In speaking with salespeople about trade spending, common responses tend to revolve around how they need to be ‘selling’. They do not have time for trade analysis & they view all the ‘numbers’ as something that finance should be addressing.
They need to ‘be out there selling’.
After decades in the business, along with 20 years in CPG sales leadership, I’m still not sure what that means.
Sure, a CPG sales resource must be personable, but that is all key functions on a team. In addition to leadership, sales teams need to get results. In CPG sales, this includes exceeding revenue, volume & profit targets. While revenue & volume can be rather simple to quantify – an acceptable profit is another matter.
The key controllable for CPG sales is maximizing their trade budget, both in terms of dollars & margin. This can be addressed in a variety of ways, to be discussed in other posts. However, the relationship between revenue, volume & trade spending is at the core of CPG sales. You need a command of this at a customer level, whether a customer that buys directly, or a retailer buying through a distributor.
Then, the focus of the salesperson / sales team is to maximize the trade budget for maximum benefit to both the brand & the retailer. Without this, an organization is not leveraging the benefit of the trade dollars; a major portion of the marketing budget & typically 20% to 30% of your gross revenue.
While sales teams need support (some call it Trade Marketing, others Revenue Growth Management) & there is affordable outsourced resources here, this area of business management needs to be at the core of the sales team & their primary focus.