Market survival requires an understanding shopper and consumer behavior. A Brand’s success relies upon how well the enterprise employs the data shared between points in the cycle (e.g., POS scan consumption, pre- and post-promotional analyses, shopper touch points, pricing, and availability).
Connected Sales solutions from Microsoft provide a familiar user experience across multiple devices to for seamless connection between the sales organization and its retail trading partners. Through a common platform we combine the power of point solutions such as DSD, Merchandising, Order Management, and Trade Promotion Management, so critical information and insights can be shared companywide for improved business responsiveness. Built on the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform, these solutions for Connected Sales are an integral part of a larger infrastructure that helps the consumer goods company become more effective as a demand-driven enterprise.
By integrating BI capabilities with existing LOB applications, Microsoft solutions for Connected Sales deliver a full range of business insights to individuals, teams, and organizations across all demand-adaptive functional areas. For example, using sales scorecards that blend syndicated data and downstream retailer data, we help account managers make better-informed decisions that will improve retail execution. These solutions help your trade promotion managers optimize their spend with real-time visibility of ROI for each promotional event, and they arm your supply chain practitioners with real-time demand forecasts to help them reduce out-of-stocks.
Sales and Marketing Effectiveness
Microsoft Connected Sales solutions enable more effective sales and marketing of consumer goods.
- Trade promotion management and optimization removes business performance guesswork by providing up-to-date sales, promotion, and deal performance data with daily updates to projections.
- Category management helps you efficiently plan and manage the category with near-real-time analytics and collaboration that connect the vast amounts of dynamic demand insights, product-location attributes, past performance, current trends, business strategies, and financial objectives.
- Retail execution solutions feature rich mobile applications seamlessly integrated with intelligent in-office management components to automate day-to-day operations, optimize in-store effectiveness, and accelerate information flow to and from the field.
- Demand signal repository solutions harness the power of near-real-time, point-of-sale scan data to drive effectiveness in sales and marketing, supply chain, operations, and new product development.
- Consumer loyalty and shopper analytics apply innovative data-mining algorithms that improve insights into consumer and shopper loyalty as well as market segmentation. Predictive analytics increase demand-forecast accuracy for improved product availability.