A clear separation is evolving between consumer goods sales teams who leverage POS data to understand the consumer and those teams just trying to keep their heads above water by jockeying data to meet the demands of their retailer and internal teams. Guess who's getting ahead.

So ask yourself - are you spending more time just churning through data? Or are you discovering opportunities from the data that help you understand and quickly respond to changes in consumer behavior? Retailers and CG companies agree on the fundamental objective of providing what the consumer wants, when they want it. And the value sales teams provide comes down to not only actionable insights, but also the speed with which they are able to process and act on new information. So how do you get beyond the enormous hurdle of too much data and too little time?

Get rid of the distinctions between report producers and report consumers within your sales team because this paralyzes your team. When such distinctions exist, the report producers act as gatekeepers for elaborate spreadsheets that they churn through on Sunday night and Monday morning in anticipation of the upcoming week. Information is then gathered into standard report formats dictated by external retailer language, which presents two problems. They make little sense, internally, and they offer little insight, externally. The reports simply provide performance measurements and limit your ability to examine why the numbers look the way that they do. Because of this, the report producers spend the rest of the week doing ad hoc analysis answering "why" questions from the retailer and the report consumers on the team. So much time is spent on these standard reports that any analysis generated outside of weekly reporting is done only as a ‘response' to special project requests and issues of the week. Priorities are not derived from the data, but are imposed on the team externally. This puts the team in a perpetual state of reaction.

On the other hand, successful strategic teams share data across the organization and let demand data dictate priorities. Everyone interacts with data and team members are empowered with flexible analytical tools that allow them to answer their own questions. For these teams, standardized reporting is only the starting point of the process and exception reporting quickly highlights issues and changes in demand. With these teams, communication is focused and meaningful, because they have the ability to understand changes in consumer behavior quickly. Conversations become future focused and consumer behavior driven, and the teams never lose sight of the fact that the true benefit of POS data is the business decisions that result from their insights, which benefit the consumers, retailers and consumer goods companies.

So - who are you? Proactive and insightful? Or reactive and treading water? Retailers are becoming more data driven, and the CG companies who are the most proficient at processing demand data and shortening the feedback cycle will have a competitive advantage. The amount of data available creates new and exciting opportunities, but can be paralyzing if companies don't have effective tools in place to use it. Intuitive business intelligence software can help you harness the power of demand data to make better decisions and improve your overall business performance.

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