Need help to succeed in Retail and CPG industries or in related fields? Helping people succeed is what I have the pleasure of doing each day through the thousands of individuals, students, and corporate learners we serve. I love to build skills and capabilities within organizations and among individuals to help them succeed. Specifically, there are ongoing and new challenges and skill areas that we address through coaching and training services, including: Data to insights, including Shopper perspective Strategic thinking/Critical thinking/Business Acumen Fact-based presentation and storytelling Category Plan/Business Review Development Industry trends (e-commerce, shopper insights, omni-channel, AI, AR, IoT, etc.)

Note: This content is part of our new eBook on Category Management with Limited Data. Feel free to read and share.

Space Management has changed significantly over the past 20 years, but in many ways has stayed the same. What’s changed? Technology has improved significantly in space planning software. Data sources have become more plentiful, including store-level data, consumer data, and most recently, Shopper research data. There are also many things that have remained the same in space management for both Retailers and Manufacturers:

Gone are the days where decisions and recommendations to retail customers are made based purely on intuition and relationships. Sales and marketing teams need to take a fact-based approach to their business, starting with developing new skills in “retail understanding”, “proficiency in data”, and “category & business insights”. A fact-based presentations approach will help you uncover development opportunities as well as combat potential weaknesses through joint business planning (JBP). Some of the questions you need to be able to answer, include: Who are your Retailers and what are they trying to accomplish? What data sources are available to me and how do I analyze and interpret them? How do I create actionable recommendations for the Retailer using the tactics? Adding value to the Retailer through solutions and recommendations that tie in with their overall strategies and their biggest areas of opportunity will help move you from relationship-only selling to an added-value, more collaborative sales approach. The result? Win-win solutions for the Vendor and Retailer. But keep in mind, once sales teams answer these questions, their job is only half done. Their next step is to learn how to tell stories through compelling, fact-based presentations that connect with the opportunities and insights they have uncovered. Let’s review the most important elements of fact-based presentations.

Learn how to build strategic thinking into your analysis to understand more advanced Shopper solutions I’ve been writing and speaking about the components of category management which relate directly to the Category Management Association’s certification requirements, including: Steps of the category management process and the importance of Retailer strategy; Key data sources available and the different data insights to uncover; Drilling through data (including in a limited data environment) to discover strategic insights; and Assessing the health of your business.

Retail POS (point of sale data) is the “king” of category management data. Are you maximizing the use of this important data source? Retailer Scanned point of sale data and Retailer Measurement data from 3rd parties like Nielsen and IRI (key account data) are derived from scanned point of sale data. Together, these 2 variations of POS data are the primary data sources with which we do category management work.

Do your presentations need a "facelift"? Start with the basics of visual communication and storytelling. Presentations have become the de facto business communication tool. Companies are started, products are launched, audiences are educated—in small or large part because of the quality of presentations. Likewise, ideas, endeavors and even careers can be cut short due to ineffective communication. Out of the millions of presentations delivered each day, only a small percentage are delivered really well. The reason for this is many of us lack visual communication skills. Most of us were never taught how to move from verbal expression to visual expression (or have ever taken a PowerPoint training course). As communicators, learning to create visual stories that connect with our audience is imperative. Turning category management data and analytics into a compelling PowerPoint presentation that engages an audience starts with the basics—you need to give equal attention to developing the visual story and to delivering the parts of the presentation!