Building Your Brand Reputation As A Startup - with Salar Salahshoor, Head of Marketing, Shelf Engine

Are you running a startup company? Do you want to know the secret to building a good reputation?

For Salar Salahshoor, Head of Marketing at Shelf Engine, building strong brand awareness is critical. But brand awareness is not just for brand recall. Find out more by listening to our podcast today!

"Reputation is everything. People connect and talk. If there's a startup like Shelf Engine, the news travels through the industry.

What do I focus on? I want to make sure that anyone considering technical solutions or digital transformation within the grocery space knows about Shelf Engine.

Number one, it's a big brand awareness challenge. How can we get our brand in front of many relevant people and make sure they understand who we are and what we do? Beyond that, we're looking to drive direct response and lead generation and build a pipeline.

What's most important is nurturing that reputation and getting out there."

- Salar Salahshoor, Head of Marketing, Shelf Engine

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Transcript

Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The LifeLong Customer Podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. Today, I have Salar Salahshoor from Shelf Engine. Salar, it's really nice to have you on.

Salar Salahshoor: 0:29
Oh, thanks, Brad. It's good to be here.

Brad Hammond: 0:31
Really excited. So tell me a bit about yourself and about your company.

Salar Salahshoor: 0:35
Yeah, sure. So, a bit about myself, I'm a marketer, for sure. Spent the last decade-plus in a bunch of different marketing situations. I've started my own businesses in the past. I've been an entrepreneur, worked at many startups, and also just large publicly traded companies. So my background is pretty varied in marketing, from dealing with startup problems to big company problems. But yeah, early on, I was actually started off in finance, which people are kind of shocked and like, "Oh, how did you go from finance to marketing?" But, my first job was working at Amazon as a financial analyst. And then, I quickly realized, it wasn't the path for me. Sort of loved finance, analytics. And, I realized that with the movement toward digital marketing, especially back then when I was first starting my career, there's just such a good marriage between analytics and marketing these days, so I really just jumped right in, then switched up really quick and went into marketing. So that's how I got it started.

Brad Hammond: 1:33
Very cool.

Salar Salahshoor: 1:35
Yeah. And so, long story, I now work at Shelf Engine. And Shelf Engine is a pretty disruptive startup here, based in Seattle. We're a Series B startup. So, we've raised a little over $40 million to date. Actually, sorry. Our Series B was $42 million. And so, we've raised quite a bit more than that. But, I started about a year ago.

When I joined Shelf Engine, there was no marketing function here yet. It was a Series A startup at the time. And so I joined really to create the function, to set up marketing at Shelf Engine, and to build the team and help the company grow. So it's been a really cool ride and really unique situation here. But I'll quickly explain what Shelf Engine does, and then we can go into any other questions you have.

So I mentioned Shelf Engine's pretty disruptive. What we do, our mission as a company, is to reduce food waste through automation. So, pretty straightforward, pretty simple and memorable mission, really hard to do. But, we're a tech company. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning models to help grocery stores better forecast their demand for the products they sell, and also forecast the inventory they have on hand, and help them come up with the ideal order they should be placing every single day, for every single product that they're selling to their customers. And, beyond that, that's like the core functional thing we do. We help with grocery ordering and optimizing supply chains and reducing waste through that optimal order so that grocery stores aren't over-ordering or under ordering, they're just ordering the right amount.

But, what's really crazy about the way we go to market, and this is something we can drill into a little bit more, we started off as a SaaS company. We were really just deploying our software to grocery chains and having them use our system to better forecast. And, when you put your software in the hands of end-users, oftentimes, they'll use it in a way that maybe you weren't intending or not in an optimal way that you were hoping to achieve the mission. For us, that mission's really important, of reducing food waste through automation. And we found that, to really get the impact we want, our better approach is what we call results as a service. That's our business model really. Instead of selling software and being a SaaS company, we completely removed that approach, and began to just fully automate ordering for our customers. So instead of them using our software to place orders, we just said, "Hey, let us take over that whole function for you. And we'll basically charge you a small fee for every transaction."

Instead of a software fee, it's a performance fee, and how it works is, we place the order for grocers. We actually own all the inventory for those items that we manage. We place the ideal order. It gets delivered to the grocery store. And until that item sells to the customer, it's technically Shelf Engine's inventory. And that's quite disruptive. What's amazing about that is the way that we charge our retailers. We only charge them for the items that they sell to their customers. [crosstalk].

Yeah. So any inventory that's stolen, lost, didn't show up in the first place from the vendor, gets spoiled, right, because the expiration date arrived, that becomes our problem, as Shelf Engine, and we own that inventory. So, for the value proposition for our customers is that we completely eliminate their inventory risk by deploying our solution in this way. And the best part is that we guarantee their profit margin improvement by working with us, because the fee that we charge is always less than their historical level of waste for that product, so that they're guaranteed to make more money with us than without us. So, we really put our money where our mouth is, and I think that's a big business model shift, but one that's been really amazing for us and help us scale a lot.

