Case Study
The following case studies are from our own customers, in their words. The customer names and brands have been kept
anonymous because this isn’t about who was right or who was wrong. The value in these stories is that the “truth” in execution
was provided to solve differences of opinion with fact-based data. Transparency wins if you’re good at what you do!
“I recently traveled to a regional supplier meeting knowing the discussion
would be centered around poor execution by the distributor network. I
came armed with CPG Data reports in hand. One-by-one the supplier
verbally attacked each wholesaler, stating the brand goals would be
exceeded if only the distributors executed against the chain ads.
When he directed his frustration toward me, I said, “For our most recent ad,
we had 93% coverage in displayable accounts with over 1300 cases on the
floor. All displays were up by the end of day Thursday, and I have photos of
each display here with timestamps, store locations, account numbers, and
sales reps names. If you’d like it in MS Excel format, I’ve got that too.” The
room went silent and I smiled.”
“The Thursday prior to Super Bowl, one of my largest suppliers called to ask if
I had heard of our largest competitor telling Safeway we were not allowed to
build displays during Super Bowl week because we were not an official
sponsor of the NFL. My supplier said he had heard from other wholesalers in
the area that this was occurring and he asked if I could confirm or deny this
practice at Safeway in my market.
I logged into the CPG Data Enterprise Portal, filtered by supplier and then by
the chain “Safeway” under the “Week to Date” timeframe. Not only could I
confirm all 21 of my Safeways had a display to support this supplier’s brands,
I also exported all of the photos to a PDF and emailed it to him (my supplier)
while we were on the phone; complete with time stamps and addresses of
every display captured.
What could have ended up being a long phone call, followed by many other
phone calls, injecting stress and disruption to my sales team during one of
the most critical weeks of the year, ended up being a 5 minute call that made
me feel very confident about my team and kept my supplier off my back.”
“It usually takes 4-5 weeks to compile all the information my supplier requires
for our big St. Paddy’s Day display incentive. This year, I logged on to CPG
Data, filtered the display photos by supplier, then by sales rep, and was able
to export each photo to a small, email-friendly PDF along with the matching
data in an Excel spreadsheet. I then emailed both files to my supplier.
This task took me about 7 minutes. It was quick, easy, and timely to provide
my supplier with exact photos of the displays and their corresponding data.”
“Mother’s Day weekend we had a big ad with our largest chain. We had 278
displayable stores in the chain and wanted to see if CPG Data could help
improve our execution. At the end of the ad I was disappointed to learn we
had only executed 58.8% of stores with an average display of 16 cases.
I addressed my management team who politely told me our previous
best-recorded performance against a similar ad was 27%. After reviewing
the results, we were quite pleased with our execution; not because 58.8% is
acceptable, but because we now had a more complete understanding and
actual baseline starting point to grow from for the first time ever.”