Amidst rising inflation rates, a top-class revenue growth management suite is something that’s helping companies successfully fight business volatility. The post-COVID supply chain constraints, raw material cost increases as well as ongoing general inflation, all pose significant challenge.
For consumer goods companies, the input cost becomes a major expenditure, making it harder for them to thrive in the market, balance their revenue and profits.
Finding the right consumer value equation has proven to be a significant challenge, forcing CPG manufacturers into sales vs. profit decisions.
A fully integrated revenue growth management solution suite, incorporating trade management and optimization, pricing analytics and top-down, bottom-up collaborative planning (AOP) can be the key to maximizing profitable revenue growth.
CPGvision is one of the leading companies addressing these challenges with this kind of solution suite., With over 16 years of Salesforce experience under his belt, Mike Mellin has always been committed to delivering customer success. As the CEO of CPGvision, Mike’s leadership style is such that it reflects trust and confidence in his team to make their own decisions and also drive strategy to reflect the company’s core values.
How did the journey of CPGvision start?
PSignite, the parent company of CPGvision, has deep roots in developing applications on the Salesforce Platform. and was the development arm of the platform even prior to acquiring CPGvision. Adam Bartkowski, the founder of the company, spun PSignite from PolSource, which he also founded.
“Bringing the two together in the same company was a natural extension for us.”
CPGvision is a fully integrated Revenue Growth Managements suite, focusing on the key issues that plague CPG companies today. With over a decade of trade promotion management experience, CPGvision is a platform that has further expanded its services into RGM, helping its clients optimize their trade spend, pricing strategy and manage the entire interactive AOP process.
Challenges and the Growth
One of the biggest challenges in the industry is the sheer amount of data. TPx solutions are data-hungry and we have invested in resources and expertise to help our clients maintain systems with a healthy data foundation.
But is has been the team that has made the difference for CPGvision. Working as a team with a problem-solving mindset proved to be the key factor in promoting the growth of the company.
Revenue Growth Management is something that has been traditionally a service offering with consulting companies. It is something these companies have usually carried out well on a project basis. But, CPGvision’s unique solution made it all easier. With a comprehensive software suite built on the AI and ML models of the company’s in-house data science team, they are able to provide a seamless experience that enables all the functions involved in RGM to be on the same platform. CPGvision clients have the advantage of working with up-to-date models at their fingertips as the work through pricing and promotion decisions that impact their business.
This unique solution, coupled with the team’s core values focusing on client empathy was the single best mantra that worked wonders for CPGvision’s success.
“If you focus on driving success for the client, everything else follows.”
Sailing through the Pandemic
The pandemic has been a period of testing for every person. Right from small scale to large scale, every company has had its fair share of challenges through these tough times. Business dynamics that used to be fairly static are not any longer.
We used to talk about a brand’s price elasticity – it was a number that didn’t change much from year to year, Now we talk about what we expect the price elasticity to be next quarter, next year. The need to react quickly and nimbly to the marketplace is what is driving our company’s growth. You can’t do it in spreadsheets any longer, it happens too fast, it changes too often.
CPGvision’s Suite of Products and Services
Wrapping the full suite of revenue growth management into one integrated software solution is what makes CPGvision stand above the competition.
While the company is addressing issues that have plagued the CPG industry for decades, the COVID and Post COVID era has magnified these issues and manufacturers have a need to be more agile in their response. Add in now, inflation and a potentially serious economic downturn, and CPGvision’s solutions are more in demand than ever.
Here are the three main service offerings of CPGvision-
TPMvision
TPMvision gives you the tools you need to quickly set up, manage, and evaluate your promotion plans!
Less compiling. More executing.
CPGvision makes planning efficient with an intuitive, but powerful UI. This makes switching from spreadsheets to software a breeze. Capabilities include:
- Full-cycle TPM transactional managemenent – budgets, allocations, promotion planning, reconciliation
- Single and multi-promotion cloning and annual plan cloning
- Promotion, contracts, rebates, and terms on one plan
- Ability to plan both directs and indirect accounts
- Promotion KPI’s calculated as you plan
- Side-by-side scenario planning
TPOvision
TPOvision can be layered on top of not only CPGvision’s platform, but has been built to work with nearly any TPM on the market. TPOvision provides:
- Post-Event Analytics
- Scenario Planning
- Full Plan Optimization
- Promotion Optimization
The Insights package from TPOvision equips you with a suite of advanced reports and dashboards that help you understand your trade spend effectiveness through:
- P&L views
- Pre and post-event analysis
- Price sensitivity
- Win/win reports
RGMcloud
A powerful solution suite added to the capabilities of TPMvision and TPOvision, driven by ML and AI. Drive the accurate predictive analytics you need behind your RGM functions.
RGMcloud delves further into revenue growth management, providing AOP Planning and Price Elasticity Management.
Maximize margin while balancing consumer value
Price management can no longer be an annual or even quarterly activity. Use RGM cloud’s Price Elasticity Management tool to have updated models at your fingertips, with a powerful UI that enables faster speed to action on pricing decisions.
Create a meaningful action plan
RGMcloud’s AOP planning allows you to define and analyze your current state through gap analysis and closure to create a meaningful action plan.
Plus, engage all stakeholders within your organization through a top-down and bottom-up planning process to effectively fill in any performance gaps.
Harness the power of AI and ML in one RGM solution
Integrate the necessary, and often disparate data sets, so your entire team has ready-to-use trade promotion intelligence at their fingertips.
AI and ML models are packaged into a user-friendly UI that exposes the outputs of data science in a way that users can understand.
All of this allows you to generate accurate sales and spend forecasts, optimize trade spend, manage monthly accruals and reconciliations, utilize spend budgets more effectively, and be ready to analyze potential pricing actions with up-to-date models at the ready.
Helping Companies Gain an Edge
“We have different engagement models. We can meet our clients where they are, some prefer a crawl-walk-run strategy but more and more companies are coming to us for a full solution suite. They want to optimize trade, implement the TPM cycle and advance their RGM capabilities all at the same time”
This is a great suite to accomplish this. The CPGvision team can actually start the Optimization process during TPM implementation and a client can be up and running with optimized plans on go-live.
For those who choose a crawl-walk-run approach, the team will help the client develop their business processes through the TPM implementation, share best practices and get them moved over from spreadsheets. Then add capabilities in the RGM suite as they are ready. It’s important that client readiness drive the choice here.
CPGvision’s solution suite really gets at the heart of addressing key challenges facing the packaged goods industry, specifically:
- Inefficiency of trade spend
- Cross-functional planning and collaboration
- Productivity for the sales and finance teams
- Need for accuracy of financial accruals, faster reconciliations and audit trails
- Agile, data science backed price elasticity and price management
- The need for granular insights without having people manually managing minutiae
- A trusted business partner to help
What the Future Holds?
“Our customer success team works closely with clients to make sure they advance their use of the solution, and in the process develop their internal capabilities.
With close relationships comes a deeper understanding of the clients’ business issues so we can suggest either changes or add-ons if necessary. It also helps us, our clients are a key and consistent source of feedback for our product development team. We want to make sure our clients drive our roadmap.”
What Makes the Team Unique?
“I really believe you build a customer-centric organization by building an employee-centric organization first. A great customer experience starts with focusing on the employees delivering that experience.
Our team is really unique in the combination of software and packaged goods experience that we bring into each client relationship. We have people who have been on the other side of the table. It provides a level of empathy and expertise that is not always the case across our industry.”, says CEO Mike Mellin.
