‘Tis The Season
Forecasting and Planning for Next Year
Well, it’s that time of year again… along with the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, business planning is filling the calendar and forecasts for the coming year are full steam ahead. Planned dollars are flying around and the papers are piling up. Calendars are being consulted, contracts pulled out of drawers, and promotions from Christmas past are being updated for Christmas present.
Everything requires extra diligence and focus, yet the office is in disarray. The 20% of revenue spent on promotions is planned in a rush with a mashup of old spreadsheets, out-of-date calendars, and inconsistent promotion and deduction information.
And what was the ROI on that one promotion anyways? Did we make any money at all? The boss wants to know. Now. Right now.
Just like last year, promotion planning is rushed, disorganized, and stuffed into a giant Google spreadsheet or Excel workbook. Spreadsheets get updated and revised so many times with dubious assumptions and estimates that everyone forgets where the heck they started from. Surely there must be a better process…
Why We Exist
Horror stories about trade management abound — just talk to any CPG manufacturer. Recurring overcharges by distributors, tens of thousands of dollars falling through the cracks with Excel-based management, losing our marbles over promotions — you name it.
Savvy and forward-thinking CPG firms have moved their trade to cloud-based trade promotion management (TPM) software to streamline and tighten their promotion-planning processes. From our experience, however, most TPM tools have their own problems — just to name a few:
- Massive implementation fees with multi-year contracts
- Steep learning curve; multi-month, headache- inducing implementation processes
- Promotion entry workflows that present only a marginal speedup, or even a slowdown, compared to Excel-based ones
- Poor customer service reps with insufficient understanding of trade
- Over complicated and outdated user interfaces resulting in minimal usage of features
Shouldn’t TPM — such an important strategic spend for the brand — justify an investment? Will anyone ever create an easier, more efficient way to properly manage, track, and measure each dollar that goes out the door? Well… we sure have.
Who we are
We’re a team of senior trade managers who helped lead Justin’s, LLC and Perfect Snacks, LLC from infancy through exit, and Harvard/MIT computer scientists with work experience at companies such as Intel, Quora, and Facebook.
Over the last 2.5 years, we have built out three tiers of tools that have helped stellar brands such as Perfect Snacks and Lily’s Sweets massively improve their trade workflow. Our platform is truly built by CPG for CPG.
If you’re a CPG company looking to improve and better understand your trade process, or are just interested in what we’re doing, please visit https://cresicor.ai/, or reach out at hello@cresicor.com. We would love to hear from you!
Sources
[1] Brown, Pam.The POI 2019 State of the Industry Report, https://poinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019StateofIndustryReport-FINALFORWEB-1.pdf. Accessed November 2019.
