How to Build a Great Walmart Supplier Team

Walmart is projected to outperform every other company in the world with projections estimating the company will generate more than one-half trillion dollars in sales again this year. As a result, Walmart suppliers are investing heavily to capture their share of that revenue and growth. For decades, Walmart has generated most of the growth generated by many of its suppliers, even as competitors like Amazon continue to post impressive results. 

Walmart’s prevalence is hardly headline news. But because of the competitive nature of Walmart’s suppliers, people rarely talk about how Walmart builds a supplier team to maximize the value created by the relationship.

I’d like to share what I learned over the course of 18 years as a supplier. If you are like many Walmart merchants and want to jump to the important insight in this article, skip to the final section, where I describe the method we used to recruit talent in a manner that our competitors could not repeat.

Before I share, I’d like to share some tangible results that my teams generated to make this formula credible. Most notably, one of the teams I led generated more than 10% Compound Annual Growth Rate for a decade (CAGR), from less than $100 million to well over $200 million in topline sales. Second, this team earned coveted Walmart supplier of the year awards for the value it created along the growth journey. Finally, I led the team that partnered with Walmart to redesign their checkout impulse merchandising strategy, as they sought to expand self-checkout, which is a material threat to impulse sales. 

Doing this work required deep, trusting relationships across numerous departments and leadership levels, given its importance and broad-reaching impact. Notably, both teams began as distant #2 suppliers in both market share and customer engagement. We earned the trust Walmart ultimately placed on us.

So how did we do it? Can it be repeated in your own company?

Foundationally, I was fortunate to work for suppliers who were growth-oriented and saw value in leading company growth with Walmart. If your company isn’t a growth leader and innovator, it might be time to ask yourself if you’re in the right company. This is not a cursory question; does the data reflect your company as a growth leader that appreciates the value Walmart offers your business?

Another important factor is understanding what is most important to Walmart. For good reason, Walmart is known to have tough cost-oriented conversations with suppliers. Many believe this is due to Walmart being only focused on driving down costs. However, the reality is that Walmart wants suppliers to grow their business through whatever means is compelling to shoppers. If your only lever is price, you will feel price pressure. If your company has trusted brands and relevant innovation, the pressure to lower costs will be notably less. Walmart will expect your cost to reflect the efficiency of doing business with them, and they are eager to partner with suppliers who will have open discussions about how to mutually remove costs and reflect a portion of the savings in a lower cost of goods sold (COGS).  

An engaging discussion about system costs can be fruitful for suppliers, Walmart, and shoppers––if these discussions involve the correct people and are sincerely towards a mutually beneficial outcome. Most importantly, the partnership must not require making cost concessions.

So, if the cost isn’t of paramount importance, what is? INSIGHT. 

You’re probably tempted to stop reading here, expecting yet another shallow case for creating insight. I’m here to tell you that nearly all of the information that suppliers provide Walmart actually lacks relevant insight. True insight provides a clear path to action that creates value, both monetary and aligned with strategy and trends. Insight is derived from taking information, interpreting the information in a relevant unbiased manner that improves known business results, then influencing decision-makers to act on your insight. My good friend and mentor, Jeff McClelland calls these the three I’s of insight (Information, Interpretation, and Influence). Supplier bias and capability gaps are frequent barriers to suppliers providing true insight.

Walmart places incredible value on insights derived from credible data, by credible partners, with tangible opportunities to grow the business. Yes, it’s that simple, but doing this is far from easy. 

If Walmart is not acting on your “insights”, ask yourself four questions:

• Does my insight provide tangible growth opportunities?
• Does the proposed strategy align with Walmart’s business model and core competencies?
• Is my data credible (Retail Link remains the gold standard, in Walmart’s view)?
• Are the team members presenting the data credible and trusted by Walmart?

As I mentioned earlier, both of my teams started as distant #2 suppliers in both market share and influence with Walmart. We transformed into leaders by taking bold steps that many suppliers were missing. 

These steps included:

1. Making structure and staffing decisions to put customer engagement at the center of our purpose.
2. Staffing the team with talent that included analytical/technical capability as well as leaders who were passionate and skilled about influencing change.
3. Producing results with the resources we had, while identifying resources that would enable us to provide more transformational results
4. Breaking the mold on supplier paradigms for recruiting talent.