Brad Hammond: 5:13
Really interesting. Being a startup and being a new innovative company in this space, I think today's topic is really around reputation building as a startup. You've come in from a marketing perspective. First marketer, how have you come in and approached this in this space of building out an awesome reputation?

Salar Salahshoor: 5:33
Yeah, it's a good question. I think, for us specifically at Shelf Engine, it's a unique challenge. We're actually going after pretty small, relatively small set of customers. It's a large market, but we're really focused on grocery retail. And within grocery retail, there's a lot of consolidation, so there are these massive enterprise-level grocery stores like... You've got Albertsons. You've got Kroger. You've got Target even now coming into grocery. And the people we're dealing with, usually director level or higher individuals with these companies. And so, you can imagine, it's not a high volume type of game we're playing. We're not a transactional business. We're very much a reputation and relationship-driven business. And, we're also operating in an industry that's traditionally very conservative, because grocery has very tight margins. The average large grocery operator is doing 1% to 3% profit.

Brad Hammond: 6:30
Wow.

Salar Salahshoor: 6:30
Which is really tight. There's very little margin for error. So you can imagine, as Shelf Engine coming in with our disruptive value prop around, "Hey, we'll just take over the ordering for you. Outsource that to us. Don't worry about it. We'll do a better job. And we guarantee the results." Even with that amazing value prop, there is just this sort of risk-averse culture in grocery that makes people very skeptical, very careful, things move very slowly.

So our challenge at Shelf Engine is, as a startup, how do we de-risk that? How do we change the perception that we're too small to handle that level of sophisticated ordering or, "Hey, what if I outsource my ordering to you, are you guys going to exist in a year?" Because it's a very critical function that we're taking over for these grocers. It's like their core operational excellence that they should have. And we're saying we could do it better. So you can imagine the type of challenge there of going to market and convincing someone who's generally risk-averse that they should completely outsource something that they think it really needs to be under their control. So we have a very unique challenge in that way.

And reputation is everything. People connect and talk. And, if there's a startup like Shelf Engine, the news travels through the industry. So what do I focus on? It's like, we want to make sure that anyone who's considering technical solutions or digital transformation within the grocery space knows about Shelf Engine. Number one, it's like a big brand awareness challenge. How can we get our brand in front of as many relevant people, and make sure they understand who we are and what we do? So, core foundational brand awareness. Beyond that, we're obviously looking to drive direct response and lead generation and build a pipeline.

But really, I think, for us, given the sort of stage we're at, what's most important is really nurturing that reputation and getting out there. And lucky for us, the grocery business is very trade-driven. So we've got a number of really great trade organizations, like the National Grocers Association, INFRA, FMI. These are all very legitimate trade groups that these retailers are partnered with, that enable us to partner with them to reach our end customers. That's been an amazing channel to educate the market and build awareness and create some thought leadership that has really helped us, quickly, within a year. I'd say those channels have been primarily responsible for enabling us to get that level of saturation we were hoping for, in people knowing about Shelf Engine, who we are.

Brad Hammond: 8:52
Yeah. It sounds like it, especially if you have this smaller list of companies and these ones that are maybe risk-averse, or really there's that culture of being skeptical in all this. What are some programs that you have in play to address that? How do you get your foot in the door at these brands? What does the marketing look like to kind of head off some of that skepticism? Maybe you could break that down for us and for other marketers to learn from.

Salar Salahshoor: 9:18
Sure. Yeah. Understanding what those fears are, I think, is the first step. And I just kind of express that to you at a high level. We're taking over this critical function. Understanding how those people feel, I think having empathy for your market is the first step. What do these people care about? What are they worried about? And it differs by person or role you're talking to within a company, what they might be motivated by or detracted by. I think really just doing that research upfront, talking to customers, getting feedback, especially if you don't win a deal, having that type of exit interview and understanding what happened, "Why? What were the issues? What was your perception of Shelf Engine?" I think we've done a lot of that, and it's helped us to just have that intelligence about our market and not fooling ourselves to think, "Oh, well, obviously they should love what we do because we're guaranteeing that they're going to perform better. And, why wouldn't anyone want this?" Right? It's that realization that, no, there are some real challenges that we need to overcome.

And I think, first step, just having the empathy and the process to go and understand what people really care about, what their real objections are and underline things they're not going to necessarily even tell you. There are a number of those challenges, and I could go into more of them to give you examples. But, we're B2B, right? We're selling a technology solution to these enterprise customers. And so, the approach that we've primarily taken has been a content-first approach, where we're... First off, part of building awareness is educating people about what we do, because what we do, because it's sort of unique, a lot of times people are like, "It's too good to be true. We don't believe you." So I'll share that, because we make such strong claims about eliminating inventory risk, about guaranteeing profit margin improvement. When you start talking about guaranteeing and eliminating, it starts to sound like snake oil, like "What are you actually selling me? It sounds too good to be true."

