POI Pulse, August 8 2016

Key Insights

–        Planning the right product assortment and a strong lineup of promotions means little if plans don’t get executed correctly and field sales personnel don’t have the right tools to understand what the issues are and to address them appropriately.

–        “Winning at the shelf” is not just relevant in the modern trade. Execution with the traditional trade is a significant opportunity in emerging markets because of the amount of growth therein.

–        Technology is only one component of addressing opportunities around promotion and distribution of consumer goods. Other factors include change management, providing best practices, and having appropriate support available in local markets.

Recommendations

–        Prioritize functionality above delivery method. The lines between SaaS, managed services, hosted private cloud, and public cloud are blurrier than ever. Your first decision is whether you will want to do customization to the solution that will take it out of the upgrade path. In the POI 2015 TPx and Retail Execution Survey we were surprised that only 21% of respondents said that the “[a]bility/willingness to do customization (write code) that would make [a] solution very tailored but turn it into a unique instance that would be out of the upgrade path” is not an important option. The question made it quite clear what customization entails, but the overwhelming majority felt that customization was important. You can customize your solution and run it on premise or in some sort of cloud, but if you customize then multitenant SaaS is, in the vast majority of cases, not an option. You just need to decide where the solution will reside.

–        Prioritize capabilities that will help users to be more effective, i.e. to “sell more.” Otherwise, why spend the money? These capabilities include retail activity optimization (RAO), image recognition, guided selling, social selling, gamification, voice recognition and in-flight analytics. Each of these is described in the Product Assessment section below. Our 2015 survey showed that about 80% or respondents do not have the “sell more” capabilities, so they give a significant competitive advantage to those who attain them.

–        Don’t neglect the needs of non-field users. This means managers and office-based personnel. We find that some solutions are quite mature for field users but can have significant limitations for those who have other roles. The same can be said for system administration tools and related personnel.

Ask for best practices from your vendor. The POI 2015 Survey found a wide disparity between expectations for best practices and what was actually delivered. Don’t just ask for best practices but also find out the background(s) of those who are expected to deliver them. Then, document precisely the sorts of best practices you are looking for and make this part of the scope of work.