Hitting sales targets is why you keep the role you are in. It is rarely why you get the next one, and the gap between those two things sits behind a great deal of career frustration in buying.
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Hitting Sales Targets and the Conversation You Are Not In
If your manager were discussing right now who on the team is ready for more responsibility, do you know what she would say about you?
Not the performance review version with the objectives you agreed in January. The real version, the informal one that happens when a project comes up, a budget is expanded, or a senior colleague asks who might be ready for the next step. Most buyers have no visibility of those conversations at all.
There are two types of assessment running in any organisation. The formal one is your annual review, measured against objectives, and it gives you clarity about performance. The conversations that actually determine whether you move forward happen elsewhere, and they are almost always triggered by something specific. A project needs someone. A category opens up. Who can handle that?
Those conversations run on entirely different criteria, and a lot of buyers spend considerable energy on the official targets without knowing what is being observed in the background.
Podcast Thrive in Fashion Buying & Merchandising
Episode 045, Why Fashion Buyers Who Hit Their Targets Still Don’t Get Promoted.
If you want a clear read on where your commercial readiness actually sits, rather than guessing at what your manager is thinking, the free Fashion Buyer Skills Assessment maps your strengths and gaps across the areas that matter for progression.
What Managers Notice, and What They Do Not Say
Hitting your numbers, managing your critical path, holding your supplier relationships: those are expected of you in the role you already have. They are the reason you keep it. They are not the differentiator.
That may sound harsh and it is worth saying plainly, because buyers spend a great deal of energy on the minimum requirements of the role and then come out of a review wondering why nothing has changed.
I had a buyer on my team who was performing well. Critical path managed effectively, strong supplier relationships, category meeting its sales targets. There was genuinely nothing to pull her up on. When a senior colleague asked me about her readiness for more, I said I trusted her completely with what she had and would be reluctant to give her more.
Asked why, my honest answer was that she never showed me she was thinking about anything beyond what was directly in front of her. Every week she managed her workload and delivered what was expected. She was performing and she was not over-delivering. If someone asked your manager that question today, what would the answer be?
One: How You Handle a Problem That Is Not Your Fault
Deliveries get delayed. A supplier lets you down. A quality issue appears at final inspection. These happen in every buying office every season, and the question is never whether the problem occurred.
It is how you respond. Do you arrive at your manager’s desk having already worked out the financial exposure, with the options mapped and a recommendation ready? Or do you arrive with a problem and wait to be told what to do?
A junior buyer came to me once before she had even called the supplier. She had already calculated the margin exposure, laid out three ways we could respond, and told me which she recommended and why. That response builds confidence quickly, and confidence is what precedes responsibility.
Two: Whether You Communicate Commercially
There is a real difference between two buyers holding identical information.
One says denim is underperforming. The other says denim is running 12 per cent below plan, and if that continues to month end the category will miss margin by around 28,000, and here is what she is planning to do about it.
Both know the same thing. Only one is communicating like someone taking responsibility for a category. Commercial communication demonstrates that you understand the implications of what you are seeing and that you are already working on the response, which is a different signal entirely from reporting a symptom accurately.
Three: Whether You Are Visibly Thinking Ahead
A buyer who always talks about what happened last week is managing the present. That is not a criticism, it is a description of a level.
A buyer who arrives at a trade meeting looking forward, identifying the decisions still to be made, the risks on the horizon, and what she needs from her buying manager or the merchandising team, is operating somewhere else.
Forward thinking is one of the clearest readiness signals there is, and it does not go unnoticed. It also happens to be the easiest of the four to start demonstrating deliberately, because it is largely a matter of what you prepare before a meeting rather than what you do in it.
Four: How You Manage Upwards
Does your manager have to come looking for information, or do you keep her updated on what matters without being asked?
Do you ask for clarity when you are unsure, or make an assumption and get it wrong? Does a meeting with you leave your manager feeling settled about the category, or uncertain about it?
Managers promote buyers who inspire confidence. Not the ones who are most impressive in a single meeting, but the ones who make a manager feel the category is in safe hands and that a sizeable budget could be handed over without needing constant checking. That feeling is the thing that opens doors, and it is built week by week rather than in a review.
None of This Requires a New Title
What I have described are habits and a way of working. They can be built inside the meetings and conversations you are already having.
- Prepare a forward-looking question for your next trade meeting. Not a recap of last week’s numbers, but something about the decisions coming up and who needs to be part of making them.
- Give yourself ten minutes before you take a problem to your manager. Work out the financial exposure, map the options, form a recommendation. Even if she overrides it, arriving with one tells her something.
- Ask for a difficult category. Volunteering for the complicated part of the business is a readiness signal in itself, and it is one of the few you can send deliberately.
- Reflect on a difficult season honestly. Buyers who recover well from a bad trading period end up with more responsibility, because they are willing to look at what happened, learn from it and move on rather than withdraw.
One quality worth naming separately is the discipline to pause and assess before committing. Some buyers are constantly busy, involved in everything, and never quite stop to look at the full commercial picture before making a call. That is not a personality trait. It is a professional habit and it can be built.
Elisabeth's Final Thoughts
Very little of how you are being assessed gets communicated to you directly. I had no idea what would be discussed in my own reviews until I was sitting in the room, and I pieced the important parts together from small signals while hoping I was reading them correctly. You do not have to work that way. The four things above are observable, learnable and entirely within your control in the role you already have.
Career Progression FAQs
Because hitting targets is the requirement of the role you already hold rather than the differentiator for the next one. Managing your critical path, holding supplier relationships and meeting sales targets are why you keep the job. The conversations that decide promotion run on a different set of criteria, and most of them are never communicated to the buyer directly.
Four things come up consistently: how you handle a problem that is not your fault, whether you communicate commercially rather than descriptively, whether you are visibly thinking ahead rather than reporting on last week, and how you manage upwards. None of them appear on a job description.
The formal assessment is your annual review against objectives agreed at the start of the year. The informal one happens when a project needs someone or a budget expands and a senior colleague asks who is ready. That second conversation is where progression is actually decided and you are not in the room for it.
Compare two buyers with the same information. One says denim is underperforming. The other says denim is running 12 per cent below plan, and if that continues to month end we will miss category margin by around 28,000, and here is what I am planning to do about it. Only the second is communicating like someone taking responsibility for a category.
Through habits rather than a new title or project. Before your next trade meeting, prepare a forward-looking question rather than a recap of last week. When a problem lands, take ten minutes to work out the financial exposure and map the options before you go to your manager. Even if the recommendation is overruled, arriving with one tells them something.
