Your Sales Data Is Telling a Half-Truth

It’s the tail end of Q3, and your sales numbers are projecting yellow, maybe green if you’re lucky. Last week, the numbers looked promising, but they’re starting to slow. For some, the numbers aren’t just slowing, they’ve dropped off without a clear explanation.

Is it the weather? A competitor’s promotion? Certainly the start of football season couldn’t affect your product… Could it? As the leaves and days start to fall off this month, why would you rely on a strategy and speculation method in the future if it’s not working for you today?

This blog assumes a few things. First, you are trying your best to make informed decisions given the information you have as a CPG professional. Second, the information you do have is likely coming from a trusted resource like shipping data, invoices, and sales analysis from Circana, NielsenIQ, or Crisp. Third, you’re involved with a product that has fought for a place on the shelf with endurance, convincing your buyer that the sales will come.

You’re working hard, making best informed decisions, and it’s taken significant work to get this far. So, why do sales numbers drop seemingly randomly, product launches flop, and all that hard work fall short?

The truth is, your sales data is telling a half-truth, (which is a half lie by the way).We believe your sales data is not telling the complete truth for CPG performance. Unless your visibility changes, you will continue to face the same issues and repeat the same mistakes. If success in CPG requires anything, it’s agility and the ability to make the right decisions quickly. But as Storesight CEO Ty Kasperbauer put it, "You can't be agile if you don't have the data." If sales data is the Ying of CPG insights, then real-time shelf-level visual data is its counterpart, the Yang.

The On-Shelf Availability (OSA) Factor 

As the calendar year fluctuates, driving sales in organic highs and lows, CPG professionals know that sales drops are not always a demand problem; it's often an availability problem. While price volatility with commodities like Eggs, Flour, and Milk can cause obvious stockouts, On Shelf Availability issues for non-commodity core products often go unnoticed until the burden is significant enough to be felt. 

For the companies that do invest heavily in monitoring the On-Shelf Availability of their products, the metric of on shelf availability is notoriously difficult and costly to capture at scale. That’s where Storesight’s “always-on” visual data makes the critical difference. 

With millions of real-time photos providing data points across every region, Storesight’s visual data isn’t just a helpful contrast to sales data. It’s the missing link, marrying up-to-date visual evidence with correlated sales data. The Storesight platform allows CPG professionals to immediately connect a dip in sales data to an image of an out-of-stock or phantom inventory issue on that exact shelf. You see the direct cause in near real-time. Most importantly, it gives CPG professionals the power to remedy issues immediately, instead of waiting weeks for lagging sales data to confirm a problem ever existed.

In the next installment, we'll explore another critical gap in your data: the competitive landscape. We’ll highlight how visual data brings a new level of clarity and legitimacy to monitoring your competition. Ready to connect with Storesight about bringing Visual Data to your team? Let’s talk!