trade spend
There are 15 entries for the tag
trade spend
By Kristin Avery
The topic of “Trade Spend” can be a difficult one to tackle. Where does one start? What key words should I type when doing an internet search? Who are experts on the topic? What information can I trust?
All right, don’t panic! Answers Systems is here to provide the answers to all your “Trade Spend” questions. You can start to tackle the topic of “Trade Spend” right here. Instead of conducting a general search on the internet that would cost you time browsing through article upon article, Answers Systems has compiled 5 of their most visited “Trade Spend” blog...
By Greg Hilton
As I pass and continue to approach some age milestones, I am becoming much more reflective about life. From time to time, I realize how little I know and how much I wish that I had listened better in grade school and college. Maybe a little more study time would have enabled me to better answer some of the questions that I get asked.
Questions like:
1. Is Steven Tyler a better American Idol judge that Simon Cowell?
2. Where did Myspace.com go wrong and Facebook.com go right?
3. Is their life after working in the Foodservice industry?...
As I was working on a list of things to get prepared for our team attending this month's National Restaurant Show in Chicago, I happened to start humming "Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music for no particular reason. It inspired me to write some alternative lyrics. Go ahead . . . close your office door and sing along with me:
Verse 1
Coffee and soda, some samples for sipping,
Delicious salsas wait for chips to come dipping,
Neat little trinkets in bags with pull strings,
These a
Great job – You are a manufacturer sales representative setting up a trade promotion contract for a large chain account and you figured out how to double your volume on the contract.
Not so great – You got twice the increase in volume by selling your products for half the listed price!
Synopsis – You may be the shortest tenured sales representative in the history of the example company. I put that together after only the minimum “required economics” courses in college.
Throughout recent history the Foodservice and Trade Spend Management industry, as well as much of corporate America, has used really cool big words to describe trends and philosophies.
From the early eighties, we had Total Quality Management (TQM), a management theory for defect reduction and heightened quality standards. Sun Tzu (that is him on the right), an ancient Chinese military general penned, “The Art of war” and a whole industry of management theorist began translating the logic of
Posted by Tom Tipps
There’s been a lot of dialogue around the topic of trade-spend management in the Foodservice industry; but, in all honesty I’m not sure the industry has ever really agreed on the definition of “Trade” Spending.
From my perspective Foodservice trade spending involves incentives paid by manufacturers directly to their operator and distributor trading partners…to motivate those trading partners to purchase, sell or promote the manufacturers products/brands to the restaur
Posted By Greg Hilton
Here is a simile for you . . . Buying a reporting solution and not considering the cleanliness, accuracy and timeliness of the data being analyzed, is like installing a beautiful water faucet in your kitchen and hooking the plumbing directly to your sewer line.
Good data is like a filet mignon!
I was on a phone call with a potential customer the other day. I love being involved in the sales process because you really get energized by offering answers to the problems th
Posted by Tom Tipps
Through our decades of experience in managing trade promotion transactions for foodservice manufacturers, Answers Systems is able to validate many of these statistics with real-world examples.
Technomic says, "On average 28% of trade claims are overstated."
For Answers Systems' clients the numbers range from a high of 50% for new clients to a low of 22% of seasoned clients. The critical statistic is that the dollar value of invalid claims totals 15% of the total dollar
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Do you ever get songs stuck in your head? I do. Today’s song is “Surf City” by Jan & Dean. “Two girls for every boy” and “I’m going to Surf City where it’s two to one. Yeah, I’m going to Surf City. Gonna have some fun.” It’s kind of annoying, yet it got me to thinking about ratios. Surf City apparently had a 2:1 ratio of girls to boys. I started wondering what kind of ratios I might find in the quarterly report I received regarding our data mapping for our clients' tra
Posted by John Nicholas
Over the past eight years I have interviewed scores of foodservice manufacturers. At some point in the conversation, I ask them whether their sales and marketing efforts and trade spend dollars are primarily geared toward operators or distributors? Every manufacturer recognizes the value of their distributor partners, and the need to support the distributor’s efforts in getting their products to market. Having said that, most manufacturers feel more than a little quea
Posted by Stacy Jackson
While at work this morning, I had one of those random memories pass through my mind. It was of a scene from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You may remember this part where Slartibartfast (crazy name, huh?) tells Arthur Dent about a race of super-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings who built Deep Thought, a supercomputer designed to calculate the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Much to the beings’ dismay, Deep
I am, by no means, what you would call a gamer. Yes, I grew up during the height of “Pac-Man Fever,” went to the arcade frequently, played Atari at home, followed by Nintendo in the later teen years, but I pretty much left the video games behind after college. Left them behind until I fell in love with the Nintendo Wii. I now even have a GameFly subscription.
I have rented everything from Resident Evil to The Dog Island, which I did conquer by the way. I have Silent Hill, Spore, Raving Rabbid
Imagine this…
Every month you get your credit card bill (not very hard to imagine!), you hop online, and pay your bill. The only difference is that your credit card company only provides you with a total amount due. There isn’t a line item statement included detailing the charges to your card. Would you just pay your bill and trust that they’re not charging you an inflated interest rate or billing you for charges you didn’t authorize? Probably not. You could potentially be throwing away mone
As Data Acquisition Liaison, I work with foodservice distributors to set up electronic data transmissions for trade spend contract management. In today’s competitive economic environment, electronic data and automated file transmissions are key to maximizing trade spend billbacks that occur on the end-of-the-supply-chain. Answers Systems has both manufacturer and operator clients so there are many opportunities to streamline data interchange for all 3 sides of the foodservice triangle.
My
In a recent foodservice conference someone made a case that manufacturers’ expenditures toward the trade should be considered “investment” not “spend.” An executive with a very large food manufacturer made the statement . . . “Don’t try to kid yourselves, most of it is spend, not investment.”