And we've gotten that feedback. People are like, "We've never heard of such amazing set of results." So, people who already don't really know who you are, if you come out right away with these strong claims, because you think, "Well, this is our value proposition." It's like, what we think is going to be the most exciting to people, it's where we're creating the most value. The issue is that, in our case, people who are like, "Well, I've never heard of this company. So how is it possible that they're having this crazy impact?" So they're already skeptical, and then they hear some extreme claim, and just red flags go off. So, I think, even if you have an amazing value proposition that you know is true, figuring out how to properly package and present it to that audience, depending on the stage you're at and their level of awareness of you, that's really critical. So you have to normalize what you're saying, to meet the expectations of the market on some level. So being too extreme about your claims is not always a good thing.

But, for us, again, it's education, slowly building up that reputation, being seen in the right places, being in the right newsletters. Those are all obviously very important. But, when I say content first, I'm really talking about really great case studies and thought leadership. We've written some really great eBooks. What we're doing right now, which I'm really excited about, is a LinkedIn Live series, where our president and our CEO are interviewing top retail executives about their challenges, just putting out authentic, really high quality content that your end customer will actually want to consume. And it's tough to do when you're dealing with super busy high level executives. There's not a lot of attention span for this type of content. So it's got to be really high value. It's got to be sort of bold. And so we're doing more and more of that, and so it's less about high volumes, and more focused on really high quality, really authentic content.

Brad Hammond: 13:13
Very cool. I love that. So let's move to a fun question. That is, what's the craziest marketing initiative that you've done in the past?

Salar Salahshoor: 13:23
Craziest marketing initiative. I thought a little bit about this question, because it's a tricky one. But, I think the craziest thing I can think of is, I was living in Santa Monica at the time, in California, and helping to launch a brand new consumer app that was sort of a local deal app, like a Groupon. I'm not going to go into detail of the business model, but just assume it's something like that, where people would use the app to engage with local service providers, merchants, food service. So, the company had just started launching, had about 150 local merchants who had listed their products and services on the app.

But, how do you get a market for that? It's a two-side marketplace, so how do you get the consumers to get involved? It's a super tricky challenge. And we didn't have a lot of money to play with. So I think the craziest thing we did there was, we printed... The mascot for the company was a squirrel, and we printed a bunch of lost squirrel. Like, you get a lost cat, like fires.

Brad Hammond: 14:24
Yeah.

Salar Salahshoor: 14:25
And, the squirrels are actually kind of all over Santa Monica, which was kind of fun too. But, we posted it all over, outside, everywhere, on light posts and besides the buildings, and just like, "Have you seen this squirrel?" And the point of it was to just initially attract attention like, "What the hell does that mean?" And then it was more of a scavenger hunt. It was like, the content was about, "Hey, text this number to engage in this little scavenger hunt." And what we were doing is basically partnering with our merchants that we had in the network, as part of this initial launch, to offer free services to people who participated in this little scavenger hunt, text-based digital experience.

So there was a way to just kind of bootstrap really quickly, just get some downloads and some interest and some engagement for the local merchants. It's not something that would scale, but it was kind of fun and a little bit risky. And it was effective at doing what we wanted. Although I wouldn't say it was the highest impact marketing initiative, but that's something that comes to mind.

Brad Hammond: 15:28
That's really cool. I love that story. Cool. Any advice that you have for other marketers out there, listening today, as we wrap up here?

Salar Salahshoor: 15:38
Advice for marketers listening. I'd say, marketing is... There are some foundational things that are important across all scenarios, but I think the thing I'll say is, that marketing is very unique for the situation you're in as well. There's so much that's contextual for that stage you're at as a company, the market you're after. I think people underestimate how important it is to customize and really think hard strategically about what marketing means within the context you're dealing with. I think we all fall into this trap. You just sort of have a playbook of best practices on marketing, what are all the things that you could be doing and should be doing. People sort of try to just spread themselves across so many different tactics that they want to cover, just to kind of cover your ass in a way like, "Oh yeah, we're doing our paid search and social. We're remarketing. We're doing some print stuff. We're potentially doing some outdoor work. We've got our campaign plan." But it's not really inspiring, and it's not specifically custom built for the company and the market you're after.

So I think, that's really the hard work is figuring out, "How do I actually custom tailor my program?" And a lot of times, you'll find that half the tactics that you're working on don't make any sense. You should just stop 100% and focus the limited resources you have on the few areas that actually matter. I think, in lot of ways, I'd say stop doing so much in trying to spread your efforts and energy and money across many channels, and really do the hard work to understand the one or two channels and the one or two strategies that are really going to have an impact for your business, and focus there. And then if you find that you reached a point where it's diminishing returns, then you can broaden yourself and try new things. But, there's usually just the one or two really solid avenues. And finding those, I think, is a worthwhile pursuit.

Brad Hammond: 17:40
Love that. Well, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing all your wisdom and insights here. I really appreciate it.

Salar Salahshoor: 17:46
Yeah. Thanks, Brad. It's good to be with you there.

Brad Hammond: 17:54
Totall.