If you are in sales, you are constantly looking for ways to optimize performance, drive growth, and stay ahead of the competition. Your paycheck depends on it! One of the most powerful tools available to sales teams is syndicated data. Syndicated data offers invaluable insights into market trends, consumer behavior, sales performance, and competitive dynamics.
In this blog post, we’ll explore three key ways that CPG sales teams can leverage syndicated data: creating dashboards, reporting, and promotional analysis.
Creating or Using Dashboards: Visualizing Insights for Actionable Decisions
One of the most effective ways to use syndicated data is by creating dashboards that consolidate key performance indicators (KPIs) in a visual format. Dashboards take the raw data and put it in a digestible, easy to read format that is easily updated. Dashboards allow sales teams to easily track performance, monitor trends, and make decisions based on real-time data. Dashboards are found in many of SPINS products, but can also be created and customized by a trained analyst, manager, or stakeholder.
Why Dashboards Matter: Sales teams are often juggling multiple tasks—tracking product performance, monitoring competitor activity, and staying on top of regional sales data. Syndicated data helps by providing a comprehensive view of sales, distribution, and market trends across a variety of categories, regions, and time periods. With dashboards, all this information is readily available in an easy-to-digest format, helping sales teams:
- Track sales performance: Dashboards can show how sales are performing at the brand, category, or regional level, enabling sales reps to focus on areas that need improvement.
- Identify opportunities for growth: By visualizing trends, sales teams can quickly spot areas where demand is rising or where there may be untapped potential.
- Monitor competitive performance: Dashboards can display many different things; some of our most-utilized dashboards are Category Reviews, Brand vs Brand comparisons, Item Level reports, Promotional Analyses, and Void Trackers.
Best Practices for Dashboard Creation:
- Include key metrics such as total sales, market share, average selling price, and velocity.
- Include channel level data for broad insights, and retailer and banner level data to drill down for more information and root causes.
- Subcategory, brand, and item level information enriched with attributes can answer almost any question.
- Update dashboards regularly to ensure that sales teams have access to the latest data.
- Use formatting to highlight positive or negative trends – red (negative) and green (positive) is the most common way to bring this to life.
Reporting: Using the Dashboards To Recommend Action
Reporting is a little higher level. If you’ve created dashboards or have premade ones available to you, you can extract information from them and assemble them into a monthly, quarterly or yearly report. Often, these are presented as Executive Summaries – see our section on What Great Looks Like to get some examples of an Executive Summary.
Best Practices for Reporting:
- Know your audience! If you’re presenting to the C-suite, get to the point quick and don’t dote on small details first.
- Identify what is going on, hypothesize why that is happening, and then move to recommendations for action
- Include competitor data in reports to assess how well the company is performing relative to its competition. -10% growth could be bad…or it could be good (relatively speaking) if the category and main competition is down -50%.
Promotional Analysis: Getting Off The Shelf
Of all the dashboards out there, promotional analysis is one of the most important – and frankly, underutilized by many companies. A lot of brands think that getting onto the shelf is the hard part, and once they’re there, the brand can go on auto-pilot. Maybe so, but probably not. At the end of the year retailers rank their set based on velocity, and if your brand isn’t in the top, you might be ripe for deletion. Keep your brand top of mind and top in sales by executing, monitoring and adjusting your promotional strategy.
Why Promotional Analysis Matters: CPG companies spend significant amounts on promotions, and understanding which promotions are most effective is crucial to ensuring a solid return on investment (ROI). Syndicated data provides a wealth of information on how promotions impact sales, including:
- Promotion lift: Syndicated data can help measure the sales increase driven by a specific promotion, so sales teams can assess whether the promotion met expectations.
- Velocity & Market Share Gains: Ideally, good promotions goose your velocity numbers in the short term, and help pull buyers away from other brands in the long term, therefore increasing your market share.
- Long-term effects: Promotions don’t always drive immediate results. Syndicated data can help track whether a promotion creates lasting increases in sales or just short-term spikes.
Best Practices for Promotional Analysis:
- Promotions are very retailer and category dependent. Some retailers don’t promote at all, instead they offer Every Day Low Prices (EDLP for short.) What works in one category might not work in another. BOGOs (Buy one, get one) might work well for candy bars or drinks, but don’t hit the same for product with longer usage times like shampoo or laundry detergent.
- Track promotion performance over time, comparing pre- and post-promotion sales to see if there was a significant lift.
- Focus on key metrics such as incremental sales, lift in market share, and promotional lift when evaluating promotional success.
- Compare the effectiveness of different promotional tactics and adjust future campaigns based on what has proven to work best.
- Look for regional variations in promotional success—what works in one market may not work in another.
Conclusion: Using Syndicated Data for Sales Success
In today’s competitive CPG landscape, sales teams need to be data-savvy and responsive to market trends in real time. Syndicated data offers an invaluable source of insights that can empower sales teams to make smarter, more informed decisions.
As the CPG market continues to evolve, sales teams that fully embrace the power of syndicated data will have a significant advantage in making data-driven decisions that lead to sustained growth and profitability.