. That's more than I made in an entire year for the majority of my adult life! 

Step 6: Closing the Deal 

So you have an interested buyer and they've asked for a follow-up. What's next? 

The Donts:

• Don't overwhelm the buyer with a ton of unnecessary information

• Don't send them a thousand links and articles

• Don't send them a million paragraphs

• Don't ask for a 30 minute meeting

• Don't promise to hit crazy shipping dates & times if you do not have the inventory, you only have one chance to kick off the relationship right, don't mess it up

• Don't lie

The Dos:

• Thank them for their time and response

• Send them exactly what they asked for. Don't make them ask twice

• Have a very nice sales catalog that clearly shows the product, product description, wholesale price, and the suggested retail price

• Clearly state when you have inventory arriving or when you could ship their order

• Ask for clarification on net pricing terms (you always want to get paid Net-30, but hard to do for big retailers)

• Make sure you get clarity on who's paying for shipping. Our retailers 100% always pay for shipping.

Respond back to this email if you want to see our brand new beautiful retail guides. I'll make sure to white out the pricing for you. 

Finally, I want to give a massive shout-out to my good friends at Triple Whale who have been sponsoring this newsletter. They have gone above and beyond to help promote CROSSNET and my story and I seriously am so damn thankful. 

If you're not familiar with Triple Whale they are the most badass new Shopify app that allows you to accurately track your Return on Ad spend in this crazy new iOS world we are living in. We're living the dream over here running three separate Shopify stores (USA, Canada, and Australia) so it's a daily headache for our head of performance marketing to compile the numbers, make sure we're staying profitable, and confirm what channels are going well or shitting the bed. They even integrate with Klaviyo which is an incredibly helpful feature that allows me to quickly gauge how many subscribers and our email revenue at a moment's notice, rather than having to load up a brand new dashboard. 

Let's be real, tracking the performance of your paid media with confidence is at an all time low after Apple’s iOS changes (they’ve officially relegated 3rd party pixels to second class citizens). Unless a Facebook user has opted-in to sharing their data with Facebook, the Facebook Pixel can no longer track a user's path from ad-click/view -> conversion with the accuracy it once had. Triple Whale is solving this with their new recently released Triple Pixel. If you want to read about it you can here, or simply save yourself some time and install it now.

I'd love to hear back from you. I need the answers for the following:

1) Was this helpful? What do you want insight on next week? 

2) What's a new DTC brand I should check out and support?

3) Give me some good new music and tv shows!

All the love in the world,

Chris