4 steps to successfully implementing your Trade Promotion Management software

Implementing a new trade promotion management (TPM) solution involves a huge amount of time, investment and resource. You’ve already spent months of review throughout the buying process, and now it’s time to ensure your carefully chosen tool is well-adopted within your business for the long term. Two thirds of consumer goods companies claim they are held back by inflexible and outdated business models, processes or functional structures. Gain market share over your competition, and don't be held back by one bad decision when it comes to your TPM solution. Here, we outline the key things to consider to ensure the smooth implementation of a TPM tool:

Sponsorship

A key part of any initiative is ensuring that you secure business buy-in from the very start. You have to be sure of the value it’ll bring to the business, then communicate this to everybody that is involved, gaining sponsorship from the bottom up as well as from the top down. It’s crucial that all involved have a very clear understanding of what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it. This is especially important for revenue growth management initiatives which involve multi-functional partnership and participation from a variety of teams, such as sales, IT, finance, & marketing.

An agile method of delivery

When implementing a TPM tool adopting an agile method of delivery, not just in the IT sense but from a total business perspective, is crucial. With an agile way of working, you 'fail fast' to learn from mistakes and move on, tweaking the solution in short iterations to ensure it's perfect. The risk of not adopting an agile approach is that you overlook practical feedback and produce something based on theory rather than practicality. Working to develop ‘minimum viable products’ when it comes to models and concepts within your TPM tool will allow you to test them on the ground with end users. This means you can tweak and refine your approach with the end users in mind, without wasting time and resource on potentially unfit solutions. One of the pitfalls that many businesses fall into is trying to define and design the perfect product before gaining user feedback.

Always have the end in mind

Many implementations get caught up in the process and the tooling, losing sight of the top line business objectives. When you take a step back, it’s actually extremely liberating to focus on the end outcome for the business and revisit what it is you are trying to achieve. This means that you’ll be able to plan and strategise for the best route to your goals, in the most efficient way.

Effective change management

How you manage change will determine how successful you are. Whether you have a small team or large, make sure that you allocate time for you to personally oversee how new processes are being applied and embedded within the business. It’s crucial to carefully plan your change management programme before investing in a new software implementation.

Find out how Acumen’s TPM tool, Acumen Invest, has been embedded into organisations to help them deliver growth:

Watch our client story with Coca-Cola Hellenic here

Watch our client story with Premier Foods here