14.05.2020

Weekly wins: Understanding the power of tactical sales insights

Learn how reliable weekly POS tracking gives you the insights you need to optimize promotions, product launches and those all-important seasonal sales events. 

Today, sales management is increasingly driven by promotions, product launches, and seasonal sales activities. With shortening product life cycles and volatile consumer behavior, you must maximize sales during these key moments of truth. And that means being regularly informed as to what’s happening at the point of sale. But how regular is regularly enough?

Tech manufacturers have been basing their strategic decisions on GfK’s monthly POS Tracking for decades; however, tactical decisions are different. To stay competitive and meet targets, sales, marketing, and product teams need more frequent insights into sell-out performance so they can spot and act quickly on opportunities and weaknesses.

Weekly POS is more than monthly data divided by four

Having weekly POS data in the form of tactical sell-out insights for your own and competing products provides the full picture across all relevant channels—online and offline. You can use this data to answer questions like:

  • Which are the most successful products in the market?
  • What is our market share?
  • Which market trends do we need to look out for?
  • How does our product pricing compare to our competitors?
  • Does our distribution strategy fit to the channel trends?

At-a-glance: six reasons to believe

 

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And here’s what these mean in practice:

1. Deep dive into sales week by week

With our monthly reporting you know what was sold, which channels performed best, how the competition is doing, and the bestsellers. However, by detecting under- and over-performing areas across all channels on a weekly basis, sales managers can take immediate corrective action to improve the efficiency of the salesforce or distribution network, and negotiate with high-potential retailers.

2. Track price developments efficiently

Monthly average prices can be helpful when creating a pricing strategy, but of course prices fluctuate during a month. Tactical pricing decisions need continuous attention. How much will consumers pay for a product? Am I selling at the right price? Is my competitor’s pricing better than mine? Crucially, Pricing and Product Managers need to understand the maximum price achievable for a product depending on the stage in its life cycle. Weekly sell-out data bring valuable insight into pricing decisions on sales performance.

3. Maximize the impact of marketing campaigns

Sales and Marketing Managers need to optimize their trade marketing spend. Regardless of the activity—price, in-store sales promotions, or advertising displays—they need granular insights on sales uplift vs. budget invested. Monthly data may show a sales increase in the respective month, but weekly POS provides detailed sales data to track the promotion’s impact shortly after the actual sales took place. More frequent reporting allows sales and marketing teams to maximize impact by acting fast—such as continuing promotional activity that delivers an uplift, or terminating a campaign that fails to deliver.

4. Optimize distribution during seasonal events

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Singles’ Day—special events dominate the retail calendar. Today, Black Friday is the most important sales peak for retailers outside China. While our monthly POS data will show that November was a very strong month, the weekly view will allow you to compare Black Friday against Cyber Monday and analyze sales performance on channel level.

5. Monitor market acceptance during launch

Launches are the ultimate moments of truth. Whether you introduce a new product, feature or product line, you need rapid feedback on performance. Weekly POS provides performance data to support adjustments to a launch strategy. It also provides objective sales KPIs to better negotiate with merchandising planners and buyers on the retail side.

6. Reporting based on objective insights

Headquarters expect weekly reports on sales performance across countries and regions. Country Managers need quick access to objective performance insights at product, country and category level to define and implement counteractions. Weekly POS data provide reliable KPIs on SKU level to understand the performance.

For more information about how weekly sales data can help you maximize your product revenue—including use cases on tracking price developments, maximizing ROI on marketing campaigns, perfecting distribution and monitoring market acceptance during launch—download our whitepaper here.