“We are now on a level playing field with large suppliers.”
Ron Tiarks of Sno Balls To Go on how Scintilla can help small suppliers scale their business at Walmart.
We recently sat down with Ron Tiarks, account manager at Sno Balls To Go, for a conversation about Scintilla. Here’s what Ron had to say about customer relationships, competitive edges, and how small suppliers can use data to get ahead.
Tell us about yourself and how you started working with Walmart.
My name is Ron Tiarks, and I'm an account manager for a small supplier, Sno Balls To Go.
I started as a stockman at Walmart in 1979. I was supposed to be working part-time and going to school, but I ended up working full-time, just growing with the company as it went along. So it was a lot of fun to see the growth at Walmart and the opportunities that came with it.
Nice. And now you’re with Sno Balls To Go. If you don’t mind us asking, what are those?
Yeah, Sno Balls To Go is based out of New Orleans, and Sno Balls—shaved ice snacks—are a big thing down there in seasonal time. The owner of the company started this out of his garage, playing on the idea of Sno Balls to go and trying to develop them into a retail product. He’s been very successful with it.
Sounds like a real entrepreneur. Sno Balls To Go recently started using Scintilla, too—is that right?
Sno Balls To Go has been utilizing Scintilla now for a little over a year. We weren't totally sure what to expect out of it when we started, but we knew enough about it that we thought it could add some real value, and it has.
Glad to hear it. Where has Scintilla helped the most?
Scintilla really opened up our eyes to our relationship with the customer, the customer's relationship to our products, how they purchased our products, etc. It brings a whole new relationship with the customer that we haven't had before, and the amount of data in relation to that is enormous.
What are some of the things you’ve learned?
Customer Perception probably did as much as anything to validate what we thought: customers wanted more flavors. Many of these people that were purchasing were purchasing for families with three or more people at home. The additional flavors supported that, and it was great to confirm that and see it through Customer Perception.
It must have been encouraging to confirm that you knew what customers wanted. How did that extra confidence factor into product development?
We used Shopper Behavior and the Performance in Detail report to understand the impact of three new flavors that the buyer let us add into the stores this past year. He only added them into half the stores, so we had a very good control group to understand what the customer's relationship to these three new items was.
The three new items performed very well. They were almost at the same metrics as the original four flavors, so very good performance. But using the Shopper Behavior and Performance in Detail report, we were able to understand how the new flavors impacted the customer's relationship with all of our flavors. And what happened was that customers bought more units per purchase, and the frequency of purchase increased as well. So we got an exponential increase in sales by bringing these three new flavors in.
In the past, we would have known the level of performance of these new items, but not that launching them actually increased the sales of the existing four. We would never have known that before. So this is a very powerful learning for us.
Sounds like Scintilla has helped you learn a lot about your brand’s performance. Has it helped you gain an edge over the competition?
Scintilla definitely gives you an advantage over the competition. With Scintilla, we now know where we stand in the category. We also know that we do not compete with and do not cannibalize from other brands on the shelf. We're an add-on sale. That means a lot as far as what our strategy is going to look like going forward and how to apply what we've learned with that in Scintilla.
For us, being able to know where we stand on the shelf and how we perform against the competition and what attributes we bring to the category—that's significant.
Speaking of applying what you’ve learned, are you able to use Scintilla with any other products in the Walmart ecosystem?
Scintilla is helping us understand who our customers are and how we might market to them. The best way is to leverage what we spend in Walmart Connect. I think that link between Walmart Connect and Scintilla is only going to grow.
You mentioned earlier that Sno Balls To Go is a small supplier. How has the role of small suppliers evolved over your time working with Walmart?
Small suppliers truly are in a position now where we're able to operate at the same level as larger ones. That's exciting for me.
To a degree, I think there might even be an advantage for small suppliers, because we can turn on a dime. Our products aren’t carried in all stores, so one decision is not going to make a huge impact. That gives us more room to experiment. The impact to the category might not be as significant, but it could be huge for the future of our products.
What would you say to other small suppliers who aren’t sure if Scintilla is right for them?
It’s hard for small suppliers to understand the return on investment into a program like Scintilla, and to know if it’s really built for small suppliers like them. But with Scintilla, we are now on a level playing field with the large suppliers.
And with this digital transformation that Walmart's going through, we really need to get on board now if we're going to leverage what's in front of us. It will dictate the future. At some point in time, you will be at an extreme competitive disadvantage if you don't leverage Scintilla.
Sometimes small suppliers aren’t sure if they have the resources they need to get the most out of Scintilla.
For small suppliers, having the skillset on board to be able to take advantage of the programs that are out there has often been difficult. One thing that is different with Scintilla is the amount of resources available to learn, whether it be within Scintilla itself, on the learnings within it, or webinars, or access to an account manager, or just being able to send a note and get a response on a particular issue. The Scintilla team has been very responsive.
Getting up to speed was much easier than I thought. It's very intuitive. It does take some time and it does take some focus to work on it, but the resources are there to learn it. The few times that I've had some questions or concerns, I could get answers to those.
Any final thoughts for small suppliers who might be reading this?
If a small supplier really wants to grow, the data is there to support it. You don't have to be big to do big things with data at Walmart. You just have to use it.
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