In today’s retail environment, trade spend is one of the largest and most critical line items on a CPG company’s P&L. Yet, for many brands, it remains one of the most misunderstood and mismanaged parts of the business. The challenges are especially pronounced for growing brands: the faster you scale, the harder trade spend becomes to track, optimize, and justify.
Executives in the CPG space know the stakes. Achieving growth goals depends directly on effective, efficient use of trade spending. Efficient trade spending can drive maximum growth – but inefficient trade spending wastes precious capital, reducing momentum and draining profitability. But while everyone wants to make the best use of their trade budgets, too often brands find themselves stuck with outdated systems, poor visibility, and fragmented processes that obscure performance and delay critical decision making.
So why exactly are so many CPG teams struggling with trade spend? And what are the brands that are getting it right doing differently?
Let’s break it down.
The Trade Spend Struggle: Why It Happens
There are a few persistent issues that keep trade spend from being the strategic lever it should be.
- First, the data lives in too many places. Promotions are planned in one system, deductions are tracked in another, and sales data sits in yet another. Worse, these disparate data sets are often in different, incompatible formats that prevent easy “apples to apples” comparison. To attempt analysis, most teams still rely heavily on spreadsheets, PDFs, and email threads. This makes it nearly impossible to reconcile spend, analyze promotion effectiveness, or close the books efficiently.
Matthew Wood, Director of Retail at Rishi Tea, best sums up this common experience for many brands:
“Trade spend is extremely important, but it’s difficult to track. A lot of spreadsheets, a lot of reports, a lot of PDFs and documents flying around...keeping track of it and coming to a place where everything made sense at the end of a quarter and the end of the year was really challenging.”
- Second, promotions often lack proper measurement. Events are executed without clear expectations, and few brands have the ability to tie post-event sales lift back to specific tactics. Without an effective post-event analysis strategy from the outset, brands risk repeating ineffective strategies - or worse - over-investing in promotions that fail to drive incremental growth.
- Third, deduction management is a huge resource drain. CPG teams are bombarded with invoices and shortage claims from distributors and retailers. Validating them manually takes hours of labor every week. Unless you have a well-vetted system in place to match deductions to the right promotion or dispute invalid claims, you won’t know the full cost of those promos – and are likely leaving money on the table.
- Finally, the “siloed” disconnect between sales and finance teams further complicates matters. Sales is focused on execution and revenue; finance is focused on accuracy and recovery. Without a shared system and language, both teams lose time, trust, and insight.
What Leading Brands Are Doing Differently With Trade Promotion Management
Some brands are breaking this cycle and transforming the way they manage trade spend by approaching it with a different mindset. Instead of treating trade spend as a line item, they consider it a strategic investment. And in doing so, they take steps to help them manage it as such.
- The first step is centralizing everything in one platform. By integrating sales data, promotion calendars, and deduction workflows into a single system, brands gain real-time visibility into what’s happening. This creates a common source of truth for both sales and finance. It reduces reliance on spreadsheets and streamlines monthly and quarterly closeouts.
- Second, they automate deduction management. Instead of chasing documents and manually validating each claim, they work with systems and support teams that do the heavy lifting. This frees up internal bandwidth and accelerates dispute resolution.
At Rishi Tea, for example, the time savings and added clarity on deductions has helped to streamline month-end closes and increase recoveries. Wood describes the difference in tracking trade spend and deductions as “night and day from where we used to be.”
- Third, they are connecting promotions to performance. With shipment and sales data flowing in regularly through connected platforms like Crisp, brands can now evaluate which promotions are driving results in near-real time. Whether a promotion lasts two weeks or four, they can finally see if it worked and whether it delivered the expected return without waiting weeks or months. This level of insight allows teams to be more agile in reallocating spend with confidence.
- Lastly, modern CPG leaders are aligning sales and finance with shared tools for shared decision-making. When everyone can see what was spent, what was recovered, and what the return was, the conversation shifts from blame to strategy. For example, teams can identify which deductions were tied to unexecuted promotions or missed events - and use that intelligence to negotiate more effectively or recover lost funds.
The Path Forward
Trade spend doesn’t have to be a black hole. With the right systems and support, it becomes a powerful source of insight, alignment, and competitive advantage.
The brands that are leading the way aren’t working harder – they're working smarter. They’ve stopped tolerating chaos. They’ve stopped relying on spreadsheets. And they’ve made visibility and control non-negotiable.
If your brand is facing similar trade spend challenges, it may be time to rethink your approach. As our clients experience shows, gaining clarity doesn’t just improve processes, it improves performance. Better visibility leads to better decisions. And better decisions lead to stronger, more profitable growth.
The question for CPG leaders is no longer whether they should take control of trade spend...it’s when.