‘Tip of the Iceberg Podcast’ — Matt King of Simplified Trade on executing produce promotions
How much money is being lost if only 44% of food promotion plans sent down from corporate are executed accurately at the store level?
Depending on the grocery retailer’s size, it could be thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales opportunities in fresh produce and beyond.
The stores best at properly executing promotions were BJ’s at 82% and Meijer at 80%, and the lowest-scoring stores were Family Dollar at 23% and Stater Bros. at 25%, according to a 2019 Simplified Trade survey — even before the major labor issues of the last few years.
There has to be a better way, Matt King thought to himself as he encountered this lack of accountability and oversight in promotional sales, during his stints with Safeway, Del Monte Foods, Campbell Soup Co. and Pepperidge Farm.
Today, King is founder of Simplified Trade, based in Redondo Beach, Calif., where he works with retailers, brokers and suppliers nationwide to offer them his solution.
Simplified Trade is a survey-based web and mobile application that enables users to gather and share retail information among manufacturers, brokers and retailers in real time with transparency. It also provides a one-stop-shop to manage a national network of partners.
Listen to this interview with King on "Tip of the Iceberg Podcast," Season 4, Episode 2.
The result is no more wondering why a product promotion succeeded or failed. There’s an ability to see and resolve execution issues as they happen, increasing a company’s return on investment.
You don’t want to wait until a monthly or even weekly sales reports show you sales drops, when the promotion is already over and you can’t fix it.
Also, “You need to know the why behind the numbers,” King said. “Why were your sales up? Why were your sales down? Is it because that beautiful display program that you had, the program was just a really bad idea? Or because it didn’t get executed well at store level? It was too difficult.”
His company’s app can send a request to brokers or store-level staff for a one-minute survey to be filled out about the promotion. The recipient takes and uploads a photo for visual verification, and it has a time stamp to prove it’s a current photo. This visual and written data is sent to higher-ups immediately so overall trends can be spotted and changes made quickly — while the promotion is still happening.
A key competitive advantage is the ability to change, pivot and leverage the information gleaned from the data to drive improvements.
“Everybody’s talking about data, data, data. Data is great, but if you can’t get actionable results from it, then it’s no good,” King said. “It’s just a bunch of numbers.”
Related: Find more "Tip of the Iceberg Podcast" episodes here.
