Solution

Commercial Excellence

Navigate the tectonic shifts in retail to accelerate growth

Three forces are reshaping the commercial agendas of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies today: a radically transformed retail environment, changing consumer behaviors and expectations, and an exponential increase in the volume of data available to guide decision-making.

Any one of those trends poses a challenge for CPGs. Retailers are under intense economic pressure as channels shift and new competitors drive prices down, making it imperative that CPGs work more closely with them to develop mutually beneficial programs. Consumers are demanding more value for money, but also want healthier, more sustainable products, and more convenience. And, despite significant investments in data and technology, the expected insights and productivity gains have not materialized.

Our Commercial Excellence framework is designed to address all these challenges. Whether you need a targeted solution to solve a single issue, or a broad rethinking of your entire commercial excellence strategy, we can help. Across five distinct pillars of commercial excellence (see below) we can work with you to identify the sources of value, and deliver on them. We also help you transform your organizational operating model, and enhance your technology capabilities, to support your Commercial Excellence strategy.

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Channel Strategy

Your commercial excellence strategy begins by identifying sources of value, and a foundational step on that journey is determining which channels and customers to target and invest in, and how to optimize your route-to-market approach.

We can help you develop a category management vision and then assess the disruptive forces in the modern trade landscape, analyze shifting profit pools, prioritize channels based on a number of external trends, develop a consistent view of channel and customer archetypes, and deploy your resources for maximum ROI. Over the past decade we’ve helped more than 100 CPG companies enhance their channel and route-to-market strategies, to achieve 2-4 percentage point increases in gross margins.

Route to Market

Spanning every link, from factories to retailers, our powerful approach to route-to-market ensures you keep a tight grip on even the most complex emerging market value chains. We can help you revitalize your route-to-market (RTM) models and gain deep insights into and control of your distribution and wholesale networks, so you can get your product onto retailers’ shelves.

This is a critical capability, because supply chains are more volatile than ever, competition from digital disruptors is intensifying, wholesaler and distributor relationships are fragile and fragmented, and potential hits to the top and bottom lines lurk at every stage of a product’s journey. These risks can be hard to spot, and they often play out differently in different markets.

Our experience has shown that when RTM is elevated to a strategic level it yields multiple competitive advantages, including a boost to brand strength, more efficient and cost-effective processes, and a greater ability to identify growth opportunities. It also keeps your company a step ahead of e-commerce and other market disruptors.

We support you with a carefully tailored approach that helps drive growth, by focusing on the specific elements of your RTM strategy that need improvement, or through a complete reinvention. We’ll help you identify potential digital disruptions and embrace the digital solutions that will keep you competitive. Our broad expertise in innovation and transformation will help you capture more value and revitalize your business.

Revenue Growth Management

Revenue growth management can jumpstart your performance by providing transparency across key value drivers and anchoring opportunities in customer plans. We can help you:

Use data analytics to align your economics with retailers’ at a detailed (SKU) level
Identify growth opportunities based on price, promotions, mix, trade terms and more, across your three-year plan, as you differentially invest based on customer priority
Conduct a before/after assessment of profit pools, and implement your plan effectively, with adequate guardrails and a repeatable methodology

In the last 10 years we have successfully worked with clients on more than 80 revenue growth management projects, boosting gross margins by 3-6 percentage points.

Key Account Management

Next-Gen Key Account Management is an Agile-based, end-to end approach that enhances the joint value you can create with your retail customers. Build customized plans for each account, anchored in a deep understanding of their strategy and the joint profit pool.

Our approach includes FrontView^SM, our proprietary state-of-the-art software solution, powered by advanced analytics, that will enable you to manage plan definition, negotiation, results tracking, and plan monitoring. Using FrontView you can model scenarios and trade simulations and develop individually tailored plans that produce maximum value for you and your customers.

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Perfect Sales Execution

Adopting a store-back, category-driven blueprint, Perfect Store helps you make critical assortment/planogram decisions by channel and store archetype, using store data and advanced analytics to zero in on the drivers that make the biggest impact. Install dynamic KPIs linked to trade terms and conditionality, and use our diagnostic and Perfect Store analytics software to more effectively orchestrate brand and item placement, layout, promotions and more.

Since 2010 we have worked on more than 200 Perfect Store projects, helping clients achieve a 3-10% sales improvement while reducing the cost of sales contact between 10-25% through our Perfect Store contact strategy.