Shopper Marketers: Say goodbye to Final.Final.xls

Industry veteran Olga Yurovski, with more than a decade of experience at Fortune 500 companies as a brand, product and shopper marketer, understands the frustrations of shopper marketers.

We have outlined these frustrations below, have a read and see if you agree with us.

FRUSTRATIONS ARE REAL!

“Undoubtedly, the area that produced the most frustration was shopper marketing planning and forecasting. The process was daunting, and the plan changed 300 times anyway,” she says.

This daunting prospect was routinely executed with spreadsheets which were re-worked again and again.  The spreadsheets, often known as “Final.Final” brought short-lived sense of relief because the process would be re-lived in a month’s time.

Or perhaps, there is a highly suspicious formula in your excel spreadsheet and are pretty sure it is messed up. However, there is no way that you are going to touch it because you don't know who came up with the template or how it works!

Let's talk post event analysis… Whilst good at them, these required painstaking attention to detail which, when delivered to management, were briefly considered, and then filed away on some remote SharePoint folder never to be seen again.

Does this sound familiar?

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!

From frustration was borne inspiration. Olga channeled this frustration into a creative outlet and dedicated her time to building solutions for fellow shopper marketers.

Her journey from a corporate marketing world to a land of marketing technology startups gave Olga a unique opportunity to speak with hundreds of shopper marketers from dozens of CPG companies. She analyzed their common organizational challenges, then and jointly with her clients developed a new generation of technology solutions.

Loss of productivity is a leading cause of concern. Heineken USA says their sales team leadership spent too much time gathering updates regarding the status of their commercial and shopper marketing budgets and promotional plans. Exacerbating the problem was that they relied on multiple offline spreadsheets.

With the Shopperations software this changed.

In contrast, the software allowed the team to build and update promotional plans and budgets in real-time, as well as automatically export data into financial reports. Automated shopper marketing calendar and reports freed up the team to use their time in a more productive, beneficial manner - as the time-consuming manual work was no longer required.

In addition, the automated reports were more accurate and granular, which afforded them previously unknown pocket of opportunity to re-allocate investments across product portfolio.

The Heineken team also communicated extensively via email and lacked consistency and transparency.

However, with data available in real-time, email communication was required less frequently as were alignment meetings.

Consistency was addressed by introducing standardization in the form of establishing common naming conventions, spending principles and product hierarchies.

Heineken USA national sales director, Michelle Nachtweih explains: “We are now able to understand brand spends before they happen and ensure we are placing our dollars in the right spots.”

BUT CAN WE AFFORD IT?

The question on most people’s mind is “How much does this all cost?” When the pertinent question is, “What does an unproductive workforce, manual reporting and feeble communication cost us?”

With an effective planning and collaborative platform in place, savings abound! By utilizing an effective planning and collaborative platform, ROI is found in:

1. More productive teams
2. Decreased cost of analytics
3. Improved effectiveness of marketing efforts
4. Shortened financial audits
5. Faster and better onboarding of new  team members and agencies.

Should you want to know more about Shopperations as a solution to you frustrations, or to try our demo, contact us on Olga@shopperations.com.