Food Manufacturer Feeds Profit With Data
A manufacturer of food service products leveraged distributor relationships to create a new sales database to end-user restaurants. Combined with its own sales data and developing CRM system, the company began a multi-year initiative to:
Accelerate annual sales growth.
Improve sales productivity.
Align strategy, sales commissions, and trade spending around 6 KPIs.
Situation:
A manufacturer of food service products leveraged distributor relationships to create a new sales database for end-user restaurants. Combined with its own sales data and developing a CRM system, the company began a multi-year initiative to:
Accelerate annual sales growth.
Improve sales productivity.
Leverage data into a competitive advantage.
Insights:
The company’s data represented a unique competitive advantage. Having the “last mile” from the distributor warehouse to the restaurant offered visibility to the purchase behavior of every restaurant. Giving the sales team better information could increase productivity, and the company could improve operations by transforming data into new insights, sales, and profits:
Focus resources on customers who matter most.
Develop fact-based growth initiatives.
Align all incentive programs to company strategy.
Outcomes:
Over a seven-year period, the company fundamentally changed its go-to-market strategies and created a new team of six business analysts to support new information and work processes that drove marketing and sales performance:
Accelerated results across a range of business goals
Record sale volumes in all years.
Sales productivity grew in 5 years.
Customer retention increased by 14% over the previous 3 years.
Aligned business partners to company goals by building the same Key Performance Measures into corporate strategy, sales incentives, and trade partner growth programs.
Created customer segments to support sales contact strategies and targeted marketing.
Leveraged technology to dramatically improve sales productivity.