Trade Promotion Automation · Built for Salesforce
Drop a supplier file in. Get back finished trade-promotion records, ready for Salesforce. Five coordinators — once spending 30% of their week on copy-paste — now spend it on customers.
Real numbers, one project
Five sales coordinators at a regional CPG distributor. Each spending roughly a third of their week transcribing supplier files into Salesforce. Here's what came back.
The problem
Trade promotions are how CPG companies move 10-20% of their gross sales. The data behind them — supplier prices, SKU lists, channel splits, budget allocations — arrives as Excel files. And then somebody, almost always a sales coordinator, sits down and types it all into Salesforce by hand.
It's not a Salesforce problem. It's not an Excel problem. It's the gap between them — and it's where every promotion currently goes to wait.
"I have five coordinators. Each one spends nearly a third of their week copying numbers from supplier emails into our trade promotion system. That's a person-and-a-half worth of work, every week, every year, just typing."
— Operations lead, regional CPG distributor (anonymized)
How it works
No new system to learn. The coordinator's job is now reviewing what the automation prepared — not building it from scratch.
Place the supplier's Excel in the shared folder. The system picks it up, reads every row, and matches each item against your stock master — in seconds.
Get a styled summary of every fact sheet that's ready, every record that needs a decision, and every line that flagged a clarification — LULU/OTHER HSM SKUs, off-quarter dates, missing channels.
Coordinator reviews the clean records, resolves the flagged ones with the brand team, and pushes the batch into Salesforce. Done in minutes.
What you get
Five coordinators reclaim 60+ hours collectively. That's a person-and-a-half worth of work every week, redeployed to the selling activities you actually hired them for.
Barcode-to-SKU lookups, currency conversion, customer-channel mapping — all done by reference data, not human memory. The errors that used to slip into the system simply can't.
Promotions that used to take a half-day per fact sheet now process in minutes. Supplier sends the file Tuesday morning — the promotion's ready for approval Tuesday afternoon.
Every run preserves the original input file, the intermediate data, and the final output, organized in a timestamped folder. Compliance, finance, and brand teams can trace any record back to its source row.
The system never silently fixes ambiguous data. Anything questionable — missing SIDs, off-standard quarters, customers needing brand-team confirmation — surfaces as its own bucket in the preview, with the exact reason.
Salesforce, Excel, your existing stock master, your existing approval flow. No new vendor to onboard, no platform to learn, no rip-and-replace. The automation slots between the tools you've already paid for.
Industry context
The trade promotion data-entry tax is one of the most documented pains in CPG operations. Independent surveys, vendor reports, and Salesforce ecosystem reviews all point in the same direction.
Industry research, the vendor landscape, and what makes Salesforce-based platforms uniquely automatable. Linked sources throughout.