Below are my top Revenue Growth Analytics quick wins that Distributors should implement (or right-size) to boost gross profits $ by 5-20% and increase liquidity.

At its very basic level, industry margin pools help you understand what share of the total profits goes to each supply chain participant, from Manufacturer, Distributor, to Retailer.

If you are a ~$1B Manufacturer or Distributor that spends ~ 15% of its Gross Revenues on Promotions & Rebates, every 50bps improvement in your Promo ROIs will drive +$0.75MM to your EBITDA. Let me describe the steps to take to enable these capabilities for your organization.

Did you know that most promotional investments by Manufacturers are a negative ROI investment, and each 1% improvement in Promo ROI can be a massive benefit to your Operating Profit?

Many mid-market manufacturing CFOs, CMOs, Pricing, and Sales executives are struggling with Promotional spending outpacing Profit growth, leading to unnecessary profit erosion.

Fortunately, most companies have the proper data assets to build sophisticated and actionable Promotion Effectiveness & Optimization solutions in-house, using methods and technologies they are already familiar with.

If you've always wanted to know how to build robust Pricing & Promotion Analytics capabilities organically and quickly (in ~ 4 months), please read this detailed Case Study that walks you through the critical steps with concrete examples.

Part 1: Using Gross Margin % vs. Net Sales Customer Matrix to segment customers into actionable Sales & Pricing performance clusters.

Have you ever offered a deep Price Discount in December in hopes of accelerating 4Q and YE target achievement, only to drive Unit Sales but suffer huge Gross Profit losses?

If you haven't tried #bayesian analysis to attack common business problems, I highly encourage you to explore it.

Companies' data science curve often starts with linear regression before a giant leap to ML within weeks or months (ensemble models, even some deep learning).

In pragmatic terms, the power of Bayesian modeling comes from being able to assign probability intervals to predictions.

Commercial Analytics, aimed at improving Gross Profits and Sales Productivity, doesn't have to be complex to drive the proper outcomes with Pricing and Sales teams.

𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 & 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 is another simple yet effective Revenue Analytics technique to steer Sales behavior in the right direction and drive incremental Net Sales (and Gross Profits).

Most mid-market companies are still stuck with basic reports and ad-hoc Pricing & Profitability analyses that take several weeks, offer little actionable insights, and are not reproducible. There is also a widespread misconception that it takes heavy upfront investment (both time and money) to build Margin Analytics & Optimization platforms that can truly transform an organization's Pricing discipline and customer & product analytics rigor.

Regardless of your company's growth stage, it is paramount that you have an easy-to-use and actionable Margin Analytics platform that provides rapid descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (what caused it), and predictive (what will be the impact) analytics capabilities.

I often see Manufacturers and Wholesalers making the mistake of trying to revolutionize entrenched Customer habits vs. creating easy-to-use, pragmatic analytics solutions that Customers understand and care about.

This week, we'll dive into another foundational but influential Margin Analytics technique, the Gross Profit Growth Decomposition using raw Transactional Data.

Commercial Analytics in B2B environments is a team sport: you need to win the trust and credibility of the Sales Team to accelerate the impact of analytics and drive sustainable Pricing and Data ROI for your company.

Read this brief opinion piece on why listening to and collaborating with your Sales teams is not optional - it's essential.

This week, I wanted to show you another simple yet effective revenue analytics technique to steer sales behavior in the right direction and drive Gross Profits.

Why is it essential to understand the business impact of Price changes and Promotional investments, and what are the analytical approaches to estimating Price elasticities?

With continued data proliferation and the democratization of popular Machine Learning methods among the data analyst community, knowing your Price and Promotional elasticities at the Customer-Product level is fundamental to Finance, Sales, and Revenue management.

Below is a quick guide summarizing a previous Revology Analytics article that demonstrates why healthy Customer Data is crucial to enabling powerful Sales Growth Analytics for companies. It also highlights steps you can take today to translate your CRM data into Revenue & Margin Growth.

A brief example of how visual analytics using Sales & Pricing metrics can be powerful in driving real, measurable change for your company.

Price leakage is a big problem for most Manufacturers and Distributors and can have a considerable adverse effect on their Operating Profits. One of the big reasons price leakage occurs is not having an adequate Margin Analytics Platform deployed and used across the organization. This means no effective measurement systems track discounts and rebates versus guidelines or strategies.

In this brief guide, we will discuss how to build a robust in-house solution, leveraging standard technologies you are familiar with. Most executives in charge of Pricing/Margin are hesitant to go down the margin analytics platform path, thinking it will take years and $ millions to implement. We will show you how to achieve 80-90% potential value realization using simple techniques and analytical methods.

Many middle-market companies are struggling to do action-oriented Commercial Analytics on a real-time basis. Understanding Sales, Pricing, and Margin performance vs. corporate objectives and strategies, along with proactively identifying and quantifying quick wins for improvement, is often a multi-day reactive, knee-jerk exercise. Pricing, Finance, and Commercial leaders are reticent to invest $MMs in turnkey price analytics solutions given high costs and long lead times – not to mention lack of flexibility and adoption issues that often yield a suboptimal return on investment.

Fortunately, you can do most of the above quickly, effectively (and cheaply!) using popular self-serve BI solutions like Tableau or Power BI.

Unproductive inventory often accounts for 20-30% of wholesale businesses' merchandise. For many, it's just the cost of doing business. But it doesn't have to be that way. Unproductive inventory ties up your cash, erodes your profitability, and puts you at the risk of not meeting debt obligations for your asset-backed loans. Automated markdown pricing is one of the most effective ways to address this problem, and simple analytical solutions (no "ML and AI) can often yield significant benefits. Learn more below how.

I welcome your comments or similar experiences.