Know Your Buyer or Sell Expensive Fruit Juice — Karen Green Pt. 1
Tonight's Episode
Karen Green has sat on both sides of the buying desk. She started as a retail buyer at Tesco, moved to Boots buying vitamins and supplements, then crossed the table to sell food and drink herself — before a move to the south of France inspired her to pour all of that knowledge into a consultancy and a book. The book is called Buyerology, and the name arrived, as the best ideas do, unexpectedly: on a bus in Reading, when a furniture store called Sofology rolled past the window and lit the spark.
In part one of our conversation, Karen breaks down the nuts and bolts of studying the buyer — why understanding how someone buys is the difference between a clear selling message and fumbling around in the dark, and why mass marketing is a losing game for everyone who isn't Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Then she names the mistake she sees constantly, including in wine: founders who build products for themselves and call it a target market, and winemakers who perfect the grape without ever asking who's going to buy the bottle. Her test is disarmingly simple. When a client describes their ideal customer and it sounds suspiciously like the person talking, she tells them exactly what she's thinking: "So that's you." The full pour, no fluff.
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Transcribed automatically by PodView
Welcome to the best 5-Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly.
She spent years on the other side of the buying desk, first at Tesco, then at Boots, before flipping the table and selling food and drink herself. Now she teaches brands the thing most of them skip, studying the person who actually writes the check. Because here's the truth. You can grow the perfect grape and craft a beautiful wine. But if you don't know who's going to buy it, it's just expensive fruit juice. She wrote the book on it. It's called Buyerology. Hi, I'm Karen Green, and I'm a business consultant working off my own business, helping food and drink companies achieve profitable sales growth.
I actually was at university and studied management science and the one of the modules in the final year was actually called bio behavior so I did start studying it and I also studied industrial and organizational psychology as part of my degree so when I left I went to join Tesco's as a retail buyer and I did that for a couple of years and then I moved to Boots which is a big pharmaceutical company owned I think it still owned by Walgreen was a buyer I bought vitamins and supplements and then did some marketing and some sales so that's how I started and then moved across to the other side of the table was a sales person and started selling food and drink after a number of years decided I wanted to move to the south of France and I needed to do something a little bit different.
So I pivoted and thought, well, I'll take all of this knowledge and turn it into an interesting consultancy, which is where birology came from. So I teach people how to study the buyer and as a result, how to adapt their sales technique. So birology with a B, I have to ask, is that a real word or did you make that up? Yes, birology. That's right. No, it's my term. I wrote my second book, Birology, and I wanted it to be about how to understand the buyer and sell more and sell better. And actually, I was on a bus.
I can remember it very clearly in Reading. And I saw Soferology and I went, that's amazing. Soferology. They obviously sold sulfas. What about Birology? And that where Birology came from OK gotcha Explain it to the nuts and bolts of buyerology It just not you know sticking your price on something and saying here you know customer buy it I work mostly with people who obviously are selling to customers and selling to retailers. So it's all around if you understand your buyer, so the subtext is know your buyer, sell more and sell better.
So if you understand how your buyer buys and how they take the journey, then you can think about how to adapt that selling message. And then it's less stressful because you're not kind of fumbling around in the dark trying to think about how do you sell, or you're not mass marketing because unless you're Coca-Cola or Pepsi, actually mass marketing doesn't work and it's too expensive. It's really surprising. Why do they overlook the buyer? Do you think? I think most people I work with make products or make stores for them.
So people all go, well, I've created this product for busy moms with a couple of kids, haven't got time, they focused on health yabba yabba yabba yabba And I looking at this person going So that you um and and it the same every time and I think that the challenge that people don think through who's actually going to buy the product more than just them or their friends or their family um so or they you know if we look at wine then people are growing um a particular grape they're making a particular wine and they're not necessarily thinking well who's this who's gonna buy it um and i think that's that's quite a glaring omission because as you rightly say if you don't if if you haven't got an audience then what's the point because no one's gonna spend money on it.
Next time you're standing at the wine shelf, 400 bottles, you'll walk out with one. Karen Green knows exactly what your brain is doing in that moment and why you'll never grab the cheapest bottle on the shelf. That's coming up in part two of our conversation with Karen Green. Thank you for listening. Tell your friends and pets. Please like and follow. You
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