Marketing at-Retail - Working Better, Not Harder - Part 3

Part 3

Share Your Data with Your Suppliers (and Recover Your Marketing Co-op Dollars More Quickly)

In Part 3 of this blog, we’ll look at one final information requirement within a typical alcohol beverage distributor; and see how Internet access to the needed information results in shorter rebate dollar recovery time.

Current Situation

You annually create tens of thousands of signs (or more), or provide hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of menus and beverage samples to your customers.

You have agreements in place with your suppliers to help defray the costs of these promotional incentives — but now, your suppliers expect you to account for what was placed, with whom, at what cost, and perhaps even a general correlation of point-of-sale spending claims to sales, in dollars or case-equivalents.

Creating the periodic “rebate reports” with this increasingly granular level of detail is difficult and becoming even more difficult as suppliers and brands increase. Reporting is a time-consuming, manual process and you’re not certain the reports are accurate, verifiable and timely.

Without a clear set of rules or written policies, it is possible that there are errors in your rebate reports. For example, when one branch creates their reports they use one set of rules, and when another branch creates theirs, they use different guidelines for filing for supplier marketing rebates.

The Solution

There is a saying that goes like this, “You can’t control and manage that which you can’t (or don’t) measure.” OnTrak applications were specially designed to help alcohol beverage distributor sales groups — sales reps, marketing, management, designers and graphics personnel — work together productively in all kinds of ways. Moreover, simply by using any OnTrak application, you will collect important Marketing at-Retail data.

Often distributors will adopt OnTrak’s managed Marketing at-Retail software applications so they can have a single place where the entire sales and sales support staff can share the updates to their point-of-sale databases and activities list.

OnTrak’s Internet-based applications facilitate information sharing so that supplier, product and customer data are easy to access by anyone who needs it.

OnTrak applications are the kinds of applications that beverage distributors rely upon to thrive and grow.  They become even more powerful when embraced and optimized by the entire demand generation team.

OnTrak applications provide the ability to measure, manage and control your Marketing at-Retail initiatives you need to maintain your competitive edge while they simultaneously handle your suppliers’ reporting requirements.

Perhaps you’ve always known — or at least hoped — there must be ways to make the jobs of your sale, marketing and administrative teams easier by getting them on the same page and communicating more effectively and efficiently with your suppliers.  Now you know for sure — there are!

 — Mark Fullerton