Top 10 Trade Marketing Pain Points
1. Poor Data
You probably don’t get the right data you need to deliver your trade promotions. Nor are you able to make that data executional. Is all your data accessible and operational? Can you find it easily? Can you act on it?
2. Logistics
Mastering the logistics of budgeting, building and distributing sales tools is incredibly difficult as there’s an endless array of skills and processes you need to master. Do your projects take forever to complete? Are they bottlenecked? Are you drowning in spreadsheets?
3. Low Communication Accountability
When you have information coming at you from a variety of sources (eg. email, phone calls and texts), it’s easy for things to get miscommunicated or lost. Poor communication is a huge downfall for any business, especially when it is unclear who is responsible for certain deliverables.
4. Disconnected Platforms
Hacking together single-purpose, siloed platforms creates an unstable environment and system fatigue within your team, leading to weak adoption in the organization. This results in messy, dirty data to organize and huge scalability issues for your department.
5. Improper Foundation
Standard CRM and ERPs are probably inappropriate for your brand’s operational marketing needs. While these platforms provide some benefits, they cannot offer what growing brands need for trade marketing, even when combined.
6. Lacking Operational Automation
The trade marketing team is often saddled with a huge volume of diverse tasks. With competing priorities, most trade marketing departments lack the capacity to get all the work done. Automation of the volume tasks is essential for the brands growth.
7. Department Wars
Are all your departments working together cohesively, or are they constantly fighting tooth and nail for their individual priorities? Your departments need a comprehensive overview of company directives with clear lines of communication pertaining to each project.
8. Poor GTM
The Go-To-Market (GTM) process can be very complex. Every functional group needs to deliver on time. When this does not happen, your trade team can end up doing things like building a POP program with no artwork or campaign direction, and rushing to production when the artwork finally shows up. Major errors happen when your GTM isn’t flowing.
9. Outdated In-Field Data
Not staying up-to-date with your in-market activations can be perilous for operations and dealer relationships. Don’t forget: trade marketing = sales tools, and if the trade team is blind and deaf to the marketplace, the tools will always be off the mark.
10. Mismanaged Fixtures & Displays
If you don’t have a defined process, there are a number of things that can go wrong including distribution, economics, logistics, tracking, service, recall, repair and end of use. Do you know where all your fixtures are?
These issues merely skim the surface when it comes to the depths of the trade marketing world. Whether you have a couple, a few, or all these problems – Regulator will get your organization running smoother and faster than ever before. We find that most brands need all the help they can get. That’s what we’re here for.
