How Kraft Heinz and Relentless Trade Achieve Success

If you missed our webinar on “How Kraft Heinz and Relentless Trade Achieve Success,” fear no more! We’ve recapped last week’s conversation which gave an inside look at how these two CPG industry leaders are driving their retail execution and why they made strategic investments in technology.

The webinar featured Shayne Kelly, retail sales manager at Kraft Heinz Canada, and Wade Duke, CEO & co-founder of Relentless Trade Solutions, who both shared stories from the field and how technology became a key part of the success of their field teams.

Watch or read a recap of each industry leader below, or click here to watch the webinar recording in its entirety:

Wade Duke, CEO & co-founder, Relentless Trade Solutions

Covering California, Arizona, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest, Relentless Trade Solutions is a merchandising broker that’s been a Repsly customer since 2019. For the past 18 months, Relentless Trade has built a winning formula for every brand they represent on the foundations of great relationship building, merchandising, selling, and brand building – and they power it all through their retail execution platform.

One of the main reasons why Relentless made the change to Repsly was because they were growing quickly and needed a system that could support their growth while allowing them to find new opportunities for every brand they support. What started as five brands grew to more than 20 in their first 18 months.

The Relentless team values the ability to measure nearly every action their reps take in the field through real-time data reporting so they could build KPIs around different reps, brands, and chains so they can see exactly where they have an opportunity. With these reports, their brands have access to a portal where they can view exactly how all of their products are performing on the shelf, creating a seamless communication link between the brands and their on-shelf performance in every store.

With Repsly’s retail execution platform, Relentless Trade also was able to optimize the routes of every field rep, create more efficient routes that saved them time, and allowed for better territory coverage. Wade described the set-up as easy with live and online training sessions that “made the change seamless.”

With Repsly, Relentless was able to stay in direct communication with all their suppliers and partners, which proved to be a crucial part of their success earlier this year when COVID-19 had just emerged in the United States.

As products were flying off the shelves due to many shoppers stocking up, Relentless Trade was able to stay in constant contact with all their manufacturers, assuring they always had inventory going to their distributors, and according to Wade, they never missed a single store and were actually able to cut down on their out-of-stocks. And with real-time alerts, Relentless could quickly dispatch a rep to fix a pricing issue before it has any negative impact or could notify a partner of any secondary placements won.

Relentless chose a retail execution platform that gave them the visibility into all of their key accounts they needed in order to support their ambitious growth goals.

Shayne Kelly, Retail Sales Manager, The Kraft Heinz Company, Canada

The Kraft Heinz Company is the third-largest food and beverage company in North America, with its Canadian organization supporting 90 sales reps in eight different regions. Each of the eight retail sales managers is tasked with managing the sales priorities of the five main categories of Kraft products, so ensuring visibility and consistency across the team is pivotal to the success of the brand.

For the past two and half years, Kraft Heinz has been driving their retail execution with Repsly. What separates the operations of Kraft Heinz from other brands is that while many reps have the same accounts for many years, their selling is data-based rather than relationship-based. Like Relentless Trade, Shayne explained how Kraft uses its retail execution platform to find new opportunities on the shelf.

Kraft Heinz focuses their operations on four main areas: Distribution; Shelf; Promotion; and Price. And with Repsly, Kraft Heinz can make data-driven decisions to prioritize the activities each rep should take in the field to have the biggest impact.

Shayne explained how with Repsly, Kraft Heinz business owners have new research, insights, and tools to be category experts. And with Repsly, their field teams are properly equipped to lead the conversation with any manager at any store. He explained how they know exactly what they’re seeking to get out of a store before they enter the store. “And if it's not this, we have four or five things in our back pocket with consumption reports to back that up.” Shayne believes in fact-based selling and trended consumption by product and he makes sure his team is always prepared to have these conversations.

With key insights from their consumption reports, out-of-stock reviews, distribution reviews, execution playbooks, and category playbooks, Kraft Heinz can educate their costumes on how to maximize their category growth with the right products, at the right place and right price.

With Repsly, Kraft Heinz Canada is accelerating and growing their brand every day in the field by finding and correcting compliance issues at the national scale. Repsly also allows Kraft to improve their relationships with retail customers. Their conversations are fact-based, using the data in the app to inform managers of insights and potential opportunities. And lastly, Repsly helps Kraft Heinz increase product availability through store audits and out-of-stock replenishment.

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