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Business Tip 9
Using Store Level Insights to Get in Touch with Consumers
The Problem
Getting in touch with consumers is the goal. Traditionally,
identifying key performance indicators unique to products
in various geographies has been incredibly challenging, often
creating more questions than answers. Questions like...
- How do new products affect consumers and businesses at
a geography-specific level?
- Who are our winners, what are our opportunities, and how
can we rejuvenate a former hot seller?
A solid sales strategy anticipates these questions, and gives
indication to the answers. A successful strategy turns these
answers into best practices that filter down to every store
in the chain. To do this, a successful strategy doesn't just
indicate if a product will grow a category, appeal to new demographics,
or generate new/return sales; it shows how.
Generating such a strategy for a single geography is a daunting
task, but doing so for multiple geographies with multiple
scenarios can become an extremely time and resource intensive
endeavor.
What's the solution?
By leveraging an automation tool, it becomes possible to automatically
create multiple, distinct data-driven Microsoft PowerPoint
presentations based on a user built presentation deck. Effective
presentation decks do not have to be massive time and resource
investments. Effective data-driven presentations can be automatically
generated, based on best practices that you define.
For example, presentations can be generated to reflect each
sales region, time period, or any combination of the two that
your business data represents in a quick and efficient manner.
And it can be done in a fraction of the time and with far
fewer resources than needed to create winning sales presentations
manually.
How does it work?
Such an automation process calls upon the dimensions that
serve as the presentation's foundation to allow multiple scenarios
to populate automatically.
Take XP3 Presentation Generation's tools, for example.
A user is able to select multiple items for any global parameter
defined as Global Settings across the presentation. When executed,
XP3 Presentation Generation will refresh the content for each
combination of items based on the selections and save each
scenario as a new, unique presentation.
Within XP3, there are two options for XP3 Presentation Generation.
The first, Quick Generation Wizard, is a step-by-step interface
that allows you to easily create multiple scenarios based
on a single set of combinations. For instance, the Quick
Generation Wizard allows you to quickly iterate presentations
against multiple geographies, across multiple time periods.
Generation Manager offers the ability to create more
complex scenarios, such as iterating several geographies against
their appropriate parent markets.
The Deliverables
The result is a more time and effort efficient method
of generating key insights and facts, developing store
level category reviews with zero hands on work, and contributing
to more accurate and, ultimately, more profitable decisions.
When you consider that such a solution will not require additional
headcount, it's easy to imagine the positive effects that
will be felt at the bottom line.
The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.
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