Last year, consumer goods manufacturers spent, on average, 12% of their revenues on trade promotion and yet less than 30% of promotions were profitable. Why?
- Most consumer products firms have an extremely informal or non-existent promotion planning process. One customer actually cites, “We have sales reps creating plans on a cocktail napkin”.
- Companies often face a stumbling block in the execution of trade promotions and fail to provide accurate and timely payment to the retailers for promotion performance. They face unexpected deductions or overspend because of inadequate processes and poor accounting. In fact, more than half of consumer product firms still use disconnected spreadsheets as the primary tool for managing promotions.
- Few consumer product firms perform any post analysis to determine which promotions are profitable. Without this analysis the same unprofitable promotions are run over and over again.
Kineticsware Trade Promotion Management (TPM) enables you to overcome the common challenges in managing a trade promotion program and supports the entire lifecycle of trade promotion budgeting, planning, execution, and analysis, enabling you to optimize trade promotions and increase the return of your trade spend:
Trade Promotion Planning
- Empower your sales force with the ability to plan and allocate trade investment at the account, channel and product level.
- Develop the capability to analyze historical sales data, test scenarios and predict outcomes.
- Integrate promotion planning into your sales and operations planning process to help shape demand and ensure adequate inventory coverage.
Deal Management and Trade Promotion Execution
- Integrate promotion plan agreements into your broader order management and accounting system.
- Monitor retail sales promotion activities and authorize payment based on performance.
- Integrate a deduction management process to quickly settle deductions against promotion plan agreements and streamline deduction clearing.
Trade Promotion Monitoring and Trade Promotion Analysis
- Calculate performance metrics and measure the effectiveness of your trade promotion against point of sale information, third party market research, and past trade promotions.
- Assess the drivers and interconnections of your trade promotion spend. Assess trade investment from the perspective of the consumer.
- Develop the ability to answer, how much of your trade investment is really driving consumer behavior.
Next Steps
To find out how Kineticsware Trade Promotion Management can meet your specific needs, contact us. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your situation.