Pretty much every manufacturer in the United States has some type of coop marketing program. It can be as easy as a rebate system based on sales, to more involved joint marketing programs funding DIY seminars, mailing flyers, providing sample goods and services.

The underlying problem with all of these efforts is the coordination, communication and transparency of the programs, so everyone involved knows what is happening. Further, the most common tool used for managing these programs is a spreadsheet program like Excel.

There are definite advantages to using spreadsheets. They are easy to create, easy to understand and don’t cost anything other than the time involved in managing them. If you have relatively few programs and partners, this is easy to set up and easy to manage.

But once you start adding programs and partners, spreadsheets become very unwieldly, very quickly. This is when having a single platform that has all the pertinent information in one place makes the most sense. Not only does it make it easy for everyone to find what they need when they need it, it helps add transparency to the process. If finance wants to find out more about how money is being spent, all of the supporting documentation is readily available. If you want to compare efforts to see what the differences were, or why one worked better than another, all of the information for both are in one location, making the comparison more straightforward.

And, once you have been using the platform for a while, discerning trends, what works, and what doesn’t work becomes easier. Further, you can start to look forward – be proactive, rather than backward - basing decisions on last year’s sales and efforts.

In future installments, we’ll discuss each aspect of the platform and why it enhances your ability to manage coop marketing programs.