Planning Your Best Trade Promotions in Just Minutes

At leading CPG companies 80% of planning is automated

It’s 2019, and the big question is: how are you going manage your trade promotions this year? If you’re simply implementing last year’s plan, it’s time to re-think, re-imagine and radically change what you’re doing.

For many CPG companies, trade promotion management hasn’t changed much at all, despite escalating pressures from all quarters. Across developed markets, consumer brands are under stress. Disruptive entrants and new trends; the rising demands of consumers who want direct connection and activist investors who want change are all driving transformation. Going into this year doing everything you have done before, has no chance of delivering better results.

Over the past year, we saw the voices of top CPG thought leaders and industry analysts become very clear about the need for change. For the CPG companies which continue to repeat year-on-year plans, invest heavily in legacy solutions that don’t deliver their business case and grapple with Excel sheets that can’t possibly unlock the power of their data, there is an ever-diminishing window of opportunity to make the kind of change that will make them an industry frontrunner in the near future.

In this latter part of the second decade of the 21st Century, the ability to transform is all about your uptake of the latest technologies, and most CPG companies are behind the curve when it comes to this.

Companies which are still stuck in traditional trade promotion planning modes, methods and time-frames are out of step with agile consumers who are price-checking on the retail floor using their mobile devices. How do you break out of the trap?

Over the past years, as we have implemented Visualfabriq’s game-changing revenue management solutions at Tier One CPG companies which are determined to be future-fit, we’ve witnessed their transformation in the ways that they plan, manage and optimise trade promotions. They have all systems integrated, process-led workflows and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) so that they can plan their best-ever trade promotions in just minutes.

A whopping 80% of their planning is fully automated saving an extraordinary amount of time and resources. Sales professionals are freed up to focus on exceptions rather than micro-managing everything. Manufacturer and retailer perspectives enable a far more transparent, collaborative relationship and increase the potential for full adherence to the parameters of the agreed promotion.

The bottom-line is that if, in 2019, you don’t have AI capabilities, integrated systems and workflows, and if you can’t plan winning trade promotions in minutes, then you are currently behind the curve.

So, what’s standing in the way of CPG companies taking up the latest technological solutions?

Visualfabriq co-founder and CEO Jaco Brussé says, “There needs to be leadership that recognises the importance of change and becoming future-fit. Strong, clear future-focused leadership can help drive organisations through fear of new technologies and the ignorance that something like AI is far off in the future.”

“It is visionary leadership that can steer CPG companies on a new generation tech course that helps them leave behind costly, time-consuming legacy solutions that don’t improve their workforce efficiencies or change their bottom-line for the better. The solutions are right there in the market-place, right now. We need leaders who can understand that, explore that and inspire their CPG companies into action.”

Interested to see how we can help to optimize planning and revenue of your trade promotions? View our trade promotion management solutions or request a demo!