Bringing Greater Control and Consistency to Trade Spend and Promotions for Improved Profitability
DIAGNOSIS
Our client is a major player in a category that is a significant footfall driver for retailers. The category is highly promotional, with brands frequently discounted at key trading peaks to drive volume and shopper traffic. While this dynamic supports sales growth, it can also create ongoing tension between margin delivery for the brand and profitability for retail partners. The client recognised that trade spend had become increasingly complex, with investment spread across promotions, trade terms and market-specific agreements. Although a Revenue Growth Management (RGM) function was in place, resources were stretched across too many markets to drive meaningful, consistent impact. Sellex was engaged to help the business gain greater clarity and control over trade investment. The initial diagnosis focused on how promotional spend was being evaluated, how decisions were made and where inconsistency across the trade was eroding both margin and effectiveness.
DESIGN AND DELIVERY
Sellex worked closely with the client to develop practical, scalable tools that enabled more robust evaluation of trade spend. This included creating clearer frameworks for assessing promotional investment, trade terms and the true return on spend across different customer and market contexts. The tools were designed to support better decision-making without adding unnecessary complexity. They allowed teams to consistently assess the effectiveness of promotional events, understand margin impact and compare performance across the trade. Alongside this, Sellex helped the client introduce stronger controls and governance around promotional planning. This ensured that future promotional events were more uniform, aligned to clear principles and grounded in commercial reality - even in a highly competitive, peak-driven category. Crucially, the approach was designed to maximise impact despite limited RGM resource, enabling the function to influence decisions more effectively across multiple markets.
DURABLE OUTCOMES
The work delivered a step-change in how the business managed and evaluated trade spend. Teams gained greater confidence in understanding where investment was delivering value and where it was diluting margin without sufficient return. Promotional activity became more consistent across the trade, reducing unnecessary variation and strengthening the brand’s commercial position with retail partners. The improved controls also helped ease tension by enabling more transparent, fact-based conversations around margin and profitability. The RGM function, while still lean, was able to operate more strategically - focusing on guiding decisions rather than reacting to them. The tools and frameworks developed are now embedded within the business, providing a durable foundation for managing trade investment more effectively in the future.Ultimately, the client is better equipped to balance growth, competitiveness and margin delivery in a highly promotional category.
"Sellex helped us bring clarity and discipline to an incredibly complex promotional environment. The tools and frameworks have transformed how we evaluate trade spend and strengthened our ability to manage margins across the trade."
Discover more from Sellex
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.