DRIVING CPG SALES GROWTH IN CHALLENGING TIMES – OPPORTUNITY #3

Consumer goods retail teams are facing a perfect storm of factors affecting their ability to deliver sustained sales growth and improved shopper experience. Disrupted supply chains, soaring inflation, staffing shortages, stagnant category volumes, and online pickup & delivery growth place tremendous stress on product on-shelf availability and in-store execution.

We previously showed how CG sales leaders can make simple adjustments to their retail execution strategies to capture sales growth, improve shopper experience, and deliver measurable, short-term ROI. In the first blog in the series, we outlined how CGs can more effectively leverage data science solutions with retailer POS data to daily / weekly calculate each store’s projected lost sales value – the “Size of Prize” – if identified store execution issues are not fixed. With visibility to this metric, sales and key account management teams can prioritize the allocation of field sales personnel to stores, record the actions taken, and ultimately measure the resulting return on resources investment.  In the second blog of the series, we showed how the “Size of Prize” metric could feed smart routing solutions that dynamically direct field resources to those stores with the highest value issues, in a timeframe when there’s still an opportunity to fix them.

Now that we have our CG field resources focused on the highest priority stores, innovative technology solutions can free reps from spending significant amounts of in-store time diagnosing issues or capturing conditions and, instead, focus on higher-value selling activities that drive incremental growth. Sales teams are often held back by software tools that serve the needs of other parts of the organization but don’t boost selling or productivity.

Actionable Alerts, using advanced data science, lifts field team productivity by enabling reps to “know before they go” the issues they will find in-store and reduce time lost on diagnosis. The sales uplift from corrective actions can also be measured, providing a direct measure of ROI on the field force investment. Further productivity and data insights can be captured through the use of digital image recognition solutions, such as StayinFront Digital, which enable field sales reps to rapidly capture and process large amounts of store conditions data to drive Next Best Action related to shelf or displays. With more time for selling, reps can easily leverage powerful guided-selling tools, such as StayinFront PitchBook, that combine selling opportunity information with store-level insights to create dynamic sales pitches and capture manager commitments. Reps can harness these selling tools to generate YOY growth around seasonal events, enhance visual impact using augmented reality content to show displays in recommended store placement, and securing the order.

All these store execution innovation capabilities need to feed a common information repository with standard packaged BI reports/dashboards, such as StayinFront Insight, providing sales leadership with easy visibility of performance across all levels of the customer and sales hierarchies, as well as continuing to drive optimization of A.I.-based recommendations.

Finally, to ensure the greatest agility, speed, and cost-effectiveness, the ideal retail execution strategy would allow all of these capabilities to be seamlessly deployed within one technology solution, such as the StayinFront Retail Optimization Platform.

In summary, the retail execution adjustments in this blog series provide CPG sales leaders with a practical approach to empowering their field teams to secure sales volume growth and to compete more effectively in challenging times.  To find out more about how your CPG organization can leverage these ideas for optimizing retail execution, contact me at jdesilva@stayinfront.com.