Some lessons from Latin America’s leading consumer-goods companies

The Latin American economy has seen better days. Over the past few years, Latin American countries have experienced slowdowns in both GDP and private-consumption growth, a rise in inflation rates, and devaluations in currency. In this difficult environment, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers must make careful choices and deliberately weigh trade-offs.

How are the region’s leading CPG companies managing their customers and channels? Our survey of 35 companies offers some best practices. We examine what “winners” do differently from their peers—winners being companies that achieved higher sales growth than the categories they play in while also outperforming peers on one or more customer- or channel-management metrics. 

The survey results show that by applying best practices, companies can grow sales by more than seven percentage points ahead of others, while reducing selling expenses as a percent of net sales (Exhibit 1). This difference in performance between winners and others is bigger than in any other market we studied except China, where the gap is 17 percentage points.<sup>1

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Playing catch-up: How to partner with the retailer of the future

There’s no denying that the balance of power in the consumer industry has tilted. Retailers have the advantage over consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers—and retail buyers are deftly using their leverage at the negotiating table. Retail buyers are more sophisticated, more analytical, and more demanding than ever. Consider this: each of the top ten US retailers employs dozens of big data professionals who provide buyers with valuable insights. The same retailers have also hired more than 70 executives from European retail companies, known for having more aggressive negotiation styles than their American counterparts. In this increasingly adversarial environment, what’s a CPG key-account manager to do?

These changes in the retailer-manufacturer dynamic are the result of three trends that have been playing out in the US consumer industry: the steady rise of newer retail channels including hard discount and e-commerce, stagnant growth among the largest CPG brands, and burgeoning capabilities in big data and advanced analytics. The trends have been evident for a few years, yet in our experience the majority of CPG sales leaders are still largely doing things the way they always have. They continue to use the same key-account management (KAM) model and they haven’t enhanced key-account managers’ skill sets to keep up with the increasingly competitive business environment.

The future success of CPG sales teams rests on how aggressively sales leaders move to overhaul their KAM model and upgrade their sales capabilities. In this article, we discuss the most important changes that CPG companies will need to make. Companies that have implemented these changes have driven incremental growth of up to 3 percent above the category, while also reducing sales expenses.

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Jack Ma speaks about the value of customers ...

 

Jack Ma once said, 'When Selling to close friends and family, no matter how much you're selling to them, they will always feel you're earning their money, no matter how cheap you sell to them, they still wouldn't appreciate it.'

There will always be people who do not care about your Costs, Time, Effort, they rather let other people cheat them, allowing others to earn, then supporting someone they know. Cause in their heart, they will always be thinking, 'How much did he earn from me?' instead of "How much did he SAVE/MAKE for me?"

This is a classic example of a poor person's mentality!

How did the rich people become rich? One of the main reason is because they are willing to SUPPORT their associates business, taking care of one another's interests thus naturally they get back more.

Your Friends will in turn support you, thus the circle of wealth continues to grow and grow!

Simple Logic, you will start to get rich once you understand it.

Jack Ma on Sales: 'When doing Sales, the first people who will trust you will be Strangers, Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you. Family will look down upon you.'

The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together dinner, entertainment, you will realised: Everyone else is present except the Strangers.

Do you get the meaning of this?

We need to treat our dear Strangers better! And even more so to Friends who know what you are doing and yet still SUPPORT you!

Let us treat STRANGERS who buys from us better from today. They are your BEST customers!