3 Signs It’s Time to Update Your Depletion Reporting Solution

The peak season is rapidly approaching and suppliers, their sales teams, distributors and retailers are all gearing up for the fourth quarter push. The forward-thinking suppliers are also casting an eye toward 2016 and considering how they’ll achieve their goals for the new year. For many, this may include examining new and improved ways to manage sales reporting – a crucial part of any successful growth strategy. If you have been using the same depletion reporting tool for a while, you may not know what you are missing. Our industry is notorious for being late adopters of technology, and depletion reporting is the worst offender. So here are 3 signs that may indicate it is time for you to consider a new and modern depletion reporting tool.

Sign #1: Your current tool was “current” when you were watching first run episodes of Seinfeld.

You wouldn’t be satisfied to run your business using old technology for telephony like the flip phones ubiquitous in the late 1980s. You’d never be content with a fax machine when mobile email and text messaging are readily available. Yet, many organizations are still using the equivalent of a rotary dial, hard-wired phone for their sales reporting solution. Not only are the industry standard depletion reporting tools clunky and inefficient to use, but they certainly cannot provide the instant visibility and cloud-based collaborative capabilities offered by state-of-the-art tools like the GreatVines solution.

Sign #2: You have a tool, but still need to download everything to Excel to do important analysis or make slick presentations.

Everyone knows that the more moving pieces a machine has, the greater the probability of a breakdown. This applies equally to sales reporting tools and processes that require users to port data into Excel in order to perform critical analysis or into PowerPoint for creating impactful presentations to manage and guide distributors or help make better decisions across their organization. It is an inefficient use of time creating reports in an outdated reporting system, then manipulating them in Excel before exporting them into Powerpoint. This workflow is especially vulnerable to errors and a significant waste of time for salespeople. Why waste time and risk errors when there is a single-source solution available?

Sign #3: It is difficult or impossible to create new metrics and provide visibility to critical KPI’s.

Funny how tools that once gave us access to data we never had before, can become obsolete by more modern technology. Your father’s depletion reporting tools were, in their time, a significant improvement over the manual processes they replaced. But as technology has improved, beverage industry experts have developed better strategies for improving their sales processes using the best technology available. Unlocking the capacity to create and focus on more detailed metrics and more highly refined performance measurements enables an organization to outperform its competition. Having technology that is flexible enough to support easy creation of new KPI strategies – and most importantly, the visibility to measure results quickly to lead sales efforts – is the name of the game. Advanced suppliers and distributors are taking advantage of technology that is flexible, powerful and intuitive enough to drive the results you need to succeed in today’s market. Yes, state of the art reporting is available for our industry!

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