Example: Small Start-Up Company succeeds in tracking sales and availability of its Natural Chilled Juices across outlets in is lead markets allowing the company’s marketing team to assess product performance by SKU and Channel-Outlet classification. Company could successfully measure, manage and direct product development strategy and channel marketing strategies.

Situation:

• A small start-up company that was funded by an investor group needed to track sales, delivery and replenishment rates by product SKU and the respective channel of distribution (e.g. small restaurants, deli’s and convenience stores) in several major metro lead markets. Generally manufacturer requests were similar in nature with either scheduled or ad-hoc requests. These requests for reports and RFI’s would greatly “stress-out” Distributor resources.
• The company contracted with several specialty beverage distributors in each of the lead markets.
• The challenge was to help the client gather weekly delivery and sales data from each of the different distributors, standardize all disparate distributor reports and ready all data for analysis using the RNI Accelerator Platform & Dashboard.
• The Marketing group needed to evaluate weekly performance against highly targeted marketing initiatives for mining and queries.
• The immediate need and opportunity was in securing the data from each distributor in a seamless process and to have weekly data available for analysis within 24 hours of weeks end.
• Insights from the data would direct product development and investment requirements to grow the new brand as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Action:

• The manufacturer’s sales and marketing leadership group worked with RNI to communicate the information needs to the respective Distributors and the weekly timeline needed to be achieved and the specific data feeds, data formats and reports needed.
• RNI’s Data Management Team worked closely the Distributor to secure all important data feeds and how the data would be handed off to RNI including API or emailed spreadsheets for entry into the RNI data store.
• RNI created the data warehouse from all available data and created a data repository focused on products and specific retail outlet classifications y lead market and distributor.
• RNI put its Business & Sales Accelerator Platform and Dashboards into place for client data mining, report generation, marketing analytics and insights for action.

Results:

• The RNI Sales Accelerator Platform & Dashboard™ acted as the clients lens on the business and was the application and tool that drove all insights, marketing initiatives and investment needs.
• The clients own highly granular datasets were analyzed by the investment group in understanding business development, sales opportunities, business sizing and investment spending.
• The clients marketing team was able to track flavor and promotion performance and effectively manage the product line and targeted marketing spend.
• The client and investment team succeeded in managing spending and investment while shortening the learning cycle for product in-market performance.