Eliminating Secret Stashes in your Marketing Supply Chain

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Hidden costs are lurking in the unused printed materials hoarded by your sales and field marketing personnel.

Did you know that 72% of sales and field marketing personnel over-order or stockpile materials? (Yep. That’s right. It’s not a typo.) According to a study by the CMO Council, 59% over-order by 20-25%. These extra materials go straight into the individuals’ secret stash.* Start adding up the costs of the secret stashes in your company and you quickly realize that if over-ordering were eliminated, the marketing budget could be dramatically reduced, or redeployed on more valuable efforts.

Why Does Over-Ordering Occur?

Probably every cliché we learned as a child applies:

  • Be prepared.
  • Save for a rainy day.
  • Stay ahead of the game.
  • Marketing departments and/or processes are not reliable. (OK, we didn’t learn this as children, but it is what many sales reps and field marketers believe.)

64% of the people surveyed said they keep their secret stash because it takes too long to receive materials, or they are out of stock when they place a request for something they need. I know from my experience as a field sales representative, that being in a satellite office, you have to be prepared to manage anything and everything. Just one experience where you do not have the materials you need to do your job, and you figure out a way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Improving Field Operations Restores Faith in Marketing

Eliminating the cost of those secret stashes is not only about improving the marketing supply chain, but restoring the confidence that field sales and marketing has in acquiring the needed marketing materials. So how does the improvement and restoration processes happen? For many companies, it is moving to a virtual marketing storefront or marketing asset management system to enable field sales and marketing to be in control of their own destiny, yet allow corporate marketing to maintain control of how the brand is presented.

Important Traits of a Virtual Marketing Storefront:

  • Provides timely production and shipping of materials, and immediate access to digital assets
  • A dependable interface that works when your associates work… which is pretty much any time
  • Flexible to allow for the needs of individual markets, while restrictive to allow for brand control
  • Highly responsive to the corporate marketers need to deploy new materials and digital assets
  • Accessible tech support to help inexperienced users learn the system and assist with questions
  • Eliminates waste by utilizing Print-On-Demand (POD) and Variable Data Printing (VDP) to reduce or eliminate storage at headquarters and the “secret stash”

Marketing asset management, communications portal, marketing storefront… regardless of what you call it, it is the foundation to effectively deploy marketing on a localized basis. It is also the underpinning to restore the trust that is essential between field sales and marketing and the corporate marketing department.

How are you eliminating the secret stashes in the marketing supply chain? Share your story by adding a comment.

* Statistics come from the CMO Council’s report on Mapping + Tracking: The Optimized Marketing Supply Chain.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Rhonda Basler
Compass
With more than two decades of marketing and operations experience, Rhonda Basler is currently the Head of Operations & Agent Experience for Compass in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Nashville. Throughout her career, Rhonda has held the customer in the highest esteem and intimately understands the relationship between employee satisfaction and customer experience. Rhonda's career has spanned both B2B and B2C companies including Dot Foods, H & R Block, Hallmark, and Compass Realty Group.

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