Business Tip 18
Give Your Category Managers the Tools They Need to Do Their Jobs

Standardize the templates and situational presentations across your organization.

The Problem
In the consumer package goods industry, the acronym CM has lost its meaning. More often than not, CM means "Chart Maker" instead of Category Manager. In today's world of fact-based selling, Category Managers spend so much time building the same presentation over and over again for different clients or products that management often takes a back seat.

The "go-to-guys" in Category Management organizations have typically been the select group of individuals who can find time in the day to create customer-specific strategies, assortment analyses and tactical action plans. And yet, changes are most of your Category Managers' workload involving the creation of standard reports, templates and presentations. A Category Management staff that is burdened with the manual creation of repetitive content simply does not have the time to make the leap to the next level.

What's the Solution?
Standardize the templates and situational presentations across your organization and you give your Category Management staff the boost they need to reach Category Management "self-actualization." Using a tool, such as XP3, your company can eliminate the time consuming cycle of creating and annotating data-driven presentations.

Several large organizations have successfully implemented XP3 to push best-in-class presentations, situational templates and findings out across the entire enterprise. By including data specific to every class of product and every customer, successful adoption by the field has been all but guaranteed.

How Does It Work?
XP3 is a top-to-bottom toolset that allows organizations to consolidate and customize relevant data (e.g. shipment, demographics, scanner, etc.). The information and insights dynamically populate Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that represent the company's best thinking and, consequently, day-to-day presentation building becomes a thing of the past.

Say one of your Category Managers has a business review at Albertsons. Instead of spending several days pulling data, populating a deck and analyzing the results, your employee could go to your website, pull down your best-in-class category review, make a few quick selections and five minutes later have a presentation that is ready to present, complete with key findings.

After that, your Category Managers will most likely do one of two things: take an early lunch and get in a round of golf, or step up to the plate and get involved with the strategic management of your customer's category.

After all, that's what you're paying them for ... right?

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.