Maximize Sales, Minimize Empty Shelves With Retail Insights

When a consumer walks into their local grocery chain or liquor store and finds empty shelf space where their favorite product should be, who is at fault?

The answer is less who and more why.

The out-of-stock is a direct result of siloed data across the beverage supply chain.

It’s time we put an end to out-of-stocks in the beverage industry by digitally connecting producers, distributors, and retailers. 

It all starts with cross-tier transparency and open data sharing. 

Access Live Inventory

Leverage Real-time Depletion Data Flow From Retailers

The lifespan of consumer trends is getting shorter and shorter. Traditional straight-line forecasting - based on distributor sales-to-retail data from the previous year - is no longer a working strategy. Consumer demand is too volatile and fast-changing.

To combat the unpredictability, distributor sales representatives are spending an average of 45 minutes of every hour-long store visit taking inventory - likely while freezing in the cooler. 

The goal of the counting is to use sales and purchasing decisions based on week-to-week comparisons of manually recorded product counts. Like using last year’s sales data, this, too, has flaws. For example, there’s no way of determining whether a product sold out on Day 2 or Day 6. 

Fortunately, today's modern distributors are equipping reps with live inventory and depletion data from retailers. As a result, they’re selling more liquid and reps are reinvesting saved time to more sales-driving tasks. Ultimately, this creates a better experience for consumers browsing the shelves.

Get Out Of The Fridge

Spend Less Time Counting, More Time On Revenue-Driving Activities 

Reps are ditching their jackets to spend more time outside of the cooler in meaningful conversations with their retail accounts and building better displays.

“With more time, I've been able to place more and new products, build and replace competitive displays, and gain shelf space.“ - Brad Pollart, Account Manager, Eagle Rock Distributing

In addition to inventory visibility, alerts can be set up to notify sales reps about stagnant items. In turn, they can help retailers make necessary adjustments to get products replaced with faster-moving, higher-margin products. 

Sales reps can also access low stock warnings for retailers, indicating they don’t have enough product to carry them through until their next scheduled delivery.

Retail Insights creates a win-win-win for sales reps, retailers, and consumers.

Tip The Scale

Capitalize On Growth Potential Of New SKUs

The desires of the individual consumer are more diverse than ever.

Most recently, the RTD (ready-to-drink) category has been on the upswing. The category was projected to grow 11.4% between 2019 and 2024. 

The industry knows this category is on the up-and-up, but, until now, there hasn’t been a way to forecast product popularity to the detail of individual retailers.

When a sales rep has daily insight into product movement at the individual retailer level, they can recognize the unique product movement happening at each of their accounts.

For example, Retailer A might sell a ton of canned margaritas while Retailer B sells more canned rum and soda. With comprehensive and granular insights into retail inventory, sales reps can see and understand these consumer trends in a much more actionable way.

Level Up

Leverage Retail Insights To Surpass Sales Expectations 

The core of a digitally connected supply chain is rich with opportunity. Retail data transparency is the first place the industry should turn to capitalize on these opportunities.

You can leverage retail data and insights to:

• Improve demand planning practices and inform production

• Optimize product mix and placement

• Understand the minute details of consumer behavior

• Diversify product portfolios based on trends at the individual retailer versus trends seen across the industry

• Identify timely promotional opportunities

As an industry, we can all work together to practice data-driven decision-making and bring the three-tier system into a future where unpredictable consumer demand will not be met with clunky troubleshooting practices, but rather with creativity, agility, and unity to consistently get the right products into the hands of consumers.