One challenge that scaling CPG companies face is their reliance on a geographically dispersed workforce to capture essential merchandising data from various retail locations around the country. Monitoring your own inventory as well as checking up on competitors’ activity is critical for your bottom line. In this post, we will discuss three types of merchandising reports that every CPG business experiencing national growth should be using, all of which can be created with retail audit software.
Keeping track of your brand’s performance is difficult for smaller companies that are new to the national retail landscape. Regardless, knowing how your brand stacks up to others is crucial to its sustainability. Field merchandising reports provide business leaders instant access to insightful data on retail operations. Knowing the condition of products, inventory levels, and amount of shelf space available helps back office managers prevent problems from occurring before they snowball into bigger issues. This becomes especially important as a brand gets placed into and ever-growing number of retail outlets.
The specific types of data that a CPG company will want to collect in a field merchandising report varies slightly from business to business. Nevertheless, there are certain categories that any and every company should be paying attention to. Those are: product availability, out-of-stocks, units ordered, retail price, discounts (if applicable), quality of merchandising, communication with the retailer, and in-store activity. Some retail audit software tools enable photo and signature capture, both of which serve as verification for merchandising representatives’ daily work, as well as customization to any mobile form.
Many CPG organizations hold in-store promotions at locations that stock their products as part of their retail execution strategy. To measure the success of these events that require a lot of preparation, it’s imperative that companies gather data about them. Amassing data about promotions allows managers to ascertain which ones are effective and which are not. More importantly, managers can better understand how to improve those promotions that did not meet expectations.
So what data should be captured in a promotions report? One thing to identify is the promotion type (tasting, demo, etc.) and its duration. Other things to note are which products are being featured, the promotion’s position in the store, the number of representatives working the event, and overall effectiveness of the event. Effectiveness might defined as product sales, number of potential customers who interacted with the promotion, amongst a host of other possibilities. Photos can be used to supplement quantitative data where appropriate.
Often underutilized, competitor reports are extremely important for retail execution management. Merchandising representatives serve as managers’ “eyes and ears” in the field to reveal information about what the competition is doing. Therefore, acquiring data about their activity in an organized format can bolster your brand’s longevity as it moves into the national retail marketplace.
Identifying who your primary competitors are and which products are their best sellers should be noted in a competitor report. Other data to record are competitors’ pricing, promotions, number of product facings present, and indirect competitors. In some cases, it’s advantageous to snap a photo of competitor activity and indicate any new competitor threats. Knowing what the competition is doing empowers a company to act proactively, rather than reactively, by augmenting its retail execution strategy as needed.
Keeping tabs on how your CPG brand is performing on a national level is usually easier said than done. Having the ability to gain key insights based on what’s happening in the field can help your business remain agile and react to market conditions faster. Using retail audits is a powerful way to derive the most vital data from the field, and in turn, act on it.
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