 |
A conversation with Tracy VanBibber, senior vp of sales, The Dial Corporation Ayear ago, when the editors of Progressive Grocer magazine named Tracy VanBibber one of the “Top Women in Grocery,” they noted that she is not only a member of Dial’s executive leadership team, but also the first woman in Dial’s history to hold the position of senior vice president of sales. Tracy arrived at that particular pinnacle almost four years ago, following a 20-year career with Kraft Foods, most recently as president of sales, planning and strategy for the U.S. Today, leading Dial’s sales force with an annual sales budget of about $2 billion, Tracy’s charge is to drive growth through strategic collaboration with the company’s retail customers. Achieving this has required major changes within Dial’s sales organization, touching on areas including category management, in-store merchandising and, of course, shopper marketing. We recently sat down with Tracy, who was refreshingly candid as she shared her views on the obstacles and opportunities of today’s rapidly changing retail environment. What are Dial’s greatest challenges at retail today? One challenge is getting it right, retailer by retailer, and now store cluster by store cluster. This adds a whole new level of complexity and challenge for Dial as it relates to customizing for success in our partnerships with retailers. Another challenge is execution with excellence, which is overarching for the entire industry. I don’t know of any manufacturer or retailer that has been able to achieve execution with excellence on a consistent basis all the time in store, or even get close to it. How are you addressing those challenges? One is that we are asking for outside help. We aren’t too proud to say that we haven’t figured everything out yet. So, about two years ago we brought in a consultant who lived with us for four months and interviewed everybody about what worked and what didn’t. Based on that, we re-designed how we go to market around in-store merchandising. One thing that fell out of that was that we should simplify our focus. We went from having about 17 different partners helping us in one way, shape or form with merchandising vehicles and reduced that to just one partner. We also mapped out and simplified our efforts around the various touchpoints of in-store merchandising. One of the solutions was to put a dedicated team in place that owns everything around in-store merchandising from start to finish. This has allowed us to have greater flexibility so that we can get it right, retailer by retailer and store cluster by store cluster, and improve our ability to react and respond with speed. Are we perfect? Are we where we need to be? Heck, no! We still have a lot of things we need to optimize and we’d like to take even more time out of the process. But we never could have gotten to this point if we hadn’t gotten help from the outside. We’ve done similar work with shopper marketing, and ended up with the same kind of conclusions — that we need to simplify, prioritize, that we need a dedicated team and a scorecard. Who are the lucky partners? On in-store merchandising, we partner with Alliance Marketing Group. They are just phenomenal, absolutely invaluable. Their capabilities are much broader than just putting up a display. They just have so much depth. They go to every national sales meeting and all of our business-building sessions. They sit in on our brand review meetings. They have become part of our organization and their expertise has helped immensely already. For shopper marketing we partner with TFI, which is an Advantage Group. They do a great job as well, although we haven’t done as much with them yet. Do you view shopper marketing separately from your overall retail strategy? Our concept is called “winning in store.” When we partner with our customers on annual planning, we want to have our “winning in store” organization in alignment so that we have mutual profitable revenue growth. This should not be seen as a one-off for shopper marketing versus a one-off for in-store merchandising, versus a one-off for category management. Our vision is to have this team work in concert, so it’s transparent to the customer and we have in-store solutions that work across all of those different groups or across the total enterprise. That sounds so easy, but it’s very difficult to do. What makes it so difficult? The execution makes it difficult. You wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to put a display up around a promotion in all of your stores. But it’s mind boggling how we all fail around that. I was talking with one retailer who was really proud and excited because he got 70 percent of his stores to comply. I’m excited too, but what about the other 30 percent? There’s so much upside for all of us if we can just figure this out. It’s going to have to be a partnership because neither side can get it done alone. Is any one element of the execution more difficult than the others? That varies by customer, and is based on their most important priorities. And then we need to partner with them to choose the right levers across that mix to maximize the collective path. For example, if we were trying to get quick trial on a new product to build share for our brand as well as for their retail banner, then we might say the most important thing is to get displays that speak to what the new concept is. Sometimes it’s displays, sometimes promotions are more important, sometimes, it’s — wow, if we don’t have a flexible supply chain this will never work. What is the importance of the supply chain? It’s hugely important and it really can constrain how much you can do if you can’t get that right. We’re fortunate in that we have a new leader, Jim Hardy, at Dial. Jim is bringing a wealth of vision and strategy and heart for figuring out how to have a flexible supply chain to the point where we can meet numerous different needs. He actually has a vision that he’d like to have a menu for the sales organization — so that in any given area, there might be five different ways we can proceed based on how a particular customer likes to go to market. It’s going to take some time, but Jim is pulling the chain together to get us there so we are better able to customize and get it right in store based on a strategy. Is the supply chain being overlooked in general? Historically, Dial has been average to maybe a little below-average on supply-chain flexibility. We have been envious of some CPG companies that seem to have the flexibility in their supply chain to allow them to do more in store. I’m just really glad we’ve got Jim here to help guide us on that because it can open up so many opportunities and so many doors. We’re not one of the biggest CPG companies out there, so one of the advantages we strive for is the ability to win based on flexibility and speed. Does having a smaller