The Challenge: Catching ‘Lightning in a Bottle’

With the rapid growth The Honey Pot was experiencing in its retail channel, understanding their trade spend at a granular level and whether their promotions were really working was becoming increasingly critical to the business. Chelsea De Loughy, Director of Sales and Rosalyn Risdon, Director of Sales Planning, faced the challenge of balancing retailer demands for increased spend, a growing influx of customer deductions, and the constant need to make decisions that benefit the company strategically and financially.
“We have been fortunate to be what we call ‘lightning in a bottle,’” said De Loughy. “Having seen tremendous growth, controlling trade spend wasn’t necessarily our top priority, but we did have a need to ensure our rate of growth was sustainable, and that our promotions and the efforts we were putting into play were beneficial to the business,” she further explained. “We knew we had likely lost trade dollars that we couldn’t get back and would never be able to track…to continue to grow and thrive as a business, we needed something.”
With no formalized process in place or systems in place to manage their largest customers, De Loughy and Risdon struggled to understand what was working and what was not in their trade spend and lacked a way to effectively compare forecasts to actual results. While they did get point of sale data from their retailers, it would come in the form of a giant excel spreadsheet, to which they would add their own shipment data. They would then have to manipulate it all, which was quite a cumbersome exercise.
“We had our own loose promotion tracker, so to speak, in spreadsheet form,” said De Loughy. “It was capturing the top line, but we weren’t able to take a magnified look deeper into it to review that trade spend in depth, especially when it comes to the deduction invoicing and coding. When those come through, it’s hard to determine what goes into what bucket.”
“The promotional pieces and tracking that working and non-working trade spend was difficult because we did not have the right systems in place,” said Risdon. “I’m managing Target and Walmart – those are two big customers that take a lot of time. Budgeting funds for promotions and dealing with the amount of deductions received, not only from promotions but from OTIF charges too, was definitely a challenge.”

The Solution: Promomash + Crisp

After seeing its Trade Promotion Management Platform in action and learning about how its turnkey Deduction Management service works, the team at The Honey Pot concluded that Promomash offered the best solution to solve their challenges.
In addition, thanks to the newly launched Promomash + Crisp partnership in October 2022, The Honey Pot team also gained access to the Crisp retail analytics platform. Not only would this give them access to Crisp’s powerful retailer dashboards, but it would also give them Crisp data-enabled reporting and analytics within Promomash.
The combination of Promomash + Crisp helped The Honey Pot streamline day-to-day operations and make more strategic decisions for their retail business in several ways:

• Cutting the time to interpret/analyze promotions by having all data available and easily consumable in one place, Promomash, instead of multiple systems/spreadsheets.
• Viewing retailer landscape and performance in one screen, at a macro and micro level, with Crisp’s easy-to-use dashboard.
• Identifying void and growth opportunities in retailers where presence is not as strong as it could be using retailer-specific sales data in Crisp.
• Tracking deductions and associating them to trade spend more effectively by outsourcing deduction management to Promomash.
• Uncovering the real story behind promotions by using Promomash + Crisp hand-in-hand to understand overall business performance and results at a granular level.
• Having more effective customer conversations and negotiations by being able to quickly analyze the financial impact of promotions in Promomash, including actual lift generated.
• Avoiding assumptions about baseline sales by using actual data from Crisp paired with promotional data in Promomash to capitalize on opportunities to grow ROI.

Insights & Results

In the several months since The Honey Pot team launched Promomash + Crisp, the team turned their deductions over to the Promomash Deduction Management platform and team of experts to organize, categorize and track trade spend at a more granular level. They have also been diving into both platforms to answer questions about their retail business that would either prove or disprove long-held assumptions.
In the first 4 months…

• Over $122,000 of deductions were identified as invalid by the Promomash team. Of that amount, over $56,000 has been recovered.
• The team is realizing a time savings of 55 minutes per promotion analyzed with all the data and paperwork readily available in Promomash.
• After Crisp data revealed that a top-selling product was not being carried in major UNFI accounts, it was added into 900 stores and became The Honey Pot’s 2nd-highest seller at UNFI.

A Sweet Partnership

With Promomash + Crisp, The Honey Pot team is now properly positioned to see their business even more clearly as time passes.
“Having a platform that’s as agile as Promomash, with Crisp data included, is making it easier for our teams to discern real trends and insights over time versus making a lot of assumptions and never knowing if they were true or not,” said De Loughy. “I’m excited for what’s ahead with Promomash + Crisp and what we will learn from our business.”