"Am I going to make my number this quarter?"

"What should I change to improve my chances?"

Recent analysis shows that in the last 10 years, trade spending has grown four times faster than spend on advertising, fueled primarily by retail consolidation, the power of super centers and slow organic growth in the supermarket industry. According to a Boston Consulting Group analysis, manufacturers pay out more than 17% of their annual gross sales for trade deals.  However, spending more isn't always the right answer.

M-Factor’s T4 Trade Spending Effectiveness solution provides answers to the questions above, and often illuminates options that don't require greater investment.  Specifically, T4 helps sales executives and trade-focused brand managers accomplish three critical functions:

• Reallocate trade spend to meet financial goals
• Identify drivers of own brand and competitors’ volumes
• Create accurate monthly forecasts automatically

T4 enables sales executives to create the most effective trade spending distribution across channels, or to identify an optimal allocation of trade spend dollars between accounts in order to maximize overall sales volume. It also enables account managers to discover the right balance between pricing and display program options for their account to maximize sales lift from trade spending.

Highlights of T4 include:

• Quick simulation of potential trade plans with any price, merchandising and distribution assumptions for your brands, your competitors' brands, and for the category.
• Powerful model-based analytics that go beyond "What happened?" to "Why did it happen?"  By comparing actual results to the plan, the prior period, or last year, and mathematically extracting the impact of each business driver, users better understand opportunities for improvement. 
• An automatic optimizer that develops and evaluates thousands of potential trade scenarios within appropriate business constraints, such as maximum trade budget or allowable discounts. 
• Automatically generated forecasts that predict volume for you, your competitor and the category, and finally reveal whether you will make your number.