Home » Trade Marketing - Innabler

.«The way companies implement Trade Marketing activities is now more important than ever. »

The facts

Markets are expanding faster than ever, sales networks are becoming more and more distributed and product portfolios are growing with increased complexity. In the meantime, companies often lack interdepartmental and store collaboration and coordination of their network of salesmen, distributors and employees.

Success rests not only on a better process management but also on leveraging the power of front-end employees throughout the organization: from corporate, to the regions, to the stores.

In fact, our experience tells us that salesmen are continuously exposed to a great quantity and quality of stimulus, by their daily environment. They are in contact with distributors, storeowners, consumers, customers, other salesmen and competition in a daily basis. As a consequence, they receive a lot of information that is often communicated to higher levels in the organization in the form of business proposals such as: price discounts, product bundling, shelve exhibition improvements, promotional activities, special operations and finally, suggestions for new product developments or new presentations of existing products.

All these business proposals, if properly handled, could be used to meet and exceed the commercial objectives of the company. However, our experience also indicates that most companies don’t have a formal process in place to efficiently turn these business proposals into tangible business results or to spread success stories fasts enough.

So, the remaining questions to be made are...

How can we manage all business proposals suggested by our sales force?
How can we bring visibility to all these business proposals?
How to build consensus to detect opportunities with greater potential?
How can we prioritize best opportunities with objective metrics?
How can we better prepare our sales force to deal with new campaigns?
How can we spread case-studies and best-practices faster?

But communication and collaboration along the supply chain is also essential, with a special focus on product promotions, such as rebates or subsidized promotional items, that can serve as excellent marketing and sales tools to drive increased revenues by providing incentives for customers to purchase select items.

Left Right

When you’re a big company that serves hundreds of channel partners and customers, it is critical that promotions can be easily managed and executed. Delays and confusion hurt efficiency as antiquated, paper or Excel-intensive communications routine, involving faxes, inter-office mail, courier, sticky notes, and other media, is the standard procedure.

This approach allows little or no real visibility into promotion outcomes and minimal access to the deal sheets, contracts, purchase orders, invoices and other relevant information. Other factors, such as price updates, supply interruptions, new vendor reps, out of stocks and unauthorized verbal deals simply add to the confusion.

Effectively managing this is difficult because the policies, procedures and underlying systems to address it are not in place. In order to drive profitable revenue, these processes must be monitored and evaluated as participants, programs and markets change. It requires the cooperation and communication of all procure-to-pay participants from corporate purchasing, to in-store buyers, accounts payable and managers.

Trade marketing teams should begin addressing fundamental questions more effectively:

What do we need to know in terms of data and documents to measure and track deal profitability?
What processes must we put in place to capture the information we need?
How can we get real-time visibility into the performance of product promotions?

Using a new breed of technology that improves both trade promotion coordination and values the human element of the process is a must.

Main Benefits

Innabler’s solution is a solution that stimulates and sustains connection, conversation and collaboration between the commercial area within the organization and its sales force and point of sale. It also allows a better use of synergies in the various sales departments by bringing the best sales-initiatives in one part of the organization to others.

It brings more value to this business process, which starts with improved innovation and the generation of business proposals and paves the way to improved sales, managed risks, and more efficient accounts payable processes that lower the cost of operations.

Instead of informally sending ideas around for approval, employees use our solution as a centralized location to manage all the workflow involved until approvals are in place. The system automatically engages each department that is required to participate, notifies all key parties once approvals are complete, improving internal communications and enabling all the team to share details more quickly to foster increased sales.

With our solution, the team responsible for trade marketing activities can:

Launch business proposal campaigns, announce prizes and rewards, acknowledge competitor’s activation activities, foster creativity and innovation attitude, select the proposals with highest potential, create an environment which helps to build a strong sense of attachment to the company as a consequence of a more fluid communication and collaboration.
Improve interdepartmental and store cooperation. Procedures can be aligned and synchronized, with integrated workflows that automate processes. Ad-hoc and verbal deals, as well as undocumented processes and procedures, give way to complete and common protocols and reconciliation processes and pertinent documents are made universally accessible.

Our solution excels when it comes to:

Create ideas campaigns to promote the generation of business proposals from sales force and evolve them into solid opportunities through a collaborative analysis.
Bring improved awareness and better visibility to internal contests and specific Market Programs;
Gaining better control over the creation and execution of product promotions, speeding approvals and enhancing awareness of product promotions.
Evaluate and prioritize new actions and brand activation initiatives with objective metrics.
Early detection and better visibility of competitor’s promotions and novelties allowing fast reaction for lowering market the impact in the business.
Improving the timeliness and content of the technical and other advisories distributed to salesmen.
Real-time tracking of the execution of promotion, brand activation initiatives and merchandising activities
Create an environment that helps to build a strong sense of attachment to the brand and company as a consequence of a more fluid communication and collaboration.
Knowledge sharing and best-practice visibility and analysis, comparing standard practices to out-performing ones.
Increasing visibility to reduce reserve spending by having a clearer idea of channel response to each promotion.
Solves the gaps in the Process Governance & provides ownership and control to the Business Process Manager while pleasing IT and senior management.

Only our solution enables you to design and implement your own Trade Marketing best practices. In addition, you can include your guidelines, create default tasks and templates, define evaluation methods and create scorecards. All these features can be customized and linked to multiple pre-defined models.

And you can enjoy simplicity at the start and sophistication only when you need it. You don’t have to use all of its capabilities at the outset. Start simply, explore new capabilities for greater levels of process maturity, according to your strategy and pace of transformation without any kind of new implementation or customization.

It solves the gaps in the Process Governance & provides ownership and control to the Business Process Manager while pleasing IT and senior management.

Do you still have some doubts? Ask us for more information.