In a fast-paced business environment, leveraging data-driven revenue insights is essential for achieving sustainable growth. Revenue Growth Management (RGM) professionals navigating the complexities of decision-making and capability-building in volatile markets need to understand the importance of translating data into action.
In our recent webinar, Global Vice President of Revenue Growth and Development at BIC, Kelly Rolader, shared how BIC is advancing its RGM strategy by telling a compelling story with its data and turning it into actionable insights to create a direct impact on the top line.
Kelly discussed BIC's approach to RGM including their triple win strategy, which aims to create value for manufacturers, retail partners, and consumers alike.
This blog post offers a snapshot of the webinar’s key themes, highlighting the strategies fueling BIC’s journey toward its ambitious revenue goals.
Firstly, why do data-driven RGM strategies matter? In Kelly’s words:
“Data-driven strategies help us provide insight-driven recommendations and solutions to our sales organizations, to our marketing teams, and ultimately to our retailers. They help to make our decision-making more structured, replacing that gut feel or that instinct, and they allow us to get to a more predictive or prescriptive approach to RGM.”
Kelly Rolader, Global Vice President of Revenue Growth and Development at BIC
Data-Driven RGM: Turning Insights into Action with BIC
The difference between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics is shown in Figure 1 below.
Descriptive analytics helps organizations understand what has happened in the past. However, to navigate today’s challenges, such as inflation, market volatility, and competitor actions, it’s essential to anticipate how shoppers will behave when standing in front of the supermarket shelf. This means moving from descriptive analytics to predictive and ultimately to prescriptive, developing a forward-looking understanding of shopper behavior that enables manufacturers to make faster, data-driven RGM decisions to reach revenue targets while accounting for market dynamics, competitor moves, and cross-effects.
We live in a world of constant change, and a forward-looking capability has become especially valuable. Kelly referred to the unpredictability of today’s market complexities as the VUCA world. The VUCA world stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, and it focuses on how these factors complicate decision-making, including RGM decisions.
Figure 2
In the VUCA world, agility and resilience are emphasized, meaning that a data-driven approach is essential for navigating these complexities and making informed decisions that drive growth for both the manufacturer and its retail partners.
Our whitepaper, The Revenue Manager of Tomorrow, provides more detail on how Revenue Managers can navigate complex, uncertain markets and futureproof their strategies.
However, simply having data and doing analysis alone isn’t enough to drive value. Translating data into actionable and compelling narratives is essential to drive effective decision-making and implementation.
“It takes being able to turn that data and those insights into a story that is not only feasible but believable, that delivers successful execution.”
Kelly Rolader, Global Vice President of Revenue Growth and Development at BIC
Data-Driven RGM: Turning Insights into Action with BIC
Effective storytelling ensures that insights are communicated clearly and resonate with stakeholders, facilitating the successful execution of strategies. By crafting simple and feasible stories that are translated into action plans, manufacturers can go from a zero sum to a triple win strategy that benefits themselves, retailers and shoppers alike. Find out more on how you can reach a triple win strategy with our infographic.
Figure 3
“The stories need to be compelling, they need to be relevant, and they need to be believable. So not only your internal teams understand the data, but your external partners understand the data as well.”
Kelly Rolader, Global Vice President of Revenue Growth and Development at BIC
Data-Driven RGM: Turning Insights into Action with BIC
Feasibility checks and understanding retailer pain points are integral to effectively utilizing data and creating a story that translates into a step-by-step action plan. While data provides insights and recommendations, feasibility checks ensure that these insights are actionable and relevant in the real-world context of both the manufacturer and the retailer. This alignment ensures that data is informative and transformative, providing practical solutions that benefit all stakeholders.
The best insights are the ones that get executed - feasibility is key!
“A really important part of before we go to execution, before we go to selling, is the feasibility check. Is the recommendation we're making based on the data and the insights something feasible for us, but is it also feasible and relevant for the retailer?”
Kelly Rolader, Global Vice President of Revenue Growth and Development at BIC
Data-Driven RGM: Turning Insights into Action with BIC
This alignment fosters a collaborative relationship between the manufacturer and retailer. Increasing the joint revenue and profit pool while providing value to the shopper by offering new products or promotions leads to a triple win. Achieving this level of alignment and precision requires well-crafted storytelling, feasibility checks, and the right tools.
Effectively turning data into actionable insights starts with combining different data sources, such as consumer insights, marketing data, shopper insights, financial data, and syndicated data.
This data must then be modeled to support informed decision-making, taking into consideration different aspects of the business. This is where the right tools become crucial. Having AI-powered software that can help model RGM scenarios holistically while considering market complexities, cross-effects, and competitor moves allows teams to go beyond descriptive analytics. However, not all AIs are the same or suitable for this job.
General-purpose AI models like GenAI or LLMs are not designed for RGM. They can generate inaccurate or misleading results, particularly when they rely on outdated concepts like static price elasticities.
That’s why enterprises such as BIC have turned to tools purpose-built for RGM to advance their RGM capabilities. The Buynomics platform, powered by Virtual Shoppers AI agents, allows BIC to simulate changes and optimize the five RGM levers: pricing, Price Pack Architecture, promotions, product mix, and trade terms. This partnership enables BIC to make predictive and prescriptive recommendations, helping to unlock growth and drive effective decision-making.
When product offers are shown, the Virtual Shoppers AI agents will replicate the actual buying decisions of real shoppers with very high precision. Cross-effects between products and competition are also factored in.
Buynomics Decision Guide allows you to automate complex analyses and provides you with pricing recommendations to reach your KPIs, taking into consideration your business constraints. The Decision Guide feature within the Buynomics platform allows RGM teams to focus on complex strategic decisions, leaving the heavy lifting of analyses to the tool.
Buynomics helps BIC and other industry-leading companies around the world to discover quick and accurate AI-based insights, and unlock growth, and we can help your business too.
To start, fill out our personalized RGM maturity assessment to find out where you are in your RGM journey. In this assessment, we will benchmark your performance in key categories and give you actionable next steps to take to move forward.
For even more tailored advice, you can find out how Buynomics can help you maximize RGM levers and lead your organization's success by requesting a demo with our team today.