Why Food Manufacturers Need to Challenge the Status Quo

Across the food and beverage industry,  competition is fierce, margins are thin and executive growth expectations are high. To support the increased cadence of decision-making, food manufacturers need to put more focus on sell-side technology to retain market share and grow the business. Closing business is a never-ending battle and sales teams closely guard their customer relationships. In the midst of this volatility, most food and beverage companies still set ambitious growth targets year after year, knowing that external forces will always disrupt these goals.

In this environment, proposals based on cost-plus pricing, multiple and manual approval steps and intuitive or tribal knowledge are just not cutting it anymore. These ingrained habits carry huge revenue and margin costs for food service companies that threaten their long-term viability.

While food companies have invested heavily in technology on the manufacturing side, they lag other industries in pursuing digital innovation in sales.

Antiquated, siloed systems, poor visibility into profitability, volatile pricing, contract complexity, and ineffective price controls and sales enablement processes are all hampering the industry’s ability to efficiently and effectively adapt to market dynamics that can change from week to week.

As noted above, most food manufacturers set ambitious annual growth objectives, but few have the tools, methods and mindset to achieve those goals. Instead of focusing on how to meet that single goal, they need to start exploring how data science-driven technologies such as price optimization and configure, price, quote (CPQ) can help them achieve their ambitious goals without resorting to ineffective cost-plus pricing and the ever diminishing returns of cost cutting. The long- and short-term costs of doing nothing are too great.

To learn more, download the tip sheet: Challenging the Status Quo: Top 5 Sales Problems For Food Service Companies.