Developing markets hold tremendous growth potential for the FMCG industry and are likely to generate new consumer sales of $11 trillion by 2025, an equivalent of 170 Procter & Gambles. However, local competitors and smaller brands will fight for that business in ways that established multinational FMCG brands have not seen. Smaller brands currently account for 19% of dollar sales and more than half the growth (53%) in the FMCG industry.
These changes in the FMCG industry have prompted sales leaders to re-assess their strategy and create an opportunity for sales teams to discover new business models, leverage technologies, and further corporate learning for long-term growth and brand loyalty. Brands must equip their sales force with in-depth market insight delivered in real-time to enable them to deliver consistent results month after month.
Lack of data at POS restricts growth for FMCGs
As new competitors enter local markets with locally relevant products and win market share, established brands need to respond and compete with a strategy that helps maintain market share while identifying new growth pockets to leverage.
FMCG sales teams struggle to hit their targets and capture market share due to the lack of real-time data across the distribution chain. Identifying and maximizing growth opportunities is almost impossible as sales teams lack insights on:
- who is buying their products,
- where the demand for their products are, geographically,
- why there is an increase or decrease in sales,
SG&A costs also remain high, up to 20% of revenue, as sales reps spend a considerable amount of time physically visiting merchants, collecting POS data manually, and then entering them into spreadsheets. The lack of actionable, syndicated data insights coupled with the manual data collection efforts leave sales teams unable to capture new geolocations and drive growth.
Actionable, data-driven insights is the only way forward.
Succeeding in this competitive marketplace will require sales teams to re-evaluate their route-to-market strategy, leverage the wealth of consumer data available to identify areas of new demand, and take advantage of these growth pockets with real-time, data-driven insights. To expand into new geolocations and increase market share, sales teams need a solution that
- Captures real-time data from multiple points across the entire distribution chain
- Sifts through the large amounts of data captured,
- Generates actionable insights that can be applied to drive sales.
By capturing POS data syndicated across the entire distribution chain and identifying the micro-consumption patterns in the market, sales teams can create new sales opportunities by:
- Understanding and segmenting their customers: With real-time, syndicated data analytics, you have in-depth visibility across the entire distribution chain and can create custom, targeted propositions for different customer segments. You also see the most effective promotions for each buyer type and replicate them to drive growth.
- Generating and evaluating effective route-to-market (RTM) strategies: The current route to market in developing markets has a high cost to serve and is one of the FMCG industry’s barriers to profitable growth. To effectively win new markets, FMCGs need to establish, integrate, and digitize ecosystem partners across the end-to-end RTM value chain. Adopting a digital technology-based approach to RTM, sales leaders can increase sales by 20% and salesforce effectiveness by 5 to 10%.
- Failure-proofing the supply chain: The supply chain is the lifeblood of any FMCG business, which is why 83% of industry decision-makers rate “out-of-stock” as the number one pitfall affecting ROI. Using synced geoanalytics data, sales leaders can optimize the distribution process by merging multiple delivery networks to create a faster, more efficient distribution chain. Research has shown that FMCGs that integrate data analytics into their operations lead to a 4.25x improvement in delivery times and outperform their competitors by as much as 5% in productivity and 6% in profitability.
Create new sales opportunities with RedCloud
Seeing just how important real-time, syndicated data analytics is to create and optimizing new sales opportunities, brands need a solution that gives in-depth views into sales data to uncover unmet needs and identify growth opportunities. Simply put, your business needs RedCloud.
RedCloud is the FMCG industry’s first digital open commerce platform that unlocks the value of the distribution network and transforms each industry connection into potential valuable data points. Our intelligent platform captures real-time data syndicated across multiple data sources in the distribution chain – distributors, retailers, and merchants and provides actionable recommendations to sales teams. With access to actionable, data-driven insights, sales teams can better allocate their Inventory across the value chain, moving beyond simple reactive operations to take proactive decisions.
RedCloud also makes entering and competing in new geolocations easier by enabling you to evaluate the distribution landscape, identify the strongest distribution channels for your business and prioritize the best retail partners to ensure success.
