Chicago, Illinois | info@kinetic12.com
Manufacturers
Manufacturer Capabilities
At Kinetic12 we work with leading food manufacturers to navigate the changing foodservice landscape. We help manufacturers create business building strategies based on relevant and actionable consumer trends, understand the new operator landscape to be customer-centric and to understand and capture their fair share of traditional and new distribution models and routes to market.
Foodservice Sales Accelerator is a modular tool kit intended to improve the effectiveness of your sales team
This tool kit is based on a proven approach designed around best practices developed by Kinetic12
Why Invest in Sales Accelerator?
- TIME TO RE-ENGAGE:
Sales must re-engage in a more strategic way. For the last several years they have been unable to fully interact with existing and potential new accounts because of extreme operational challenges.
- RAISE THE BAR ON YOUR GTM APPROACH:
Integrate best practices into your sales approach + raise the bar on your team’s skill set & effectiveness.
- FOCUS ON SOLUTIONS:
Operators want suppliers to focus on solving their problems. Focus your team on understanding how their current and future business needs intersect with your company’s strengths to be a true valued partner.
BEST-IN-CLASS CUSTOMER BENCHMARKING
Client Challenge
The sales team of a leading foodservice manufacturer knew that a deeper understanding of their customers was critical to continued success. While this manufacturer had the resources to gather some of the information on their own, they knew they needed support from an outside organization to gather first-hand information from their customers and help them turn it into actionable customer plans.
How Kinetic12 Helped
Kinetic12 conducted interviews with the client’s key national account and distributor customers, as well as potential new customers, and researched the client’s key competitors. Utilizing a proprietary customer benchmarking methodology, we focused on establishing what the client’s key customers felt made a supplier “best-in-class” in sales, supply chain, innovation and marketing support.
Additionally, the client and their competitors were score carded against what each customer viewed as best-in-class. During the process, Kinetic12 uncovered what each customer valued most and what frustrated them when it came to supplier support and specifically related to the client’s performance.
Kinetic12 then delivered a customized best-in-class supplier report, including:
- A new customized Best-in-Class Supplier Model and explanation
- A detailed Benchmark Analysis of how the client scored against the model
- Customer verbatims on what the client did well and where customers saw growth opportunities
- Insight (including strengths & weaknesses) on how their competition was perceived by their customers
- Recommendations on what actions the client should take to move their organization closer to best-in-class
Results
As a result of this work, the client adopted a new approach to chain account and distributor sales that leveraged their strengths, addressed their weaknesses and ensured their entire organization was focused on what their customer valued most from a supplier.
Key actions implemented by the client included:
- Better utilization of value-added resources, such as culinary and insights, against key accounts
- Consistent approach to customer communication/information sharing, such as supply chain reporting
- New sales training program launched
- Sales team performance tracking and reporting updated
ACCOUNT TARGETING & SEGMENTATION
Client Challenge
After five years of flat sales growth and margin erosion, the foodservice division of a major CPG company was tasked with finding additional ways to grow their business. Trade spend continued to outpace top-line growth, and investments in sales resources continued to increase with little return. Something needed to change.
How Kinetic12 Helped
Kinetic12 worked with the foodservice leadership team to develop an updated operator segmentation framework. The new model used a mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics focused on segmenting customers & potential customers based on the following:
- Current Financial Importance to Manufacturer
- Future Financial Opportunity for Manufacturer
- Strategic Fit and Business Alignment
After a thorough analysis, we discovered that a significant portion of the additional customer investment, including trade spend and sales and marketing resource time, was directed toward tactical customers who offered limited financial benefits and were not aligned with the organization's growth goals. Our analysis also identified several growth customers who had a higher probability of driving sales growth and were more well-aligned from a strategic fit perspective, but were not being resourced effectively.
Results
The client restructured where they spent their time and money at a customer level and leaned into more profitable growth customers to accelerate their business.
- Large tactical customers received more selective investments, mitigating spend while decreasing costs
- Growth customers were allocated more resources and trade-spend than previously, which accelerated their growth in more profitable accounts
As a result of implementing these strategies, sales growth increased by +7%, customer investments reduced by 15%, trade spend decreased, cost to serve decreased, and sales resources time spent servicing their customers reduced, making for a more profitable and sustainable business. Our client now has a segmentation model that can be updated as their business evolves to keep them growing strategically in the years to come.
Strategic Planning
Foodservice manufacturers are facing more disruptive changes than ever before. Therefore, a sound strategic plan and action oriented executional roadmap with insight into the current market conditions and how to navigate them is critical.
