DRIVING CG SALES GROWTH DURING CHALLENGING TIMES – OPPORTUNITY #1
Consumer goods retail teams are facing a perfect storm of factors affecting their ability to deliver sustained sales growth and improve shopper experiences. 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. Fortunately, CPG technology solutions can help sales leaders make simple adjustments to their retail execution strategies to capture sales growth, improve shopper experience, and deliver measurable ROI in the short term. In this series of blogs, I’ll lay out StayinFront’s practical approach for global CG sales organizations to harness significant growth opportunities.
Our first growth opportunity is to ensure that the sales volume projected in retailer agreements is fully captured during in-store execution. Deploying field teams is expensive. Reps can’t be everywhere all the time, and some expected sales volume is lost due to poor in-store implementation of retailer joint business plans (JBPs). Most CG sales organizations can’t identify on any given day which stores need the most attention. Despite their experience, best intentions, and effort; costly field resources spend a lot of time visiting stores and working on issues in ways that are almost certainly not of the highest value. In a recent CG industry survey, 64% of respondents placed “data & insights not fully leveraged” as the #1 top issue in preventing exceptional retail execution[i].
The great news is that CG commercial teams can take immediate steps to correct this by leveraging the abundant retailer data they already have. StayinFront Retail Data Insight’s (RDI) data science solutions harness retailer Point of Sales (POS)and other data sources (when POS data is unavailable) to identify an array of SKU/store execution problems, and calculate a “Size of Prize” for each issue, and alert field and customer account teams with suggested corrective actions. Field teams that prioritize visits to stores with the greatest opportunity to prevent future lost sales can be more efficient because they “know before they go” to the store.
Finally, by capturing the corrective actions taken and measuring the resulting sales uplift, CG leaders can quantify and tie field sales activities to sales growth contribution – by activity, across accounts, teams, and geography.
In the next blog, I’ll cover how we use “Size of Prize” data to create dynamic, daily journey plans to direct field resources to stores with the highest potential lost sales.
Connect with me to find out more on how your CG sales organization can leverage these ideas to optimize retail execution or contact me at jdesilva@stayinfront.com.
Read the next installment here.
[i] Promotion Optimization Institute – 2022 POI State of the Industry Report
