Have you been considering a sales enablement or a commercial/retail execution solution but are not sure if it’s right for your business?
Do you have specific questions, but no time for a phone call? Scroll through this blog and hopefully you will find your answers (and if we missed anything – please do get in touch).
This blog was specifically created for the consumer goods (CG) industry, however some of the questions will be relevant for all industries. We have interviewed a number of key roles in the CG industry to be able to better understand their needs and how a sales enablement solution, such as Pitcher, could help them fulfill their objectives and alleviate their biggest challenges.
We have taken into consideration their areas of responsibility, their objectives (measures of success) and key challenges.
Roles interviewed:
- Head of Retail Execution
- VP of Sales or Head of Commercial
- CMO / Head of Marketing
- Field Sales Manager
- CIO
- Head of Training / Enablement
- Head of Trade / VP of Finance
Questions and answers with Pitcher
These following questions or scenarios may be applicable to your specific situation. They may be questions that you want to ask a sales engagement solution, such as Pitcher. Using this Q & A could help determine if a sales enablement solution such as Pitcher may be able to help you.
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Q: What if my needs are broader than sales enablement?
A: Our solution is a comprehensive sales enablement, planning and execution platform. We provide your sales reps, key account managers and sales managers a Super App to ensure that planning is done intelligently and that it flows seamlessly to the field reps to be able to make informed decisions on the go (both on- and offline).
Some of our use cases include guided selling, retail execution, content management and automation, 360 customer view, personalized sales coaching, onboarding and training, multichannel and remote engagement, order/sample management and more.
See what more we can do for consumer goods. And, see how Mueller increased the effectiveness of its retail execution here.
Q: Adopting sales tools has been an issue for our sales team before. How is Pitcher any different?
A: The Pitcher Super app is a consumer-grade app (meaning, it’s as easy to use as any app you’d find on your smartphone). It’s been built for users by users. Our product teams have spent countless hours shadowing reps in the field, experiencing first-hand what matters the most to them and building it to the product in an intuitive manner.
What’s more, we have been rated #1 for highest enterprise user adoption for sales enablement by the G2 site in 2021. Because we know first hand what the sales reps need, we can make sure that we deliver on those needs, and also adapt our solution as needed, based on the clients evolving needs.
Q: We have multiple complex channels in our company. How does your solution support this?
A: The Pitcher solution is collaborative by nature and has an open-integration and set of pre-built APIs that are capable of solving the complex, multi-channel interactions that are core to a consumer goods business.
We offer a seamless experience for your teams, with one single application that handles everything they need. Read more about our integrations here.
This blog on how Coca Cola Femsa transformed their perfect store execution may also be interesting for you.
Q: How do I ensure that I get access to the right data, and can make data-driven decisions?
Adopting a data-driven sales enablement solution would help you to create a more dynamic field sales team that is equipped to respond in real time to changes in customer and outlet behavior.
You can use score cards and real-time insights to monitor promotion and execution results in a unified and comparable way across different outlets and geographies. This enables everyone to identify the outlets with execution issues and prioritize them for sales rep intervention.
Aim to use advanced analytics to identify trends and uncover root causes of promotional performance.
Q: We already have a trade promotions system. Why do I need this?
A: We don’t offer promotion planning or optimization solutions. However, where we see a major gap and revenue loss with our customers is the execution of those planned promotions.
What we often see is a disconnect between trade promotion planning and execution, and end-to-end measurement is often missing. It’s important to integrate your retail execution data with your key account management and trade promotion systems so that your KAMs and promo planners can measure the product availability, price and display compliance while the promotion is in-flight and really measure the success of a promotion.
Also, integrate your point-of-sale data into trade promotion planning and measurement to identify issues, spot changes in sales in near real time, and alert your field sales reps on any issues.
See more about what we do for consumer goods here. This blog on how to optimize trade promotions may also be of interest to you. It includes some of our top recommendations for optimizing the execution and measurement of trade promotion spend effectiveness.
Q: How do we justify budget for content automation as we have difficulty measuring marketing activities with leads and opportunities?
A: Our solution is built on Salesforce and natively integrated with Salesforce, MS, SAP and most leading CRM solutions. This gives you the ability to tie content related to each marketing campaign with associated leads and opportunities, so that you can actually measure your campaign and content effectiveness.
Importantly, consider adopting a unified content automation solution that allows you to tailor content to specific audiences and surface the right content to the right customer on the right check out.
More importantly, give yourself the ability to gauge your customer’s feedback and sentiments when they engage with your content. An integrated content automation solution can feed that insight back to your marketers, allowing them to continuously improve the quality of your promotional content. 30% of the marketing budget goes towards content creation hence the need to fully understand what content in fact drives deal conversion, thanks to Pitcher Insight.
Q: Why do we need this tool when the digital marketers we hire do most of the work?
A: Where we see our customers winning market share, is the ability to tailor the right content and right promotion to the right outlet at the right time.
The Pitcher Super App will enable your marketers to maximize the impact of their content, and to gauge a retailer’s feedback to continuously improve the quality of our engagement with them.
Q: Our team is really busy, and we do not have resources to allocate to content automation.
A: That’s exactly why we have created the Pitcher Super App. It’s built for marketers and designed for ease of use. The intuitive consumer graded interface enables users to learn and adapt quickly.
Read more about how our content automation works in our blog “Take control of your content with content automation” and check out our page on the subject here.
Q: How can we bring together all the data and integrations that we need to get a better understanding of our customers?
A: Absolutely, connecting the point of sales and outlet data and feeding that into sales execution is a top priority for all of our customers.
Hence why we designed a collaborative platform that offers an open integration (SDK) and set of prebuilt APIs that enables you to integrate your syndicated, point of sales, CRM and order data all in one platform, drive surface actionable insights and put it in the hands of your sales team so that they can have more meaningful conversations with your customers.
We provide out-of-the-box integrations between business platforms of all types, as we offer a seamless experience for your teams. We offer full integration with market-leading CRM and BI platforms, including Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and more.
Learn more about our integrations here.
Q: Why do we need sales coaching in addition? We currently have it in our LMS, which is already paid for.
A: LMS is very organizationally focused and training is quite broad. What we offer is onboarding, and personalized coaching and training which are truly focused on enabling your sales and commercial teams with on-point coaching and real time feedback.
This can include feedback on customer conversations, effective language, and even body language. This will in turn optimize your sales performance, and allows you to customize the onboarding path. Pitcher coaching complements your current LMS.
Q: We already have a sales coaching tool. Why would we need two?
A: Are these standalone solutions? If yes, have you thought about having one consolidated platform to optimize the sales rep experience.
Here’s some info on why using a consolidated tool is beneficial.
Q: We used LinkedIn Learning extensively. Why would we need Pitcher Coaching?
A: Based on our experience and what we hear from customers is that LinkedIn Learning is quite generic, unable to accommodate a company’s specific needs and provide tailored training where it’s needed. Is that the case for you?
Thanks for checking out this Q&A, we hope it was helpful. If you can’t find the answer to your question, try our FAQs here or simply get in touch.
Read more about how our coaching solution works here. Or, learn why Coaching is the first step to building a customer centric culture in our blog here.