ARE YOU FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL?

Let's get a jump start on 2023!

This is your opportunity to address the common pricing challenges beverage alcohol businesses face so you can better manage (and improve) your margins, run DAs more efficiently and effectively, hone in on your brand, hit your sell-through goals, and start increasing profits.

Of course, improving your processes and performance means adjusting your approach to the?entire cycle of pricing and three-tier distribution?management. This includes everything from promotions, depletion allowances, your QBRs, and your gross-to-net—and we can help.

Here are 4 most common three-tier pricing challenges in the industry:

Challenge #1: Tracking Promotions in Real-Time

How do you track promotions in real-time? You can start by choosing Trade Promotion software that helps you get a complete picture of the real promotion spend and pricing data all in one system. Tradeparency lets you?track all your promotions, such as?by-the-glass programs, depletion allowances (DAs), free goods, incentives, and samples.

You’ll be able to plan profitable promotional models at any level from the most comprehensive view of your trade program performance. Automating pricing approvals from any device will enable your sales team to serve and coordinate promotions with your distributors more effectively in the moment, without waiting for long allowance authorizations that only come after lengthy accounting exercises.

Challenge #2: Getting the Full Picture on Gross-to-Net

It can be easy to focus exclusively on depletion allowances (DAs) when managing your pricing and margins, especially when most pricing tools focus just on DAs too. But they don’t tell the whole story and are only one in a long list of expenses you need to account for. These other expenses include sales incentives, non-distributor vendors, and sample costs.

Using?Tradeparency centralizes every one of your expenses, it will give your team more visibility and more control over the profit margin.

Challenge #3: Covering the Gap in Third-Party Depletion Data

Most traditional wine pricing strategies and solutions use third-party depletion numbers that won’t account for all agreed-upon deals and real invoices. It sounds reasonable in theory (especially since it’s standard industry practice) but relying only on external information results in at least a 30% gap in pricing data.

The gap is especially evident when you reconcile chargebacks and are missing the actual agreement data with the distributor. You stand to leave thousands of dollars (sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands) on the table going this route.

But when you lean on modernized Trade Promotion software that uses real-time data and actual invoices integrated with centralized pricing grids and accounting records, you will remove all the guesswork associated with chargebacks and recapture the rest of 30% to protect your profit margin. You’ll have the ability to verify that the price and promotion commitments you made align with the chargebacks and invoice adjustments thanks to 100% coverage on distributors, marketing, and promotions.

Challenge #4: Putting Your Quarterly Business Reviews to Work

How do you make your QBRs more productive and strategic? Start by ensuring that during the QBR meeting, your sales team can track your existing promotions and automate pricing approvals. If you’re using centralized?full-cycle Trade Promotion software, your sales, finance, and IT teams can all be ready to ensure price cohesion and processing at a moment’s notice.

Your sales team will be empowered to respond to status questions because they’ll have access to accurate reports, and your finance team will be free from the painful process of gathering data to approve DAs and promotions (that usually slowed down the QBR in the process).

By using a?trade?promotion management platform, everyone in your business can work from a single source of the truth through the entire?pricing and promotion?process?that will?drastically increase the value and the purpose of distributor QBRs.

At?Tradeparency, we are dedicated to?helping?sales?victories unfold by delivering a solution that empowers account managers with their?distributors.?Contact us today?to talk more?about how we can help seamlessly bring?your?sales, finance, and IT together?to eliminate the friction, serve the distributor,?automate billback reconciliation with accurate data, and plan successful promotions.?