Trade planning in the CPG world is complex—but when indirect channels like distributors and wholesalers enter the mix, the challenges multiply. That’s why Visualfabriq and EPP hosted a panel featuring senior leaders from Organic Valley, Bumble Bee Foods, and Chomps, moderated by Rajeev Prabhakar, Chief Product Officer at Visualfabriq. The discussion tackled the messy realities of managing trade spend, forecasting, and revenue recognition across indirect routes to market.
View the full panel discussion.
“Getting all the data to talk in our language… from very disparate sources… is definitely one of the big challenges.”
Sell-through data coming from distributors is often incomplete or formatted differently. GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers) may be represented inconsistently, or they may be using their own product codes. This forces CPG teams to spend significant time mapping, cleansing, and harmonizing data—often with limited visibility into the end customer.
While teams have developed methods to plan indirect volume, planning trade investment value remains a challenge. Bryan Smith from Bumble Bee Foods noted:
“We’ve slowly started to shift to accruing money at the indirect level… based on the forecasted plan of our sales team.”
This shift helps align trade accruals with revenue recognition, especially for short-term deals. However, long-term contracts and distributor markups complicate the picture. Teams must decide whether to treat distributor fees as part of the cost-to-serve or separate them out for analysis.
And that’s where technology often falls short. Most ERP systems are only capable of accruing at the distributor level, which means that fees assessed at the ship-to location don’t automatically cascade down to indirect accounts. As a result, analytics teams are forced to manually allocate those costs across split percentages—an error-prone and time-consuming process.
This limitation becomes especially problematic when trying to assess customer profitability or plan long-term investments. Without automated allocation, teams struggle to get a clear view of how trade spend impacts indirect customers, making it harder to optimize promotional strategies or justify spend.
Managing split percentages—how volume is allocated across indirect customers—is a dynamic process.
“Ideally, it’s quarterly. Reality? It ends up being longer than that,” said Bryan Smith from Bumble Bee Foods.
While some teams aim for monthly updates—or even more frequent recalibration when new retailers come on board mid-month—others face delays due to system limitations, resource constraints, or lack of timely data. The frequency of updates often depends on the availability of EDI feeds, retailer reports, and internal bandwidth.
New customer onboarding, shifting supply chains, and evolving distribution points all demand agility. But in practice, split models may lag behind market changes, requiring manual intervention and cross-functional coordination to stay accurate.
“The past is usually your best predictor… but if that past is cloudy at best, you run into some trouble.”
Forecasting must span the full value chain—from ship-to locations to end customers. Teams often treat each distributor DC as a unique customer due to behavioral differences. This granular approach helps improve forecast accuracy but requires tight coordination between sales, finance, and supply chain. And with end customers switching between suppliers and constantly changing channel relationships—like Key Food moving from UNFI to C&S, models must be recalibrated frequently.
Understanding the true cost of doing business with indirect customers requires consolidating direct and indirect trade spend.
“We run it all the way to customer profitability,” said Matt Meloy.
“If that fee gets assessed at the ship-to location, it has to cascade all the way down to the splits.”
This enables teams to benchmark indirect customers against direct ones and make informed decisions about promotional investments and supply allocation.
The panelists didn’t sugarcoat the complexity of indirect trade planning. But they also shared practical strategies for navigating it—like building flexible forecasting models, integrating systems for better visibility, and aligning cross-functional teams around shared data.
As Arthur Bernstein summed it up:
“The more information you know, the better decisions and recommendations you can make. You work with the data you’ve got.”
Yet working with the data you’ve got—when it’s fragmented, inconsistent, or incomplete—is far from efficient. Without a solution that helps unify and translate disparate data sources, teams are forced to rely on manual workarounds, assumptions, and reactive planning. The result? Slower decisions, reduced accuracy, and missed opportunities.
The panel made it clear: solving indirect trade planning isn’t just about managing complexity—it’s about enabling clarity. And that starts with the right tools.
Visualfabriq’s recently launched Indirect capabilities bring clarity, control, and confidence to even the most complex route-to-market models. More data means more accuracy. But even with limited data, we support you by modeling missing information and filling in the gaps.
Whether you're managing distributors, indirect accounts, or hybrid structures, Visualfabriq gives you the tools to plan smarter, reconcile faster, and forecast more accurately. Our software is designed to harmonize data from multiple, disparate sources—retailers, distributors, internal systems—without manual effort. That means no more juggling spreadsheets or reconciling mismatched formats. Just clean, connected data that flows seamlessly into your planning and analytics.
If you’d like to see how it works, schedule a demo now.