Many Field Marketing companies plan their campaigns based not on the opportunity to add incremental sales at store level but on the size of the store. This “insurance policy” approach fails to recognize that these bigger stores tend to be most compliant for promotions and new product launches and in fact, it is often the medium size stores where the greatest opportunity lies. To complicate things further, a store which has been historically had positive promotion compliance can easily have a problem at any given moment. This means that Field Marketing agencies and their brand owner clients must deploy resource on a discretionary basis, having analyzed the most up-to-date POS data at store, day and SKU level.
To find out whether your Field Marketing agency is working with this philosophy, here are 6 questions you could ask to reveal the thinking behind their approach.
1) Promotional compliance has improved in our biggest retailer – do you think we should reduce the time we spend in call as there is now less to do?
2)We’ve done some research and worked out that 50% of our visits add no value –can we talk about reducing the budget for next year?
3)Would it be a good idea to flex our FM investment over the year? Along with seasonal peaks there are quiet months where it seems that FM can add much less value?
4)Do you think we could reduce our spend in smaller format stores – the rate of sales means that we struggle to achieve break-even against the cost of a call?
5)We don’t think that simply merchandising stock is adding value – shouldn’t we focus on more difficult issues which are more likely to drive incremental revenue?
6)Can you show us the strike rate, incremental sales value and ROI of each member of the Field Team, and then explain what you plan to do about the differences?
