Services – Bechmarking for Performance

Sales and Marketing benchmarks analytics are available in the following functions:

Company, Sales and Marketing structure and organisation effectiveness benchmarking

Metrics such as incremental growth, new consumer and new usage occasions are evaluated alongside headcount, levels of busyness, cost of people, and management layers. Ratios are used so that companies of different sizes and complexity can compare “apples with apples”.

Investment effectiveness: money, data, people, time/focus, merchandising materials

Metrics include: trial, activation, consumer advocacy, sales and speed-to-market, for the five types of resource that are planned and spent in each plan period. Ways of working: strategic, cross-functional planning.

Portfolio and brand strategy/function and activities

Metrics of new products vs line extensions vs existing brands, channel-specific products, and competitive intensity are benchmarked against direct and indirect competitors.

Ways of working: portfolio and brand planning, cross-functional project management.

Channel distribution strategy, channel marketing, and category activation functions and activities

Metrics include: cost-to-serve, capability of different channels to build share, awareness and trial, incremental growth from different customer types.

Big data, analytics, consumer and shopper insights functions and activities

Metrics include: spend levels, and growth from insights, budgets. Ways of working: strategic planning, process for determining insights, and turning insights into strategies.

Key customer and small customer engagement and strategy performance benchmarking

Metrics include: the drivers of customer satisfaction/engagement, trading terms, spend and effectiveness, and ways of working for managing large organised customers and small independents or small and POP stores.

Field sales force efficiency and value-add; third party effectiveness

Metrics include: cost of salespeople, call frequency, headcount, days between calls, objectives per call, and activities per call. Ways of working include use of technology vs use of paper, and effectiveness of training and coaching.

Options to using B4P's benchmarking services:

Customised research

Identifying and quantifying issues

Clients control what is researched and the companies they are benchmarked against when they hire B4P to provide specific data, analysis and insight. The client gets information, data, models and ratios that remain confidential and private to the client. Typical projects are:

Determining whether the client is correctly resourced versus its direct and indirect competitors

Determining whether the client is using its resources efficiently and effectively

Determining whether processes are best-in-class, well designed and being used correctly by the Sales and Marketing functions

Problem solving: constrained resources, insufficient opportunities to grow; poor customer engagement, non-aligned end-markets in a region (e.g. Asia Pacific)

B4P provides existing metrics, benchmarks and data from existing clients, and can gather new data if this is required for your market or category.

Omnibus benchmarking studies

Clients can take advantage of benchmarking studies that are run by B4P on particular pre-set topics in their market every 18-24 months with a broad sample of typical companies. Recent studies include:

Leveraging resources in a cluster or region of countries such as Asia Pacific or Oceania

Trading terms effectiveness and return on investment

Social and digital media spend levels and returns

Sales force efficiency, right sizing and correctly structuring to service highly organised customers versus independent customers – Reps vs Merchandisers

Best practice route-to-market

Use of technology in sales force effectiveness – tablets vs laptops vs paper-based systems – and their return on investment

Use of third parties, brokers and agents, costs and value-add

Use and cost of combination strategies to service different channels such as Pharmacy, Mass and Department Stores vs Grocery

Customer engagement vs customer satisfaction – increasing share by improving how customer satisfaction is measured

Best-practice sharing and communities of practice

Keeping clients in the loop

All clients gain access to invitation-only networks and closed LinkedIn groups to learn solutions to share and evolve best practice in all of the six work streams in Sales and Marketing, and in the area of organisation structure of effectiveness. From B4P, clients receive white papers, client-only blogs, updates on best practice, tools, strategy and planning templates, client-only workshops, evaluation tools for third parties, best-practice job and role descriptions, and checklists.

Sales and Marketing consulting projects

Solutions to common problems

Clients use B4P for: