Small team, big deal volume: a better way to create deals

Picture a Tuesday afternoon on a broker's deal desk. There are deals in progress for several different brands, each with its own terms, its own timing, and its own retailer. Every one of them has been planned down to the last detail and is ready to be created and sent to the retailer. Nothing has been approved yet, and nothing is final, but everything your team needs already sits in your deal planning data.

Then someone opens Deal Center and starts typing the first deal in. After that comes the second, then the third, and then the rest of the brands on the list.

If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. Many brokers still get their deals from the plan into the system by hand, and it works well enough until the number of deals grows. For a broker, that growth rarely comes with a bigger team. This post explains why the habit has lasted so long, what it quietly costs when you are managing many brands with limited resources, and how Deal Automation takes it off your plate.

If you only have a minute, here is the short version. Deal Automation connects your existing deal planning data to DemandTec's APIs, so deals are created in Deal Center without manual entry. Those deals can then be submitted to retailer partners from the same integration. Your team spends less effort on each deal, makes fewer errors, and can handle more deals without the manual work growing along with them.

The plan is ready, but the work isn't

If you ask a broker operations leader why their team is so stretched, they will usually point to deal volume. If you ask the team why each deal takes so much handling, they will point to the process. Both answers are right, and neither one is the whole story.

The real issue sits in the space between them. The information that defines a deal lives in your planning data, while the place where the deal has to exist before it can go to the retailer is Deal Center. The only thing connecting the two is a person, so every deal gets entered twice, and only one of those entries adds any value.

When you manage deals on behalf of many brands, that double entry multiplies. Each brand brings its own set of deals, and each deal has to be typed in separately. Typing more carefully will not fix that, and neither will tighter process discipline, because the process itself calls for the re-entry. The gap closes when the deal is created from the data that already defines it.

Three ways manual entry quietly costs you

The first cost is that your workload grows with every brand you add: Every deal takes manual effort, and that effort repeats for each deal that follows. A broker serving many brands can end up with a large volume of deals and no easy way to add people to handle them. The result is that deal entry can limit how many deals, and how many brands, your team is able to take on.

The second cost is accuracy: Whenever someone types the same information a second time, a mistake can slip in, and somebody then has to find it and fix it. When your team is switching between brands, terms, and retailers all day, the chance of an error grows, and so does the time spent correcting it. For a broker, whose value depends on getting deals to retailers correctly, a process that relies on keystrokes can only be as reliable as the typing behind it.

The third cost falls on your people: When deal creation relies on individuals, a small team spends much of its time on some of the most repetitive work in the process, even though those same people could be working on account strategy and retailer relationships for the brands you represent.

Connect once and let the APIs do the typing

Deal Automation is a scalable, API-driven solution that helps you create and submit deals more efficiently. It starts with a one-time connection. Your existing deal planning data is linked directly to DemandTec through a structured, scalable integration pipeline, so you set it up once rather than for every deal.

After that, the APIs do the repetitive part. They create your deals in Deal Center automatically, which means nobody has to re-enter the details. The same integration can also submit those deals to retailer partners, so you can create and submit them at scale.

The deal itself is exactly the same as before. The only difference is that no one had to type it in.

What your team gets back

When you take the manual work out of creating deals, the effort required for each one goes down, and that adds up quickly when you are handling deals for many brands. Fewer details are re-keyed, so fewer user errors need to be found and corrected, and the data reaching retailers is cleaner from the start. Manual work also costs money, so removing it lowers the expense attached to every deal your team handles.

Most importantly, you can handle more deals with the same team. For a broker with limited resources, that can be the difference between turning down work and taking it on. The hours your people used to spend keying deals in can go back into the work that grows your business.

What this is and what it is not

Trade deals are commercial negotiations, and Deal Automation does not change that. Creating and submitting a deal puts it in front of the retailer, and the conversation from there is still yours. Deal Automation can create a status change, but your team can always review its deals and stays in control of the process.

Deal Automation also does not necessarily make the process faster. What it does is remove the manual work of creating deals, which reduces expense and errors. We would rather tell you that plainly than promise something it was not built to do.

A quick test you can try today

Here is a simple exercise that takes about five minutes. Work out how many deals your team creates in a year across all the brands you represent, and then count how many people spend their time entering them. That number shows how much manual work Deal Automation is designed to remove, and it is the one that makes the business case.

Teams have been moving deals from one system to another by hand for a long time, and the technology to stop doing that now exists. Once your planning data is connected to Deal Center, your team can stop entering deals by hand, make fewer errors, and take on more volume without taking on more manual work.

Creating deals from the data that defines them is part of what Commercial Trade Intelligence™ (CTI) is built for. Deal Automation is an add-on within the Trade Performance suite, where retailers and their CPG and broker partners plan, fund, execute, and reconcile trade together.

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