How to Sell More of the Right Product to the Right Person — At the Right Time and Price

How do consumer products (CP) companies grow their revenues? There are many considerations, including what price they set, how they manage the size of their products, and the assortment mix of those products. A question as simple as, "Will customers buy this product individually or in a set of six?” can be a highly impactful decision that influences purchasing occasions and net revenue long term. CP companies also need to be holistically observant — identifying which products are selling, which aren’t, and how to adapt to product and market demands as they evolve in real time.

Many companies are on a never-ending journey to gain a better understanding of these consumer trends. They must execute a process that achieves a clear goal: getting the right products to the right people, at the right time and at the right price. To do this, organizations must take a data-driven approach — leveraging the broad scale of their data and optimizing it across the business. This starts by integrating a robust data architecture, which allows teams from different areas of the organization to access a broad spectrum of diverse information. By combining that with third-party research on emerging trends and patterns within customer value segments, CP companies can be armed with the knowledge needed to be proactive, making the necessary adjustments that will support top-line growth. This includes dynamic pricing, following the supply and demand of the market to optimally price products to earn the most possible revenue.

This emerging approach to packaging pre-existing financial metrics in a holistic fashion is called revenue growth management (RGM). In response to shifting consumer and channel preferences post-pandemic, supply chain challenges, and bottom-line pressures from inflation, RGM allows organizations to navigate through these obstacles and drive profitable growth.

When CP companies are ready to embrace this tactic, here are three ways they can position themselves for success:

Proactive Monitoring With AI

Artificial intelligence's greatest traits are speed and scale. To support a data-driven RGM approach, CP companies can deploy AI models that will continuously monitor for social anomalies across an organization’s large consumer base. When anomalies are discovered, CP companies gain early visibility into new trends before they ever fully emerge — creating a competitive advantage that also provides enough time to course correct and respond. With advanced notice, these businesses can evaluate the trends in more detail by implementing predictive analytics and re-training their AI models to gain a better understanding of these newly forming patterns. Whether it’s a spike in sales for a particular item in a particular region, or more consumers purchasing a certain item in bulk, these new patterns give organizations the knowledge to investigate the cause. If it was driven by product placement in the store, a new ad campaign on social media, or external factors like current events in the news, CP companies are well-informed to adjust and capitalize.

Adapt Approaches to Optimize Revenue Streams

Having early visibility into emerging trends is the first step, but CP companies need to be bold enough to make sweeping changes when necessary. With the discovery of new patterns and anomalies, organizations can quickly take the leap to adapt their approaches in ways that optimize their revenue streams. While a big shift in strategy can be intimidating and, at times, a tough sell to senior leadership, CP companies activating RGM aren’t making decisions on a gut feeling or assumption. The pre-emptive move to augment strategy and tactics to better reach consumers is always backed by the analytics. Quick pivots driven by data will reward those with the agility to make them, while the organizations that hesitate may be too late to reap the rewards.

Use Insights for Decision Making Across the Value Chain

A critical mistake some CP companies can make at this stage is to assume that the data insights gained through proactive monitoring and adapted approaches are only limited to one specific area. Instead, these insights should be utilized up and down the value chain. Sales-focused data can naturally help companies within the sales process, but that data is also valuable for customer service, marketing, and production departments. Extending insights up and down the chain creates a holistic, enterprisewide monitoring approach — with a data-sharing ecosystem that drives top- and bottom-line growth.

One of Capgemini’s Fortune 500 clients in the food and beverage industry wanted to improve its in-store sales by increasing its “share of shelf” among top retailers. Through RGM algorithms that included a user-centric, prescriptive analytics framework, the organization was able to rapidly capture millions in net new sales per month. This represented a massive payback in terms of positive return on investment — all within the first year of deploying the solution.

We know that data provides valuable information and visibility, but it takes a coordinated approach to fully maximize its potential and influence an organization’s revenue. The CP companies that can predict trends before they happen, adapt their approaches based on those trends, and apply the insights gained across the business will be the leaders that sell more of the right product to the right person, at the right time and price — truly excelling in their RGM programs.

Dinand Tinholt is vice president, insights and data at Capgemini Americas, a global leader in consulting, technology services, and digital transformation.