Address the Current Staffing and Structure of Your Team.

I’ll begin by addressing the current staffing/structure question. As a leader, you should be able to assess your degree of customer influence fairly quickly. 

How much time are your customer managers spending with the customer? Are they working on things that will lead to category and company growth? If the answer is “No”, it’s likely you have the wrong people or structure to merit customer engagement. One such example I experienced was a structure that had a team of seven people with four managers. Managing people is no small responsibility. If more than half the team is managing people, customer engagement is likely suffering. 

Staff Your Team With Both Analytical and Leadership Capabilities.

Finding team members who can find data, organize it, integrate it with other data, and translate the data into insights is hard. Finding this talent who also has the interpersonal skills to inspire others to act on their insight is nearly impossible.  

The best-case scenario is that you have this range of talent on your team, and work to create a culture that rewards those who can both create insight and compel others to act on their insight. This work will happen in stages.

Produce Results with the Resources You Have.

Next, it’s imperative to produce results with existing resources as a prerequisite to earning additional resources. We used this principle both internally and with customers. 

First, when I proposed a new structure, I purposefully didn’t request an additional headcount. Instead, I proposed that we would demonstrate tangible results before asking for additional resources. As with all teams, people move on, creating an opportunity to strengthen the team without adding headcount.

My leadership provided on-the-spot approval of the plan and willingness to invest in us as we demonstrated ROI on the resources we already had. We did the same with the customer, and I cannot count the number of times internal colleagues talk about the insight they could provide if they were able to obtain proprietary customer data. 

I learned over time that the best way to access incremental data was to demonstrate a knowledge of what to do with the data you already had access to. Between customer data and syndicated data, we helped the merchandising team understand how shoppers thought about our category and department, why they chose Walmart, or why they chose a competitor. But doing this had dramatic implications:

• Access to leaders within the merchandising organization
• Access to other department leaders who had decision rights and influence in decisions we were advocating
• Access to highly protected data that enabled our insights to become unmatched by other suppliers

Break the Mold on Supplier Paradigms for Recruiting Talent.

The final step is sourcing talent using innovative methods. While the other three steps are important, this step is uniquely important. Once you do this, your competitors will have significant barriers to competing with you for talent. Most suppliers’ talent comes from two sources: internal promotions and poaching people from other suppliers. 

While there may be a role for poaching, suppliers frequently learn why the poached talent was looking in the first place. For those that I poached, I hope you know if you were an exception to this rule.

Typically, the talent wasn’t as skilled as you thought. This indicates why they may have been looking to switch companies in the first place. This is particularly found amongst poached talent that joins a new company in a role that is essentially the same as the one they left. Would top talent really do this? 

I found that this required a belief in transferable skills and talent development. I have since come to believe this is more a product of my luck than strategy or brilliance. My first experience hiring someone without industry experience worked out excellently. The first person I hired, Ilim Kunter, had zero U.S. business experience, but she had extensive international business experience, including working for U.S.-based multinational companies. Her analytical experience was clearly transferable, and she demonstrated the most compelling attitude of any person I ever hired. I literally kept a quote from her at my desk, “it can be done”. This attitude led her to consistently produce excellent results.

Over time, I broadened my talent search to leverage this notion, prioritizing transferable skills over specific experience. This notion led me to recruit more than a dozen students and alumni from the University of Arkansas, Walton College of Business.

 I first recruited a member of my Walton MBA cohort, James Trotter, who was the top student in my class, and had extensive work experience and education, focused on developing insights. From there, I learned about the Walton Full-Time MBA internship program. The Walton Full-Time MBA students take on internships that last most of the two years of their studies. 

We started with one intern, and we kept growing from there. We found a specific role for each intern, and nearly everyone chose to join the company full time upon graduation. Most of them remain with the company today, in roles of increasing responsibility from where they began. 

The quality of this talent was noteworthy, with these future leaders possessing broad academic business understanding, along with tangible skills that enabled them to conduct valuable work from day one. 

If you are ready to become a leading supplier to Walmart and have the passion to use insights as the currency which enables your leadership, I encourage you to consider authoring your own plan that reflects some of the insights I’ve shared.

If you are one of the many people I was fortunate to have worked with while writing my Walmart story, thanks for what you did to help our company, Walmart, and me to enjoy incredible success.