The on-line supplier

Is the long-term task of any supplier to become the brand of choice? Does it matter that you are currently an online supplier only or a niche provider for a limited demographic in a specific territory, or that your business is a regional provider of multiple goods?

Is there a responsibility to grow the business into a Megabrand? If so, does it matter what the strategy is?  Will the relationship with the customer determine the final outcome?

What are the six commercial capabilities of the brand? What is the strategy for the brand? Is there a brand vision?

Managing the brand

Any brand strategy requires a brand vision that focuses on the core areas of brand productivity and measuring the competition.

Sales talent is grown around the brand and should focus on the areas talent strategy, functional capability standards, sales capability embedding, building an expert network, advanced negotiation skills and coaching for high performance.

Brand productivity requires that the business encourages joined up business planning, category development and shopper insights, Trade spends and investment, channel and customer profitability, Trade strategy, brand passion, the route to market and distributor management.

To measure the competition the brand needs a commercial scorecard, amazing relationships, search and spin Organisational Alignment and finally a global channel or customer strategy

Sales Vision  

A trading strategy focuses an organisation in all markets and is a fundamental activity toward achieving a sales vision. A sales vision is an integral part of the annual strategic planning process that enables the portfolio and consumer strategy to understand brand strategy, which helps generate channel prioritisation to identify where to activate the portfolio strategy. The sales vision combines with the overall plan output to inform and drive the commercial plan.

The Process

A vital part of the process is scorecard measurement that aligns the organisation with the final outcome.  A scorecard commits various stakeholders to the plan.

A trading strategy takes the most used tools and blends them with the experience of a variety of markets and distils it down to focus on core outputs.  A trading strategy should be easily understood by the entire organisation and can be fewer than 20 output slides.  It should remain true to the original version to keep the continuity of experience.

Trade strategy outputs

With an effective trade, strategy organisations can prioritise on the channels and brands to focus resources behind to achieve the long-term business goals with our customers.  A trading strategy establishes the priorities for growth by understanding the trends, issues and opportunities.

Decision making

A process of developing a trade marketing strategy challenges any organisation to decide which parts of the business you will be focussing on, with which brands, and where the greatest challenges lie in achieving corporate objectives.