The CPG & broker reality
Trade is your biggest line item after COGS. It runs on the least infrastructure.
Trade spend runs 15 to 25 percent of gross revenue, and CPGs fund 40 to 60 percent of every promotional event. The money is enormous; the tooling around it is spreadsheets, portals, and email.
Your process is everyone else's
Every retailer has its own portal, template, and deadline. The operating model of a CPG trade team is shaped by systems it does not own and cannot see into.
Three versions of the truth
Planned funds in the annual plan, committed funds in the deal system, actual spend in the ERP. Closing the books means reconciling three systems that never agree.
Deductions arrive as a verdict
Industry estimates put invalid deductions at up to 20% of claims, but the evidence lives months back, across email threads and retailer records. Most organizations recover a fraction of what they could.
Brokers multiply all of it
A broker runs this whole picture once per principal, across every retailer relationship. Multi-principal complexity is the broker business model — and the broker burden.
82%
of trade teams spend 10+ hours a week on manual deal processing
20%
up to this share of deductions are invalid (industry estimate) — disputed long after the money moved
The hours go to re-keying and reconciling, not to the account
For a broker, multiply the manual load by the number of principals on the roster. Every hour spent re-keying a portal or chasing a deduction is an hour not spent on the relationships the business is actually built on — and up to a fifth of those deductions should never have been taken.
Where CPGs and brokers start
Trade Intelligence, end to end
Your path leads with Trade Intelligence, the bilateral deal layer — joining the network your retailers already price and promote from. Three moves close the loop.
One record, both sides
Deals, offers, and costs sync live between your systems and the retailer's, so the record never forks into versions.
Real dollars, shared plan
Joint plans built on committed funds, not assumed ones, in the same CPG–Retailer Co-Planning workspace the retailer works from.
Reconciled at the source
Planned terms compared to actual billing as it happens. Discrepancies surface while they are still conversations, not chargebacks.
Looking for the view by role — trade marketing, RGM, sales finance, brokers? See For CPG Suppliers & Brokers, or go straight to the Trade Intelligence suite.
Run every principal from one record
See Trade Intelligence against your own accounts, funds, and deduction backlog.