Operating as a trusted advisor

Nick Calver, Marketing Director

Is your approach to retail partnerships proactive enough to elevate your role beyond order taker to helpful retailing ally, or do you find yourself blending in with the rest of the herd?

Top-performing Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) companies recognise the critical role of building strong relationships with their retail partners. By positioning themselves at the forefront, they not only gain a competitive advantage but also unlock opportunities for success that would be challenging to attain otherwise. Leading CPGs leverage insights and establish themselves as leaders in category development, using their strategic positions to distinguish themselves in a crowded market.

  • Certain CPG manufacturers have broken [the] cycle. They’ve proactively entered into deep and broad collaborative efforts with retailers – and demonstrated above-average sales growth and profitability as a result.
  • Winning CPGs are almost three times more likely to apply their advanced analytics capabilities to predict and manage out-of-stocks at the store level.

‘Power partnerships’: Manufacturer–retailer collaborations that work – McKinsey

By pursuing this strategy, they evolve from mere suppliers to valued partners. The transformation is key to ensuring product visibility and store presence while aligning retail decisions with the CPGs’ interests. The ultimate goal is cultivating a win-win-win relationship that benefits all parties involved, including the shopper.

Trusted advisors develop a detailed picture of performance

Becoming a trusted advisor is fundamentally rooted in providing detailed, data-driven insights that enhance sales, reduce costs, and creates positive experiences for shoppers. To establish relationships that elevate their status, successful businesses distinguish themselves through their depth of understanding. They are not only adept at delivering store-specific intelligence but also excel in offering timely, fresh insights. This comprehensive approach demonstrates their deep understanding of the grocery landscape and solidifies their role as trusted advisors. Equipped with knowledge and insights, they are perfectly positioned to guide their retail partners towards informed decisions and effective strategies.

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“Every day, it gives us an incredibly granular view of what is happening at category level. That allows us to compare performance over different periods of time and understand the overall trends. More importantly, it helps us understand why things have happened and what’s likely to happen next, particularly in terms of predicting obstacles like compliance issues.”

Jon Colby, Data and Insights Controller at Hain Daniels

While you might think this is the domain of major brands and category captains, today, with the insights surfaced by advanced demand intelligence platforms, every supplier can become a trusted source of advice. 

It’s become a level playing field.

Supporting dual-pronged approach to collaboration

The importance of collaboration between suppliers and retailers cannot be overstated, yet many suppliers hesitate to engage for fear of overstepping boundaries. This in-depth intelligence and advisory role supports a dual-pronged approach to collaboration, effectively addressing the concerns of both buyers and supply-chain managers:

  1. Buyers are overwhelmed with new product proposals, promotion suggestions, and market analysis and prefer working with well-informed suppliers. Account managers who provide a high level of understanding, backed by clear evidence, quickly become trusted advisors to grocery buyers.
  2. Similarly, supply-chain managers oversee thousands of products and constantly strive for optimal stock levels. Retailer sales forecasting, while sophisticated, is not infallible. Suppliers often find discrepancies in stock levels or forecasts, and at times, even when everything ordered is delivered, on-shelf availability isn’t as expected.
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“We adopt a dual-pronged approach to collaboration. On the one hand, we aim to optimise efficiency – how can we streamline our retail partners’ operations? We explore options such as larger case sizes and improved order management. Simultaneously, we focus on improving product availability. We strive to enhance our cooperative efforts without encroaching excessively on their time.”

Jimmy Coulson, Head of Supply Chain at Yoplait UK

Establishing a deeper level of trust requires transparency

Emphasising the need for transparency next, successful retail partnerships hinge on clear communication and openness. Leveraging demand intelligence is pivotal for broad-scale collaboration, encompassing both commercial and operational spheres.

For CPGs, transparency is the cornerstone of deeper trust with retailers. It involves the open sharing of insights and aligning on metrics, significantly aided by utilising the retailers’ own data. This open-style collaborative approach not only fosters trust but also brings expansive advantages like improved product availability, more effective promotional strategies, and lowered distribution and inventory costs, creating a more efficient and responsive supply chain.

Collaborating more closely with retail partners by staying on the front foot

The strategic benefits gained from transparency and collaboration pave the way for more proactive and effective engagements with retail partners. Staying on the front foot is crucial if you aim to forge fundamentally better conversations with your grocery customers. However, it’s important to be mindful of certain pitfalls, such as:

  • Engaging customers with either too little or too much information.
  • Relying on large, complex spreadsheet models instead of coherent, relevant visualisations.
  • Overwhelming customers with extensive presentations rather than concise, meaningful, timely insights.
  • Bypassing hard evidence in favour of subjective ‘gut feelings’.

To avoid these pitfalls, successful engagement relies on data-driven decision-making to deliver genuinely helpful insights on trading patterns. This involves:

  • Spending more time exploring and understanding trading performance, and less on data collection and organisation.
  • Providing well-structured, visual reporting and analytics for effective communication.
  • Analysing sales determinants like pricing, distribution, wastage, and shelf availability to evidence impact.
  • Understanding and articulating distribution and service metrics to manage order volumes and availability targets effectively.
  • Preparing optimally for meetings with sales forecasts, distribution strategies, and new product updates.

By approaching partnerships this way, you can ensure that distribution, orders, and deliveries are optimised for the needs of your customers’ shoppers, working collaboratively with retail counterparts to make informed decisions in the interest of those shoppers. 

Want to see SKUtrak in action? Contact us today for a demonstration and learn how SKUtrak can help you become a trusted advisor to your retail partners.