As food companies become more consumer-centric, their ability to anticipate and understand consumer needs and market trends drives their overall sales and marketing activities. To compete effectively for market share, shelf space, and consumer wallet, you need to integrate and streamline all sales and marketing activities.

SAP for Consumer Products supports the full range of sales and marketing activities, including:

• Brand equity management – SAP solutions support strategic goal-setting, planning, and budgeting activities that are seamlessly connected to marketing activities. You can manage all marketing resources, including budgets, people, time, information, campaigns and promotions, and external resources.
• Category management – With SAP solutions, you can manage consumer-driven categories as strategic business units and gain efficiencies in areas such as assortments, promotions, shelf presentation, and product pricing.
• Trade promotion management – SAP solutions support trade promotion spending and volume planning activities in a consumer-centric, connected environment. You can plan, sell, deliver, execute, validate, track, monitor, pay, reconcile, and evaluate your promotion and volume plans.
• Account management – SAP solutions support the management of all retailer-oriented activities on global and regional levels. You can collaborate with retailers on sales agreements, volume- and allocated-spend plans, and listings of new products and supporting promotions.
• Sales force management – With SAP solutions, you can create and understand consumer demand across market segments and sales channels – and successfully execute merchandising activities. You can also improve forecasting and align sales promotions with new product introductions.
• Order-to-cash management – With SAP solutions, you can integrate and streamline the complete order-to-cash cycle, from contract analysis to billing and dispute management. By automating transactions across the cycle, you can reduce order lead time, shorten proposal/quotation cycles, and reduce administrative costs.

Sales and marketing is enabled with SAP applications such as SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and SAP ERP. To find out how SAP ERP can help you improve your sales and marketing, please complete the "Contact SAP" form and request information about customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning.