Everyone Wants To Be Your Portal
It’s fourth quarter. Sales and Finance walk into a room to discuss the state of the business. “It’s great,” says Sales. “It’s lousy,” says Finance. You know what? They’re both wrong.
Two views, two sets of numbers, two objectives, and you’re bound to get more than one answer. And even though there are at least two sides to every story, that doesn’t mean that either side is correct.
The folks at “C” level – CEO, CFO, CIO – are sick of it. So you start to hear the rumblings around the office: ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), SFA (sales force automation). You’re being inundated with TLAs (three-letter acronyms). But it’s finally time to put everything you know about one thing in one place. It’s for your own good, even if there is some initial pain. Time to learn and use the new system that will bring it all together for you. Faster, cleaner reporting, a single source of data and activity. Time for that proverbial left hand to begin collaborative discussions with that right hand, so they know what each other is doing.
These systems all come on the Web now, and everybody wants to be your new portal. They all want to be the system that allows you to integrate and communicate and evaluate. Great, but don’t forget what you need to look at. You might have beautiful curtains, but look outside your window. Is your portal bringing you a spectacular picture of integrated activity? Or have they just moved the garbage dump into your backyard?
There are three big buckets (buckets is a technical term) of stuff (stuff is a technical term, too) you need to see in that portal: shipments, scanner, and consumer. It’s like food, clothing, and shelter. These are the tissue needs of basic integration and analysis.
Curiously Strong Shipments So how you do get your stuff to the store? Is it direct store delivery (DSD)? Do route drivers show up there once, twice, three times a week with all the product that store is going to need? Do you use distributors? Do you ship to distribution centers? If you have a new sister company, you can’t automatically assume that everything in your new family of products is going to get to the store the same way. Lots of bigger-than-you-ever-imagined CPG players face new challenges synchronizing distribution. I am not talking about putting everything on the same truck; I don’t mean the logistical supply chain side. I am talking about tallying everything you do with that mega-morphed retailer loaded with national clout.
How Ya’ Scannin’? You know what went in. Now find what came out. Syndicated scanner movement data is the lifeline to CPG reality. Be fluent in how you get it. Syndicated market level, key account, retail scanner area. Census or sample? (The biggest misconception I have found in my travels is about “census data.” It means data from every store in the aggregate. And that aggregate can be a market or an account definition. It does not mean that you get data from every store one-by-one.) Most reporting in these portals will give you one screen for shipments and one for scanner. Ask to see them integrated.
It’s the Consumer, Stupid Everywhere you see a customer you should see the consumer. Period. There is a monumental disconnect between making the sale to the retailer and thinking through to the consumer who is shopping in that retailer’s store. This isn’t an afterthought or a nice-to-have data set. Put the consumer into everything you do. If your field force has an SFA (remember what that stands for?) system in their hands as they walk the store, they should know what kind of consumers are likely to buy which products in that store.
“Linking the scanner and shipment tracking to a common consumer definition provides the means to diagnose short-term market dynamics based on strategic target definition,” says Tim Kregor, group vice president of product management for Chicago-based Spectra. “Then you can end the disconnect between the strategic panel-based target definition and market-level share change.”
Keep that three-item checklist in mind. Say it with me: SHIPMENTS, SCANNER, CONSUMER. Every time you look at a customer do you see shipment? Do you see scanner? Do you see consumer?
That’ll make sure the view from your portal doesn’t make you want to pull down the blinds.
