Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
In the low-margin grocery business, every one percent - of anything - counts for a lot. By that measure, Kraft Foods' new strategy for deploying sales reps in stores has been a big success. Called Wall-to-Wall, it has single-handedly boosted sales by more than one percent at the 16,000 stores where Kraft has rolled it out.
In fact, after only two years into the program in which individual reps now handle more brands and fewer stores than before, one top Kraft executive is ready to declare Wall-to-Wall a key piece of the company's retailing arsenal.
"We're happy with our progress, and now we're going to focus on optimizing it," Darryl Brown, Kraft's senior vice president of retail sales, told CPGmatters. "Wall-to-Wall is a weapon that we can use to help the business long-term."
Before Wall-to-Wall, Kraft maintained three separate organizations of store reps. One group mainly handled Nabisco cookie and snack products and would be in any given store three to five times a week. The second group handled the rest of Kraft's dry-goods portfolio and were in stores only every two to four weeks. "It's hard to sell incrementally when you're only showing up every 30 days,” Darryl Brown, Kraft's senior vice president of retail sales, told CPGmatters.
So, about two years ago, Kraft collapsed the barriers between those two groups and created a new Wall-to-Wall organization that now handles more than half of the total of 30,000 stores with which Kraft does business. (Kraft's third group of reps still represents Kraft's frozen-pizza brands separately.)
"We are in every aisle, and Wall-to-Wall was an opportunity to give one face to the [retailer] customer, so they could relate to 'one Kraft' coming in,” Mr. Brown said. "Once we gave them one face to go to, the intent was to have that one person become almost a consultant to store management to help them piece together their product portfolio.”
Immediately, Kraft noticed that the Wall-to-Wall reorganization provided a big lift in three areas: easing out-of-stock situations, enhancing special in-store promotions, and ensuring overall optimization of the merchandising of Kraft brands in customer-specific ways.
"Our Number One issue is out-of-stocks,” Mr. Brown said. "But now because we're in stores more frequently, we're able to assist in that area.”
In promotions, he said, Wall-to-Wall reps "can more easily partner with private-label or other [brand] partners in the store to create in-store excitement.”
Of course, the progress driven by Wall-to-Wall has come at a price: higher labor costs. For one thing, Kraft has boosted compensation for reps who enter the Wall-to-Wall program because of the richer mix of skills and higher levels of training required for them to become successful.
"The old warehouse reps were really focused on selling, not as much on merchandising,” Mr. Brown said. "Now we need people who can understand the complexities of all our product categories and bring them to life to make them sell. We've got them representing multiple categories and multiple meal-usage occasions that we weren't able to bring to life before.”
Discussion Questions: What do you think of Kraft's Wall-to-Wall reps program? What are the advantages and disadvantageous of having reps covering more brands and fewer stores? What areas do you think such a program would provide the most benefit?