At Kinetic12, our approach to strategic planning is grounded in turning data and information into insights that identify a market opportunity or expose a risk. We then turn those insights into actionable strategies with a detailed execution plan. Let us help you build thoughtful, provoking plans that set you on the most efficient, effective path for new vision and growth.
Brand Strategy and Positioning
In a cluttered world of messaging and brands that echo one another, it can be hard for customers to distinguish one company from the next. Our goal is to make sure your brand is poised with clarity and distinction, and that your brand communicates a unique point of difference.
We have a customized process to arrive at your brand’s functional and emotional benefits, and ensure that your brand positioning resonates in today’s marketplace with your target customer. Through a process grounded in data and insight we create strong brand positions that are a unique point of difference in your category.
Research & Insight Development
Good foresight comes from insight. At Kinetic12 we help turn your data into actionable insights that can inform your strategic planning, your brand plans and possibly change how you talk to customers.
We believe business decisions must be grounded in insights, based in facts and data. Success requires taking the time to gather the knowledge to build compelling and actionable insights that lead to sound business decisions.
We are experienced in qualitative research and our partnership with Datassential gives you access to a team of research experts grounded exclusively in the foodservice industry.
Portfolio & Category Planning
With higher consumer expectations and constantly evolving tastes, the demand for innovation in the world of food is greater than ever. Operators must work harder than ever to satisfy today’s consumers, they look for manufacturers to offer an on-trend portfolio and innovation strategies to meet consumer’s multiple needs and eating occasions.
We take a disciplined and strategic approach to assessing your product or service mix and develop a long-term portfolio strategy for your business. Whether you want to strengthen your innovation pipeline or build a new holistic portfolio strategy, we can help.
Route-to-Market
The path to getting your products to market is becoming more challenging in foodservice with many new and emerging distribution channels.
Kinetic12 brings intimate knowledge of the foodservice industry, segments, distribution models and purchasing requirements to get your product to the right customer and the right time. We understand that as the foodservice channel changes and as consumers demand products when, where and how they want them, your route to market model changes or evolves.
Our approach to assessing and optimizing your route-to-market strategy includes:
- Prioritizing and targeting the optimal mix of segments and customer
- Looking at traditional distribution along with cash & carry, club stores, ecommerce and direct to consumer delivery
- Determining the most efficient model to get your products into the hands of customers
- Segmenting and optimizing your customer mix, choosing where to invest and identifying win-win opportunities
Customer Planning
Put your energy where you’ll see the most returns. As customer demands continue to change, it is imperative that manufacturers identify the biggest growth opportunities and invest resources against their most valuable customers.
Kinetic12 helps manufacturers build customer segmentation models based not only on size but profitability, alignment and projected future growth. We have developed industry best practices and strategic models for operator collaboration and joint business planning. Through this disciplined approach, we can help you grow your customer relationships.
Organizational Design and Process Improvement
Organizational design is more than a new organization chart. It’s a detailed analysis of the big picture and the smallest details – looking everywhere for fresh opportunities and new ways of thinking. We know your business is more likely to deliver long-term, sustainable growth if your organization’s design, structure and processes are developed carefully and strategically.
Organization designs are challenged by disruption in current marketplace dynamics, strategy changes and internal cost structures that are no longer competitive. We help you develop optimal organization design that ensures clear understanding of the work to be accomplished and ensures that your company’s goals and strategies are supported and delivered via the optimal design and processes.
Kinetic12 will ensure your organization has the optimal operating model, organizational design and work processes for today’s challenges and future growth.
Trade Spending & Customer Profitability Management
The challenge faced by manufacturers related to trade spending has been well documented. The industry has seen a proliferation of tools to help manufacturers better manage the investments they make with customers. Unfortunately, the Foodservice environment continues to evolve leading to new and different demands of manufacturers to spend with customers.
Kinetic12 helps manufacturers successfully navigate this challenging environment. We believe the key to effectively and efficiently managing trade spend starts with understanding you: Who are your customers? What are you trying to accomplish with them? What processes and tools do you have in place? How do you compare to the best in class and competition? How do you win in the marketplace? We seek to understand your business first and benchmark how you compare to other Foodservice manufacturers. We then work with your organization to develop and execute trade solutions that enable your business goals.
Kinetic12 partners have delivered bottom line results for clients by implementing solutions that have created better visibility to customer profitability, enhanced customer contracts, improved the efficiency of trade spend & customer pricing decision making, improved the effectiveness of trade promotion management (TPM) systems and upgraded organizational capability. Kinetic12 can help you transform your trade spending into a key lever to efficiently and effectively enable profitable sales and/or margin growth.
