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What’s the buzz about Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud?
May 2023
It has been a few years since the appearance of the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud (CGC) offering in the marketplace yet the buzz and the impact it’s had on businesses are still very evident today. Even through our client work we’ve seen CGC grow rapidly in a short time from offering retail execution capabilities to also now including a suite of trade promotion management (TPM) capabilities.
So what is CG Cloud?
One of the best ways to think of this offering is that it’s an umbrella term for overarching trade planning activities, retail execution processes, as well as an integrated engagement experience for your customers.
What are the benefits of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud?
The large majority of consumer goods companies still depend on traditional retail channels, namely brick and mortar locations and their retailers to help boost revenue, making it a priority for businesses to help improve the processes related to those specific channels. However, no matter the channel, one element remains at the center - data. This is where Salesforce CGC comes in - by utilizing the data and information companies readily have at their fingertips, businesses can enable their front line teams to make more informed, smarter decisions across core processes such as ordering, pricing, and retail execution to help improve both efficiency and their bottom line.
Catalysts for adopting Consumer Goods Cloud
1. Scalability for the business
Many retail and consumer goods companies find that other market offerings and even native homegrown solutions likely can’t provide the tools and data needed to achieve or retain industry-leading standards to keep up with their customer base and establish competitive advantage in an increasingly saturated market. Salesforce CGC helps unlock just that for both large and niche (consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies - actionable insights and information at the business’ fingertips that can help drive decisions geared towards achieving high operational and strategic growth. For example, we supported one of our clients helping them to consolidate and optimize their sales processes by finding synergies with the capabilities found in CG Cloud - front-end sales reps gained efficiency with the shorter time it took to do store visits, merchandisers were aware of which items on shelves needed to be restocked, and delivery reps knew what routes and which products need to be included ahead of time in the day’s delivery. Through leveraging industry-leading practices and what we learnt from working with other clients, CGC was the lever used to support our client with refining their sales process globally.
2. Future state readying
Salesforce CGC often acts as an enabler tool and many times it has given companies the ability to unlock other market differentiators for their businesses by helping increase efficiency and giving time back to focus on more strategic value-add activities. It can grant companies the ability to standardize processes, and reduces the manual efforts required by their front-line teams to execute on tasks, and for their managers to supervise. For example, with in-store visits reps can easily see what retail activities they should perform at locations, and managers can track the productivity of reps’ visits from the updates they receive on these tasks. Furthermore, with the launch of Salesforce’s trade promotion management (TPM) in Summer ‘22, the foundation of the CG cloud data model can now be used to build out TPM capabilities such as sales volume forecasting, promotion and tactic planning and much more. To listen to our recent webcast on TPM click here.
3. Building on your existing suite
Most CPG and retail companies have these common items on their wish list - a 360-degree view of retail activities, effective customer segmentation, and increasing their field reps’ efficiency. Before the emergence of Salesforce CGC many companies relied on Field Service Lightning (FSL) to help their front-line workers prioritize work to satisfy the needs of customers. The data drawn from FSL allowed CPG companies to be more efficient and effective with their front-line workers’ time and serve customers successfully. With one of our clients, business goals expanded and FSL could not bring about the desired efficiency and digitization needed. We help to support the migration of DSD (direct story delivery) capabilities to CG Cloud allowing our client to have a unified Salesforce architecture across each of their channels. With a proven success story and strong business fit, both CGC and FSL worked seamlessly to help create an integrated solution to achieve the business’ goals.
Considerations for getting started with Consumer Goods Cloud
1. Understand business needs
From a CPG business standpoint, it's important to understand what are the main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), metrics and data needed to help drive and improve processes and change. By identifying these business requirements and what KPIs may need attention and prioritization over a given time period, companies should be able to effectively use the core tenets of CGC such as retail execution, planogram checks, or perfect store surveys to effect desired outcomes and help deliver that success.
2. Assess your data architecture
The value for CGC can be harnessed when the right data is accessible and can be ingested into the systems that business leaders and decision makers use daily and rely on. Fortunately, the Salesforce platform is equipped with the connectors needed to get this master data management (MDM) benefit. With Salesforce and CGC hand in hand integration can be easily enabled with external systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERPs) and other data warehouses to help achieve data consistency and accuracy across accounts, products, pricing, discounts, etc.
3. Evaluate your workforce and systems
There’s been a historical disconnect between the business and IT in many organizations. While business leaders may know the metrics they should prioritize, they often do not know exactly where the data lives. It therefore falls on IT to be able to properly synthesize and help deliver what business leaders need to be successful. At an enterprise level, this means building a closed loop of where and how the data flows (i.e. whether a data lake or robust ERP), and also an understanding of how systems interact to produce desired outcomes for your business. That being the case, companies should assess whether they have the skills needed across their organization striking the right balance of understanding business and technology needs before beginning a successful CGC transformation.
4. Consider change management
When introducing any new process or technology it’s a good rule of thumb to prepare for the change. Whether a company is finally moving to more cloud-based solutions and Salesforce is their first instance, or there is a reliance on power-users of competing technologies for reporting and metrics, consider your current and future users affected, and what their needs are with respect to communication, training and therefore what their adoption rollout should look like. Oftentimes users may expect that their previous or current processes have been recreated as-is (e.g. historically-used spreadsheet-based reports now live in Salesforce exactly as they appeared in Excel). Consumer Goods Cloud’s foundation for success is based on a robust data model that focuses on improving and helping drive successful end-to-end retail execution. It presents an opportunity to help improve and redefine current processes that should empower users to gain efficiencies and insights. For that reason, it’s important to address the change early on and shift towards showing users how their processes have improved, and functionality has expanded with the introduction of Salesforce CGC to their activities and needs.
Salesforce CGC takeaways
As with any new implementation it is important to think and plan ahead to successfully implement Salesforce CGC in your organization. Companies should take stock of their internal processes, technology stack and current data structure before getting started. Along with these, comes the importance of having a set of clearly defined business goals and an understanding of the metrics needed to help achieve them. These pieces combined, creates the north star and path forward that a company should have to be successful with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. Established on a platform that is continuously expanding in its capabilities, companies who are pioneers with CGC will likely continue to retain their market leadership amongst their peers as they continue to take advantage of its many features and growing capabilities.
Additional blog contributors: Saloni Mundhra and Shanta Samlal-Fadelle
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