Sales Dashboard for UNFI, KeHE, and Whole Foods
Free Sales Dashboard for UNFI, KeHE, and Whole Foods to measure sales, velocity, and inventory.
by Foodbevy
Effective planning is a crucial process that guides you in optimizing business performance and achieving growth objectives.
However, many companies struggle with disorganized data existing in silos across various systems. As a result, planning lacks strategic direction because it is not fully informed by uniform information.
This makes it difficult to connect high-level plans to precise execution initiatives, further diluting your focus into the nitty-gritty of your campaigns. To overcome these challenges, it’s important to create a single source of truth for all relevant business data that your team can use for decision making.
The biggest planning requirements are around aligning your forecasted sales with production planning. Overproduce and you’ll have cashflow issues from product sitting in your warehouse. Order too little and you’ll end up with out of stocks disappointing your retail and direct customers. It’s crucial to avoid overextending into predictions – forecasts beyond 12-18 months become increasingly unreliable due to the dynamic nature of the external environment.
Instead, focus on your largest retailers and distributors that typically drive 80% of your revenues, like Kroger, Walmart, or Sysco, as their purchase patterns are more stable. Focusing on a few key customer segments provides a solid baseline to build your sales and marketing KPI projections on.
A common challenge faced by many CPG brands is the fragmentation of their planning data across various systems and departments. This includes customer, financial, and operational data, which are often scattered in different software applications. As a result, critical information, such as sales by product or store, may live in your ERP while customer profiling data stays in CRM.
Without a single source of truth, connecting these disparate datasets and understanding their relationships becomes a daunting task, especially for companies with a cross-functional structure. Consequently, valuable insights are overlooked, and initiating a new plan without a clear strategic direction becomes a significant obstacle. Ultimately, this fragmented data landscape leads to wasted time, effort, and brain fuel.
Uncovering the underlying factors behind customer behaviors often requires delving beneath the surface of aggregated sales numbers. To gain a comprehensive
understanding customer purchasing patterns and identifying growth opportunities, it is essential to incorporate detailed data at a granular level. This may involve analyzing purchases at the stock-keeping unit (SKU) level, considering factors such as customer, region, and time period.
It’s important to know where you’re going first to understand what you need to do today. Let’s say you have 500 current retail doors you’re selling into, and they’re roughly ordering 75,000 units per year. This acts as a good baseline, but how do you account for new store growth? Are you going to be adding another 50 or 1500 doors, and when? With production lead times often 1-3 months, you’ll need to make sure you have enough product on hand to fulfill the sales. This is planning at the Macro scale, based on your growth goals.
It’s also important to then know what’s going on at the Micro scale of your business. If you’re an ice cream brand, you may see a disproportionately high number of sales in the summer compared to the rest of the year. You’ll have to manage your production and inventory accordingly so you have enough to full fill in the summer months, but not pay high storage fees for unsold inventory in the winter. You’ll also want to know how your best stores are performing compared to your worst stores. Is the sales difference based on something you can control? Maybe demos are driving sales at your best stores, or maybe they’re located in the city center. Knowing this can help you manage how to increase your worst performing locations.
In order to overcome disarray and achieve a truly insightful planning process, CPG companies require a centralized system functioning as their single source of truth for all business data.
By adopting an integrated platform, previously isolated datasets can be seamlessly connected. Consolidating all information in a single location empowers planning teams to devise strategies that drive significant impact by delving into detailed insights about customer purchasing behaviors. Interactive reporting and dashboard tools empower granular data exploration across all dimensions to reveal hidden opportunities.
Promomash is a dedicated platform designed specifically for CPGs needing a single source of truth for marketing, sales, and business planning. Their solution ingests transactional data from all systems into an interactive and customizable analytics dashboard. They empower planning and marketing teams to analyze sales patterns both broadly and granularly by customer, region, product, and more.
By centralizing insights in one location, they allow CPG brands to continuously improve their planning process over time and make informed decisions. Additionally, Promomash supplies built-in, best practice KPIs, reports, and analytics relevant to CPGs to streamline workflows.
If you’re struggling with planning disorganization, explore how Promomash can serve as your integrated system for gaining valuable customer insights, which could help refine your strategies and achieve new growth milestones.
Free Sales Dashboard for UNFI, KeHE, and Whole Foods to measure sales, velocity, and inventory.
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