POI 2026 Spring Summit Session Pre-Read
From RGM to PRGM: Aligning Revenue, Category, and Trade to Drive Real Growth
Marc Kennedy, Director of Trade & Category Management, Land O’Frost
If you look at most organizations today, Revenue Growth Management, Category Management, and Trade (Sales Finance) are all doing good work—but they’re not always doing it together.
RGM is optimizing price and promotion.
Category is building the story for the shelf.
Trade is managing the investment.
But too often, those efforts happen in parallel instead of in sync.
The opportunity—and frankly the necessity—is to bring these three together into a single, action-oriented commercial engine.
Where Things Are Changing
RGM is at the center of this shift.
For a long time, it’s been a reactive function—adjusting pricing, responding to cost pressures, managing trade spend after the fact. All important, but largely backward-looking.
That’s changing quickly.
RGM is becoming more predictive, more integrated, and more strategic. Instead of asking, “What price should this be?”, the better question is:
“What role should this product play in our portfolio—and how do we design it to win?”
That’s a fundamentally different mindset.
This Only Works If Category Evolves Too
Category Management has a huge role to play here.
It can’t just be about reporting what happened or building a retailer presentation. It needs to become the bridge between strategy and execution.
That means:
- Connecting assortment decisions to price-pack architecture
- Translating shopper and shelf insights into clear actions
- Aligning directly with RGM on how the portfolio is structured
When Category and RGM are working together, you stop reacting to the shelf—and start designing for it.
Trade Spend Has to Be Treated Differently
At the same time, Trade (Sales Finance) needs to evolve from managing budgets to managing investments.
Promotions and trade dollars shouldn’t just drive volume—they should be evaluated like a portfolio:
- What’s the incremental return?
- How does this impact long-term price perception?
- Is this building the brand or just moving cases?
That’s how you shift from spending money to deploying it intentionally.
The Next Step: From RGM to PRGM
When you bring all of this together, you get what I’d call Proactive Revenue Growth Management.
This is where:
- Decisions are modeled before they’re made
- Trade-offs are understood in advance
- Functions aren’t handing work off—they’re co-creating the plan
It’s not about optimizing pieces of the business.
It’s about aligning everything around total growth.
The Role of AI (and Why It Actually Matters)
AI is a big part of enabling this—but not in the way people sometimes think.
The real value isn’t just better dashboards. It’s giving teams time back.
Time to:
- Go deeper on insights
- Pressure test assumptions
- Build real recommendations instead of just reporting results
And more importantly, AI allows us to simulate the future, not just analyze the past:
- Elasticity scenarios
- Competitive reactions
- Retailer-specific outcomes
The teams that win will be the ones that can see around the corner—not just explain what already happened.
What This Means Going Forward
The biggest shift here is simple:
We’re moving from margin protection to growth creation.
And that only happens when:
- RGM, Category, and Trade are fully aligned
- Insights turn into actions—not just presentations
- The organization operates with a shared, forward-looking plan
This isn’t just a capability upgrade. It’s a different way of working.
Less reactive.
More connected.
And a lot more intentional about how growth is actually created.
