How Nutrabolt Plans and Executes on Goals During Busy Season

If you missed our webinar on “FMCG Retail Execution Excellence - Best-in-Class Strategies to Attacking Summer Promotions Season with Confidence” with POI, you’re in luck! We’ve broken down the webinar into digestible recaps with everything you need to know from the discussion with Earin Friedbauer, Director of US Retail at The Kraft Heinz Company, Hagen Panton, VP of Global Sales Capability at Nutrabolt, and Pete Paris, VP of Business Intelligence & Analytics at Spindrift Beverage Co, Inc. here for you.

In part two of three, you’ll hear from Hagen Panton, Vice President of Global Sales Capability at Nutrabolt. As VP of Sales Capability at Nutrabolt, his team is responsible for aligning sales and marketing toward a common goal of retail execution. Nutrabolt tracks, ranks, publishes, and most importantly incentivizes the field team making for a fast-paced competitive environment that has stunned their competitors.

Read along for a recap of the conversation with Hagen on the strategies Nutrabolt is using to convert increased foot traffic, execute promotions from day 1, and win at the shelf during the busiest time of the year. Discover key strategies you can take away during this pivotal season with planning, new tests, and perhaps most importantly, a plan of attack to achieve execution excellence.

Hagen Panton, VP of Global Sales Capability at Nutrabolt

How are you planning retail execution goals as you go into this busy season?

Hagen explained this planning starts at the beginning of the year when Nutrabolt works with their trade and shopper marketing team to see what resources are available. This year, they chose to partner again with Kevin Hart and Roman Reigns and the retail team goes into national accounts and sells the programs they’ve created, and now is the time to go execute and hit the floor with the product, he explained.

So how do they execute it all? “When we come into a busy season like summer, we set up incentives that range to $100,000 just during the summer months. We have one contest, the first team to place 60 coolers in 60 days gets $10,000 to split amongst the team. These are big prizes with big audacious goals, 60 coolers in 60 days is a lot. That's out of the 100 that they've been awarded for the summer,” said Hagen. “We measure the number of displays and we also measure the total cases on display through Repsly. So we have these dashboards where everybody can watch in real-time and we know that the guys in New York may only be able to place shippers or wire racks because they just don't have the space like my guys in Texas who are dropping two pallets into every H-E-B. so total cases on display and the total number of displays, that way everybody kind of has a chance to win.”

Hagen said how it’s a great opportunity to go into summer, launch those promotions, and leverage IRI to measure the number of displays in stores. “IRI is now measuring out the displays and then we can actually look at our velocity and we know that we are one of the highest velocity energy drinks when on display,” Hagen said. “So we're actually measuring month-over-month how much our velocity is increasing and all of it's tracked through Repsly.”

Any examples of mid-summer promotions pivots and how they impacted your bottom lines?

Hagen explained that Nutrabolt saw a unique opportunity within the C4 brand, specifically their canned beverages. The brand has three lines: C4, C4 Ultimate, and the Smart Energy line that users drink for improved cognitive function and performance. “We pivoted and were not planning on launching our C4 Ultimate this year but we actually pulled it into selling season now because of the interest from consumers to have it available in-store,” Hagen said.

The other pivot Nutrabolt made was after noticing a consistent trend with consumers for a 12-ounce offering. They will now migrate the Smart Energy platform into a 12-ounce can, based on consumer data. “We'll move our Smart Energy into a 12-ounce, said Hagen. “That'll come in January and we moved our C4 Ultimate back to get it out in the market as quickly as possible so we can build out that brand block.”

How has Nutrabolt chosen to be sustainable?

NUTRABOLT + SUSTAINABILITY

1. Plastic Neutral

2. Over 73,800 lbs. of plastic reduction

3. Nearly 63 million bottles (1,255 metric tons of plastic in 2022)

4. Over 2.5 million kg of emissions avoided from 2021

5. Integrated How2Recycle® guidelines

Hagen explained that this is something Nutrabolt has been working on for the past couple of years. They reflected on the company and acknowledged that in selling over 3 billion servings, they put out a lot of plastic into the world, and wondered if they could make their containers a little bit thinner and a little bit smaller.

“We are proud to now be plastic neutral partners with Plastic Bank to become plastic neutral and offset all plastic use in 2021. We're now over 2.5 million kilograms of emissions avoided from 2021 with enhanced transportation practices of our products as well.”

Nutrabolt reduced over 73,800 pounds of plastic in packaging from January 2021 to April 2022. They’re also providing guidelines for how to recycle as they’re noticed many people are unaware or confused by what should and should not be recycled and in which bin. “We now have guidelines on our products and labels to better support how to recycle a product because a shrink wrap can't be recycled like a printed can. So we're literally going to have a QR code that tells you how to recycle the Nutrabolt product that you're using,” Hagen said.

Can you help our attendees understand two things that are within your “rule of thumb” that you recommend they do consistently? Can be around execution, implementation, analytics, etc.

“None of this works without engagement. We need to have engagement. We need to have alignment, but we also have to get people to want to do stuff. And I think one of the most important things right now is that it’s so easy to work from this digital world, but there is nothing more valuable than that camaraderie of bringing your teams together monthly, bimonthly, once a year, twice a year. You have got to get your people back together. It is so important.”

For more from this webinar, check out part one with Earin Friedbauer, Director of US Retail at The Kraft Heinz Company. In her current role as Director of US Retail, she has responsibility for flawless execution of Kraft Heinz Customer and Brand team Perfect Store initiatives. She leads a team of 60 and actively partners with external third-party brokers to win at the shelf.

If you’d like to watch the webinar in its entirety, check it out here: FMCG Retail Execution Excellence - Best-in-Class Strategies to Attacking Summer Promotions Season with Confidence.