Why is Commercial Trade Intelligence the CCMO's secret advantage?

A retail merchandising leader is accountable for category margin, promotion performance, and the supplier relationships that fund both. The information needed to manage all three usually sits in different places.

Retailers see demand, price response, and margin. Suppliers hold cost, funding, and terms. Each side decides with half the picture. A cost or allowance changes on one side, and the decision on the other side runs on old numbers.

The cost of fragmentation

Most retail teams don't lack data. They lack a shared version of it. The deal lives in a spreadsheet, the update comes by email, the funding view sits in a finance report, and the promo calendar is somewhere else. The questions that follow are familiar: Which version is current? Who has the latest update? Did the funding change?

Retail teams often run pricing and promotions across several disconnected systems. Every handoff between systems is a chance for a commitment and an execution to drift apart. Merchandising leaders see the result later, as an underfunded promotion, a missed cost change, or an invoice dispute.

What Commercial Trade Intelligence™ does differently

Commercial Trade Intelligence™ (CTI) connects two engines on one platform:

• Revenue Optimization (Decide): pricing, promotion, and markdown decisions, all driven by one demand model.
• Trade Performance (Agree): supplier co-planning, deals, funding, and reconciliation, worked from a shared record.

Neither engine is new on its own. The advantage is the connection between them, which creates four handshakes:

• Terms inform the plan: Decisions are approved on current economics, not last month's.
• The plan shapes co-planning: Retail plans feed supplier co-planning, so commitments match what will run.
• Changes reach action: Agreed cost, deal, and funding changes reach planners in time, which means fewer missed changes, less rework, fewer disputes.
• Performance informs the next agreement: Each plan and negotiation starts from evidence.

Where the advantage shows up: the supplier relationship

Supplier negotiations are usually led by category and trade teams, but the CCMO sets the strategy and owns the outcome. Shared intelligence changes what that conversation looks like.

• From intuition to scenarios: Teams can model a price, cost, or promotion change and see the projected effect on demand and margin before the supplier meeting, so positions are stress-tested in advance.
• From trade funds to total fund strategy: When both sides can see how pricing, promotion, and supplier funding interact, the discussion moves past the size of the allowance toward what the combined investment will deliver.
• From opaque funds to shared visibility: When both sides track the same committed dollars, disputes over performance and allocation drop. Underfunded promotions surface while there is still time to act, and invoices reconcile against the agreed deal instead of competing records.
• From annual ritual to joint business planning: Joint plans can run on shared, current numbers across forecast, promotion calendar, and funding. Retailers can focus the deepest collaboration on strategic suppliers and keep standard agreements for the rest.
• From black-box forecasts to explainable numbers: A forecast that shows what drives it, such as seasonality, promotions, and competitor pricing, is easier for both sides to accept and for the merchandising leader to defend internally.

Why this is an advantage

• Negotiations start from evidence: A supplier conversation begins with what happened on the last event, not with memory or competing spreadsheets.
• You see the forecast before you commit: Promotions and price changes are modeled before they lock, with visibility into the supplier funding behind them.
• Your organization works from one plan: A pricing leader can run scenarios on their own categories. A category leader can plan promotions against connected deal terms. A trade lead can see an agreed change reach planners in time. Shared measures reduce friction between merchandising, finance, and trade.
• Suppliers work from the same information: CTI is bilateral by design, built on a network of 7,800+ connected CPG partners and 120+ retail banners.
• The science underneath is established: The platform draws on 25+ years of demand science and 90%+ forecast accuracy, which form the intelligence layer beneath every pricing, promotion, and trade decision.

Start with one module, then connect the rest

• Pick the decision that hurts most: For many retailers this is a pricing decision driven by a cost change or competitive move that needs a fast, defensible answer. For others it is promotion planning or deal management.
• Start with one module: Pricing is a common first step, but promotions or trade can lead if that is where your pain is.
• Add the next module: Promotion planning and execution, deal management, co-planning, and reconciliation are part of a connected platform, so each one extends what is already running instead of starting a new project.
• Connect both sides: As Trade Performance joins Revenue Optimization, agreed costs, effective dates, and funding reach planners automatically, and results feed the next agreement.