Numerator offers rich consumer insights and shopper data, but despite its depth, many businesses struggle to transform those insights into a clear, retailer-ready narrative. Working with Numerator data isn’t always intuitive – especially if your category team is juggling fast timelines, limited resources, or simply doesn’t have a dedicated analytics expert. In fact, many teams attempting to DIY their way through Numerator run into recurring roadblocks that can undermine their retailer meeting success.

Top Challenges Insights Teams Face

Here are some of the most common issues when preparing for retailer negotiations using Numerator:

• Lack of focus: It’s easy to get lost in too much data. Numerator offers tons of shopper behaviors, switching trends, receipt details, and cross-channel metrics – but without a clear plan, your message can become diluted.
• Difficulty isolating incremental value: Retailers want to know what new value your brand, product, or initiative brings. Without careful interpretation, data might look like general sales shifts rather than true incremental growth opportunities.
• Poor connection to retailer priorities: Not all metrics carry equal weight with every retailer. Using the wrong KPIs – or missing an opportunity to tie insights to a buyer's category goals – can reduce your impact.
• Incomplete cross-category narratives: Especially for brands that span multiple adjacent categories, stitching together a customer-centric story across departments can be confusing or incomplete – particularly if you're pulling different data sets without alignment.
• Shopper missions aren’t clearly defined: One of Numerator's biggest strengths is understanding shopper missions – but many teams struggle to apply this insight in a practical, retailer-relevant way.

What’s Behind These Roadblocks?

These issues often come down to a mix of time constraints, limited internal capabilities, or unfamiliarity with how to structure compelling retailer stories using complex market research tools. As businesses invest in powerful platforms like Numerator, there is often a lag in building in-house expertise to match that investment. This is where strategic support from experienced consumer insights professionals becomes crucial.

SIVO’s On Demand Talent can help bridge this gap. These professionals are deeply experienced with tools like Numerator and know how to extract the signals from the noise. Unlike freelance generalists, On Demand Talent are embedded partners who work alongside your team to clarify the questions you need to answer – and structure the data in a way that supports those answers, clearly and effectively.

Recognizing the challenges upfront is the first step. The next step is building a strategy to work through them, leveraging the right support along the way.

One of the top goals of any retailer negotiation is to demonstrate not just performance, but potential. Retail buyers want to see clear proof of incremental value – that is, how your brand or category initiative will drive new dollars into their business, not just shift share within it. While Numerator provides excellent access to longitudinal panel data and competitive dynamics, highlighting incremental value takes more than downloading a few charts. It requires thoughtful interpretation of the data, a strategic lens, and a retailer-specific story.

Understanding What Incremental Really Means

Incremental value doesn’t just mean sales gains. It means gains that wouldn’t have occurred without your product, placement, or tactic – value that expands the purchase occasion, adds to baskets, or attracts new shoppers to the category. Numerator’s rich set of longitudinal panel data provides several ways to uncover this, but it’s how you frame it that will make the difference in the room.

Strategies to Bring Incrementality to Life:

• Use switching behavior to prove gain: Numerator allows you to track where your customers came from. A shift from competitive brands or adjacent categories can powerfully demonstrate incremental volume.
• Tap into new shopper growth: Highlight how your initiative recruited new or lapsed buyers into the category. Segment these results by demographics or channel to show where the untapped potential lies.
• Analyze category-level lift: Rather than just show your brand’s lift, isolate moments when the total category grew due to your contribution. A well-visualized story about how you activated a new usage occasion can be persuasive with buyers.

For example (fictional case): A plant-based snack brand used Numerator to show that new buyers were not switching from other snack brands but were actually new to the salty snack category altogether. This insight helped position them not just as a niche upstart, but as a growth catalyst bringing new households into the category.

Why Many Teams Struggle

While these insights are technically available within Numerator, accessing them in a way that aligns with the retailer’s needs requires a clear roadmap. Many insights teams may pull the right charts without fully understanding how to interpret them for retail impact. It’s also easy to get trapped in a brand story rather than a category story, which weakens the business case in a negotiation context.

The Strength of On Demand Talent

On Demand Talent from SIVO brings the critical thinking, experience, and category storytelling ability to ensure your data works harder. These consumer insights experts know how to build narratives backed by quantified growth opportunities – and how to tailor them to different retailers’ priorities. Whether it’s highlighting incremental revenue from multi-category promotions or showcasing how a portfolio change drives core category expansion, On Demand Talent can help translate raw data into winning stories.

If your team is stretched thin or lacks experience working with advanced market research tools like Numerator, bringing in flexible, high-caliber talent – even temporarily – can lead to better results and longer-lasting retailer relationships.

One of the most valuable features in Numerator data is the ability to analyze shopping behaviors based on consumer intent – also known as shopper missions. These reveal why shoppers are buying, not just what they’re buying. In the context of retailer negotiations, this deeper understanding of shopper missions can help brands strengthen arguments around assortment strategy, shelf placement, and promotional opportunities.

