Sales and Marketing for the Consumer Goods and Services Industry

Reaching high performance, as Accenture research shows, requires companies to excel in sales and marketing. This insight is particularly relevant in the consumer goods and services industry, where customer-centricity is the key to ultimate success.

However, consumer goods and services companies face real sales and marketing challenges. These include much more demanding end-consumers. This more demanding group also does not fall into the traditional broad segments, requiring marketers to deal with more, smaller market segments. Companies in the consumer goods and services industry, therefore, must increase their levels of performance in sales and marketing, developing the capabilities to:

• Create strategies for multiple audiences and brands.
• Measure the effectiveness of those strategies and improve marketing performance.
• Empower and measure sales teams, ensuring they fulfill the strategic intent.
• Optimize the business processes that support the marketing and sales efforts.
• Ensure that the skills of the sales and marketing teams are continually refreshed.

Accenture can help consumer goods and services companies to achieve these goals. Our extensive experience means that the time-to-benefit is reduced and the cost is minimized.

To find out more about how Accenture can help you to successfully manage customer relationships, visit our Customer Relationship Management pages.

Accenture has the experience, insight and acumen to help the consumer goods and services industry transform its sales and marketing functions to achieve high performance. For companies wishing to begin or continue along the journey toward high performance, Accenture has a unique mix of capabilities that make us a partner of choice:

• Deep industry insight: We have been working in the consumer goods and services industry for years, and have a track record of helping companies around the world enhance sales and marketing performance.
• The best people: As the world's largest management consultancy, with a vast pool of business talent, no other company can better help companies innovate intelligently to create competitive advantage in the consumer goods and services' industry. Many of our consultants have held senior positions in leading consumer goods and services companies, giving them unrivalled insight into what works in this industry.
• Global reach: Accenture's global presence means we can leverage local insight into sales and marketing unlike any other company.
• Technological excellence: Sales and marketing are increasingly reliant on technology. From innovation to what works, nobody understands how to use technology to increase business advantage better than Accenture—and we have the global capability to manage technology cost-effectively at higher service levels.

Accenture is committed to partnering with you in your journey toward high performance, helping your company achieve its strategic sales and marketing goals in the most effective manner.

Contact us to discuss how Accenture can help you understand high performance in this industry—and how best to reach it.

Accenture has a number of distinct offerings that can be used to help your company progress toward high performance in the consumer goods and services industry—or we can assist with an end-to-end transformational program. The specific services we offer are:

Commercial (portfolio and brand) strategy—Accenture assists in helping to develop a portfolio and brand strategy that contributes to achieving strategic goals through:

• Portfolio and brand management.
• Positioning and brand essence.
• Competitor analysis and strategy.
• Business planning and aligning business goals with metrics.

Innovation that delivers—Accenture partners with companies to create innovation management that will assist in all aspects of the product life cycle, including:

• Innovation process management: New product development; product lifecycle management and packaging development.
• Innovation execution: Brand development; launch planning; risk management and assessment and deployment (action).

Marketing productivity—Accenture helps manufacturers by focusing on customer relationship management strategies, creating valuable marketing investments, giving economic value to the corporate brand and guiding competent and cost-efficient marketing operations such as:

• Marketing communication management—Marketing strategy; advertising and promotion; integrated public relations and sponsorship; ethics; corporate social investment; and marketing law.
• Consumer interaction management—Consumer satisfaction levels; experiential/relationship marketing; online and mobile marketing; and direct marketing.
• Marketing performance management—Brand health tracking; brand financial management; marketing return on investment; pricing optimization; and commercial spend effectiveness.
• Pricing strategy and optimization.

Sales excellence—Accenture focuses on understanding customer (retailers and end-consumers) needs by interacting with them. The different points of contact that need to be managed to obtain communication of standardized messages include:

• Account planning—Customer insight and segmentation; customer profitability and key account planning; customer contact management (closed loop account management); channel management; category management; and range optimization.
• Consumer interaction management—Consumer satisfaction levels; experiential/relationship marketing; online and mobile marketing; direct marketing.
• Trade promotion management—Pricing; trade terms; promotion effectiveness; trade management.
• Outlet management and execution; trade marketing (retailers and wholesale).
• Sales territory design—Planning and efficiency.
• Execution excellence—Sales force effectiveness.
• Sales territory design—Planning and efficiency.

Commercial processes/productivity—Proper management of sales and marketing processes is important to decide where to allocate resources and how to increase productivity. We offer:

• Sales and marketing process optimization.
• Resource allocation and productivity.

Commercial operations management —Helping to ensure that business processes work efficiently as part of the total organization, we offer:

• Organizational design.
• IT applications.
• Interdepartmental partnering.

Commercial capability management—Accenture helps to ensure your sales and marketing teams have the training they need to be effective through:

• Sales and marketing training.
• Professional training.
• Market and industry training management.
• Performance and skills development.