Event Planning & Analysis for a leading Global Food Company

Background/Problem:

A leading Food company was unsure how effective their Sales and Marketing was with both their consumers & retail trade partners. The management of the company wanted to:

Better understand how effective their current planning process was on both sides of their business.
Evaluate their current spending guidelines and practices and evaluate their events to better understand the ROI they were getting on their spending.
Set up a new planning & evaluation process which could be rolled out to the organization to be used on their next planning cycle (6 months away).

Our Analysis:

Once we looked into their process we found there essentially was none. Employees were doing essentially what they had done the year before.
Since no real ROI measurement was being done (except sales dollars generated) for their events the majority of them were losing money for the corporation.
Sales forecasting accuracy was very low which was killing the profitability of their logistics department.
Sales and marketing did not have a good relationship because effective planning could not be accomplished due to inaccurate forecasting and Sales and Marketing always fighting over the budget funding.

Our Solution:

We decided that there was an urgent need to put a corporate methodology in place to plan and evaluate all event spending for both Sales & Marketing.
It was evident that the company did not have the data necessary to properly evaluate their spending. Vendors were recommended, packages evaluated and additional data purchased.
The client knew they needed additional data, but were unsure how to use it. We provided a clear picture of value of the data, it’s usage, and it’s ROI.
We utilized a proprietary in-house software program to evaluate their current spending habits. What we found was that over 85% of all current spending was not profitable. The major issue was they were evaluating their events based solely on sales dollars generated, but they were not taking into effect the true costs to implement and deploy their programs.
It was important that this new process be closely aligned to their current process, and be as automated as possible. To accomplish this we worked with their existing software vendor to enhance the product they were currently utilizing.
The methodologies and framework were put together to both plan for (what if scenarios) and evaluate each program (ROI) and to compare the initial plan with the actual result and adjust the ongoing plan accordingly based on the results.

Results:

The company was shocked on how inefficient their current spending practices were, but was very happy that they were identified so they could now be improved.
New spending guidelines were implemented immediately which contained the new process for planning and evaluating their spending (both measures and methodology).
Employee incentive plans were changed to reflect a new focus on profitability verses sales generated.
The plan for the next 12 months was distributed outlining the work being done with the software vendor to fully automate the new process.
Funding was reduced by 8% because the company felt they could get more sales with less spending because they had identified their inefficiencies.
The following year the company increased sales by +12% almost triple the previous year and increased operating profit by +19% due to a more effective spending process.

Timing:

The engagement took only 10 weeks from inception to the final recommendation. Recommendations were implemented in their planning cycle for the following year.
Phase two (working with their software vendor to automate the process) took an additional 9 months to complete.
Phase #1a & #3 was training which took place both at the end of the initial recommendation and once the software was completed and being rolled out to the organization.
Total engagement lasted a little more than a year.
4 Years later they are still utilizing our methodology to do their planning and event evaluations.