Brands need a means to efficiently manage their trade expenditure in an increasingly competitive retail world, allowing account managers to quickly plan their trade operations, assess their performance, and interact with cross-functional teams to identify the best course of action. Account managers must ensure that their new plans are based on strong baseline predictions and uplift models, rather than merely duplicating what they did the prior year.
Salesforce offers a ‘Trade Promotion Management’ feature in CG Cloud allowing Consumer Goods companies to plan, track, and optimize trade spending to drive revenue growth. In this blog post, we’ll discuss Trade Promotion Management in Salesforce CPG cloud, understand its various benefits, and more.
Also Read: Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud: What, Why & How?
Salesforce CPG Cloud provides packaged industry-specific capabilities for consumer goods companies that need to engage more effectively with customers and consumers in today’s digital world. The platform delivers an integrated solution that enables companies to connect with shoppers and customers at all points along the path to purchase and throughout their entire lifecycle. It also helps companies optimize marketing and sales operations across channels by providing a single view of customers and consumers as well as key retail partners.
The Trade Promotion Management feature in CG Cloud digitalizes the planning and execution of trade promotions, helping brands harness their data and get optimal ROI from every dollar spent on promotions. It offers:
o A unified view of promotion executions, as well as a detailed trade and marketing calendar.
o A promotion library and dynamic fund management, to speed up promotion creation and budgeting.
o Support for seamless account planning.
o Comprehensive visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) and the performance of customer business plans.
According to Salesforce, Consumer Goods companies spend 20% of their revenues on promotions. In addition to that,
o 72% of promotions fail to break even
o 60% of promotions go unevaluated due to a lack of analytical rigor and manpower.
o 58% of business users say existing solutions are only somewhat effective at revenue management.
o 71% of customers use spreadsheets for trade promotion management.
While many processes of CG companies have been digitized, managing trade promotions has lagged behind.
1. Streamline your promotion planning- Minimize time spent on admin tasks connected with funding promotions and provide your partners the tools to better engage with strategic customers. Real-time budgets and dynamic fund management ensure budget visibility and communication between finance and sales teams, while an integrated marketing calendar allows your teams to align with national marketing.
2. Make your promotion execution flawless- Collaborative forecasting and dynamic fund management help your account teams to collaborate efficiently and ensure flawless plan execution. Account planning ensures available inventory through accurate promoted and unpromoted predictions, while integrated retail execution ensures POS delivery and execution with planned promotions. Checks are done to ensure that there is enough inventory to meet the increased promotional demand.
3. Optimize your ROI - Eliminate the guesswork from promotion planning and leverage data and insights to optimize ROI from your programs. Get actionable insights on how to optimize and allocate trade investments.
4. Streamline the settlement process - Get visibility to accrued liabilities, seamlessly match claims, generate payments and quickly process retailer claims to take your supplier relationships to the next level.
Salesforce CPG Cloud has many useful features to help consumer goods brands optimize their sales, marketing, service, and commerce. The Trade Promotion Management feature addresses a specific but highly valuable part of operations and helps brands optimize the effectiveness of their programs and get more value from every dollar spent on their promotions.
If you are ready to implement Salesforce CPG Cloud in your business and are looking for expert assistance then AppShark can help you. We are a Salesforce Gold Consulting and Product Development partner with over 10 years of experience helping businesses leverage various Salesforce products and services. Our team of certified Salesforce consultants can help you implement CG Cloud and customize it to your specific needs. We offer support at every stage of the process, from initial consultation to implementation to customization, post-launch monitoring, and maintenance. To know more about our Salesforce services, please feel free to contact us, or mail us at sales@appshark.com.