…and how Sales Enablement can help you stay on top
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies with innovative sales and marketing teams grow at 4.1 percentage points faster than lagging companies, according to McKinsey. But achieving growth and innovation and increasing market share is no simple feat.
Promoting collaboration between sales and marketing is the catalyst for success in the CPG industry. We took a look at common growth challenges for CPG companies’ marketing and sales teams and how sales enablement solutions help them connect with buyers, stay current with industry trends, and beat out the competition.
Challenges in the CPG Industry
Selling CPG Products
With more players entering the CPG industry, including pop-up stores, there’s increased competition for CPG brands in a small market. Sales representatives for CPG companies need to be creative and add value to buying experiences for the customer to stand out. Unfortunately, a lot of sellers for CPG companies are spending more time in meeting preparation, searching for content. On average, industry salespeople only spend one-third of their time on actual selling activities, yet they are getting pressure from their CPG companies’ leadership to increase the time spent interacting with the customer .
When they do interact with buyers, reps have a limited window of time to pitch and must make their value clear to the customer. With higher, more sophisticated customer expectations, CPG sales reps must take a customer-centric approach and commit to a deeper relationship with buyers, taking customer trends, needs, and preferences into account to position themselves as a partner throughout the process. This means getting a full picture of the specific customer, industry, products, and other important information before the meeting. Salespeople need proper training and access to digestible learning materials to be most effective in the consumer goods market.
Marketing CPG Products
The consumer packaged goods industry has a high rate of change, with frequent product, pricing, and promotion adjustments and a fast production-to-market cycle. This presents another set of growth challenges for marketing teams who need to know the ins and outs of products to create clear and concise content for their CPG brands.
Once that content is created, it needs to be consistent, up-to-date, and relevant to the customer’s unique challenges. It’s difficult for marketers to personalize every piece of content for every customer while still keeping up with change and high demand and maintaining a high level of customer experience.
Additionally, all content must be easily accessible for sales reps whenever and wherever they need it, so they aren’t wasting minutes, or even hours, locating brand materials they need to impress buyers. Within consumer packaged goods organizations, departments including marketing, supply chain, and sales can become siloed, and impactful sales content gets lost and never makes it in front of a customer. Marketing and Sales need a way to improve communication and collaboration without reducing productivity.
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Addressing CPG Manufacturer Challenges with Sales Enablement
These CPG industry trends are overwhelming for Sales and marketing teams, but through a proper sales enablement solution, you can ease some of the pains associated with the CPG Sales experience.
The Showpad Sales enablement solution helps CPG brands:
- Build a connection with the customer and position themselves as a partner and trusted advisor
- Provide interactive selling and an omni-channel experience
- Elevate brand presentations with AI and other innovative technologies
- Scale sales training and coaching
- Promote collaboration with a central content portal
- Integrate CRM, marketing automation, email, sales engagement, content, and other tools into one platform
How can Showpad solve your Sales and CPG marketing challenges? Visit our site to discover more about Showpad for CPG companies.
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