Connecting Missions to Retailer Objectives

Retailers are constantly seeking ways to meet shopper needs more effectively. Shopper mission insights can show how your product aligns with those needs. Are shoppers doing a quick 'fill-in' trip, or are they stocking up for the week? Is your category frequently part of 'meal solution' missions or 'treat myself' moments? These patterns allow you to position your brand as indispensable in key need states – a clear value-add for the retailer.

For example, a fictional snack brand might find that its products are heavily associated with 'on-the-go' missions among young professionals. This insight could fuel a pitch around secondary placement near checkout aisles or bundling with beverages, strengthening your story with real shopper behavior.

Common Challenges Using Numerator to Analyze Shopper Missions

Despite their usefulness, shopper missions aren’t always easy to interpret in Numerator without experience. Common issues include:

• Segmenting missions too broadly, diluting insights
• Failing to connect missions back to specific category goals
• Overlooking how missions differ by channel or retailer

Because of this, insights teams sometimes present general data that lacks the strategic clarity needed to influence retail partners. Simply saying, "Shoppers buy us on the go" isn't enough. You need to quantify it, explain the context, and tie it to retailer-specific programs.

How On Demand Talent Enhances Mission Storytelling

Experienced insights professionals can help translate raw mission data into compelling narratives that support your retailer pitch. Whether it's reframing the data to uncover a higher-margin consumer occasion or drawing connections across multiple categories, they can help you make the mission insight actionable.

Pairing shopper mission data with market research tools and retail strategy strengthens every slide in your presentation – turning abstract insights into advantages that align with retail priorities.

Retailers don’t think in silos – and neither should your insights. One of the most powerful yet underused strategies in retailer negotiation is cross-category analysis. By using Numerator data to understand how your category influences or is influenced by adjacent categories, you can build a broader, more strategic story that resonates with retail buyers focused on total store performance.

What Cross-Category Analysis Looks Like

Suppose you're in the dairy category. With cross-category insights, you might find that when shoppers buy Greek yogurt, they often purchase granola or fresh fruit. This opens the door to partnership stories with other suppliers, bundled promotions, or even adjusting in-store adjacency to drive basket size. These types of insights present your brand not as a single SKU pitch, but as a growth engine for entire category groups.

Challenges in Cross-Category Work Using Numerator

While Numerator’s granular shopper data supports cross-category work, the analysis can quickly become complex.

• It’s easy to surface correlations that lack business relevance
• Insights may remain fragmented if not connected to a wider retail strategy
• Teams might struggle to visualize the full story from scattered data points

This is where many beginner or time-strapped teams encounter roadblocks. Without a clear framework, the opportunity gets missed – or worse, it reads as speculation rather than actionable strategy.

Elevating Retailer Conversations with Expert Analysis

On Demand Talent gives brands access to seasoned professionals who know how to mine and structure cross-category insights in Numerator. These experts translate large datasets into clean visuals and powerful narratives, combining category insights with consumer behavior to position your brand as an enabler of total aisle growth.

Especially in high-stakes negotiations, telling a story that aligns with a retailer’s broader goals – beyond your brand – makes all the difference. A combined approach of shopper data, incremental value analysis, and adjacent category behaviors creates a convincing case for increased support, expanded distribution, or shared promotional space.

Great data doesn't drive great decisions – great analysis does. While Numerator provides robust shopper data, raw numbers alone won’t get your brand the shelf, placement, or promotion it deserves. Retailer negotiations require retail-ready insights: efficient, persuasive stories that highlight opportunity, growth, and shopper alignment. This is where On Demand Talent proves invaluable.

The Gap Between Raw Data and Strategic Insight

Many teams invest in tools like Numerator and expect instant insights. But tools are only as good as the people using them. Without the time, training, or experience to weave data into compelling category narratives, even the best dataset gets underutilized. Common pain points include:

• Spending too much time cleaning, filtering, or formatting data
• Being unsure which metrics carry the most weight with retailers
• Difficulty translating insights into visually clear, persuasive presentations

Why On Demand Talent is Different

Unlike freelancers or general consultants, SIVO’s On Demand Talent are insights professionals with deep expertise in tools like Numerator. They can step in quickly to:

– Structure your Numerator report to spotlight incremental value
– Clarify shopper missions and connect them to retail objectives
– Identify and package cross-category stories that align with buyer strategies
– Deliver polished decks for internal or customer-facing presentations

This flexible, fractional model allows you to scale efforts strategically – whether for a key retailer pitch, seasonal reset, or broader category management need – without the overhead of hiring or slowing down workflows.

Teaching While Doing

One of the added advantages of On Demand Talent is capability building. Not only do they deliver insights you can act on immediately, but they also equip your internal team with smarter ways to use your consumer insights and market research tools going forward – an essential step in maximizing your investment.

So whether you’re preparing for a pivotal buyer meeting or need help leveling up your internal data storytelling, On Demand Talent gives you the expertise, speed, and clarity to transform complex Numerator data into negotiation-ready content that drives results.