brand portfolio help? It can, but it all starts with having someone in leadership in the supply area who finds that flexibility to be important. It’s interesting, because the old way of looking at the supply chain was to avoid flexibility and just make a lot of one item and do it really fast. When you say you want flexibility in your supply chain, that’s almost counterintuitive to the model that used to work. You can be a big company and still have an old mindset or a smaller company and still have that old mindset. You can have a whole bunch of brands or just a few brands. It really all starts with having a vision and a strategy. You have to be able to go about it in a metered way and with a menu of options for your customers. One thing I’ve learned as we’ve embarked on this “winning in store” approach is that it doesn’t take as much as you’d think. When a retailer says, “customize with me,” literally that might only require making two or three small tweaks. But it can open a bunch of doors for you in terms of being able to partner. How has Dial’s organization changed through this process? The biggest change is that we’re trying to become more of a solutions provider. Instead of just saying that the sales organization sells a product or promotion, we now have to be able to partner around solutions for shoppers and ultimately for retailers, as well. But we have to be able to think much more broadly than we did in traditional sales. That’s why you see a lot of companies actually changing the names of their sales organizations to “business solution partners.” Sales used to be one dimensional and siloed, but it’s become much larger and much more matrixed. We’ll have a number of customers visit us here in Scottsdale year in and year out. You don’t have a sales person sitting down and talking with a customer — you have your R&D organization, your supply chain, your sales planning, your “winning in store” organization, and whatever that encompasses. Sales plays less and less of a selling role and you have a matrix of people who bring solutions playing a much bigger role. Where does marketing fit in? Marketing is obviously a huge part. When I say sales, I usually mean sales and marketing. They’re joined at the hip here at Dial. Has that changed? Sales and marketing at Dial have always been very well connected and have worked well together. Our customer collaboration is one of Dial’s strengths. The one that adds some complexity is shopper marketing, because it is actually almost a combined role between sales and marketing. You have to be able to interact with the retailer, have the consumer always in mind and put brand strategies and brand equity at the top of the list. Shopper marketing has helped sales and marketing get to the next level in terms of how they partner with the customer. That has brought this added layer of complexity as well as an extra opportunity for us. Is sales the dominant player in shopper marketing? It’s less around where shopper marketing sits than it is around the opportunity. Some opportunities lend themselves to sales expertise and some opportunities lend themselves to more of a marketing bent. So, as you look across the annual calendar, you can find yourself weaving and bobbing a bit on who needs to be taking the lead role based on the opportunities. For example, in our shopper marketing organization, which is a dedicated organization, we have some people who have come from sales and we have other people who have come from marketing. We don’t necessarily think you have to have a particular core competency and that’s all there is to it. Do you have a working definition of shopper marketing? I define shopper marketing to be anything that can support and build our brand equity in partnership with building a retailer’s brand equity. In many instances that ends up being in-store activity, but sometimes it also involves bringing people to the store. The definition has to ebb and flow a bit, because each retailer defines it a little differently. In some instances, it takes on a much broader role than you might think. In other instances, it is extremely condensed. A retailer’s idea of shopper marketing might be a mailer. At the end of the day, it’s trying to turn consumers into shoppers and have them make a purchase. Through all of that you want to build brand equity for both parties. What kind of research do you need to succeed at retail? One of the best, hidden sales people we have is in Research and Development. Whenever I’ve brought R&D into a customer discussion they really add a whole new level of expertise and credibility. We really value R&D’s insights and knowledge base extensively. Whenever we have anybody come here, we give a tour of our innovation center. The R&D people take them through how we make our products. What was the genesis of a new item? Where did it come from? What was the consumer learning and then how did you bring that into the product fold? And then we talk about the benefit of the product versus anything else that’s in the market place and show test results. R&D is a wonderful asset for us to have. Does understanding shoppers require different kinds of research? Yes, it does. There is a big difference between the consumer and the shopper and understanding those differences is crucially important. It takes a different skill set. We’re going through an activity right now and literally our insight lead is visiting customers, trying to find out what do they know, where is the white space, and what value we could add because obviously it has an ROI bent to it. How has your relationship with retailers changed as a result of all these changes that you’ve made? A good sign of success is the amount of time retailers spend with us. Over the last six months we’ve had somebody visiting us, or we’ve been visiting them, every other week. This last year we’ve had 12 different retailers come to visit us in Scottsdale to go through this whole solution annual planning concept that we call Strategic Growth Planning, or SGP. We just get more and more every year. It really has helped us to be viewed as a strategic partner. How do you measure results? We’re really big into benchmarking. We use Performance Monitor, which is by Advantage Group — not to be confused with the Advantage Broker Group. Every two years we get benchmarked and we really live and die by that. We dissect what the customer said and try to put action plans around them. We’re really trying to move the needle on profitable revenue growth and on cost savings. And we’re trying to build the brand equity and the partnership support. n -- TRACY VanBIBBER is senior vp of sales for The Dial Corporation, A Henkel Company, where she leads the company’s sales force. She is also responsible for sales training, including all sales systems and tools. Tracy was previously a vice-president of sales with Kraft Foods.
-- Subscribe to The Hub
|