How Consumer Goods Organizations Turn Every Store Visit into Measurable Growth
A five-part blog series for consumer goods manufacturers and the agencies that support them.
By Sam Barclay, Chief Growth Officer, StayinFront
Series Introduction
Field selling in consumer goods has an arithmetic problem that no amount of effort can solve.
A merchandiser or territory representative has, on a good day, forty to sixty minutes of productive in-store time. In that window, they are expected to audit the shelf, spot out-of-stocks, check pricing and promotional compliance, resolve issues with a store manager who has fifteen other vendors waiting, and, somewhere in there, actually sell something.
Meanwhile, the assortment has grown, the store universe has fragmented into thousands of independent and convenience outlets, trade spend has climbed, and head office wants more visibility than ever.
A better call plan or a harder-working team will not fix that. The information is already in your systems, and the return comes from putting it in your representatives’ hands the moment they walk in the door.
That is what the StayinFront Retail Optimization Platform (ROP) does.
StayinFront ROP helps teams drive measurable growth through a five-stage process that runs from the cloud to the shelf and back again: Opportunity, In-Store Conditions, Coach, Pitch, and Measure and Goal Set.
Each stage answers a different question:
1. Opportunity: where is the money, and which stores deserve the visit? AI models generate a Size of Prize: the dollar-value opportunity in every outlet, for every SKU, that day. Modular services including Intelligent Store Locator, Next Best Actions, Must Stock List of 1, Promotion Monitoring and RDI Suggested Orders feed StayinFront Dynamic Routing, which puts the representative in the right store at the right time.
2. In-Store Conditions: what is actually happening on this shelf, right now? Image recognition (IR) builds a “realogram” of the shelf or secondary location and measures on-shelf availability, share of shelf and quality of shelf instantly, so recommendations are grounded in reality rather than last month’s data.
3. Coach: what should this representative do next, and why? The platform shows the problem, explains the possible solutions and why they work, and recommends the best course of action. Coaching increases the skills and capabilities of your field team in real time.
4. Pitch: how do we convert insight into a sale? A custom pitch is built for that buyer at that moment, delivered through StayinFront Pitchbook® with Augment®, with usage tracked and the administrative journey from pitch to order automated.
5. Measure and Goal Set: did it work, and what changes next cycle? Field Sales ROI Optimizer measures the return on every in-store recommendation and action. Large datasets enable causation analysis that goes beyond correlation, and goals are reset at store, representative and route level.
The important thing about this process is that it is a loop rather than a funnel. Stage 5 feeds stage 1. The measured outcome of yesterday’s recommendation changes the size of the prize the model calculates tomorrow. That closed loop is the difference between a field force that executes instructions and a field force that compounds learning.
This series takes each stage in turn. Every post starts with the whole process (because no stage creates value in isolation), then goes deep on one. Every post is also anchored in what actually happened when consumer goods organizations put it to work.
Where This Leaves You
On their own, the five stages each solve a real problem in the field. Connected, they compound, and the organization improves with every cycle. The result is representatives who go where the money is, act on what is really on the shelf, and prove the return on every action they take.
Next in the series is Opportunity, covering how a quantified Size of Prize changes where your representatives spend their day.
Sam Barclay is Chief Growth Officer at StayinFront. Follow along as the series unfolds, or, to see the StayinFront Retail Optimization Platform at work on your own store universe, send Sam a message here on LinkedIn to book a demo and learn more.
Know More. Do More. Sell More.
