Boost Revenue and Profitable Growth with Trade Promotion Management

Even though trade spend is the second largest expense item — after the cost of goods sold — 60% of trade promotions go unevaluated because employees don’t have the tools or enough time. At the same time, margin-pressured retailers are demanding more visibility. CG companies want to maximize their return on billions of dollars of spend: They need to quickly replicate and scale the most successful programs, change or stop the unprofitable ones, and ensure they all stay on budget and within promotion guardrails.

Joint business planning enables CG companies and retailers to target investments at the store and channel level. That sounds simple enough. But the challenge for retailers and CG companies is that omni-channel selling has made the route to market much more complicated. Suddenly, CG companies aren’t just building a relationship with one buyer — they’re working with multiple partners across virtual and in-person teams. Using a spreadsheet to keep track of promotions in real time across regions, locations, and selling channels isn’t just cumbersome and slow — it’s impossible. Manual processes and outdated tools keep promotions from being as effective as possible, because organizations are unable to identify what’s working (and what’s not) without real-time, dynamic data.

To meet heightened retailer expectations and get the most value from their trade spend investments, CG companies should reevaluate their trade promotion management (TPM) capabilities. Through digitization, CG companies and retailers can meet TPM’s challenges head-on and create win-win promotions that maximize ROI.

One-size-fits-all promotions don’t meet the needs of omni-channel retailers. Just like online promotions don’t always work in-store, other factors, like seasonality, play an outsized role. Today, companies that can target promotions by channel, region, or even store level will be best positioned to get their products in the hands of customers.

Digitizing TPM data enables companies to get more granular with the promotions they offer. Suddenly, retailers and CG companies can tailor trade spend to specific regional or seasonal needs, for example, offering a discount on beach towels in springtime.

If you’ve ever spent time designing and populating a complicated spreadsheet, you know it’s a slow process. Limited file permissions means team members don’t have access to data when they need it. Updating is tricky because it’s easy to make mistakes. Because spreadsheets don’t dynamically populate with real-time data, the document is stale as soon as you hit save.

When you digitize trade management, you only have to enter in program parameters once. You can link real-time data across disparate sources and use the calendar view to deliver visibility to your full team, ensuring everyone has access to one single source of truth.

CG companies are leaving money on the table by failing to learn which promotions drive top-line revenue and which don’t — or why some products might not need a promotion at all.

Digitizing TPM enables agility and smarter decision-making. Automating reporting with real-time data ensure you can quickly evaluate the efficiency of your trade spend programs. Analytics you can define and control yourself ensure key account managers can spot changes in demand or see at a glance which promotions deliver the biggest ROI. For example, why spend money promoting high-volume goods when you could allocate resources to products that drive bigger profits? The ability to pivot or scale quickly ensures you can target promotions on the right products in the right locations at the right times.