The secret sauce to higher Route-to-Market (RTM) performance isn’t doing more things that increase your efforts.
But rather putting in the right efforts.
When asked the time-immemorial question “how to increase sales”, most leaders have the same fix.
Expand the length and breadth of distribution in the hope to win the game.
That’s majorly why new products and new promotions are always hitting the market.
But yet, they lose.
~ Because it’s easy to know which markets to penetrate but not which shops to sell in.
~ Because we assume to know where demand is, but fail to measure it.
~ Because efforts don’t always have to be increased, but have to be right.
So, instead of exhausting 100% of your efforts into executing, bifurcate them 80/20.
Because not knowing is the real devil!
Channelise 20% of your distribution efforts to understand the performance and potential of your channel and salesmen, the dynamics of the market and the perfect places to place your product. This makes it much easier in executing distribution successfully with the remaining 80% effort.
For example, to increase your market share in a highly competitive market, should you just run around and sell your products in more shops? Wouldn’t it be more logical and easier to understand what consumers want, and sell those focused products and SKUs to your existing retailers in the market?
Here, you’re increasing the output, without increasing the input.
And that’s efficiency!
But while this sounds great, it will probably take 200% of your team’s efforts to achieve that kind of intelligence.
Luckily, life gets better.
Retail intelligence tools like Beat Optimization use predictive analytics to tell salesmen the right combination of products and SKUs for each retailer in the market. This keeps the sales representatives more focused on what they need to sell and saves them hours each day in deciding what products should be sold to whom.
Some other great examples of leveraging retail intelligence to increase sales efficiency are the Trade Promotion management tool and Business Intelligence.
The TPM tool uses advanced metrics to analyze the effectiveness of trade promotions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. At the same time, BI captures every business data point and analyzes them rigorously to bring out the real-time performance of the business, its products and its employees.
Right now, we’re half past 2022. It’s time you discovered the 20% of efforts that will help in achieving 80% of your goals!
Talk to our team at marketing@mobisy.com to learn more about our Retail Intelligence platform or request a demo below
