Nestle Delivers Speed to Insights
Nestle USA’s (www.nestleusa.com) retail partners have come to expect a high level of insight-driven information to drive growth, not only for the global company’s diverse range of consumer products, but more importantly, for the strategies and plans that help grow their categories overall.
“We have found that our customers prefer having account-specific information in addition to national-level information in any category and new item discussions,” says Mark J. Nichta, director, Sales Information Strategy, Nestle.
However, providing this customized information was time-consuming for account managers, many of whom service multiple customers and/or multiple categories.
Nestle USA’s Sales Division spotted an opportunity to streamline this process by creating customizable information at the headquarter level, which account managers can update at the click of a few buttons.
A cross-functional team evaluated technologies to streamline and automate the work of account managers, freeing up their time to focus on more value-added activities, like researching shopper and consumer insights, profitable promotion planning, and reviewing and improving retail conditions.
The team found the right fit in Interactive Edge’s XP3 Suite (www.interactiveedge.com), enabling account managers to provide more actionable insights to retail partners across all classes of trade.
“The most important reason we selected Interactive Edge’s XP3 was because it met the business need of delivering business-building solutions and selling stories to the account manager who is already extremely busy,” says Nichta.
In the past, most sales managers received a national-level presentation or category review and were left to build a customer-specific one on their own. Today, account managers can click a button and have the presentation data updated in minutes to his or her specific customer’s information. The tool was implemented in March of 2013 and is now in use for all accounts that the Nestle USA’s Sales Division services.