Marketing departments are constantly facing the challenge of being considered cost centers instead of revenue units, even in industries where marketing is front and center – such as in consumer packaged goods (CPG). But how to measure your brand’s growth in a way that will show upper management that every dollar invested in marketing leads to increased revenue?
A mobile app for retail execution allows reps to perform physical counts and other in-store activities right on their mobile devices. Additionally, since most retail sales audit software solutions run on the Cloud, office-based supply chain professionals have instant access to audit results, allowing for virtually no lag time between data collection and reporting.
Fraudulent check-ins, besides being unethical, can lead to a host of issues for businesses. Out all of them, fraudulent check-ins are especially detrimental due to the consequential overlooking of mission-critical issues such as out-of-stocks, hazardous displays, or damaged shipments. But how to prevent or even eliminate fraudulent check-ins of merchandisers and reps?
Planogram compliance checks and retail audits take a lot of people and, along with it, exponential amounts of paperwork and transcription effort. Because of that, solutions for merchandisers have gained a loyal following among CPG companies and their sales and marketing agencies. But in which ways is a solution for merchandisers streamlining planogram compliance checks?
Merchandising and brand managers traditionally work at a CPG manufacturer headquarters or regional office, isolated and sometimes blissfully unaware of what actually goes on with their product or brand at actual stores. This not only affects their perception of their product’s positioning, placement, and price but it may lead to inappropriate strategies, damaging sales in the long run.
Supervising outside staff and field reps is one of the hardest parts of a manager’s job description, just because there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the activities being performed by the team members throughout the day. That is the main reason many companies are implementing solutions for field marketing. Through mobile technology, smartphones and tablets have become an essential tool for outside teams. But what are the main benefits of a solution for field marketing?
Adopting a system for merchandising is the first step in achieving the oversight necessary to effectively monitor retail channel strategies. With a system for merchandising, management can streamline keeping track of merchandise sets and resets, promotions, etc, by customizing audit forms and capturing valuable information without having to go through the cumbersome activity of transcribing paper forms.
With a mobile merchandising app, smartphones and tablets not only replace the old pen-and-paper method – virtually eliminating cumbersome data transcription – but also become de-facto merchandising auditing tools that provide managers real time access to retail planogram compliance check results.
Retail planogram compliance checks used to be notoriously complex activities due to the scale of operations necessary to implement them on many stores – and then transcribing sometimes thousands of pages of data in order to generate reports. VisitBasis solution for automation for merchandising in store came into the market with the purpose of making recurring retail planogram compliance checks drastically easier to implement and report – and it delivers.
Calculating retail merchandising metrics such as product, category, and store KPIs is an essential part of many businesses, from large CPG companies to supermarket and drugstore chains. However, collecting the source data beyond what is supplied by cash registers can be incredibly complex, since it might involve ground teams with dozens or even hundreds of people.
