If there is one problem common to vendors selling products through a retail channel it is getting a handle on the ROI of trade promotion dollars. Unless you are responsible for spending and managing these funds it’s hard to appreciate the complexity of this problem. But the reality is as much as 30% of sales are spent on trade promotion. That is allot of money to pour into a program without the ability to track effectiveness.

So what’s a vendor to do? Unfortunately there is not a simple solution but one tool that seems to work is carefully monitoring POS data available from your retail customers. By looking at weekly unit sales for promoted items it is possible to calculate the lift associated with your trade promotion expenditures. As we have chronicled on this blog that brings many challenges also.

As you develop the capability to work with POS data remember these best practices: 1) Working the data should be the smallest portion of your effort. If you find yourself spending 80% of your time building reports you’ve got a problem. Seek a better solution. 2) Define your business objectives first, then build exception based reports to isolate top performers and laggards. If you expect a program to create a 15% increase in sales then use software to compare week over week unit sales and automatically color in red those SKU’s that are below expectations. 3) Measure and manage. Much of the decision making on how trade promotion dollars are spent is done based on gut feel and buyer feedback. Or worse yet trade promotion dollars are given away at the negotiating table without a clear measurement and management strategy. Instead learn to track the unit sales and then trust your numbers and make impartial decisions.

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