Run Your Promotions

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how to schedule and execute trade promotions.
• Explain how manufacturers pay retailers for trade promotions.
• Define the different key performance indicators that measure trade promotions’ effectiveness.

Get Ready to Roll

Now that NTO and Alpine Group agree on the details and the promotion is finalized, it’s go-time! Gustavo is excited to execute the tactics in NTO retail stores. For each tactic, he can select the following components.

• Products, depending upon the promotion template setting
• Tactic type
• Duration
• Lift factors, for example 25% incremental volume
• Compensation model and rate of the tactic.
• Included or Excluded, include or exclude a tactic out of the multiple tactics added in the promotion

See It Happen

No one likes lack of information, and the same holds true for people running promotions. Gustavo and his team need to know what’s happening when and how their promotions are going. They monitor all of their promotions in the trade calendar in Salesforce TPM, broken down by:

• Dates or time frame
• Products
• Customers

The trade calendar is the entry point for Gustavo. It presents a visual overview of all the promotions and its related details on one screen.

Gustavo uses the trade calendar to:

• Access existing promotions and Account Plans (P&L) for the customers and related product category.
• Review basic promotion details of all the existing promotions.
• Create new promotions.

Make the Payments

The promotions are live and results are coming in. It’s time for Alpine Group to pay the retailer NTO. Consumer goods manufacturers pay retailers to run promotions, which drive the sales of their products. The retailers send a payment request for their executed tactics.

Just like promotion performance, payments are also tracked in Salesforce TPM. The manufacturer pays the retailer for running the promotion or they reconcile the invoice in another way. 

There are several ways to pay retailers, and they’re all handled through payments management—the process of a settlement between retailers and manufacturers, when manufacturers pay the retailers to cover the costs of promotion. 

Tactics within promotions create costs. Payments in TPM are used to validate payment claims or deductions from the retailer and link tactics to them.

Retail customers like NTO sends payment requests to manufacturers such as the Alpine Group. These payment requests are claims for remuneration of tactic costs. The responsible team at the manufacturer evaluates each of these payment requests to decide whether or not the claim is justified fully, and accordingly resolves the payment request.

Post Event Analysis

Once the promotions are done, the products are sold, and the retailers are paid, Gustavo wonders—did his efforts make a difference? Once again, Salesforce TPM provides him the answer. Gustavo reviews the impact of a promotion using insights of volumetric, financial, and other KPIs. Actual volume and costs are interfaced and can be reviewed in promotions or account plans.

Salesforce TPM helps customers determine if their promotions were effective and successful. The TPM dashboard tells users like Gustavo if their promotions hit the correct targets. These KPIs and metrics are either monetary (proceeds in sales), by volume (actual number of products sold), or percentages (year-over-year increase). Through these KPIs, Gustavo can evaluate just how well his promotions have worked.

These calculations help Gustavo to estimate the total promotion costs and actual sales. He can then compare these results with his planned goals to determine if they’re met, not met or exceeded.

With real-time reporting, Gustavo configures reports that access the KPIs directly from the Salesforce TPM Processing Service. The data is consistent and updated in real time. The following types of reports are available:

• Scorecard real-time report: The scorecard gives a matrix-view on the KPI totals and more details on each product’s KPIs.
• Flat list report: The flat list report shows weekly and monthly views of KPIs. It can compare previous years’ values with this year’s.
• Nested report: A nested report is a report integrated into a promotion page. For example, an account plan scorecard can be integrated into a promotion.

The Way Forward

The data and results from these promotions do more than just showcase success. They also demonstrate what does and doesn’t work for specific regions, products, and categories. They provide new information about what motivates consumers and how to build more successful promotions in the future. These new KPIs and results are the starting points for the next round of promotions—just like the data Gustavo used to create the promotions in this module. It’s truly a full-circle journey!