Is finding the right Trade Promotion Management solution the beginning or the end of your journey to trade promotion effectiveness?

While light years ahead of Excel spreadsheets, and so a major step in the right direction, securing a trade promotion management solution is really just the beginning. Great you have one. Now you need to make sure everyone is properly trained on it so they maximize its usefulness. Then you need to conduct diagnostics to track proper compliance, meaning that the users are putting in all their volume and deals by retailer by promoted group. Too often the users take a short cut and leave out data they don’t think is necessary. This leaves major data holes making proper tracking and reporting down the road impossible, which could lead to disastrous over or under spending. 
If your data is complete and accurate another area along the journey that can hurt trade promotion effectiveness is poor administration. Often the administrator is an admin person and even if they have the skill set, they can frequently change jobs leaving a lot of down time retraining a new administrator. One option is to make sure your trade promotion management provider can help you get through these down times with ongoing administrative expertise you can tap into.
Now that it’s up and running efficiently, to truly impact trade promotion effectiveness, you need to utilize the trade promotion management solution to help analyze the spending and results at key retailers and with key promoted groups both in terms of the syndicated consumer data, as well as, with SPIN data and the sales and spending data within the solution. This is traditionally an area where CPG manufacturers, particularly the small and medium sized ones, fall way short due to lack of resources able or capable of doing the analysis from lack of time or expertise. Yet this information is critical to determine how effective your trade spending was so that you can change things to improve effectiveness going forward. This is also another area where the right trade promotion management provider can help you with the ability to tap into trade experts to analyze the data and provide insight into better strategies and tactics.