California Apparel News

To streamline in-store merchandising and marketing, the San Francisco–based customer relationship–management technology company Salesforce introduced its Consumer Goods Cloud as a tool to help brands work more efficiently with retail partners. Salesforce worked on developing the solution to also incorporate Einstein AI.

The Consumer Goods Cloud blends Salesforce’s capabilities of marketing, service, commerce and sales products to help field sales representatives and merchandisers work with retailers on-site to align their missions.

“Think about planogram compliance,” said Sunil Rao, global head of consumer goods at Salesforce. “When you’re in a store, instead of taking notes on all the SKUs that you’re seeing, you take a photo and the image-recognition technology that we have will identify all the SKUs that are on the shelf and it will give you all the KPIs and it will tell you if all the things are in compliance or the things you should fix because the store is supposed to look a certain way.”

After surveying 500 global consumer-goods professionals in spring 2019, Salesforce discovered that, while 95 percent of consumer goods are sold in bricks-and-mortar stores, 52 percent of these leaders felt that merchandising-and-marketing plans weren’t followed.

“The Consumer Goods Cloud is our foray into building a product very specific to the industry for consumer goods,” Rao said. “We have had consumer-goods customers for the last two decades, and we’ve been using the platform in a multitude of ways. What we’re doing with this strategy is we’re really making it out of the box and directly fitted to each use case in the industry.”

Through technology that allows brands and their parent companies to monitor in-store activity in real time, the Consumer Goods Cloud collects data, analyzes the information and yields a plan of action for representatives who visit retail partners. Citing the need for companies to prioritize where and how their representatives should spend their time, Rao noted that the data Salesforce works with could be sourced from different areas specific to each company’s focus.

“To optimize distribution, they need to identify the leading indicators on data they are getting,” he said. “In some cases, they might be getting point-of-sale data from all the different stores they sell through. In some cases, there might be other demand signals, but all of that data needs to get adjusted and be cobbled together to prioritize who needs to go where to have the maximum impact on business and maximize sales.”

Through digitizing a representative’s task list in real time for every store visit, brands are able to work with each retailer according to that location’s particular needs. Rao explained that through connections between planning and execution systems, companies can bypass unnecessary steps, thereby streamlining these processes.

“When someone is merchandising in-store and they have an issue setting up a display or setting up something because they have the same system [as other retailers], they’re able to communicate that back to the planners,” he said. “They [the planners] can fix the instructions or the issue before it comes back in the form of lost sales.”

The Consumer Goods Cloud will be available Oct. 15, and Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods will be available in February 2020.