DRIVING CPG SALES GROWTH IN CHALLENGING TIMES – OPPORTUNITY #2
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. In the first blog in this series, we discussed how CPGs can capture significant growth by more effectively leveraging retailer POS data to ensure that the sales volume projected in retailer agreements is fully captured during in-store execution. Field sales and account management teams gain visibility to every store’s calculated “Size of Prize”, the potetial lost sales value if the issues are not fixed, so that they can prioritize the actions they take and measure the resulting ROI.
The next significant growth opportunity is to use that “Size of Prize” in the smart routing, dynamically directing field resources to those stores with the highest potential lost sales values while there’s still an opportunity to intervene and stem lost sales. Currently, many CPG sales organizations define continuity coverage store visit schedules months in advance. That means it’s unlikely the stores with the highest value lost sales will be visited in a timeframe where valuable corrective actions can be taken.
The solution is smart routing technology, such as StayinFront Dynamic Routing, that use data science algorithms to evaluate the “Size of Prize” along with numerous other parameters, such as drive times, level of influence, seasonality, time since last visit, scheduling constraints and commitments to generate an optimal daily journey plan for every territory. Different business rules can be deployed to suit the needs of different teams or geographies / markets and algorithms can be adjusted to find the right balance between dynamic and continuity coverage routing. The bottom line is that CPG sales leaders can quickly harness data science to more effectively direct their field resources to the right store, at the right time, to ensure any sales losses are stemmed and volumes projected from retailer agreements are realized.
In the next instalment, we’ll show how innovative retail execution technologies can free CPG retail teams from wasting significant amounts of in-store time diagnosing issues or capturing store conditions and, instead, focus on higher-value selling activities that drive incremental growth
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.
